Each year, besides predicting what will happen in the coming 12 months, we review what we thought would happen in the prior year. How many of our predictions from December 2008 came true? Let’s take a look.

1. “Speech takes center stage as ‘the’ multilingual issue.” We predicted that spoken language communication would become an expected feature from mobile carriers, consumer-facing organizations, and government agencies. Crystal ball assessment: The telephone interpreting market grew at record rates, and Language Line brought on-demand interpreting directly to consumers via the iPhone, Google Translate made a new text-to-speech feature available, and we spoke on the intersection of speech recognition and machine translation at SpeechTek.
2. “Translation gets easier, but everyone struggles to find the money.” We wrote that companies would struggle with language service provider (LSP) and internal staff labor costs, flat or declining budgets, and increased demand for more content in more languages for both developed and emerging markets. Crystal ball assessment: In this troubled economic climate, localization and translation planners found themselves fighting for limited funding. However, business confidence quickly recovered in the language services industry.
3. “Machine translation (MT) enters corporations via high-value applications.” We thought that MT software vendors might break out of the dominant low or no-revenue model with applications focused on real business needs. Crystal ball assessment: We certainly observed a major uptick in MT usage and consideration for customer care, intranet information feeds, and employee communication. Several LSPs did begin offering MT-related services like post-editing. However, we only saw the broad outlines of MT melding with enterprise search technology.
4. “Google pulls more surprises out of its bag of translation tricks.” We forecast that Google would keep rolling out language technology and that corporate users would sidestep LSPs and software purchases by “shopping” at Google. Crystal ball assessment: Google certainly energized the computer-aided translation (CAT) tools market with its stealthy announcements, but, to the best of our knowledge, didn’t beta-test company-specific MT partitions to gauge reaction to an MT appliance. We did see smart freelancers and corporate users employing Google Translate as a free productivity tool.
5. “Language policy and international self-preservation fuel government interest in language.” We said that incoming President Obama would focus more attention on international communication, translation, and interpretation. Crystal ball assessment: He did, with enforcement of the linguistic provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and a call to use machine translation in his strategic vision for competitiveness. In Europe, the 27 member states of the E.U. ratified the Lisbon Treaty, providing unprecedented protection against linguistic discrimination.

Each of our five predictions included several subtopics. We’d say that our prediction about speech technology is still en route to becoming a reality, but that we scored plenty of points on each of the other four. Read our predictions for 2010 and check back with us next December for the scorecard.