8/14/2019 The End of Old School Localization Thinking

1/2ClientSide News Magazine

If a $22 million transactioncan shake up a $10 billionindustry even a little bit, you

wonder what state this industry must be in. The acquisi-tion of Idiom by SDL stirred up discussions of awe anddespair. Many people loved Idiom for what it was: inde-pendent, neutral, the Switzerland of the translation in-dustry. WorldServer was the technology that would maketranslation easy and attractive for every user. But letsface it, the company was performing poorly, and had losttoo much money over the years. The investors had losttheir appetites. Even though WorldServer could automate,lets say, 20 of the 40 steps in the process, it was not thesort of magic solution that excited a global executive.

End of story....

p aradox

In this age of globalization you would expect thetranslation industry to be ten times bigger. The ow ofinformation that requires translation is immense and isgrowing everyday. The economic wisdom of demand andsupply, however, does not seem to apply to this indus-try. Translation is one of the most cumbersome processesfor business to manage. It is slow and costly. Professionaltranslation resources remain scarce. Technology - usuallythe answer to such dilemmas - has been of little help inthe translation industry. The size of the translation tech-nology sector is miniscule. Add up the revenue numbersof the translation technology companies - including Idiom

- and you possibly get to a gure of around $100 million.There can only be one conclusion: translation is too com-plex and the technology is not good enough.

o ld school Thinking

In this context SDLs acquisition of Idiom makes per-fect sense. By monopolizing the little technology that isout there, SDL buys time and market share. If you ownthe technology you potentially own the services. Sincetranslation technology automates only a fraction of theprocess, the ratio between technology and services isvery favorable for companies like SDL. Every Euro in tech-nology comes along with perhaps ten Euros in services.It is a good example of old school thinking: locking thecustomer into your services. Everyone does it. And theweapons used in this battle for customers are not alwaysproprietary tools. They may be assets such as ownershipof data, or translation memories, or the kind of knowl-edge and experience that make customers nervous aboutswitching. Many translation companies have convincedtheir customers that they have a monopoly on linguisticquality. It is only natural.

w rong cusTomer

Old school thinking can easily turn into complacencyand self-righteousness. The translation industry has lostsight of its bigger mission in the global economy. Newtechnologies, rules and regulations, medication, politics,and entertainment must all be made accessible for con-sumers, citizens, taxpayers, and patients speaking differ-ent languages around the world. The industry is failingmiserably in this mission. It is only scratching the surface,squeezing out only a fraction of the words that are wait-ing to be translated. The real customer is not the buyer atMicrosoft, Philips or the government. Old school thinkingtends to undermine values and become destructive, es-pecially if it is focused on the wrong customer.

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ind ust ry f ocus

The end of old school l ocalizat ion t hinking

Reprint ed from TAUS Newslet t er, February 2008

SDL, Idiom and the state we are in

byJaap van der MeerTAUS

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8/14/2019 The End of Old School Localization Thinking

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l ocalizaTio n business innovaTion

But old s chool thinking can also offer a very fertile envi-ronment for business innovation. The question was askedin a TAUS survey whether the localization business modeland payment structure are out-of-date and in need of re-vision. Sixty- ve percent of the respondents agreed thatit was. However when we assembled a group of localiza-tion leaders at the TAUS Forum in Brussels last Novem-ber to explore new business models, the brainstormingessentially resulted in a con rmation of the status quo.This well-established industry prefers to close its eyes todisruptive innovative trends such as crowdsourcing, ma-chine translation, shared language data reposi-tories and language service enabling plaforms.Mission dismissed.

c onvergence

The most likely scenario for the translationindustry is therefore that it will become featur-ized or marginalized inside other solution offer-ings. Think in terms of convergence, like cam-eras becoming a feature in telephones. Transla-tion then becomes a feature in, for example,search portals, software applications and cus-tomer support sites. Other business sectorswill jump on the tremendous global translationopportunity with a dedicated focus on the realcustomers. As many localization buyers under-stand very well, this sort of challenge requiresgenuine out-of-the-box thinking, revolutionarypricing and fundamental changes in the busi-ness model. New terms are entering the local-ization conversations - user experience and

content eco-system. One thing is clear: wehave moved from a push-model to a pull-model.It does not matter what the publisher pushesout to the market; it is the user who is in com-mand. Welcome to a new world.

i nfra and lingua

A clear seperation of infra and lingua is aprecondition for business innovation. The pipes

(infra) that channel the ow of words acrosslanguages should not be controlled by the sameentities that provide the language service (lin-gua). Language data will be stored in industry-shared repositories, such as the emerging TAUSAssociation platform. Thanks to advanced trans-lation automation such as machine translationand advanced leveraging, the cost of translationper word will come down dramatically, creatingnew opportunities for value-added services andgenerating tremendous market growth. Newlinguistic services, including the development

of taxonomies and semantic coding, will be es-

sential for the delivery of high quality serv ices to thenew world of customers. All these scenarios for changeand innovation were outlined in the TAUS Report Tur-moil in Translation (October 2006), and we shall keeptracking them. We are currently working on a reportabout language intelligence applications that are be-ing researched and applied in other business sectors.They include such functions as search, text analytics,information retrieval and knowledge management. Welike to build bridges and pave the way for convergence.Why? Because we can hear the clock ticking. It is onlya matter of time before the bell rings on old schoollocalization thinking.

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