The Globalization Rapporteur

Localization Industry: Evolution and Innovation presentation

2010-01-07T17:49:00.009+01:00

Another interesting presentation from Localization and Translation Thailand 2009 Conference.

Renato Beninatto C.E.O. from Milengo on the evolution and innovation of the translation and localization industry:
The future has to go on "an increase in productivity" and technology has a lot to say on the topic. We have to be open to this technology evolution, Human edited Machine Translation and similar.

Revisiting the recent post on Machine Translation: Human edited Machine Translation, Crowdsourcing, Collaboration Technology as the core of content rich translation projects are here to stay and we better learn, evolve and adapt.

Mr. Wiggins was kind enough to express his point of view on my comments on that post:
Thanks for taking the time to watch my presentation. I would like to respond to your comment above.

"Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!"

One of the key points I made in the presentation is that human should nearly always be involved. Machine Translation is a tool to enhance human productivity, not to replace them. Its not a choice of MT or Human, its MT and Human. Typical productivity gains on regular text such as manuals, novels etc are around 250-300% productivity gains - i.e. from 2000-3000 words per day up to 9,000 words per day or even greater. If the text is extremely technical, such as patents, studies has shown that productivity can be increased by 1,000 percent. This is because nearly all the technical terms are already translated well.

I agree if you want quality, you should trust a professional translator, but how that professional translator executes the translation task at hand is what is the change in the market now. MT now has reached a quality level where it can be a true performance enhancer. This was not the case just 2 year ago.

Regards

Dion Wiggins,
CEO, Asia Online

Again, technology will revolutionize what we do. Let's open our eyes and watch carefully. The future may be closer than we think.

Social Media ROI: We are transparent, so we better have passion for what we do

2010-01-05T22:02:00.003+01:00

Interesting video below illustrating why social media is vital in your marketing strategy.

By the way: Isn't the separation between marketing and sales more and more difficult to make? And to go even further (well, I'm not the first one to say this of course) but isn't the the separation between production and marketing and sales smaller and smaller?
If your employees don´t feel engaged, don't understand that each interaction, communication or conversation is an opportunity for the business, then you are in trouble. Everybody in the company must understand this.

But I wil go further...
If you, as employer, partner, or vendor of a company do not feel commited, ready to spread the word around your projects, ready to "sell" what you are doing... you better try to find something that will move you and excite you. If you don't, that lack of engagement will show up easily to future employers, sponsors, or any stakeholder that will need to chose whether to work with you or not.
If you are not already motivated, find motivation NOW, or find a project that will passionate you.

Happy New Year 2010

2009-12-31T18:56:00.002+01:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!

"Jeremiah Laments the Devastation of Jerusalem" by Rembrandt. (1630. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.)

My bet for 201o:
1. Cloud Computing
2. Virtualization
3. Business Intelligence (also for SMEs)

Want to know more about Machine Translation?

2009-12-30T00:08:00.004+01:00

Very interesting Dotsub video: Localization and Translation Thailand 2009 Day 2 Beyond Machine Translation: Collaboration, Integration, Quality, Change and Jobs - Dion Wiggins, CEO, Asia Online
How come the Machine Translation industry, failing consistently during 50 years, still survives: because demand is there, and growing exponentially every day.

We should not be afraid of Machine Translation: it is what it is for. Human translation can only reach a fraction of what needs to be translated.

Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!

Spanglish Fun: Dr. Pepper

2009-11-27T00:24:00.004+01:00

Funny road advertisement sent by a contact.

I learned that there is a North American Academy of the Spanish Language.

The parable of the boiling frog

2009-11-24T15:59:00.002+01:00

"The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. [...]

The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually."

extracted from wikipedia

The parable is used in:

Senge, Peter M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday/Currency, ISBN 0385260946

Revenue or Margin? What's your game?

2009-11-24T15:25:00.005+01:00

Is Revenue the only figure a sales person should be paying attention to?

In my past experience I have been working with public companies where Revenue seemed to be the only goal.

"Production will have to take care of the margin" is not an unfamiliar sentence. It is kind of true that as long as you do not completely run out of cash, the more revenue you get for your company, the better. However you can get yourself in a very tricky situation if Revenue is the sole driver and the sole objective.

The company strategy can also influence this: If your sales people are completely disconnected from production, receive bonus solely on revenue increase, it is very likely that the importance of other factors will be minor.

In SMEs however, the growth and stability of the companies is much more related to the margins that a specific project or program allows.

More than ever, companies should do all they can to analyse their client base and extract the right conclusions.

Sales, Marketing and Production efforts should go to those clients that are strategically more important for the company. It could very well be that clients bringing loads of revenue are not bringing any margin and therefore taking resources from serving those clients that would really bring benefits and allow the company to grow.

Actually I don't really believe that there is a difference on this point between big and smaller companies. The only difference is that the problems could be easier to hide if you are big enough.

Leadership: How to create independent thinkers and give them the freedom to enjoy...

2009-10-22T01:31:00.002+02:00

"Maestro, with all due respect... when do I start?"

Karajan: "You Start when you can't stand it anymore"

Itay Talgam: "You need to have process and content to create a Meaning"

Enjoy the video... it's so good!

Will social networks kill Spam? (Are we creating self regulated networks?)

2009-10-21T20:05:00.006+02:00

The amount of comunications happening inside social networks is exponentially increasing. People are not using email anymore (well, not that much at least):

Why Email No Longer Rules…

Happens with every change, some people are afraid of it and some are so rapidly changing habits that they forget that the value of technology is to enable better processes, be more efficient and get most of your time spent in front of a computer.

There is a big fuzz about getting Google wave invitations. It is just a matter of typing "google wave invite" in your search engine and you will see, or try twitter and you will see everything from people asking for Retweets to some even offering sexual services in exchange of a Wave invitation.

Google Wave may or may not be a revolution, but the really interesting thing for me is that I believe all these communications through social networks like Linkedin, Facebook, etc... will provoque a major change to our communication behavior and specially will allow for getting spam out of our lifes.

It will take time, but I believe that these new platforms for communication will become self regulated networks. Users will no longer accept unsolicited communications, it will simply be a matter of unfollowing, deleting or not being friends anymore with the person sending you spam.

And you better not be in the list of people doing that because you won't be able to communicate anymore.

Professional Translation - Dilbert way

2009-10-21T11:02:00.001+02:00

Don't you feel sometimes translations are performed this way?

Fighting with SDL Passolo and SDL Trados Studio 2009

2009-10-02T12:00:00.009+02:00

Blogging out of frustation is normally an experience that should be avoided and I normally prefer to concentrate on positive feedback, but... Please prove me wrong and I'll acknowledge my error and ignorance! (Feel free to contact me).

Foreword:

Trados is still an essential tool for any agency performing tasks that go beyond simple Word translation. I have not seen yet any set of tools work for such an ample diversity of software applications: FrameMaker, Indesign, etc....

Coincidence:

9PM: I just arrived home and my mobile phone rings. It's an ex-colleage of mine who runs a small sized translation business.

- Are you using SDL 2009 in any of your clients offices, ¿should I upgrade?

My first impression was that I had a camera on my shoulder: how else could it happen that after 10 hours trying to figure out what wasn't working properly with a recently upgraded license of SDL2009 so translators could work on a project, I receive such a call.

I told him my "yesterday 9PM" truth. - Listen, I just had a very bad experience with it and I'm not going to be objective. Can I sleep on it tonight and try to be a little less subjective with my response tomorrow?

Background (11 hours earlier):

We had to translate resource strings with Passolo. It has worked in the past, so wasn´t supposed to be a big deal...You are supposed to get your prepared bundles into Passolo, connect the TM and Multiterm to Passolo through the Addin, et voilá.. all should work like a charm.

The problems:

1st issue: The Passolo edition coming with SLD 2009 is an incomplete edition, same for the one that comes with SDL 2007. The funny thing is that even the Translators free edition has basic functions like (Edit/Find) enabled and the one installed with a close to €3000Euro SDL 2007 license doesn't (The message: "The Function "Find..." is only supported by the SDL Passolo Professional or Team Edition.", not true, since it works on their own FREE Translator's editions.)

OK, we must be doing something wrong. I've seen this work. It was not yesterday, but I was sure Passolo worked and I had a good experience with it.

2nd issue: Let's link the TM and the Multiterm to Passolo. Surprise! It seems to work, but when we try to translate the strings, try to Find Concordance, the TM connection changes its state and is "deactivated".

3rd issue: Can we check if Multiterm can be linked? I simply didn't manage to make it work. I could simply mean I was ignorant on how to do it, but Passolo seemed not to let us get the Multiterm link option work.

(Just in case: yes, I did link the Multiterm through Trados Workbench first)

Oh!! But it works with Passolo 2007!

Solution:

Why don´t we forget about all these new versions and just take the ones that seem to work fully: Passolo Freelance Edition and we take an old Trados 7.1 which is the version the translators will have anyway (it's not going to be easy to make translators upgrade!).

And it works....By taking the older Addin for older Trados versions, all works like a charm:- TM is linked- Multiterm is linked- Passolo works

My thoughts:

What is going on? Am I simply not capable of making the new versions work? Maybe these are too complicated for me and I should finally get one of these expensive SDL courses? My filling so far with the combination of Passolo Essential and SDL 2009 is that the software provider is trying to make us pay much more than we should for a product that comes with "essential versions".

BUT: I liked the new interface! I liked the fact that I would not need to use the tedious S-tagger anymore! I liked the integration of many features that were sold to us with the new upgrade! But again, when we need to do something that goes a little further than the simple doc translation...something goes wrong.

Please, prove me wrong. Please tell me I don´t know what I'm talking about. Because if I'm right, I find it very unfair that people downloading Free editions and getting working Trados versions through simple google searches with no need to touch their wallet are managing to make this work and those who pay a high fee are rewarded with a 10hour nightmare "training course".

I'm afraid I won't have a final answer for my friend yet. For the moment I can say that the purchase of SDL Trados Studio 2009 Professional (2995€) + SDL Passolo 2009 (1840€) is quite an investment.

Links:

SDL Trados Studio 2009: http://www.sdl.com/en/sites/sdl-trados-solutions/default.asp

Free SDL Passolo Freelance Edition: http://www.sdl.com/en/sites/sdl-passolo/downloads/files/passolo-2009-translation-edition.asp

Simple explanation of Web 2.0

2009-07-22T16:22:00.003+02:00

(in Spanish) Presentation on PM tools for managing cultural diversity - PMI Madrid Chapter - March 2009

2009-05-22T18:47:00.002+02:00

Herramientas Gestion Diversidad Cultural

View more Microsoft Word documents from victor.alonso.lion.

Price and value...

2009-05-14T23:05:00.003+02:00

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

Warren Buffett

Leadership Key Sentences

2009-05-08T22:37:00.005+02:00

The five most important words: "You did a great job."

The four most important words: "I really was wrong."

The three most important words: "Your opinion is?"

The two most important words: "Thank you"

The most important word: "We"

The less important: "Me"

Stop selling: learn and share

2009-03-31T04:59:00.004+02:00

Sometimes you just need to stop delivering your selling pitch.

Share information, comment, start a dialogue. If you are really interested in what you sell, if you consider yourself an expert in what you offer, then you will be able to give and share information. You will learn so much from your interlocutors, that the result from these real conversations will outperform any possible "pressure" strategy (pressure will just create rejection anyway).

Tech. Tip: MS WORD Remove frames (text boxes) from document, after OCR or save as rtf from pdf (works fine with Crystal Report exports too)

2009-02-20T17:09:00.003+01:00

If you ever needed to remove frames and still maintain formatting use this tip found at http://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php?topic=21220.0

Worked perfectly for the problem I needed to solve for a client...

"Removing frames (text boxes) from a word document, after OCR or saving as rtf from pdf document

You saved or scanned a document with OCR software like Abbyy FineReader or OmniPage Pro? You saved as rtf a PDF document and the resultant word document, contains multiple frames?

Frames make the document very hard edit because all text is placed inside frames. We need to remove those frames if we want to edit the document.

How do we do that?

If you do not care about formatting you do this:

1.
—Open the file which has frames in MS Word
—Save the file as a Plain text file.
—Open the new text file you have just saved in Notepad or WordPad or some other text editor.
—Now Select all the text by pressing Ctrl+A, Copy and paste that into a New MS Word file. Then Save it with any name you want. Frames are gone.

If you do care about formatting:

2.
—Copy everything in the Word document, paste all the text into WordPad, copy all the text in the WordPad document, and paste it back into the Word document.

Or

3.
—Select the entire document by pressing Ctrl+A, and then press Ctrl+Q. This will set every paragraph back to its default condition."

"Long Tail" economy also for the service industry

2009-02-19T15:12:00.004+01:00

You probably have read already about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept to describe the niche strategy of business is very well known (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail)

But how does this affect the service industry or the individual consultant:

You could claim that it is necessary to twist a little bit the idea to understand it as a valuable resource for the service industry.

Here is my attempt:

a. Broader audience could mean less attraction: The more specific you are the more you could position yourself as THE expert in the field.

If you focus on a small niche, the members of that tribe will easily consider you as the problem solver for their specific issue. The more specific your target niche is, the less efforts and resources will be necessary to outstand from your competition.

Let's consider an example: There could be many English to Spanish translators, but how many are experienced in the broadcast industry? How many of these are experts in signal measurement devices and protocols... If you find the way to proove your expertise in such restricted area, guess who clients in that specific industry will call next time they need a quality translation. With that perspective you could become the king of mambo. Your kingdom will be restricted, but you will lead it. (Of course you will need to find the way to market yourself correctly to the target market.)

b. Be specific: In a Long tail economy, consumers ask more and more for that specificity. They become used to specific messages and to receive offers focused on them. I believe that poor quality mass media advertisement has favored a development of a brain switch in the public: “General ads: not interesting. Please ignore”. If you are not specific enough, people will easily forget about you.

c. Compete for sincere love: The less obvious your niche is, the less competition you will have. Who are you really? Where are the people you can connect with? If you connect at an emotional level you will be remembered. Relationships are what matter the most.

Why do I enjoy game localization so much?

2009-02-01T00:52:00.006+01:00

The game industry could still be perceived by some, as a less important division in the localization league. The truth is that the game industry is a complete world in itself. There are really bad quality translations in some games...absolutely true. But doesn't this happen in all industries? However top game publishers (and not so top) aim for translation quality that could compete with the most demanding regulated industry.

I'm so lucky to be involved in different industries and be able to have my inhands personal overview of how localization is maturing in different fields including Financial, IT and Life Science. Although these last mentioned industries are considered to be more "noble", I can confirm that none, including regulated industries, should be, as a whole, be considered as more demanding than the game industry. I will try to explain why in the following discussion.

The "Fan" factor: game players are incredibly tough critics:
Game users are fans. They play on a specific title because they chose to (and pay for it). This doesn't apply to any other non-entertainment industry localization.
The first consequence of this is that a huge community of users is analyzing, criticizing, suggesting better translation, voice over or feature in regards to any possible tiny detail in a game.
The second consequence is that players could really feel spoiled if a game translation, voice over or functionality in a specific language is not working properly. For major MMORPG games, millions of users are interconnected, not only in the game itself but in mega huge communities in continuous movement and discussion. In addition, these fans are fond of their games. And the news about mistakes spreads quickly... Really, really, very fast.
I can give an example of the fast spread of information. Just imagine... For a game I was involved in there was a localized voice over part recorded directly by the publisher to launch a demo, in a kind of amateur way. This demo reached journalists who were supposed to simply have a quick overview of the game months before the official release. Even before the scripts reached the studios to record the final version, we already had specialized journalists calling us and asking if we were going to record the voice-over the way it was in the demo... comments on their website was full of angry fans, not understanding why voice over of the second version of the game was not going to be as good as the first one.

The "Expert" factor: real experts will play your game:
Imagine you decide to launch a baseball game in France. Who will buy it? People who love baseball. Even if baseball is not an extremely popular game in the country. Users will know the terminology, and therefore will require that the correct terms are used in the game. If you are working on localizing such a game, you better send your linguists to a French baseball field if you don't want the result to be strongly criticized and have a very unhappy costumer at the end of the day.

The "Emotional" factor:
Game players are emotionally bound with their games. Consider the implications in regards to the quality standards required. The concept of a virtual life gaining importance in respect to real life is extremely well expressed in the following video (a bit long but worth it), presented by David Perry at the Ted Conference.

The "multidiscipline" factor:
The Game industry encompasses dozens of job disciplines. Just check the amount of Special Interest Groups from the International game developers association (IGDA) to get an idea. Localization, like it happens in many other industries was only considered at the latest stage of game development in the past. Today simultaneous shipment ("simship") is essential for any important game in the market. The consequence is that localization is considered already in preproduction and during the production stages. Localization is planned early in the process and, if outsourced, localization vendors are involved since the beginning, becoming real partners. Many publishers are highly conscious that the success of the product in the different markets depends on localization as much as on the quality of the game. To succeed in such a competitive market, Development, Marketing and Sales need to be involved. It is also very important not to forget an essential discipline playing a relevant role in a product aiming to be global, what the real experts on the topic call “Geoliteracy". Cross-cultural awareness is more than essential, to avoid unnecessary risks.

The "multimedia" factor:
For localization project managers (or producers, as they are usually called in the game industry), this field could be a very interesting and instructive experience (or a real nightmare). I'm not going to talk about how aggressive schedules can be, because I’m sure there will be examples of impossible turnaround requirements in all imaginable industries. The original factor comes from the fact that game localization usually includes audio localization (not that usual in other localization projects), and very often a very strong involvement with integration activities (integration of localized assets in game code). For localization experts or project managers coming from more "standard" localization (like myself), the game industry has lots of new experiences to offer and new knowledge to acquire. In addition to these activities, game localization is strongly related to testing. Of course this is not a 'game industry' only characteristic, but there is a very strong linguistic testing investment in games, especially in AAA games.

Let’s also not forget that the game industry is huge. In many countries, revenue for games is higher than movie and music together. Check the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) facts if you are curious.

As a last thought, my opinion is that creativity and science coincide in the game industry making of it a crucial technology laboratory.

Be remarkable: Stay ahead of your competition

2009-01-27T16:35:00.009+01:00

I was listening to an interview to Seth Godin, the Internet Marketing Guru, available at Ducttapemarketing.com.

The following statement took my attention. "Be remarkable, by simply delivering what you promised to deliver."
It seems like simple common sense...

A simple statement in itself, but if deeply analized not so simple to accomplish. If you are working on your own, it could me a matter of simply maintaining your promise...

But what does it mean for a multiperson SME or a big corporation?:

¤ As a company, do you know what is exactly offered to clients?

¤ Is your company, (or are you) providing your teams and different departments all the necessary tools and techniques to share information?

¤ You could state that strict process, investment in standards will take care of this. Really?...
Does your sales team really know how production is handled? If you have an operations manual (you should), hand it over to your business development people.
Is your marketing campaign in synch with what is really done once you get the go ahead from your client?

Be remarkable and work on analyzing how applying this statement to your specific case will make your service outstand from your competition.

My product is selling well in English! What next?

2009-01-20T06:31:00.000+01:00

Your traffic metrics are getting higher and higher numbers. The analysis shows that a high amount of these new visits come from international visitors. Is it time to localize?

There are a few things to consider first:

Localizing your site or presence in the internet has one objective: bring new final customers or consumers for your information or product. The real challenge is to bring NEW costumers. Consider that these new customers will be different than the ones that found you with an English search. You will need to optimize your localized version as much as your English version (multilanguage SEO for your web site for instance).

Provide the same customer support service to your international clients as you do to your English clients. If you have a customer support infrastructure, think that you will need to support the non English speakers too. This could be very costly if not correctly done.

Don't change your business model! (yet): If your revenue is coming from advertisement in your web pages, or inside your software product, don't forget that your non English speaking audience will need the advertisement in the local language. If you are aiming for a widely spoken language, the effort could be interesting, but if you are launching one sole product for the international versionsand your are planning to deliver rotating languages in your advertisement, it could happen that the efficiency of this new advertisement compared to the original English one will drop. Again, this completely depends on your business model (this will not apply if your revenue comes from selling the product itself).

Different products requiere different efforts, different markets ask for different needs. Going global is not without challenges, but don't forget that the market outside your boundaries is huge, and that brings an awful lot of new opportunities.

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech | Focus on localization

2009-01-16T14:05:00.003+01:00

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech

My fellow Americans, today is a original day. You have shown the world that "hope" is not just another word for "localization", and that "change" is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually Globalize.

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces perfectly quality challenges like never before. Our economy is consistent. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for multiple language translations. Our healthcare system is multilingual. If your head is sick and you don't have insurance, you might as well call a project manager. And America's image overseas is tarnished like a test console computer. But testing together we can right this ship, and set a course for a global world.

Finally, I must thank my comprehensive family, my trustful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank team for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of translating the views of American people. Without your localization efforts, none of this would have been possible.

---

Speech generated with:

http://www.atom.com/spotlights/inauguration_speech_generator/

Change happens! and fast...

2009-01-11T12:37:00.000+01:00

Marketing 2.0: How to respond to a viral attack (Tiger woods & Electronic Arts alliance)

2009-01-05T12:39:00.004+01:00

We sometimes do not recognize the importance of our presence in the internet.

Electronic Arts has responded to an attack to its PGA Tiger Woods game with the same weapon...

Agile & Scrum Project Management applied in the Translation/Localization industry?

2008-12-01T14:27:00.002+01:00

Agile Project Management is a trend, not really new in software development projects, but quickly gaining popularity in other areas.

Practitioners of the Scrum Methodology claim that once trained in “agile thinking”, it becomes a part of your everyday thinking process: it specially forces you to focus on the right thing at this point in time, while continuously anticipating later actions aiming for an optimal end result.

Although Agile is criticized for not being as formal as other methodologies, these critics are not really understanding the point.

Agile forces scope commitment at multiple levels and is a open to continuous adjustment and review.

In a simplified explanation, we would be for instance talking about having a running software as quickly as possible (let's say 2 weeks, where all phases will be performed: design, implementation, testing, correction...) and from there, use similar quick turnarounds to build additional features. I'm leaving many interesting characteristics out of this short explanation, but this incremental approach is the basis of my comments below.

Based on this basic idea about scrum that the team should get to an operative product as soon as possible, how would that "translate" into the localization industry? Should we aim to get "chunks" of translated content as soon as possible?

That would in a way go against the best practices from the industry (i'm leaving many activities out of this description...just to make this thinking as light as possible) :

- 1st phase: Translation of the whole content

- 2nd phase: Editing of the whole content

- 3rd phase: Proofreading of the whole content

Well... In fact in any demanding project, review starts before translation is completed.

So were we "scrumming" in the localization industry whithout knowing it? Like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme: « Par ma foi ! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien, et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde de m'avoir appris cela. » (M.Jourdain is surprised and delighted to learn that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it). Or were we just "fast tracking" the project and not really having an agile approach?

What about other situations where this could be "already" happening?

I'm thinking for instance of Content Management Systems where translated/reviewed/approved paragraphs can be displayed to the user without waiting for the rest of the content. Technology can make this work perfectly, I've seen it implemented at Nestlé for instance. Any company big enough to run a GMS could aim for it with the help of the proper technology partner and experienced team.

Need for speed

The trend for speeding up the reaction of translated content to created content is no doubt going to increase.

Technology will probably lead the change, and project management approaches will need to follow.

No doubt the "need for speed" will be exponential, which will influence the whole industry. Process will need to adapt.

There are of course top companies working with online TMs, Collaboration portals, etc... but the bulk of the industry still works with really old tools: Are you telling me that you are still not emailing your kits to the translators?

Clients will still ask for lightspeed... and they will get it...