Stepes was recently featured in a FastCompany article authored by Carl Yao, Stepes’ founder.

In his article, Stepes founder Carl Yao summarizes four big impacts Big Translation will have on the way we all live our lives. Big Translation, he notes, will be able to address the present imbalance in supply and demand for multilingual global communication. There is far more demand for translation than there are translators, and as a result, the price and inefficiency for translation has always been high. Carl concludes:

“That’s why we need an era of “Big Translation,” to leverage our existing technological tools and scale up translation capabilities to a level that actually matches global communication needs. Big Translation, a large-scale translation efforts by people speaking two or more languages, would allow businesses, individuals, and even tweeters to get what they want translated easily and affordably.”

Crucially, it will take technological innovations like Stepes to enable this kind of large-scale translation to happen. In the era of Big Translation, many people could simultaneously work on (sometimes multiple) projects together; moreover, anyone bilingual could participate in translation using easy and intuitive free translation tools like Stepes.

When that happens, Big Translation will have at least four major impacts on global business, trickling down to the lives of ordinary people. Carl describes the four impacts.

CONNECT TO THE WORLD THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

“Big Translation would complement the shift in the way we consume news, now that social media is the quickest and most direct way of obtaining up to date and live coverage.”

With Stepes and Big Translation, user-generated content and even individual social media posts could be translated into dozens of languages for a global audience.

DOMINATE THE E-COMMERCE WORLD

“A faster, more affordable model of translation would give e-commerce sites and their independent retailers a way to reach more potential customers, turning what is already a thriving industry into one that is truly booming.”

Carl notes that e-commerce sites are trying to break into global markets but have been struggling to translate their digital content fast enough to match the volume of products and customer views each day. Big Translation could handle this volume of content.

CREATE A GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM FOR ENTERTAINMENT

Carl writes about how translating entertainment content (movies, TV shows, music) would be much faster and easier with Big Translation and the significance of such an innovation:

“Given that much of our perceptions of the world and each other are shaped by the entertainment and media we consume, creating a global entertainment ecosystem where media can easily leapfrog across language borders is crucial. At the heart of such an effort will be Big Translation.”

INVIGORATE GLOBAL INNOVATION IN TECHNOLOGY

Finally, Carl discusses how new technology products being produce all over the world can be used by many more people as Big Translation handles the localization of new devices:

“Technology has already allowed citizens to connect with their governments, businesses with customers, and users with one another. Now Big Translation can help us tackle the enormous amount of interface localization and technical translation that is building up as people innovate faster than we can translate.”

Click here to read the original article at FastCompany in its entirety.