Why the Craving for Standards?

Again we are seeing Gala, now a major localization industry body, driving ahead with the process of overlaying the production process with more and ever more steps to "ensure" quality. They have announced that they are "rolling out several important projects" and are pleading for industry professionals to "reap the benefits through volunteer participation". At the end of this great show of how valuable their input is going to be, there is then the begging for money to allow them to continue with even more of this bureaucratic nonsense that actually never has an ending.

Given that we who live in the real world of producing quality translations for our customers already have excellent processes at hand to check files and ensure that what we are delivering to our customers is up to the required standard, it seems hard to understand why there would be the need for all the additional time and effort to be applied. However, there does seem to be a mindset that without going through these "important" standards steps on top of the real world business of getting the work done on time, we cannot be assured of the quality of the deliverables.

Having been in the industry for many years and running teams of project managers and legions of in-house and freelance linguists, we do have a view of why some projects finish with great quality, and why some projects end up with poor quality. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tools" that were applied to the work after the translation was completed!

The formula that is proven to work is simply to only have people involved in the project who actually know what they are doing and get on with the business of doing it carefully, responsibly, and with a single objective of delivering work that is up to a high standard from the outset. Our experience is that professional linguists take great pride in their work. They carefully check source texts and will refuse to take a project if they realize that it is outside the scope of their expertise. Trained project managers know how to select only those translators and editors who have the background and subject specialty required to competently carry out the work. They can often foresee problems in a given task and set in place solutions long before such problems are able to impact the production process.

Right now though, these two essential components, experienced and professional linguists and trained veteran project managers, are being viewed as expensive and dispensable appendages to the industry. The thrust is to develop sophisticated (and expensive) software packages that are claiming to make it all happen and can be placed in the hands of any junior admin staff who knows how to turn a computer on.

Translation and localization was and is a "people" business. The pressure on for LSPs to deliver more and more for less and less and this is causing garbage to infect even quality work that was done in the past. By using the cheapest available resources and let it be directed by project managers who were shop assistants last week, the only assurance that they can have it that they will always be looking for ways to improve the quality of the finished product that they used to have a few years ago.

Quality does not come from a “system” that can only ever handle commodities. Quality results come from competent management and the application of talent, experience, expertise, and an understanding of what is actually needed in each of the myriad of different project challenges that are faced every day by the localization industry personnel.

When it comes to the quest for quality, we at Admerix look for quality in the people who are handling every aspect of the work and find that this approach works very nicely!

Replacing Translators with Clouds of Amateurs

"Translation in the cloud" is another process that seems to be infecting the perception of translation in the minds of translation buyers. The concept seems to be that you just throw a document to the cloud and there it will be machine translated and then lots of translators are sitting “out there” waiting to proofread the result without charge or for minimal amounts of payment. It relies on the controversial notion that speakers of two languages are also natural translators.

However, professional translators are not sitting “out there” or anywhere else, just waiting to do work for free or for peanuts. Generally, if they are professional, they will refuse to work on MT output because they will not put their name and reputation at risk for the inevitable substandard results. That will leave cloud translation to hobbyists and amateurs, and the results of that certainly are predictable.

Nothing replaces a competent translator and editor team working with quality tools and an experienced, professional Localization Industry Project Manager (remember those people?) to coordinate the various process and keep the projects on track and compliant with QA guidelines and client instructions.

Nothing has replaced the industry standards for processes that generate quality translations in a reasonable time frame, and those companies who stick to such tried and proven industry standards will be the ones who succeed in maintaining a satisfied and loyal customer base.

At the end of the day, all the client wants is a quality translation of his documentation, software, website, etc. at a reasonable price and in a reasonable time frame.

Oh yeah, and you better not cheap out and use students either.

Why Computers Still Can’t Translate Languages Automatically

Why Computers Still Can’t Translate Languages Automatically - Slate, May 11, 2012
...The difficulty of knowing if a translation is good is not just a technical one: It’s fundamental. The only durable way to judge the faith of a translation is to decide if meaning was conveyed. If you have an algorithm that can make that judgment, you’ve solved a very hard problem indeed...

We all hate Trados, but...

As a supplier of translations to the translation industry, we are recently seeing a bewildering array of new translation packages being adopted by major LSPs.

Just to date this year, we have seen major companies moving to, and insisting on, one of the following: Wordfast, MemoQ, XTM, Catalyst, WorldServer.

Some companies have even gone further to completely reinvent the wheel by setting up their very own CAT tool with the view that their resource pool will be happy to learn their quirky and impractical system and translate online.

We all love to hate Trados, that is true. Many companies are trying to use Trados Studio 2009 and are not exactly delighted with the results, even after exhausting efforts to learn and implement its new features. Relying on a tool like Trados, that is created by and owned by a giant LSP that would like to take away all your clients, has always been irritating, but Trados has long been the industry standard and linguists have invested heavily in it.

At Admerix, some time ago we moved to using Trados 2007 in both WorkBench and TagEditor and all of our teams are equipped with this package, familiar and comfortable with its use, and the results are predictable and reliable. A quick perusal on any of the translator forums will testify that this is true, and while some translators do like other packages such as DejaVu they have to perform all sorts of file conversion tricks if they are going to serve more than a very few customers. Generally you can be very confident that if you ask a translator for a translation using Trados 2007 you will have no problem and the project will run smoothly.

What could it possibly be that is motivating the management of many LSPs to try to make expensive and time-consuming transitions away from Trados--especially after so many linguists have spent the time and money to be proficient in it?

The only answer that we can suggest is that such companies are desperately trying to retain a market share when new dominant technologies threaten to change the localization landscape. They inevitably turn away from good people (e.g. hire novice project managers and insist on the very cheapest translators) and towards some magical technological process fix.

The hope that “technology will save our company” has been dealt with on this blog in the past (in fact it was our very first post). Despite what management thinks, technology will not carve out a niche for both customers and a select pool of resources.

Our prediction is this process will spawn dissatisfied customers and make the vendor manager’s job practically impossible. Turnaround times will increase due to all kinds of technical glitches and slowdowns due to translators not being able to mesh with the new systems.

It also will limit the choice of translators who can be available for projects. This becomes a major problem when there is a need for specialist translator and editor teams. Also, and very importantly, scalability is limited when confined to such systems.

Are You The Customer You'd Want To Have?

EVERY department of localization companies--production, sales, management--should be required to read this article: Are You The Customer You'd Want To Have?

...Entitlement trumps respect, impatience trumps appreciation, rudeness trumps understanding and greed trumps civility. Who has time to be a good customer? Just fix it for me. Just bring it to me. Just do what I say. I’m a very busy man and I haven’t got all day. I am the customer, and you are here to serve me...