The lure of the cloud (Part 3 of "Will technology save your company?")

There is also the irresistible lure of the “cloud.” Strapped vendors dream how high margins could be if they could get a cloud of super cheap (or even free) translators who would frantically collaborate on translation in real time in the same way as Wikipedia is edited.

The three-focus syndrome and the localization customer

The three-focus syndrome is one of the biggest traps that we see being laid for localization project managers in recent times. Understanding it can be the difference between a successful project and failure.

First, the customer asks about price, and is looking for the most "competitive" price that they can find.

Down-skilling project managers (Part 2 of "Will technology save your company?")

Project managers working in high-cost developed countries are a huge expense. The reaction to this is that experienced project managers have been “down-skilled.” Seen only as a cost to production, veteran project managers have been pushed aside as companies replace them with low-paid novices (sometimes even interns) who can be pressured into staying in the office all night trying to fulfill promises made by overzealous sales staff. The inevitable result is chronic poor performance and low quality. The resulting quality gaffes create further pressure to regiment the project process to make it more fool-proof.

Will technology save your company? (Part 1)

How should a localization company lower costs and increase quality? Today, the answer seems to be eliminate project managers as much as possible and regiment the process with a computer-based system of some sort.

A streamlined localization process is the holy grail of the industry and would be seen to increase quality and speed of production. However, this solution naïve and showing that it is certainly not in the best of interest of customers.