Revenue Opportunities for LSPs

Innovation and new services are regular topics in my consulting engagements. My clients want to know how they can differentiate and increase their margins. They want to go beyond calling prospects and offering translation for cents per word.

Recently, while on-site at my clients, I happened to come across requests that I thought could become opportunities for starting new conversations with potential translation buyers. After all, calling a prospect to offer translation services is a losing proposition. To use the words of Anne-Marie Colliander Lind: to be successful in sales, you have to talk about activities that will generate translations, and not translation itself. Here are some examples:

• Video subtitling. In the middle of my consulting session, a project manager asks permission to talk to the LSP owner about an urgent project that required subtitling in two languages. Using the traditional processes, the transcription, translation, and subtitling would have taken four days and cost $3,000.00. I introduced them to dotSub, a site that I first mentioned here back in 2007. In a few minutes we had an account and I walked them through how to do the job. Few hours later, the translation was ready and we downloaded the HD video to deliver to the client for no cost at all (except our effort). 
• Tape transcription. Same scenario: PM brings a client's request for the transcription and translation of the recording of a Board Meeting that was held in English. Finding foreign language transcribers is not always easy, especially on short notice. Enters CastingWords, a crowdsourced web-based transcription service with fast turnaround and prices varying from $1.00 to $2.50 per minute. Low cost transcribers can also be found on Elance and other freelance sites. The result was that the transcription was done in 24 hours by native speakers and the translation was ready the next day. Point, set, match! 
• Streaming content. Hot day, no air conditioning (you guessed, I was in Europe!), my client tells me that he recently lost an opportunity because his client had short sentences that needed to be translated within 5 minutes for the duration of a sporting event every Sunday. These were newsflashes and game statistics that needed to be broadcast in several languages and my client lacked the infrastructure and the linguistic resources to fulfill the need. The project never materialized. I explained to him that companies like SpeakLike specialize in this type of service, and that he could have outsourced the solution for as little as $0.06 per word, giving him enough room to mark it up and make a profit, without having to invest in the technology infrastructure.

The action item following these three events was clear: Productize the request and call potential buyers asking questions that will generate translations. 

So in the first case, the question could be: "Do you ever receive training videos in other languages that you need to share with your employees?" 

In the case of transcriptions, the LSP could call administrative assistants (or secretaries as they are still called in some countries) and ask if they ever have to transcribe audio from meetings in English (if you ever had to do it, you know it is a pain).

As for streaming content, any website that publishes news is a candidate for on-demand translation. Financial sites, sports associations or events, news organizations, all need to provide information fast and accurately. After all, news has as very short shelf life. In theory, a Czech hockey player in Canada might want to have his Twitter feed and news published in Czech, English, and French to satisfy his fan base.

Using creativity to transform project challenges into new and innovative products is a good practice. All you need to do is say yes to your client requests, and maybe give me a call.

Google Translate App for iPhone Censors Swear Words

WARNING: This post contains graphic language. Don't read it if you are too sensitive.

Since I bought an iPad for our home, my five- and eight-year old children have learned every imaginable swear word on YouTube by watching Lego videos and Justin Bieber parodies. After the initial surge in interest and the inevitable uncomfortable situations in public, they seem to have gotten over the potty mouth phase.

Last week, I installed the new Google Translate app on my iPhone and was impressed by the voice recognition in 15 languages and the accuracy of the translations. I actually thought that it would have come handy in a couple of situations in Korea and China, where there were no foreign language speakers around.

This weekend, one of my brothers from Brazil came to visit and we started to play with the Google Translate app. Just like when we were kids moving to a new country, the first phrases we used to test the functionality of our new toy were swear words. And this is where the big surprise came: Google Translate doesn't print swear words in English. But ONLY in English.

As you can see in the screen capture, every time we used the word fuck, it was replaced by ####.

Out of curiosity, and using a very scientific approach to the process, we went about testing offensive sentences expressed in other languages and translated into English. Interestingly, the app had no problem translating and printing the word fuck from other languages into English, as you can see from the screen captures below.

This makes me wonder what is behind this policy and who makes the decision to enforce it.

• App Store policy against offensive language? If so, does this also happen in the Android version of the app?
• Hypersensitivity of Americans to four-letter words? If so, does this also happen in the UK or Australian versions of the app?
• Why does the "censorship" only applies when you speak the swear words? In fact, you can actually type them and the text will be translated fine.

In any case, this is just a funny thing. The tool itself is excellent and very practical. I have been able to dictate relatively long sentences with acceptable accuracy, especially for a free tool. No wonder it is already the number one download in the App Store.

If you have an iPhone, download the app today and test it with your language pairs.

The screen captures below were the result of speaking a sentence in a foreign language and having it translated into English using the voice recognition feature.

Video of My Presentation in Bangkok

Here is a video of my presentation in Bangkok. If you missed the presentation at the ATA in New York, you will see that this one is very similar. The video lasts 36 minutes.

Vendor Management Event in Mexico

As you are aware, I go to a lot of events all the time. One of the best events I go to is one organized by a couple of Argentinean entrepreneurs in Córdoba once every two years: the Cecis (photo on the side). I like it because they take good care of the program and the participants, making every event an experience.

They asked me to suggest a topic and a keynote speaker for their first event outside of Argentina. I believe that the big topic for 2008 is going to be Vendor Management, and I suggested that they organize an event for Vendor Managers from translation companies only (as there is none).

The event will be held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in February, a time when some of us will be ready to leave the snow and go to somewhere warm. The idea is to have an event that is affordable and where vendor managers can discuss their issues and challenges and even find some new resources. It's supposed to be half-conference half-training.

If you have any ideas of themes that you would like to have discussed, please let me know.

Quality Still Doesn't Matter - ATA San Francisco Presentation

As promised to the attendees of my presentation in San Francisco, here is a copy of my presentation.

The new directions of the translation industry is a ongoing topic for us at Common Sense Advisory. So stay tuned, read our blog at http://www.globalwatchtower.com/ and send us comments whenever you have them. We love to hear new ideas.

And while you are visiting the Global Watchtower, read my posts on The End of Localization Taylorism and Dispatch from Localization World: Old Age Affects Localization Industry.

Click here to download the presentation.

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.