With more and more businesses seeking to grow internationally in order to reach the more than 1.4 billion non-English speakers online, the need to offer multiple languages is paramount. The translation industry is estimated to grow by 11-percent per year over the next two years, stoked by demand for business in rising market languages and expanding online interchange. English as the most ubiquitously used  language for global business is being surely challenged. Chances are we’ve all had to use Google Translate for a speedy, convenient machine translation, but we also all know better than to get too complex in our requests. What sets two new companies, Smartling and MyGengo, apart from Google the Goliath is their expansion away from inadequate machine translation and onto the more precise mediums of professional and crowd-sourced translation options.

Smartling in particular has managed to bolster itself by offering a hybrid model of services, allowing users to choose between machine, professional, and crowd-sourced translators, thus allowing for the best combination of speed and high-quality accuracy, not sacrificing one for the other. The perks of going the professional route are easy to imagine – it is the most effective way to ensure translations are done within context. For example, complicated phrases find their closest counterparts in the target language, and new content to a site is automatically updated. Using crowdsourcing, on the other hand, is especially beneficial in that it enables community engagement and thus increases a website’s volunteer network; you can translate your digital content while building brand loyalty and inviting your multilingual friends, colleagues, and power users to join the translation process. Volunteers are provided by Smartling’s dashboard and kept engaged by the use of leaderboard stats. Website owners can assign the medium of translation they want for specific parts of their websites, for example, where human translation is not needed you can simply use a machine translation for easy and speedy integration.

MyGengo uses only human translation service and works with 600 “certified” translators, each waiting for a user to upload a text or document they feel they can tackle based on level of expertise. Users choose from three quality and price levels and can expect to receive their translated document within a matter of a few hours. MyGengo and Smartling each conveniently allow you to upload a document and get a price quote as well as an estimated wait-time. MyGengo’s three quality levels include standard at five-cents per word, business at ten-cents per word, and ultra at fifteen-cents per word.Smartling works on a monthly charge basis; Silver at $99 per month, Gold at $249 per month, and yes, there is even a free option.

Each site is extremely versatile in terms of the kind of material you choose to have translated – from tweets, blogs, various articles, essays, and books. The list goes on. Business websites based on e-commerce and web app development can integrate with the translation API feature offered by both Smartling and MyGengo in order to benefit from fast, cheap, and automatic translation that can keep up with how constantly they need to update the contents and products on their sites. These neat companies are the most luminous stars in the practically unnavigable dark skies of existing translation tools, so let's see where they guide businesses hoping to make a presence in places such as China. Chinese is considered the most natively spoken language in the world at 1.2 billion speakers and a 22-percent online representation estimate, which comes relatively close to English at 29-percent. English must also compete in the global language market with languages such as  Arabic, Hindi, and Russian which are continuously increasing online. Smartling and MyGengo are at the forefront of assisting businesses with preparing to adjust to a global market that cannot rely as much on English as was once unarguably possible.