CSA predictions for 2011

Interesting predictions from Global Watchtower: Predictions for 2011: Increased Visibility for Language Services (Global Watchtower is the blog of Common Sense Advisory).

Most localization industry predictions have not had a good record of success. For instance, throughout the 2000’s predictions of CMS and TM systems somehow turning the industry into a mature corporate-dominated arena were a bit far fetched at the time, and have subsequently not come true. (This was expected by many savvy agencies who work at the coal face of the industry :) ).

While it is true that "workflow systems" are still a vision presented as a marketing ploy to corporate clients, the reality is that the back end of the localization industry largely remains a commodity driven cottage industry preformed at home by the cheapest resources available.

Still, the phenomenon of machine translation—and in particular the involvement of Google into the equation (the only player with scale enough to make a dent in this process)—is changing the possibilities in the industry as well as how work is done.

CNS is picking up on this and several other issues, such as:

Instead of just squeezing suppliers for better pricing, they’ll start to look at the big picture, turning to more sophisticated solutions, such as automation and process optimization to address the need to offer multilingual content and services without breaking the bank.

With some top vendors pressing receptionists into project manager duties, the top down push for lowering costs and raising margins must indeed be severe. The conflicting desire for ever higher quality at the same time is what is pushing the move to computerized systems for automating the process and giving higher ups in the organization the illusion they have control of the process.

The one concept missing here is the fact that so many major localization vendors have gone through big external infusions of cash and near brushes with death (and this was even before the economic downturn of the last few years) that shaving sourcing costs continues to be a mania and a necessity.

Another trend:

Internal localization and translation departments will question whether they should go the route of outsourcing wholeheartedly, and whether a large internal staff is truly critical for efficiency in managing their language activities. Smelling the opportunity, savvy LSPs will work with their customers to develop more consultative arrangements, enabling them to offload more work.

This is particularly interesting to us at Admerix as this is at the core of what we are set up to do—provide industry veteran project management that is affordable. We allow major LSPs in expensive locations to offshore their production to an affordable location while maintaining industry expertise. This thinking runs counter to what most companies are trying to do—cut project management expertise and somehow make up for it with expensive online process-management systems.

What Went Right and What Went Wrong At Your Company in 2010

So many year-end company newsletters (as well as company blogs) are simply a waste of time  since they focus on the minutiae of a company's internal workings (staff profiles, cheery news about how the company fared in the past year, etc.). These are all things that no one cares about. In business, we all care about our own problems and how to solve them.

Considering that the only reason effort was put into newsletters and blogs was as a marketing activity to create consultative relationships with clients and adds value, it is amazing how anyone could think that company newsletters telling about staff member hobbies and recipes could be worth anyone's time.

As you can tell, we at Admerix have little patience for the traditional year end newsletters, so we decided to try to make a year-end message that does not focus on our performance and issues, but instead on our clients and the issues the localization industry is facing.

Take a look and let us know what you think: What Went Right and What Went Wrong At Your Company in 2010

Machine Translation and the "Over Reverence Phenomenon"

Like many companies, Admerix has experimented with MT engines and other methods to reconfigure existing localization processes.

The dream of many companies is that they can eliminate translator fees by initially translating with machine translation and then get another translator to edit (read: retranslate) at an editing rate. We have even seen some companies trying to pass this off as a proofreading only process!

This sort of concept is already used by some companies—especially for more difficult work. They have the cheapest unqualified linguist to do initial work and then try to contract a normally expensive subject specialist to “edit” the translation. Most professional linguists see through this kind of scheme and will turn down these “editing” jobs that are really re-translation at cut-rate editing prices.

Although Admerix has never used machine translation on any live job, we had to investigate and understand what all the fuss is about.

One thing we discovered as we were testing the new machine translate/edit paradigm is an interesting phenomenon that we call the “Over Reverence Phenomenon.”

As we review the efforts of linguists editing machine translation, we consistently find editors deferring to often wrong or stilted work coming from machine translation. This results is less refined translation work than if an editor is editing the work of a live translator.

This reverence for machine language-generated text occurs even with experienced editors. It seems evident that there is some conscious or unconscious desire to defer to the choices made by a computer-based translation engine—particularly with regard to terminology. Editors appear reticent to challenge MT output on specific linguistic issues.

As we spoke with editors who undertook our tests, several of them expressed the opinion that the MT output seemed correct and they were happy to learn the correct terms from it.

Anyone experienced with the localization industry will find this state of affairs unusual as many linguists revel in tearing up the work of other linguists—even over purely preferential and stylistic issues. There seems to be something about an MT engine though that makes editors hesitant to rewrite stilted or incorrect grammar—instead deferring to the supposedly superior knowledge of computers.

The other machine translation trend we've been aware of recently is MLVs discovering their linguists are exposing proprietary client data to machine translation engines through Google Translator Toolkit.

Many larger companies are finding their resources have been heavily using the service and thus giving away valuable and confidential translation to a public MT engine. Non-disclosure agreements, formerly held in light regard as a bureaucratic nicety, are suddenly becoming important again to ensure that linguists are not exposing client data to Google Translate. Of course, the corollary to this is that end clients may begin to see translation gains from work that has been entered into the Google Translate system.

We are also aware that some Asian vendors have sold or bartered millions of units of client translation memory to private companies that are creating their own translation engines.

Just to be clear, Admerix doesn’t use machine translation on its projects and we never expose client material to public MT engines. We hold our NDAs to be inviolate.

We also don’t feel that eliminating linguists is key to profitable projects. Our experience is that expert project management is key for the inevitable challenges that come with every corporate project. Translation often turns out to be the most trouble-free aspect of any corporate localization project.

A Machine Translation future is not "just around the corner"

 

Above via Flickr: Translating Machine. Typist copies story from Russian newspaper Pravda on special machine which converts Russian letters to punched holes in paper tape. Insertion of the tape into another machine produces translation. By the 1970's, automatic translation of practically all foreign publications and books will be routine. (from 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach)

Note this fascinating update from the localization blog "Global Watchtower" (confusingly named as if it was a Jehovah's Witnesses site): At TAUS, Practitioners Settle In for a Long Slog

…At one point, Jaap van der Meer made the provocative statement that MT would see “no new breakthroughs” in the next five years…

This is a stunning admission from these people! And interesting that the efforts at machine translation is still so fragmented. Lots of players are trying to invent the wheel independently because they all want to be first to make a big killing by eliminating the lowly translator.

Here’s what they want: interoperability among systems of all kinds, machine translation, translation memory (TM) sharing, terminology, quality assurance, project management, reporting, finance, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and so on.

People on the production side of the localization industry (the people who are DOING the jobs that salesmen sell) often find that translation is the smallest and easiest part of any project.

The key to a successful project is: being able to synthesize legacy files from a client uninterested in being part of the process, integrating last minute on-the-fly changes from a client CEO who just "wants it done," and the knock-on effects that these inevitable challenges bring to a project schedule.

The real challenge for the localization industry in the short to medium term will be cutting the massive costs of bricks and mortar client-facing operations in Europe and the U.S.--along with dealing with increasingly savvy corporate customers trying to break the middle-man syndrome of MLVs based in major markets.

Admerix Survey - The State of the Industry: Linguists Speak

We've posted our latest survey, "The State of the Industry: Linguists Speak," on the Admerix.com website.

This is a survey of linguists' opinions on machine translation editing, online work flow systems, new tools and other current innovations which threaten to drastically change the role of the translator in the localization industry.

Please take a look and let us know your opinions.