Localization Industry: Evolution and Innovation presentation

Another interesting presentation from Localization and Translation Thailand 2009 Conference.

Renato Beninatto C.E.O. from Milengo on the evolution and innovation of the translation and localization industry:
The future has to go on "an increase in productivity" and technology has a lot to say on the topic. We have to be open to this technology evolution, Human edited Machine Translation and similar.

Revisiting the recent post on Machine Translation: Human edited Machine Translation, Crowdsourcing, Collaboration Technology as the core of content rich translation projects are here to stay and we better learn, evolve and adapt.

Mr. Wiggins was kind enough to express his point of view on my comments on that post:
Thanks for taking the time to watch my presentation. I would like to respond to your comment above.

"Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!"

One of the key points I made in the presentation is that human should nearly always be involved. Machine Translation is a tool to enhance human productivity, not to replace them. Its not a choice of MT or Human, its MT and Human. Typical productivity gains on regular text such as manuals, novels etc are around 250-300% productivity gains - i.e. from 2000-3000 words per day up to 9,000 words per day or even greater. If the text is extremely technical, such as patents, studies has shown that productivity can be increased by 1,000 percent. This is because nearly all the technical terms are already translated well.

I agree if you want quality, you should trust a professional translator, but how that professional translator executes the translation task at hand is what is the change in the market now. MT now has reached a quality level where it can be a true performance enhancer. This was not the case just 2 year ago.

Regards

Dion Wiggins,
CEO, Asia Online

Again, technology will revolutionize what we do. Let's open our eyes and watch carefully. The future may be closer than we think.

Social Media ROI: We are transparent, so we better have passion for what we do

Interesting video below illustrating why social media is vital in your marketing strategy.

By the way: Isn't the separation between marketing and sales more and more difficult to make? And to go even further (well, I'm not the first one to say this of course) but isn't the the separation between production and marketing and sales smaller and smaller?
If your employees don´t feel engaged, don't understand that each interaction, communication or conversation is an opportunity for the business, then you are in trouble. Everybody in the company must understand this.

But I wil go further...
If you, as employer, partner, or vendor of a company do not feel commited, ready to spread the word around your projects, ready to "sell" what you are doing... you better try to find something that will move you and excite you. If you don't, that lack of engagement will show up easily to future employers, sponsors, or any stakeholder that will need to chose whether to work with you or not.
If you are not already motivated, find motivation NOW, or find a project that will passionate you.

Happy New Year 2010

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!

"Jeremiah Laments the Devastation of Jerusalem" by Rembrandt. (1630. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.)

My bet for 201o:
1. Cloud Computing
2. Virtualization
3. Business Intelligence (also for SMEs)

Want to know more about Machine Translation?

Very interesting Dotsub video: Localization and Translation Thailand 2009 Day 2 Beyond Machine Translation: Collaboration, Integration, Quality, Change and Jobs - Dion Wiggins, CEO, Asia Online
How come the Machine Translation industry, failing consistently during 50 years, still survives: because demand is there, and growing exponentially every day.

We should not be afraid of Machine Translation: it is what it is for. Human translation can only reach a fraction of what needs to be translated.

Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!

Spanglish Fun: Dr. Pepper

Funny road advertisement sent by a contact.

I learned that there is a North American Academy of the Spanish Language.

The parable of the boiling frog

"The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. [...]

The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually."

extracted from wikipedia

The parable is used in:

Senge, Peter M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday/Currency, ISBN 0385260946

Revenue or Margin? What's your game?

Is Revenue the only figure a sales person should be paying attention to?

In my past experience I have been working with public companies where Revenue seemed to be the only goal.

"Production will have to take care of the margin" is not an unfamiliar sentence. It is kind of true that as long as you do not completely run out of cash, the more revenue you get for your company, the better. However you can get yourself in a very tricky situation if Revenue is the sole driver and the sole objective.

The company strategy can also influence this: If your sales people are completely disconnected from production, receive bonus solely on revenue increase, it is very likely that the importance of other factors will be minor.

In SMEs however, the growth and stability of the companies is much more related to the margins that a specific project or program allows.

More than ever, companies should do all they can to analyse their client base and extract the right conclusions.

Sales, Marketing and Production efforts should go to those clients that are strategically more important for the company. It could very well be that clients bringing loads of revenue are not bringing any margin and therefore taking resources from serving those clients that would really bring benefits and allow the company to grow.

Actually I don't really believe that there is a difference on this point between big and smaller companies. The only difference is that the problems could be easier to hide if you are big enough.

Leadership: How to create independent thinkers and give them the freedom to enjoy...

"Maestro, with all due respect... when do I start?"

Karajan: "You Start when you can't stand it anymore"

Itay Talgam: "You need to have process and content to create a Meaning"

Enjoy the video... it's so good!

Will social networks kill Spam? (Are we creating self regulated networks?)

The amount of comunications happening inside social networks is exponentially increasing. People are not using email anymore (well, not that much at least):

• Why Email No Longer Rules…

Happens with every change, some people are afraid of it and some are so rapidly changing habits that they forget that the value of technology is to enable better processes, be more efficient and get most of your time spent in front of a computer.

There is a big fuzz about getting Google wave invitations. It is just a matter of typing "google wave invite" in your search engine and you will see, or try twitter and you will see everything from people asking for Retweets to some even offering sexual services in exchange of a Wave invitation.

Google Wave may or may not be a revolution, but the really interesting thing for me is that I believe all these communications through social networks like Linkedin, Facebook, etc... will provoque a major change to our communication behavior and specially will allow for getting spam out of our lifes.

It will take time, but I believe that these new platforms for communication will become self regulated networks. Users will no longer accept unsolicited communications, it will simply be a matter of unfollowing, deleting or not being friends anymore with the person sending you spam.

And you better not be in the list of people doing that because you won't be able to communicate anymore.

Professional Translation - Dilbert way

Don't you feel sometimes translations are performed this way?

Fighting with SDL Passolo and SDL Trados Studio 2009

Blogging out of frustation is normally an experience that should be avoided and I normally prefer to concentrate on positive feedback, but... Please prove me wrong and I'll acknowledge my error and ignorance! (Feel free to contact me).

Foreword:

Trados is still an essential tool for any agency performing tasks that go beyond simple Word translation. I have not seen yet any set of tools work for such an ample diversity of software applications: FrameMaker, Indesign, etc....

Coincidence:

9PM: I just arrived home and my mobile phone rings. It's an ex-colleage of mine who runs a small sized translation business.

- Are you using SDL 2009 in any of your clients offices, ¿should I upgrade?

My first impression was that I had a camera on my shoulder: how else could it happen that after 10 hours trying to figure out what wasn't working properly with a recently upgraded license of SDL2009 so translators could work on a project, I receive such a call.

I told him my "yesterday 9PM" truth. - Listen, I just had a very bad experience with it and I'm not going to be objective. Can I sleep on it tonight and try to be a little less subjective with my response tomorrow?

Background (11 hours earlier):

We had to translate resource strings with Passolo. It has worked in the past, so wasn´t supposed to be a big deal...You are supposed to get your prepared bundles into Passolo, connect the TM and Multiterm to Passolo through the Addin, et voilá.. all should work like a charm.

The problems:

1st issue: The Passolo edition coming with SLD 2009 is an incomplete edition, same for the one that comes with SDL 2007. The funny thing is that even the Translators free edition has basic functions like (Edit/Find) enabled and the one installed with a close to €3000Euro SDL 2007 license doesn't (The message: "The Function "Find..." is only supported by the SDL Passolo Professional or Team Edition.", not true, since it works on their own FREE Translator's editions.)

OK, we must be doing something wrong. I've seen this work. It was not yesterday, but I was sure Passolo worked and I had a good experience with it.

2nd issue: Let's link the TM and the Multiterm to Passolo. Surprise! It seems to work, but when we try to translate the strings, try to Find Concordance, the TM connection changes its state and is "deactivated".

3rd issue: Can we check if Multiterm can be linked? I simply didn't manage to make it work. I could simply mean I was ignorant on how to do it, but Passolo seemed not to let us get the Multiterm link option work.

(Just in case: yes, I did link the Multiterm through Trados Workbench first)

Oh!! But it works with Passolo 2007!

Solution:

Why don´t we forget about all these new versions and just take the ones that seem to work fully: Passolo Freelance Edition and we take an old Trados 7.1 which is the version the translators will have anyway (it's not going to be easy to make translators upgrade!).

And it works....By taking the older Addin for older Trados versions, all works like a charm:- TM is linked- Multiterm is linked- Passolo works

My thoughts:

What is going on? Am I simply not capable of making the new versions work? Maybe these are too complicated for me and I should finally get one of these expensive SDL courses? My filling so far with the combination of Passolo Essential and SDL 2009 is that the software provider is trying to make us pay much more than we should for a product that comes with "essential versions".

BUT: I liked the new interface! I liked the fact that I would not need to use the tedious S-tagger anymore! I liked the integration of many features that were sold to us with the new upgrade! But again, when we need to do something that goes a little further than the simple doc translation...something goes wrong.

Please, prove me wrong. Please tell me I don´t know what I'm talking about. Because if I'm right, I find it very unfair that people downloading Free editions and getting working Trados versions through simple google searches with no need to touch their wallet are managing to make this work and those who pay a high fee are rewarded with a 10hour nightmare "training course".

I'm afraid I won't have a final answer for my friend yet. For the moment I can say that the purchase of SDL Trados Studio 2009 Professional (2995€) + SDL Passolo 2009 (1840€) is quite an investment.

Links:

SDL Trados Studio 2009: http://www.sdl.com/en/sites/sdl-trados-solutions/default.asp

Free SDL Passolo Freelance Edition: http://www.sdl.com/en/sites/sdl-passolo/downloads/files/passolo-2009-translation-edition.asp

Simple explanation of Web 2.0