Research on the Current Status and Prospects of AI Translation: AI Translation Market Size Expected to Reach $3 Billion by 2027
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Research on the Current Status and Prospects of AI Translation
Currently, translation services can be broadly divided into human translation and machine translation. Human translation often pursues 'faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance,' ensuring translation quality. However, with increasingly close global communication and exponential growth in translation volume, machine translation has now become one of the commonly used tools in people's lives.
The revenue of China's machine translation industry is primarily generated by hardware products, which currently include translation devices, Bluetooth translation earphones, and translation smartphones. With the enhanced functionality of smart translation devices and improved user experience, the application of smart translation devices is expected to become more widespread, driving the growth of the machine translation market.
Artificial intelligence is a national strategic innovation area under the 14th Five-Year Plan. To seize the major strategic opportunities in AI development and establish a first-mover advantage, the state and relevant departments have introduced a series of industrial policies to support the development of AI language services and the translation industry, providing a favorable policy environment for the industry.
On one hand, AI translation is becoming increasingly mature, with continuously reduced errors. On the other hand, for translations that require high quality, professionalism, and precision, human translation remains indispensable and is often the primary choice.
China's machine translation industry chain has become increasingly mature. From hardware facilities, platform services, technical support, application development, consulting services to application services, a comprehensive industry system has been formed. The upstream of the machine translation industry chain mainly includes integrated circuits, machine translation algorithms, and data; while the downstream is primarily applied in fields such as outbound tourism, finance, and healthcare.
The 2022 China Translation Talent Development Report by the Translators Association of China shows that in 2022, the number of translation service personnel in China reached 5.38 million, with approximately 980,000 full-time translators in translation service institutions. Although the translation workforce has grown significantly, there is still a shortage of high-quality, professional Chinese-to-foreign language translators and non-common language translators.
The AI wave will not have a substitutive impact on the localization translation profession in the short term. Based on current commercial projects, the prices of machine translation-related tasks have been lowered, but translators often still need to perform 'painful' proofreading and revisions on machine-translated texts as required by clients. More importantly, localization translation not only involves translation but also incorporates creative knowledge—AI's current capabilities are far from achieving effective 'creativity.'
According to Zhongyan Puhua Industry Research Institute's report 2024-2029 China AI Translation Industry Market In-depth Research and Development Trend Report analysis.
China's machine translation industry is developing rapidly, and the competitive landscape is quite intense. The main competitors in China's machine translation industry are still well-known companies such as Baidu Translate, Sogou Translate, Tencent Translate, Kingsoft PowerWord, Youdao Translate, and 360 Translate. These companies are actively investing funds, technology, and manpower to drive the development of the machine translation industry.
Baidu Translate is the largest company in China's machine translation industry, possessing the most advanced technology, the largest user base, and the biggest market share. Its business spans both domestic and international markets, making it the leading enterprise in China's machine translation industry.
Sogou Translate is the second-largest company in China's machine translation industry, with rich language resources and strong technical capabilities. It is developing the industry with its leading technological advantages.
Tencent Translate and Kingsoft PowerWord are also important players in China's machine translation industry. They are increasing their investments in the industry with new technological models to elevate the development level of China's machine translation industry.
Youdao Translate and 360 Translate are also key players in China's machine translation industry. They are actively developing machine translation technologies, continuously innovating, and improving the industry's development level.
According to data released by the China Writers Association, overseas users exceed 150 million, covering more than 200 countries and regions.
Overseas readership is surging, yet the number of Chinese web novels "going global" remains minimal compared to the domestic output. Since the international expansion began, China has exported over 16,000 translated works—a stark contrast to the 3+ million new titles created domestically in 2022 alone. Millions of overseas readers now refresh screens daily, eagerly awaiting updates in a market where supply falls far short of demand.
Translation forms the primary bottleneck. The colossal volume of lengthy works combined with insufficient translator resources significantly limits the industry's global expansion potential.
The challenges are twofold: complexity and cost. Industry insiders reveal professional translators typically charge ¥200 per 1,000 characters—prohibitively expensive for million-word epics. Even at these rates, top-tier translators prefer more lucrative fields like simultaneous interpretation or specialized translations in finance, law, and healthcare.
A 2023 report shows WebNovel (Qidian International), China Literature's overseas platform, now hosts ~3,600 translated works—a 110% increase from 2020. This year's top five globally read titles (Super Gene, Lord of Mysteries, Circle of Inevitability, 100% Drop Rate, Light of My Life) exemplify the genre diversity driving China's web novel exports.
To help global readers access Chinese web novels faster and more comprehensively, China Literature Group has significantly expanded its AIGC (Generative AI) technology deployment this year, continuously upgrading its human-AI collaborative translation model. With AI assistance, web novel translation efficiency has increased nearly 100-fold while costs dropped by over 90%. Multiple AI-translated works like the Chinese-to-English 'Mythical Era: I Evolved Into A Stellar Beast' and English-to-Spanish 'The Duke's Masked Wife' have become highest-tier bestsellers on Webnovel's international platform.
Currently, AI translation still requires human refinement. As one of AI's applications in language processing, AI translation holds tremendous future potential.
The intelligent voice translation industry has entered a phase of rapid development. Machine translation represents a massive market where technological advancements are driving products toward multilingual capabilities with promising growth prospects.
Given the rapid development in AI translation, the industry is expected to grow steadily in coming years, delivering more convenient, accurate, and faster translations while meeting the global trend toward automated quality translation.
The global AI translation market is projected to expand rapidly. According to Global Market Insights, the current $650 million market is predicted to reach $3 billion by 2027. Currently, most systems train AI on thousands of translation datasets to improve accuracy.