Framing the Discussion about the Future of the Industry

Earlier this week in Budapest, during the MemoQ User Conference, I participated in a panel discussion about the future of the industry. It seems that this is a favorite subject in recent events and I suspect that people are so interested in what is going to happen either because they are bored with the present or because there is a sense of insecurity in the air.

At a dinner with Kirti Vashee in the Trastevere the previous week, David Orban, CEO of dotSub, gave me an inspiring quote by William Gibson: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

I couldn't resist and started using it the next day in a presentation to the students at LUSPIO. That quote helped me frame several of the ideas that are popping up in the global discussions about industry issues in events, associations, and online venues like LinkedIn and Twitter.

I particularly like that quote, because every time that a problem is raised, someone comes up with a story about a company that has already found a solution or is working on it. Combined with my favorite disclaimer that “The closer your vision gets to a provable future, the more your are simply describing the present. In the same way, the more certain you are of a future outcome, the more likely you will be wrong,” — which I took from The Visionary’s Handbook by Wacker & Taylor — William Gibson's axiom explains why we seem to be stuck: We never really talk about the future, we are only talking about a present in which we don't participate.

In a recent interview, Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan and one of the first to preview the collapse of the financial system in 2008, talks about the concept of "subtractive prophecy." He says that "to predict, you need to remove from the future what doesn't belong there because of fragility." This thought completes the triangle that I like to use in the recurring discussions of what will happen in the localization industry.

The questions that I pose myself are:

• Is someone already doing it? (Description of the present)
• Is it plausible that someone is already doing it or is the issue easily solvable with existing technology? (Provable future)
• Do we really need it? (Subtractive prophecy)

Following these premises, here is what I think of the three favorite topics of the industry:

Machine Translation, My view is that it is a reality that is here to stay. It will improve over time and its uses will expand. It is not "evenly distributed" but it is widely available, and it is more of an ally than a foe to the language services space.

Standards. A laudable effort undertaken by organizations that have no power to enforce them. On the technology standards front, I think it is more likely that middleware will develop to broker conversions between translation memories and transfers between different content management systems. (I seem to have heard something about a product called Any2TM at memoQfest and ClayTablet already does some of it).

Crowdsourcing. A topic dear to translators who see it as a threat, as the encroachment of non-professionals into the language industry. Too late. People will do translations for free, just as you take pictures without the help of professional photographers. The reality is that there is more demand for translations than there are professional translators to handle them. Crowdsourcing -- like machine translation -- is just another way to address this market reality.

Google Introduces New Type of Telephone Interpretation

As announced yesterday on Google's blog, next month Google will launch what it is calling the Conversation Mode in Google Translate for Android. You can see a preview of it here.

It is a basic process of Voice Recognition, followed by Machine Translation that is converted back to voice using text-to-speech. The service will start to be offered in February 2011 between English and Spanish, but other languages will follow soon.

Google alerts that this is still an experimental feature that is in its early stages and that it cannot handle accents, background noise or rapid speech.

Is this the so awaited Universal Translator that we saw in Star Trek? Will this replace telephone interpretation or even human interpretation?

Not yet. In fact, I have seen demos of voice-based MT systems several times. Language companies used it as a technique to impress investors and get some venture capital. One of the first ones I was from Lernout & Hauspie that translated between English and Chinese. More recently, I was very impressed by how Speaklike was able to create a functioning demo just using off-the-shelf or free software.

Just like Google Translate, the Conversation Mode will help in situations where an interpreter would never be called before, like the shoe store case presented in the preview mentioned above. The applications are limited and the accuracy is not consistent. And just like Google Translate, the Conversation Mode will probably help increase the awareness of the importance of professional interpretation. Or would you go to court in foreign country using your Android phone as your translator?

What I expect to see in 2011

This is the time of the year when people start making predictions for the next year. Well, as I have already been asked several times what I see in my crystal ball, let me share it with you.

• Content. Let me start with a quote from futurist Ray Kurzweill in a recent interview for Time Magazine: "Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion."
  
  So content is growing exponentially and that's not news, but for the language industry there will be two trends that will accelerate in 2011. First is the atomization or chunking of content, i.e., translation projects will come in smaller sizes (in line with the trend in the software industry to move to apps). Second is velocity of content, i.e. clients will want these projects faster. These two trends will drive increased demand for productivity gains.
• Voice. I believe that there is going to be an increase in demand for voice translation. Not only on-site and over-the-phone interpretation, but also dubbing and subtitling. Everybody talks about the ascendance of video, but video means very little for the translation industry; what needs to be translated is what people say, hence the increase in video will lead to an increase in the demand for voice-based translations. (Note to translators: Learn interpretation skills).
• Languages. Be prepared for increased demand for Indonesian (Indonesia is right after the U.S. in numbers of Facebook users), Vietnamese, and African languages. I also expect increased demand for Brazilian Portuguese as the predictions for growth in the Brazilian economy are very positive.
• Business. Acquisitions will happen. Expect several announcements and some consolidation at the top. The main discussion will be once again the fair valuation of companies. Naturally Welocalize will lead the charge, but I expect to hear from SDL, Moravia, CLS, HiSoft, and the Scandinavian companies like Semantix, AAC, and LanguageWire. Either as aquirers or targets of acquisition.
• Pricing. It is true. Price pressure is really a fact now. Mature clients are shopping around for better prices in order to translate more with the same budget. For many years I have said that prices had been stable in the industry, but I believe that in 2011 companies will succumb to the haggling of the big buyers. The only way out of this is to dramatically increase productivity using technology at levels never seen before. This will be especially important for Single Language Vendors. Freelance translators should think about measuring their income per hour or per month, instead of their price per word.
• The year of interoperability in the cloud. All this talk about privacy and how Google Translate breaches confidentiality clauses will disappear. Translation memories will be shared in the cloud and the chatter of the last two years will become just that; chatter. The big winners in technology will be  the MT solution providers and Kilgray, with its MemoQ technology (that works very well with files generated by their competition and thus achieves de facto interoperability). It is not surprise to me that MemoQ only has raving fans. Asia Online stands a good chance of growing a lot this year as the last stalwart of independent MT. I predict SDL will still grow out of pure momentum, not because of its "innovative" solutions.

What I don't expect to be news in 2011, even though there is going to be a lot of talk about it still, is the adoption of Machine Translation and the impact of Social Media as a source of more translation and localization.

In my opinion, MT crossed the chasm in 2010, and Social Media content is generated almost exclusively in local languages, with very little impact on the demand for translation and localization. Social Media might be a driver, but not demand generator in itself. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a few startups come up with the idea of creating companies focused on localizing Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

Now I need to catch a plane....

Localization Perspectives 6 - Quality

Another installment of our conversations about industry topics. This time the focus is Quality.

Kirti Vashee and Renato Beninatto Discuss the Acquisition of LanguageWeaver by SDL

Some Trends in the Localization Industry

In preparation for the Vendor Management Seminar that will be held in Las Vegas later this month, I have been doing some thinking about trends in the industry that affect the services provided by companies like Milengo, and thought you might be interested in them.

There are three trends that I have identified:

• Disintermediation and Collaboration: The vast improvement in the quality and reduction in cost of online collaboration technology -- combined with the widespread availability of affordable bandwidth -- is leading LSPs to redesign their production workflows to remove unnecessary steps and activities from their processes. A clear result of this trend is that larger LSPs are going back to working with individual translators instead of using single language vendors as intermediaries, especially in projects involving time-sensitive or dynamic content.
• Productivity Boost: The incorporation of machine translation engines and shared translation memory environments into the desktop productivity tools of translators will result in a massive increase in the number of words that a professional translator can process in a day. Averages will jump from 2,500 words to 15,000 to 20,000 words per day in the first stage, reaching even higher numbers in the near future.
• Role and Cost of Technology: Translation technology tools like translation management systems and desktop translation memory software are unusually expensive for the value that they provide. As Chris Anderson points out in his book “Free," software and content want to be free. What creates value are the services provided around technology, not the technology itself. So, I have predicted that Translation Memory technology will be free or become irrelevant by 2015.

What are the implications of these trends for buyers? In a nutshell, more words will be translated in a shorter period of time at a lower total cost.

In general, I believe that because Milengo positions itself as a technology agnostic and customer service-focused organization puts it in the right position to succeed in this new market reality.

If you haven't registered yet, don't miss the opportunity to send your vendor managers to the IMTT event in Las Vegas. IMTT consistently organizes the best training events in translations industry.

Machine Translation in the News Again

Google Translate and Google Translator Toolkit made the rounds of the big U.S. media last week, with major stories in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. These were tweeted, retweeted, facebooked, LinkedIned, and forwarded by e-mail ad nauseam. How are people reacting? I identify two major groups:

• It's the end of the world for translators. This doomsday approach stems from fear of the unknown and amazement with the quality of the translation that Google has been generating for some language pairs. 
• MT is never going to reach perfection. So, no worries. This nonchalant attitude comes from those who only see the defects in the tools and feel safe in their current positions.

Nem tanto ao mar, nem tanto à terra, is a Portuguese expression (don't try to google-translate it, it's not going to work) that literally translates as "not so much to the sea, not so much to the land" but means that the neither extreme is right and the truth is probably in the middle. If you follow my postings or presentations, you should know by now that I believe that translators should use MT to improve their productivity and it is only useful if the user knows the language into which the text is being translated. 

I agree with Ben Sargent from Common Sense Advisory, when he says in the Global Watchtower that "...machine translation could remove the cloak of invisibility from translators, giving them greater recognition and status. As 99.99 percent of translation is done by the machine, two things may happen: 1) The volume of human translation could increase; 2) the perceived value of human translation could increase."

Nabil Frej and John Yunker have posted on their blogs the preliminary results from the “Which Engine Translates Best?” challenge organized by Gabble On which asks volunteers to evaluate Google Translate, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo Babel Fish translations (if you haven't done it yet, I strongly suggest you spend 10 minutes doing it). And it looks as if Google is doing a better job than the other two, but with some exceptions.

From a translation business perspective, I am adopting a pragmatic approach. At Milengo, we are running a few pilot projects with some of our clients to evaluate seven language pairs using the Asia Online technology. We have also used the API for Google Translator Toolkit to connect it with Milengo's Translation Management System and we are currently running some test projects with it. Our goal with these efforts is not to replace human translation, but to increase productivity and to allow our clients to translate content that would otherwise never be translated because of cost and deadlines.


The situation reminds me of a story that my friend João Roque Dias, from Portugal, told me about how government officials in Portugal would fend off requests in the late 70s by saying that outcomes were unpredictable because the country was in a PREC (Processo Revolucionário em Curso or Revolutionary Process In Progress), which eventually became synonymous with "a mess."  Language technology for me is in a PREC: Any outcome is possible, so I am hedging my bets!

Localization and Translation Thailand 2009: A Great Event!

Sometimes I think that my job is participating in translation and localization events. Although I really enjoy the networking and the content, I must confess that there are too many and several of them just copy each other (but this is the topic of a future posting).

But every once in a while, in the most unexpected places, even a veteran like me can be surprised and re-energized by the contents of an event. For me, 2009 was the year of the small and unpretentious events culminating with Localization and Translation Thailand last week in Bangkok.

In the same line as the 6th Language and Technology Conference, in Córdoba (Argentina), and the ELIA Networking Days, in Vienna, the Thai event attracted fewer than 100 people, which made it a perfect venue for in-depth conversations, real networking, and the development of excellent business opportunities.

The highlights of the event were the keynote presentation by Andrew Rufener, the COO of Lexis Nexis Univentio, and the panel on new developments in localization R&D.

Andrew Rufener reported on his experience in implementing large scale machine translation in patent information services. A real case study by a group that thoroughly evaluated seven MT solutions and ended up selecting Asia Online's solution.

Philip Köhn, from the University of Edinburgh, showed some data on the performance of "monolingual translators" post-editing MT output compared to generic human translation. The concept of a monolingual translator is revolutionary enough, but the fact that industry domain experts perform better than professional translators in post editing tasks was viewed as heresy by the weaker souls in the audience.

My friend Hans Fenstermacher, representing GALA and Translations.com, made a compelling presentation about the challenges that localization has to face because of the way content is developed and handled.

Dion Wiggins, the master of cerimonies and the brains behind the whole event, unveiled some of the accomplishments of Asia Online's new technology and how the world will view language technology differently in the near future.

Finally, I really enjoyed Biraj Rath's presentation about the untapped opportunities about the Indian market. I was amazed at how much I didn't know about India.

All in all, an outstanding event that exceeded all my expectations. For 2010, I am looking forward to Think Latin America in Búzios, near my hometown of Rio de Janeiro, and to ELIA's Networking Days in Istanbul. Both events will be in April and I am really impressed with the line up of speakers and topics (full disclosure: I am helping both events with their programs).

And if you want to follow the Twitter activity of several of the participants with quotes and comments from the speakers and panelists, click here.

New York Has Six Official Languages. And It is Sued over Translations.

The New York Time publishes a story about a lawsuit against the city's welfare agency for not enforcing a law that requires the provision of translation services.

According with the Equal Access to Human Services Act of 2003, the city had sixteen months to have its forms made available in Arabic, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

The commissioner of the Human Resources Administration says that the agency “provides between 7,000 and 8,000 interpretation services each year through our contracted services.” It also provides interpretation services by hundreds of bilingual staff workers, and other community resources. The agency has also translated 800 client-contact forms, brochures and notices into the six required languages, he said.

The article quotes Language Line as the provider of telephone interpretation services for some agencies.

Looks there is opportunity for more translation services in New York.

Elements of a Collaborative TM Environment

Last week I was in Québec City for the ATA-TCD Conference, which was superbly organized by Rina Ne'eman and Grant Hamilton.

The biggest takeaway of the event was the last presentation of the last day: A panel presentation by Don Shin, from 1-Stop Translation, and Rocío Txabarriaga, from Common Sense Advisory, named "The Future of the Translation Industry: MT, TM, Open Source, Crowdsourcing: Where’s It All Headed? And What Should You Do to Prepare?"

For his intervention, Don compiled some of the major efforts being done in those areas, but what I liked the most was his depiction of what the desktop of a translator working in a collaborative manner might look like.

The key point is that the translator is in control. At the top, you have the source text. Right below it, you have the translator's TM, the project's TM, and a Machine Translation of the segment. And below that, the translated segment.

It is up to the translator to choose which one of these sources she is going to use. On the right panel you have access to terminology and a chat window, to ask for help in live mode to other people working on the same project.

Finally, on the bottom right, there is a fare meter, that shows how much money the translator is making on the project. Whether this is a motivator or a demotivator depends on the price that the translator is getting.

Another panel discussing Translation Management Technologies, moderated by Duncan Shaw, failed to address what all the LSPs in the room were looking for: Interoperability. What I heard LSPs saying is that they want to let their translators work with any tool that they prefer (Trados, SDL, MemoQ, Across, whatever) and not to require them to have different tools for different projects.

What the industry seems to want, and the technology providers can't seem to be able to deliver, is a standard format for Translation Memories that does not get corrupted if you change from one tool to another. Like as Comma Delimited File that can be opened by Excel, Lotus, MySQL or Oracle, without any data loss.

I guess that was the original promise of TMX.

You can't make these things up

The story making the rounds of the translation industry today is yet another indication of the power of bad translations. I've already received 12 e-mails with links to the BBC story of the bilingual road sign in Wales that reads "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" in English, but "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." In Welsh. 

This story falls in the same category of the Chinese restaurant that used a free machine translation website to convert its name into English and printed a giant sign for its façade saying "Translate server error." 

In terms of viral capacity, this story will probably rank in the same category of the Berlitz video for its language schools in Germany, which clogged my mailbox with its 3MB everytime that it was sent to me (By the way, if you want to circulate a funny video, check first if it wasn't already published in YouTube... it's much easier to just send the link than add the video as an attachment to your message).

Now seriously, what do we learn from this?

• Translation is for professionals. I can hear the linguists around the world jumping to use this as proof that machine translation doesn't work. Well, the Welsh story is actually just an Out-of-Office reply that the client thought was the translation for the text he or she requested. The client actually sought a professional to do the job.
• Machine translation should be a productivity tool. If you follow my postings or presentations, you should know by now that I believe that translators should use MT to improve their productivity and it is only useful if you know the language into which the text is being translated. The second picture is a clear example of a person who did not have any command of English and trusted the internet to translate his sign.
• Signs continue to be a translator's best friend. Before the internet, stories about bad translations in hotel signs were a favorite past time. They circulated by letter, telex and later by fax.
• Only bad translations make the news. When was the last time you saw a story about a good translation? Did you ever?

Google MT and dotSUB - an atomic combination

I wanted to do something cool for my presentation at the ATA this weekend -- Quality Still Doesn't Matter, which focuses on topics that should really matter to translators and LSPs, such as productivity, new technologies, sales, etc. -- and decided to start with a video subtitled in dotSUB.

dotSUB is a cool site that allows you to upload your video, transcribe and subtitle very fast. I actually wrote about it in the Global Watchtower almost one year ago.

So... this week I read the news about Google abandoning SYSTRAN and starting to use its own Statistical Machine Translation Engine instead. I played with it a little bit by writing some text in Portuguese and having it translated into English. I was very surprised with the quality of the translation into English. That's when I decided to really play with Google Translate and dotSUB.

Here is what I did:

1) Wrote a script in Portuguese.
2) Had it translated into English with Google Translate.
3) Read the script to my webcam.
4) Pasted the Portuguese text into dotSUB.
5) Pasted the English transaltion into dotSUB.

All of this took me no more than 10 minutes to do.

Then I decided to have some fun. I edited the English translation a little bit and used Google Translate to go from English into Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

I found that the quality of the translation was much better than I expected. I can judge Spanish, French, and Italian. I asked someone here in the office to check the Russian, but I have no idea of how the Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic came out. I don't even know if my visual pasting of the subtitles didn't break any words in the middle.

Check out for yourself. Try changing the languages using the small arrows in the bottom right corner of the video.




What I am going to say in my presentation is essentially that translators that are not using Google to pre-process their jobs, are doing too much work. MT is here to stay... as I had predicted a couple of years ago, this can be the disruptive player in the market.

Look out for mash-ups of Translation Memory technologies with Google from Elanex, XML-Intl, Proz.com, and other players. I can now see huge projects incorporating all these new technologies: a Ning portal for discussion and training, Google Translate for preprocessing translations, a shared translation memory repository from LingoTek, a wiki in wikidot.com for editing the translations in a collaborative way. These are all free technologies that would allow a company to manage a huge project in a much more efficient way than using the tools of today. All of this could be managed in ]Project Open[ and the sales process might have been tracked in FreeCRM or SugarCRM.