What I expect for 2012

As the song goes, "it's the most wonderful time of the year". It's the time to make predictions.

Before going into my expectations for 2012, I took a look at what I wrote last year, and I believe that my predictions for 2011 materialized.

Content is indeed being served in smaller chunks and requiring faster turnaround times. There is more demand for multimedia translations such as video, and also for interpretation both on-site and over the phone. So voice was in fact more in demand in 2011.

Last week, LinkedIn announced that their website was now available in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Korean. Several other companies have done the same. Brazilian Portuguese was one of the fastest-growing languages, but also one with the most quality and delivery problems.

What didn't happen at the pace that I expected, was the number of mergers and acquisitions in the industry in 2011. There have been some, but no major mergers.

The topics that I expect to hear about in 2012 are more related to startups. There is going to be an increased focus on on-demand translations. Companies like Speaklike, MyGengo, Smartling, Translated.net, LanguageWire, Tolingo, and OneHourTranslation will be all over the place. Larger players will also offer their own solutions. Companies will be able to find efficiencies in moving down to smaller projects.

I also believe that we are going to be talking about marketplaces again. This sounds so 1999, but companies like Cloudwords and OpenBorder will be offering an online marketplace for translation companies to bid on projects of traditional buyers. Proz tried that before, but who knows... the times are different.

The automation of small project workflows, will require an increased productivity on the part of project managers. The most requested job in the translation industry will actually be project management, but the role of the project manager will shift more rapidly from closely managing resources to managing exceptions.

I don't think that the economy is in shape for many mergers and acquisitions. But we will hear about some of them happening. Companies like Welocalize and Transperfect still have plenty of cash, and there are companies for sale in the market. It is just a matter of finding the right price point.

SpeakLike and a New Category of LSP: The On-Demand Translation Vendor

I just saw a demo of SpeakLike and I was instantaneously brought back to a comment that I made in a recent post here on this blog: We never really talk about the future, we are only talking about a present in which we don't participate.

SpeakLike fits in an ever-growing category of companies that cater to web-based streaming content and small projects with fast turnaround times. Companies like MyGengo, Smartling, Translated.net, LanguageWire, Tolingo, and OneHourTranslation have slightly similar (or slightly different, if you prefer) approaches to address their client needs, but they all center around Project Management Automation, one of the strong industry trends that I have been talking about. I call this category of companies the On-Demand Translation Vendors.

SpeakLike was founded by Sandy Cohen, a serial technology entrepreneur, with the original idea of integrating existing off-the-shelf technologies to provide online interpretation services based on machine translation, speech-to-text and text-to-speech. Some of the early prototypes I saw some years ago worked better than the speech-enabled version of Google Translate does today. But as it often happens to innovators, Sandy was early to the party and the demand for these services was not there yet. But there was demand for real-time on-demand human-based translation of chat communication at the enterprise level. And that is what SpeakLike has morphed into.

What is exciting about this approach to translation, which lies between the traditional time-consuming Translation-Editing-Proofing method and the often vilified pure Machine Translation, is that it provides a browser-based environment for experienced freelance translators to work on fast turnaround documents or customer support online chats. It's like telephone interpretation for text.

Some of the features that I like about SpeakLike:

• Interface. The translator interface is like an improved version of Facebook Translate. Along with the source text (sometimes images or PDFs), the translator gets relevant terminology, previous similar translations (translation memory) and Style Guide information that is specific to the client at hand, with data about tone and format.
• Speed. The system is designed to provide translations as fast as humanly possible. This means turnaround times of minutes to hours instead of days and weeks. It is a system that is ideal for streaming content like news, financial data, and online support chat.
• Price model. Translations are cheaper than what you would get from a traditional LSP, but margins are still attractive for the business because once a client is setup, all tasks are automated and the overhead is minimal. 
• iPhone App. If you are in a foreign land and cannot understand a sign, you can take a picture of it and submit it to SpeakLike, where a human translator will translate the sign and send it back to you. It's a manned version of Google Goggles or Word Lens.

The challenge for SpeakLike, as well as for the other companies that I listed above, is adoption. With limited funds, these companies need to invest in sales or other forms of mass dissemination of their solution in order flourish.

Smartling Gets $4m in Funding: Or How To Throw Venture Money Away

Last week Smartling, Inc., a provider of real-time, crowdsourced translations for Internet based businesses, announced that it has secured a US$ 4 million Series A round of investment, led by Venrock. The round also included funding from US Venture Partners, First Round Capital and several angel investors. According to the press-release, the company will use the funding to expand its operations and support product development.

What this shows to me is that the executives at Smartling are very good salespeople, and that the investors haven't done their homework very well.

Smartling proposes to use a hybrid model which essentially allows clients to pick between professional translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. The key is managing it all, which can be done with Smartling’s software. With it, you can pick and choose which part of your site to translate which way.

I can predict here that this company is not going very far:

• First, because they assume that clients have the ability to pick and choose how they want things done. 
• Second, because like many before them, they assume that website localization is not more widespread because of lack of technology (as I say frequently, localization is a service not a technology problem). 
• Third, because they haven't learned their history. Companies like eTranslate, WizArt, Wordlingo, and MotionPoint have pitched this story before. And where are they? Do you see them among the Top 30 Translation Companies in the world?

If the investors expect a 10X return on their investment as many venture capitalists do, I suggest that they start looking at other areas, or contact me to tell them where the money is in the translation industry (hint: not in website translation).