This IDC study discusses machine translation and its role in today's world of global commerce and geopolitics. Today, it is vital to communicate across language boundaries. However, the volume of text is growing astronomically, and no human translator can keep up with this growth. Machine translation harnesses this surfeit of information in every language to produce more accurate translations in real time.

According to Sue Feldman, IDC's VP for Search and Discovery Technologies, "As it becomes more accurate, machine translation will be widely adopted. Machine translation is ideal for gaining quick cross-language understanding in ecommerce and for communicating with colleagues in internal chats. It bootstraps the human translation process as well, by providing a translation that can be edited and published quickly."