Never Stop Bullshitting: Or Being Popular in the Translation Industry

This is a guest post by Luigi Muzii (and his unedited post title). Luigi likes to knock down false idols and speak plainly, sometimes with obscure (to most Americans anyway) Italian literary references. I would characterize this post as an opinion on the lack of honest self-assessment and self-review that pervades the industry (at all levels) and thus slows evolution and progress. Thus, we see that industry groups struggle to promote "the industry", but in fact, the industry is still one that "gets no respect" or is "misunderstood" as we hear at many industry forums.  While change can be uncomfortable, real evolution also results in a higher and better position for some in the internationalization and globalization arena. Efficiency is always valuable, even in the arts. In my view, the companies that solve the most challenging and interesting translation problems today (and thus earn the most money from translation related activity) are all VERY focused on efficiency, and interestingly are also not really part of  "the translation industry." These companies are in a different league, in terms of scale and process efficiency and I think could pave the way in providing a vision for real change in how things are done in "the industry". The old process models are not sustainable for anything but the most important and critical content. From my vantage point, most of the content that is the primary focus of  "the industry" is not really important or critical. Simpler, faster and more efficient translation (cheaper) production really does matter to both the existing and emerging customer base

I came to the "translation industry"  from the IT industry, specifically, the storage virtualization and applications software development sectors. I recall that I was surprised by several things I saw when I first arrived to "the industry", and I am sure this is not unlike what many brand new translation buyers might also experience. My key observations when I had a fresh mind include:

1. The degree of fragmentation in the translation industry which hampers movement towards more efficient production processes,
2. How archaic and dated the most popular translation technology was, especially TM (1990's technology that was really the only automation technology in widespread use),
3. The number of LSPs who still kept building (sub-optimal, klunky) "custom" TMS and Project Management systems, when perfectly workable, more robust options were available,
4.  The hostility and ignorance regarding MT technology and it's potential and proper use cases,
5. How labor-intensive, slow, reactive and inefficient production processes were in general.

This, I suspect is what many others feel if they come from other industries where efficient production processes are much more deeply established and understood. Not that much has really changed in 10 years, though now you see a proliferation of really bad, self-built MT systems, and fortunately, most have given up on building that magical TMS, that is allegedly waaaaay better than anything yet known to man. Maybe MT will also reach the point where most users realize that it is an undertaking best left to experts, especially in these NMT days, where new developments and techniques are occurring every week.

There are going to be many more "buyers" and new customers entering the market for translation services in future, and we probably do need to move beyond the insubstantial fluff that pervades "the industry".  Potential customers who understand your product and service are more likely to buy quickly, than those who need to learn and decipher what your special obfuscating in-group language and terminology actually means.

Frankfurt (referenced below) determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade, without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether or not their listener is persuaded.

For those who are offended by the term bullshit, let me share these alternatives and feel free to substitute these terms wherever you see the offending word. In the British Parliament, you are not allowed to call a member a liar as this ‘unparliamentary language’ brings dishonor to the house. As a result, various euphemistic phrases are used to indicate ‘bullshit’:

• Winston Churchill in 1906 used the term ‘'terminological inexactitude’;
• more popular recently has been the phrase ‘economical with the truth'. This was originally coined by Edmund Burke referring to measured speech, but has come to mean ‘liar’ in parliament or court

Bullshit Innovation - Graphical View

The emphasis and italics comments in [  ] below are mine.

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Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.
Eric Ambler

 

According to Evgeny Morozov, bullshit is the new oil, everything derives from that. Many years earlier, Harry Frankfurt opened his best-selling essay with “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.”

It is worrisome that most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. As Frankfurt noticed, the bullshitter is, by his very nature, a mindless slob. And a presumptuous snob, too. The bullshitter’s arguments and use of language are both meant to support a kind of bluff or be a misrepresentation or deception. Indeed, his ultimate goal is to convey a plain falsehood. Marketing is the typical realm for bullshitters. Not surprisingly, storytelling is the new black in written communication.

Unfortunately, marketing, especially social media marketing, as it’s virtually free, is the new mantra of "translation industry" people.

Whether he/she is a translator, an LSP, or an advisor, a bullshitter is always there, mouth breathing, his/her words like mere vapor.

Invariably, bullshitting in the translation industry revolves around three subjects: Innovation, Technology, and Quality. They may be presented differently, but they are always interconnected. Invariably, the most active bullshitters are always the very same people. They champion innovation, without having introduced any, ever; they champion technology, especially when related to automation, without having automated anything, unless, sometimes, forced by customers; or they provide premium quality, only work for premium customers, receive premium fees, even though they won’t substantiate any of their statements.

The Quality Myth

When the bullshitters are LSPs, they are obviously always technology-savvy, localization technology developers, and positive users of the most amazing KPIs—which they always forget to enumerate. They consistently boast of having (unmistakably) seasoned linguists and localization and globalization experts in their (unquestionably) great teams, known for — guess — outstanding quality of delivery and service, and famous for their technical and technological capabilities. More and more often, the icing on the cake is a set of wonderful tools available for free.

When the bullshitters are translators, the mantra becomes perfect, absolute quality. The bravest bullshitters venture intrepidly into dispensing with hands full, their futile directions to navigate out of the wild and stormy bulk market, up to the bright and warm oasis of the premium market, a mirage if not a hoax as most believers would discover at their own expense. Indeed, if there ever were a premium market, it would most likely be a small segment of a bigger market, otherwise, it would be so large as to welcome everyone, and it wouldn’t be premium anymore. There are certainly premium clients, but everyone can tell, they are hard to reach, win, and retain. To penetrate the fabulous ‘premium market’, bullshitters all have the same strategy and advice for peers and newcomers: specialize, brand and market yourself, raise your rates, educate your prospects and customers. However trivial, it is worth reminding readers, that studying (to specialize) and networking (for branding and marketing) are costly activities that consume time and incorporate the work of others, although their costs might be indirect, hidden, postponed, redistributed, or transferred elsewhere. Not surprisingly, these bullshitters never produce a single piece of evidence of the effectiveness of their advice, and never talk about how much money they get from implementing the strategies they advocate, or where their money comes from.

When the bullshitters are advisors, their landmarks are faddy and fancy words and phrases like simship, continuous delivery, KPIs, agile, lights-out project management, augmented translation, and the inexorable big data and disruption. And if you manage to use blockchain and smart contract in the same paragraph, then you’ve really authored a masterpiece. That’s marketing, baby. Marketing! And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing! It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what. And you don’t need to be Seth Stephens-Davidowitz to know. On the other hand, why lie when storytelling can be equally effective?

The Innovation Myth

Even innovation is a casualty of this mouth-breathing hype. Bullshitters from all categories battle on the innovation field. Although the translation industry has not seen real innovation coming from its players for years, they have always been talking grandly as they were competing for ranting the loudest and shooting further. Indeed, the translation industry is overcrowded with futurists, visionaries, and wishful thinkers, with the latter being largely more numerous. They can all be found in any localization conference around the world. The narrative/storytelling frenzy virtually affects every LSP. Every LSP has a brilliant ambitious idea, an innovative process or some new technology that is going to disrupt or revolutionize the industry. And this does not happen just once in a year but happens recurrently, whatever the event. To quote Renato Beninatto and Tucker Johnson from their recent feat, “the language services industry has proven itself to be horribly equipped to actually innovate in any meaningful way.” This deluge of bombastic bullshit is nothing but the effect of a self-breeding epidemic of ‘delusions of grandeur.’ In fact, most LSPs do not have the spirit, the capability and the resources to innovate, they simply cannot afford it, let alone become the driving force for innovation. The bigger they are, and the more they are focused on basic financial indicators, making profits, and possibly growing their business, the more unresponsive they are to invest in innovation.

Unfortunately, as Beninatto and Johnson say, “critical thinking and skepticism are often thrown out the window in favor of recycled ‘headlines’ and flattering commentary.” In fact, there are no contrarians in this industry, though one may just occasionally stumble into a talking cricket.

This is a reason for not discrediting the unreliable surveys that have been circulated to constantly feed ourselves with a reassuring echo and lead people in the industry to believe everything they hear.

However, when you need the hype, it usually means you’re in trouble. Once the hype starts, it often continues on and on, and the longer the hype is sustained, the bigger the problem, and capturing the attention of the random public is not the same as revolutionizing an industry or a market.

Hype does not affect technology only; it also affects market analyses, branding, sales, and marketing policies. The essence of marketing is about narrowing the focus. Too many in the translation industry translate this fundamental principle in a self-defeating approach, using quality as a magic wand. No wonder if it works no wizardry. “Focus on the high end of the market!”, the (in)famous premium segment as if anyone is interested in the low end, where the emphasis is on price only. “Raise your rate, quality is worth a higher price!” The problem is that since no one proclaims themselves as the “un-quality” [or bulk market] player, everybody stands for quality, and as a result, nobody does. You cannot narrow the focus with quality or any other idea that doesn’t have proponents for the opposite point of view. Especially if “quality” is the only way to prove you are better than your competitors.

The "Educate The Customer" Myth

Most people want to believe they can get to the top by being better than others, but actually, the best way to do this, if not the only way to get there is by being first. It is the first one of the 22 immutable laws of marketing enumerated and illustrated by Al Riesand and Jack Trout in their 1993 book. Riesand & Trout also wrote that many people believe that the basic issue in marketing is convincing prospects that you have a better product or service, despite this, people tend to stick with what they have already got. It is a common belief among industry players that educating the client is an absolute necessity when, on the other hand, the idea is equally widespread that salespeople fail because they don’t understand the customer needs, as they are better trained on LSP processes, rather than on client issues. In fact, most LSPs are still in the nuance-specifics-of-translation-industry state of mind, and simply dismiss people who are not from the translation industry as to those who need to be ‘educated.’

Educating customers is not a cost-effective marketing strategy for most small businesses like LSP’s, especially towards first-time buyers who probably don't know very much about translation. Translation industry players who may be tempted to approach their customers this way possibly do this from an illusory sense of superiority. They offer their products/services (solution) to people who don’t recognize that they have a demand (problem) and assume the client has a sort of functional illiteracy. They presume the client has an interest in features rather than in benefits, and thus fail to understand and quantify the client’s needs, thus showing their ignorance and lack of interest in their customer’s business.

Rarely are customers willing to be instructed by someone who does not belong to the same class of business, especially if they understand the issue behind their demand and are searching for answers. On the contrary, the “I have no questions” attitude is fairly common in customers who are not concerned in disentangling the intricacies of an extraneous and unimportant business. So, what word should a translation business own in the minds of prospects? Tip: customers want to see instant results.

All this to say that educating the client is bullshit too.

The Growth Myth

But how is bullshitting affecting market analyses? In the way, the industry news is presented.

According to Aiman Copty, Vice President of International Product Solutions for Oracle Corporation, since translation is now increasingly at a general utility stage, “people should not need to think about it,” and “the industry is rich with translation and subject matter expertise,” the keyword is no longer cost or quality, but efficiency. According to “captain of the translation industry” Adolfo Hernandez, “localization is far too labor-intensive” and “for the foreseeable future, the best results in localization will come from the best humans using the best machines.” Luckily, SDL is creating ‘islands of stability’, whatever that means. Another captain, Rory Cowan, invites readers to observe patterns across other industries and get the pace right. No matter if the financial results of his company in two decades could hardly be labeled as astonishing in spite of “the growing opportunity” H.I.G. Capital is supposed to have seen, according to Lionbridge’s chief sales officer Paula Shannon “in the company’s business and the value in the long-term relationships that Lionbridge has with customers in verticals such as IT and financial services”. Smith Yewell, founder, and CEO of Welocalize is strongly convinced that the value-add won’t definitely be in technology but in the strength of the service.

What bright future translation and translators have ahead! And forget about the Bodo Dilemma.[ an abundance of tools, technology, data and innovative solutions combined with a painstaking shortage of human talent to properly deploy them. ]

This is just a part of the problem. Another major issue comes from how numerical data on the industry are presented.

For example, the growth of the translation industry over the last decade or more is usually presented as linear, steady and unceasing, but it is expressed with revenues only. If the same trend is displayed on a combined graph together with percentages, things look a little bit different.

If profits or volumes are taken into account, things might be even less exciting. In fact, while volumes have been possibly—undoubtedly if we should trust the same sources—growing as much as revenues—indeed they should have been much higher according to the same sources—we might discover that profits have not been growing at the same pace. Any real industry ‘veteran’ with a ungarbled memory can tell that, in the last twenty-five years, prices have been undergoing an increasing pressure and compensations, at best, have remained unchanged, i.e. in real terms they have halved. On the contrary, it does not take a genius to figure out that, over the same period, IT has made volumes increase by at least a 10x factor while productivity has, at most, tripled. In other words, revenues are not the best metric to measure growth. Also, the translation industry is notoriously made up of very ‘light’ players, who rely almost exclusively on outsourcing. Therefore, even the average revenue per employee and the average revenue per salesperson are not reliable metrics. A volumes/revenue ratio would be more suitable, but the two figures might be very hard to get from players (remember, everybody, lies.) EBITDA (i.e. earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) might be a good metric to evaluate profitability, even though it has its drawbacks too. In fact, it is often used as an accounting gimmick to dress up a company’s earnings. More properly, it is good to meet the original purpose to indicate the ability of a company to service debt.

The noise around the recent acquisitions or the interest in a few translation businesses by some private equity firms is just more wood for the hype fire.

The recent deal for the acquisition of Moravia by RWS is a purely industrial (i.e. not just financial) transaction. Incidentally, Moravia has been entirely held by a private equity since 2015. Clarion Capital Partners sold Moravia to RWS for twice the company’s revenues, 11.8 times the 2016 EBITDA. H.I.G. bought Lionbridge for a fraction (64%) of the company’s revenues. RWS acquisition of Moravia will be a typical LBO, through a combination of equity (60%) and debt (40%.) RWS exposure is therefore expected to be substantial (roughly USD 400 million in total) corresponding to the combined pro-forma annual revenues.

After a bitter—to say the least—three-year war to win control of the company, the forced sale of TransPerfect might hardly be anywhere near to the projected USD 1B.

In essence, organic growth in the translation industry has long been left to small businesses. Even medium-size businesses are now relying on M&A to expand. See Arancho Doc’s M&A history with the acquisition of the fellow Italian, 40-year-old LSP Soget in April to be subsequently acquired by Technicis.

Technology is not the primary interest of private equity funds looking for investments, nor is it the service, however profitable. In an industry where growth increasingly happens through M&A, mid- and large-sized translation businesses are easy preys and vehicles for easy money. Also, the size of translation companies is considerably lower than that of other companies with comparable performance in other industries and this makes them even more appealing.

Why the hullabaloo, then, around the alleged interest of private equity funds for translation businesses? What do you expect from an intelligence channel with a boasted base of a few thousand readers releasing the results of casual surveys run through its main outlet with a rate of response of 0.9%? Tertium non datur: either the released news is just gossip, or industry players are dancing on the Titanic.

Chasing the hype ends up with us getting lost. In 2016, the eight fastest growing industries to invest in were 3-D printing, drones, marijuana, virtual reality, AI, food e-commerce, wind energy, and green building. In 2017, they grew to eleven, virtual reality, video games, elderly health care services, physical therapy, translation and interpretation services, biotechnology, VoIP, drones, green energy, water and water treatment, and marijuana.

Maybe marijuana is the one secure investment, judging by certain analyzes and those who support them. Incidentally, BLS expects a 29 percent increase in the number of jobs in the translation and interpretation service industry by 2024.

After The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide, do we need a No Bullshit Rule or a Bullshit Survival Guide?

A Bullshit Process Graphic

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Luigi Muzii has been in the "translation business" since 1982 and has been a business consultant since 2002, in the translation and localization industry through his firm. He focuses on helping customers choose and implement best-suited technologies and redesign their business processes for the greatest effectiveness of translation and localization related work.

This link provides access to his other blog posts.

Translator Perspectives on MT & Technology In General

I found an interesting series of blog posts by Christelle Maignon that I thought articulated translator perspectives on MT and the increasing use of technology in translation work very well. She herself was driven away from translation work towards coaching because PEMT was just not her cup of tea from what I could gather. Anyway I thought it would be good to highlight her work in case you are not aware of her blog.

Some posts that readers of this blog may also find interesting are listed below:

Why machine translation creates so much anger and how to deal with it

This post references Dr Kübler-Ross study of grief. She describes the five stages of emotions which are experienced by people who are approaching death or dealing with the death of a loved one. Her model was widely accepted and it was found to be valid for other forms of losses, as well as situations relating to change (for instance, the loss of a job or of a familiar way of doing things). Her model has been used as a change management tool by businesses across the world.

I have written about this as well in the past referencing this link  but it is good to get a real translators perspective which interestingly uses the death and grief cycle as a reference.

Another post describes the widespread use of MT based on presentation by Stefan Gentz and is one the most popular posts on her blog.

What Does The Future Hold For Translators?

I find the reaction and interpretation by a translator interesting though I don’t really see how MT is taking work away from translators or the professional translation industry. MT mostly translates stuff that would never get translated were it not possible to do it with MT.

Another that I found interesting is:

Riding The Wave Of Technological Change As A Translator

Or Future Proofing Your Career As A Translator

I think there is lots of useful information for translators on her site, and while I am regularly reminded that I am not a translator and should not be telling translators how to do what they do, I will dare to say that many will find useful information here.

I truly hope that my highlighting her blog here raises her profile and does not have a negative reaction from some who might see this as an endorsement from MT advocates.

I have not been very active in the last few months but I have a new series of ideas that I will start writing on again shortly.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving vacation for those of you who celebrate this.

Let what comes come.
Let what goes go.
Find out what remains.

—  Ramana Maharshi

Understanding the Translation Buyer

In my last post I talked about various viewpoints on the emerging trends in the industry and I noticed that the post very quickly established itself amongst the most popular of the year. In fact second only to a March posting on post-editing compensation, a subject which continues to draw ongoing attention. In many ways this post is an expansion on some of the points that were raised in the last post.

When one considers the general focus of translation work done by the professional translation industry, I think we see that a large part of the work is related to translating content that facilitates and enables international commerce. The world of localization, to a great extent focuses on the content that is closely related to the final packaging of products that are sold in international markets. This focus is the software and documentation localization mindset that is at the heart of the largest translation agencies work in the business translation industry. So much so that one company chose to name themselves SDL, though most of the other agencies in the industry have exactly the same focus.

Much of the content (which is just a word to summarize a particular collection of words) that gets translated is mandatory and necessary to be able to participate in target international markets. So most global market focused enterprises translate what they absolutely must, to legally participate in key target markets, some do more,  but for the most part only what is absolutely necessary gets done because it is slow and expensive. An example of doing the least amount possible: Microsoft Office products have a Thai user interface but if you hit the F1 online help button you will only see help in English! But everybody understands some amount of translation MUST be done to be viable in international markets e.g. Honda could not sell cars in Europe without creating some amount of final customer (aka end-user) and distribution channel material about their products in “key” languages.

To my observation this traditional content is 1) marketing content (brochures and high-level product descriptive web content, legal liability, some advertising) and 2) product packaging related material since most customers and some governments require that imported products have user documentation and other basic service information be contained in the package that international customers buy, preferably in their language. The SDL mindset is a result of the increasing importance of software products and services in the world in the last 20 years. In fact, we see few translation agencies (LSPs) older than 20 years old in this industry. This has resulted in a world where “translation projects” are often outsourced to agencies (LSPs) today as it does not make economic sense for companies to build internal translation task focused teams unless they have ongoing and continuous needs to translate material.  And as we know it is still quite messy to coordinate translators across many languages to release products at the same time across the globe.  While there is change afoot across many dimensions, most of this traditional localization will continue, though I suspect that much of the paper documentation will get thinner and much more content will move to the web. Today global enterprises have to seriously consider translating new and continuously flowing text and video related to their products offerings that is accessed via tablets, smartphones and PCs. It has become important to translate “external” content that customers peruse and use to make purchase decisions and also provide a much richer set of information to enable self-service with products after the purchase.  

We live in an age, where increasingly marketing and corporate-speak is challenged, undermined and sometimes even seen as disingenuous and false. (Raise your hand if you trust and respect corporate press releases about their amazing “ground-breaking” products).  Today we see customer voices rise above the din of corporate messaging, and taking control of branding and corporate reputations with their own “authentic” discussions of actual customer experiences, while marketing departments look on haplessly.  We are also seeing a shift away from corporate controlled top-down marketing messages, to more open uncontrolled customer initiated and driven conversations and some have been saying that the old view of corporate websites cannot succeed anymore. In 2012 global enterprises need to do different things to be successful in building a satisfied and loyal customer base. Corporate marketing messages have gained the same patina as political party propaganda and most customers look elsewhere to determine the real truth about anything they might consider buying. While a few companies are learning the new rules of engagement, many still continue the old way and risk irrelevance. There is growing awareness of these forces of change as we can see from the many discussions related to these trends and the popularity of discussions on disintermediation and change in the translation industry. GALA recently alerted their members of the need to cooperate, collaborate and develop meaningful standards and stated the following:

To respond to these challenges, LSPs, tools providers, content developers, and all players in the language industry need to be smarter than we were in bygone days. We need to cooperate and collaborate, not only because now we truly can, but also because it is the new way of the world. Those in our midst who don’t collaborate with others will soon find themselves losing out on opportunities and falling behind.

Collaboration means more than having a Facebook page, a profile on LinkedIn, some files on Google Drive, and tweeting. The new collaborative paradigm means participants are distributed, peers are connected, work is interactive, and ideas are shared. Innovation goes up, down, and across the supply chain. But real cooperation also requires a certain level of trust. Intuitively humans only collaborate to the extent they trust others. As the ice of the P.C. era melts away, we may see trust building mainly through discussions in social networks and networking at conferences right now, but this is only the beginning of the Social Collaboration era. Over time, more ways will appear to establish trust and form collaborative networks.

The changing dynamics at the broadest level are eloquently described by John Hagel as The Big Shift.  He describes various core assumptions and historic conditions that are being undermined today and I like his advice on how to deal with change. The following is good advice for an industry with 25,000 companies.

If we approach interactions with the zero sum mindset – that there is a fixed quantity of resources that must be distributed and your gain will inevitably be my loss – we virtually ensure that we will end up with short-term transactions and undermine any efforts to build longer-term relationships.  In contrast, if we adopt a positive sum mindset – that through our collaboration we can generate a growing pool of resources – we are likely to be much more successful in building long-term trust based relationships. In turn, this means we will be more effective in participating in the knowledge flows that have the potential to generate the most economic value, thereby creating a virtuous cycle that builds upon itself and generates powerful network effects.

So, if we see that the way the customer gathers information and assesses purchase decisions is changing, we should also understand that the content that will have the most value in helping to build customer relationships and thus international market success is also changing.  Aligning your business processes and strategies with this new reality is likely to be a wise thing to do.  We can see today that while there will still be an ongoing need for the traditional SDL-type of content, there is also high-value content being created in much less controlled ways that could significantly benefit international business initiatives. The graphic below illustrates this. There is great value in identifying content that customers are creating about user experience and product feedback and translating that in addition to traditional localization content. Better yet, global enterprises could encourage this in sponsored forums. We see today that more informal corporate content (e.g. blogs and product discussion forums) and also “external” content created by customers in user forums can be invaluable in helping to build market momentum. A lot of this new high-value content is much more unstructured and fleeting but can still influence customer purchase behavior, so it should be taken seriously and considered worthy of translation through new production approaches like community crowdsourcing or automated translation with carefully tuned MT systems that easily outperform free MT solutions. 
 

For many global enterprises even internal communications about new products and services are increasingly becoming multilingual so the role of translation can be significantly greater than the limited scope defined by the SDL mindset.  Thus “internal” emails and product design discussions that are embedded in Microsoft Office documents also become very valuable to producing products that are truly localized for different markets, especially if these discussions are global and multilingual. There is probably a role for language translation specialists who can solve these new kinds of problems for global enterprises. Many corporations are attempting to solve these problems on their own since the translation industry is for the most part still only focused on the historical SDL-type solutions. How many LSPs do you know who are involved in translation projects related to customer conversations in social media?

 
However, the decisions to translate knowledge bases, customer discussion forums or high-value customer created content is probably happening in executive suites rather than in the localization department. Thus it makes sense to learn to understand and speak to the needs and view at this level. The conversation is likely to be quite different from the TM value and word rate discussions that happen with localization departments. (Which I know are also important.) I expect that new translation production models to build success in international markets will involve MT (and other translation automation), crowd sourcing as well as traditional project management. It is very likely that old production models like TEP (Translate-Edit-Proof) will become less important, or just one of several approaches to translation challenges as new collaboration and translation production models gain momentum.I think that the most successful approaches to solving these "new" translation problems will involve a close and constructive collaboration between traditional localization professionals, linguists, MT developers, end-customers and probably others in global enterprise organizations who have never worked in "localization" but are more directly concerned about the quality of the relationship with the final customer across the world. At the end of the day our value as an industry is determined by how useful our input is to the process of building international markets and the requirements for success are changing as we speak.

I will take a stab at describing what qualities might be most appealing to the target buyer who may not even know that the word localization is related to translation. The vendors that would have the most attractive profile with an executive suite buyer (VP Sales, VP Marketing, VP Customer Support, VP Customer Experience, COO, CMO, CFO etc..) would probably have the following characteristics:

• Be an expert on solving language translation related business problems rather than be just a language service provider (LSP) who manages translation projects of defined bags of words
• Ability to identify, recruit and retain a superior human translator workforce
• Ability to understand and participate in the larger customer satisfaction and customer loyalty building dialogue that matters at the C-level and explain how translation contributes to this beneficially
• Ability to interface with and process and translate critical content in a highly automated workflow as seamlessly as possible
• Ability to adjust production to business needs i.e. combine and mix TEP, MT, PEMT and Community-based production as required to meet customer needs
• Ability to articulate and adjust time, quality and cost parameters as necessary to meet different customer requirements rather than force all projects through the same millstone
• Ability to have a productive and objective discussion on deliverable translation quality across different production methods
• A commitment to open standards to facilitate data transfer and exchange on a long-term basis so that efforts transfer and scale across information delivery mechanisms (web, tablet, smartphone, documentation)
• Demonstrated competence and an understanding of developing superior automated translation technology (i.e. beyond building dictionaries and operating Moses in rudimentary way). Preferably better than is possible with free MT on the web or your basic DIY effort.
• Ability to manage and handle small (single sentence) projects as well as large bulk projects with equal ease and efficiency
• Ability to respond rapidly to changing customer requirements

It is said that the Winter Solstice of 2012 is a very special time, (actually so special that the planetary alignment we see now apparently only happens once in 26,000 years.The Earth, The Sun and The Center of Galaxy are on the same line at the moment of this Winter Solstice.) and depending on your viewpoint either a time for great new beginnings or a time of final reckoning. Hopefully for most of us this is a time of wonderful and energizing new beginnings and evolution. I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year.

Emerging Language Industry & Language Technology Trends

As the year comes to a close, it is sometimes useful to review and look ahead on where things may be going, and even though many of these type of ruminations can be self-indulgent and self-serving, I have decided to throw in my two cents anyway. These are personal opinions on other opinions, and like much of what I do in this blog, this is also a collection of information that I consider most worthwhile to share on this subject of trends.

The translation industry remains a highly fragmented industry with relatively inefficient production and business models. In 2012 we still have over 25,000 language service providers (agencies) of varying quality and professionalism doing the work of business translation across the globe. Efforts to define the final product or service produced by these firms are unsuccessful despite valiant efforts from industry associations.   However, many have been talking about change and disintermediation and many of us are aware that something is afoot. My intent here is to collect and organize different opinions rather than only promote my own and hopefully I succeed in creating a broader clarity on these emerging trends and possibly starting some discussion on this.

A trigger for this post was a conversation with Bob Donaldson who presented on this theme at Translation Forum Russia. I have also added some material gathered at other conferences I attended this year that extends these initial opinions. Bob has simplified my task by gathering and sharing the opinions on key trends of several different viewpoints as summarized below. (I have kept the text exactly as presented in his slides at TFR but you could get clarifications and detail beyond this slide verbiage by directly contacting him). 

Multi-Language LSP Vendor (MLV) Perspective by Renato Beninatto

•  
• Rise of Micro translations (interesting response to this point by Luigi Muzii)
• Outsourcing to translator teams
• Demand for “long tail” languages

CAT Tools Training Perspective by Angelika Zerfass

•  
• Terminology Management gaining traction (finally)
• New content types (twitter) don’t fit old processes
• File management becoming more complex

Translator Perspective by Jost Zetsche

• Deep integration of MT into translation workflows
• Limited lifespan of LSP as (mere) middleman

End Buyer Perspective by Anonymous

• Demand for continuous translation with very little context (Micro translation)
• Declining Quality Expectations
• MT will fill the gaps created by the first two at an ever-increasing price

Single & Regional Language Vendor (SLV/RLV) Perspectives in aggregate

• Greater usage of MT
• Multi-faceted approach to quality
• “Price compression” will drive small/inefficient players out of business
• “Disintermediation” will show up in various forms
• Greater demand for self-service portals

Bob Donaldson Top 4 Trends Summary

•  
• Transition from “Project Orientation” to “Content Stream” orientation
• Increasing integration of MT at all levels
• Increasing emphasis on velocity rather than price or quality
• Increasing reliance on global SLV partners rather than freelancers

All resulting in changing and needed innovation in business models



As I consider all these views, my own sense is that the following trends are increasingly understood to be clear and continue to gain momentum:

• Business translation is shifting focus from intermittent project work of relatively static content to continuously flowing streams of information that might enhance international business. The old “software and documentation localization” (SDL?) view of the world is becoming a smaller part of the core translation challenges that global enterprises face to be successful in international markets.  There is also a growing awareness that translation should be able to flow from document/video to PC/web to mobile/tablet easily, quickly and efficiently.
• An expanded view of critical and translation-worthy content that includes more informal corporate content as well as customer generated content and social media conversations about products. Social media has dramatically changed the traditional top-down views of marketing, and this impacts the decisions on what is important to translate as enterprises realize that purchase decisions are being made in social online conversations and information sharing.
• The importance of automation and collaboration increases. This is more than just MT, it includes greater integration of content flows from the information creation process all the way to information consumption. Successful use of comprehensive automation and collaborative processes will help create meaningful differentiation and competitive advantage amongst LSPs and help identify superior players.
• The increasing importance of cloud based services and infrastructure to facilitate collaboration and standardization of translation-related informational flows. This will also mean that desktop tools (TM, MT) will become less important over time as usage shifts to the cloud.

On the MT front I expect the following trends, much of this is already in place and also gaining momentum:

• Increasing awareness amongst translation professionals that domain focused MT produces the best results in terms of production efficiency and productivity gains. We will hear of many more successes of these kinds of focused systems.
• Increasing understanding of post-editing based translation production and processes. While there will be some or many “premium” translators who refuse to work on PEMT projects, more and more translators and LSPs will learn to work effectively with MT.
• Continued momentum in the understanding of MT system quality which will result in better PEMT experiences and trusted, fair and equitable compensation practices. This is essential for broader long-term adoption.
• A shift away from free and instant MT solutions to expert collaboration and expert-built MT systems.  (Some will say this is self serving and to some extent it is.) It has become increasingly easy to get some sort of MT system into place by throwing some data into a hopper, but very few of these systems provide long-term productivity gains and strategic advantage out-of-the-box. MT in 2012 is still very complex and getting some kind of basic system together quickly should not be equated to building long-term production efficiency. Experience and knowledge about MT system development matter, and the best, i.e. the highest productivity and best overall ROI systems will still come from experts. As Malcolm Gladwell says, “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.” Experts are people who have built hundreds or thousands of MT systems. Many who experiment with Moses and other instant MT solutions will learn that deep expertise is required to move the system quality beyond the initial engine capabilities and that long-term business advantage only come from continuously improving MT systems. In 2013 MT system development is still an evolutionary process and a skill based technology, not the instant iPhone-like gadget that some want it to be. There is a difference between using MT well and just blindly using MT because it  is in vogue. If you don’t know what you are doing and what you will do after your initial system is in place, being able to do it quickly initially is not going to really add much to your business leverage. 
• Better understanding of what MT can and cannot do, and more pro-active use of MT to build long-term competitive advantage rather than just be a means to react to cost pressure or client demands. This means that some LSPs will build MT systems BEFORE they actually have a customer to ensure that they have an advantage in particular domains that they feel have strategic promise and potential.

I have discussed the importance of automation (process integration which includes MT and much more than traditional project management) and collaboration (which also means that you respect your workers and customers) as important elements of new business models that can effectively respond to and take advantage of these trends. I would like to add agility as a critical third element. What is agility or agile? I think this is increasingly becoming more important as a critical element for success in the future. 

: Characterized by quickness, lightness, and ease of movement; nimble.
: Mentally quick or alert
: marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace
: having a quick resourceful and adaptable character

So are there any examples of where all these elements come together? Not really, and definitely not at large LSPs like Lionbridge, SDL et al.  Largeness (over $50M for the translation industry) generally tends to undermine agility and often collaboration (in the sense I use the word) too. I think there are smaller companies where all these elements are more visible and look like they have the potential and promise to bloom. A nice and succinct description of “agile” is presented by Jack Welde, CEO Smartling in the first 8 minutes of this video.

An 8 minute overview of Agile Business Translation

I suspect that many new business translation customers will opt for this type of lean, quick and more cost-effective approach over the traditional LSP sales and TEP process hype, where the customer is often treated like an idiot that needs to be slapped into shape. Lingotek is another company with an approach that has many key elements in place and I think is well positioned to challenge the old model. In both cases outsiders are creating tools to change a cumbersome old business model and facilitate rapid collaborative production. DotSUB and Amara are two that are focusing on facilitating translation of the huge volumes of video content that are increasingly useful to help sell products and services, and are increasingly recognized as more important than a lot of traditional localization content. In all cases these new approaches can steer easily to professional, MT or community based production or any combination of the above at significantly lower prices with “quality” intact. Try and have this discussion about flexibility, speed and various production modes with a large traditional LSP and you will likely see that it may be possible at a significantly higher price, and I suspect the conversation will also be labored and difficult.


All of this for points to examination of changing business models and innovation and the most interesting discussions I have seen on this subject for this industry are at the The Big Wave. Listing all these trends has some value but it is useful also to understand how all these trends mix together and what implications it might have. I can’t say I have the answers but I think these are good things to ponder.  I have seen several interesting posts about this at the Big Wave site. For example here are some selections from this post:

TEP is the unique answer of most translation vendors, an old-fashioned and somewhat obsolete answer too, but it is the only model they know.
At a closer look, none of the big players in the industry, however, has produced substantial product, technological, or process innovations.
When customers don’t get any new value from traditional vendors to meet new or implicit needs, they abandon these vendors and do something different themselves to better accomplish their goals.
This is why innovation in translation has always come from outsiders.

There are also interesting posts On Information Asymmetry and The Disintermediation Myth: Bogy or Opportunity? which are provocative and worth reading even though some might feel they are slightly opaque.

The future is likely to see multiple production models co-exist e.g. TEP, PEMT, Customized MT, Free MT, Crowdsourcing or Community Collaboration as well increasing examples of social translation, as these will all be necessary to solve different types of translation challenges we face. I have often thought that it is too complicated to buy translation from traditional LSPs and I hope that we as an industry make this much more clear and simple for the customer who has never heard the word localization used in relation to translation. There are a lot more of these customers out there than there are customers in localization departments. People usually find it easier to buy, when they know exactly what they will get for a given price. People like predictable outcomes (really hard to do with MT) and would like to be able to easily compare alternatives.

I would welcome any readers who would be interested to share their own perceptions and views on these trends as a guest post. I assure you that I will print it without modification (hopefully no personal attacks or rants).

The Continuing Saga & Evolution of Machine Translation

I recently attended the 7th IMTT Conference in Cordoba, Argentina. I especially enjoy the IMTT events because somehow they have found a content formula that works for both translators and LSPs. You get to see the translation supply chain communicate in real-time. The overall culture of their events is also usually very collaborative, and to my mind the place to see the most open and constructive dialogue between translators and agencies. Some may not be aware that Argentina has a particularly strong concentration of skilled humans who understand the mechanics of localization (especially in FIGS BrPt), and many of the agencies, even small ones, are able to work with pretty much every TM and TMS (Translation Management System) system in the market with more than a basic level of competence. Because of historical decisions made by @RenatoBeninatto many years ago and a great university educational system, Argentina has become a place with a comprehensive and sizable professional translation eco-system.

There were a few presentations that I found especially interesting, including a plenary presentation by Suzanne de Santamarina on the use of quality metrics. You can see some of the twitter trail here and here but basically Suzanne described her very active use of J2450 measurements to improve the dialogue on quality with customers and with her translators. While there clearly is effort and expense involved in implementing this as actively as she has, I think it dramatically improves the conversation regarding translation quality between all the participants, as it is very specific and impersonal and clear about what quality means.  It is also a means to build what she called “customer delight” which of course also includes a major service component.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out (of the product/service) and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality…
~ Peter Drucker

Asia Online makes a software tool available to enable customers to calculate J2450 scores for this very reason.  It helps to move the discussion from inactionable complaints like “I don’t like the quality” or “the quality is not good”,  to practical error identification and resolution action steps like  “Is there a way to reduce frequency of the wrong terminology errors in the system?” Just as proper use of BLEU scores requires care and some expertise so does the use of J2450. Suzanne’s company’s regular and highly structured use of J2450 is such that they can really assess the linguistic quality from project to project with a precision that  few have. Her approach is refreshing in its clarity and precision and quite a contrast form the meandering inconclusive discussions on “quality” that you see in LinkedIn. Tools like BLEU and J2450 depend on the skill level of the user, and require an investment of time and effort and repeated use to develop real user competence before one understands the informational insights that their use can provide.

I also enjoyed the presentations by master translators like João Roque Dias and Danilo Nogueira  on the craft and art of translation, and enjoyed talking to them about MT and the life of the translator in general. (Yes, MT is sometimes useful even for some of them.) There were several skill focused presentations on Language QA tools, CAT and collaborative tools that were also very interesting. I heard great things about Val Ivonica’s presentation (in Brazilian) on translation productivity tools which I was unable to attend as it coincided with mine. It is interesting that Patricia Bown positioned MemoQ as collaboration software that enables the linear TEP model to evolve, enabling faster turnaround and higher volume. There were many Brazilians present (though some said not enough) and they lived up to their reputation for revelry but unfortunately were thwarted in their (our) attempts to find a karaoke place one evening. Nevertheless they shared their linguistically oriented humor with me and I had no difficulty finding a willing interpreter even though I was often the only person who did not speak the language.

I delivered a presentation on the emerging role of MT as a means to deal with the translation challenges created by the content explosion and new kinds of dynamic product/business related content. The feedback I received was mostly positive and constructive even though there were several very skeptical translators in the crowd. There were some in the audience who have already experienced MT that works and even those who had not worked with customized systems admitted that sometimes MT was useful.  I was also on a panel on “The Future of the Industry” which got mixed reviews as some translators felt it was not relevant and others felt it was a tired topic that nobody had any real clarity on. Many feel change is coming but are not clear what this really means and unfortunately for many the end-result of these changes is that customers expect more work for less money. This does mean that there is a certain amount of apprehension amongst the attendees as the future is not quite predictable.

A blog entry by Emily Stewart that pondered upon the theme of technology driven change at the conference a few days later, triggered an interesting and on-going discussion in LinkedIn.  Her post which was about the advent of technology in a variety of different markets is thoughtful and worth reading. I also think her conclusion (shown below) is good advice for us all.

Instead of denouncing machine translation as the end of the translation world as we know it, it may be time to take a step back and see what happens.  The discussion shouldn’t stop, but perhaps it could become less polemic and instead convert into a deeper conversation on and reflection of what may or may not lie ahead.

While initially there is a lot of focus on the perceived threat (there are some who think that I, together with other over zealous MT developers, am responsible for some of this fear and FUD), I am hoping that the dialogue moves beyond this point. Some MT systems have indeed been used to push rates down unfairly, but as we all begin to better understand these early mishaps, this can and must change. As George W Bush misspoke when he tried to say "Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me."  (I hope you click on the Bush video, it is toooo funny). If it becomes clearer to everybody what it actually takes to “finish off” MT output to required target quality levels, this kind of abuse cannot continue. We need better quality assessment so that this gap can be more clearly defined.

All MT systems are not equal and to have a global post-editing pricing policy is guaranteed to create disenchantment. We all need to better understand where to use MT and where to avoid it. MT cannot easily if ever replace humans, on the same projects that were previously done through a careful human TEP process. If the quality expectations are high, it has to be MT and human.  MT makes most sense where there is ongoing volume and information volatility. We also need to better understand how to quickly assess the output quality of different MT systems so that post-editors are compensated fairly. The best MT systems are yet to come and they will be better because they are the product of informed linguistic steering in addition to standard data and MT techniques. We have yet to see useful compensation systems develop for these linguists and this will probably be needed before some of the uneasiness dissipates, but the forces driving this expanding need are strong and hopefully we should realize and recognize the value of these key individuals at some point in the future. This is already true at Asia Online so I imagine it can be done elsewhere.

In terms of disintermediation, I think MT will be only part of the whole picture, as we see more people learn to use motivated communities to get work done. Adobe and others have learnt to use “the crowd” to get traditional localization work done using translation platforms like Lingotek and newcomer Smartling (which might also have obtained the biggest startup investment made by a VC in the translation industry.) Much of the coming change will also come from collaboration software platforms like Lingotek, Smartling and others yet to come, that change how translation projects get done in terms of process flow, and that have a different modus operandi from traditional localization tools born in the TEP world. Translators are required to spend too much time working with data in different formats and too little time on the actual act of translation. New collaboration platforms and real data interchange standards will hopefully enable translators to focus mostly on real linguistic problem solving, and not on managing archaic and arcane format interchange issues. 

From my vantage point, I see that -
1) Translation is increasingly done outside of the sphere of the localization world and community based translation initiatives around the world are gathering momentum both in the non-profit and corporate world
2) The volume of translation that can help drive international business initiatives forward is increasing at a substantial rate (5X to perhaps as much as 100X) Interestingly, there are still some who think that this content explosion is a myth.
3) Social network conversations matter and are often more important to translate than having user documentation that is "perfect" and “error-free”. The company to customer communications have also become much more interactive, real-time and urgent and go way beyond the scope of most user documentation. 

Thus to approach every translation task with the TEP mindset that made great sense in the 1X or 2X volume days is not useful today. New approaches are needed and new models of automation/collaboration are necessary - and are perhaps the only way that all the changing momentum can be handled effectively. MT is simply one part of the equation and is far from being the whole solution. The need to solve this overall translation challenge is linked to the customers business survival so it gains a kind of momentum of inevitability. Businesses need to translate way more content to remain competitive in global marketplaces that move at internet speeds, thus automation and better collaboration are essential and critical to success and even survival.

 
We have seen in the last 5 years that many of the largest global organizations have launched MT initiatives on their own, because their LSP vendors were/are stuck in the TEP mindset, and did not realize that their customers had to learn to do dramatically more translation with not very much more money. This is perhaps a clue that in certain volume and time constraint scenarios, MT is necessary. We have seen that global enterprises need to solve this problem with or without vendors who historically managed the bulk of their localization translation. My sense is that this trend is likely to build momentum if LSPs do not learn to offer real MT competence. Real MT competence comes from building custom systems and seeing what works and what does not. Global enterprises will increasingly take this task upon themselves if they cannot find LSPs who can help them solve this problem e.g. TAUS is mostly a buyer driven organization with the key focus of sharing TM and facilitating large scale MT initiatives. The greatest successes presented at TAUS are all in-house initiatives with little LSP involvement. Surely this is because there is a real need, and we see that competitors are willing to share linguistic data and resources to handle this problem. I suspect that the buyer’s motivation is less about saving cents per word on translation costs, and much more about keeping and building customer loyalty and satisfaction in a world with growing global online commerce and information access needs.

My guess is that some of the anxiety on the coming change comes not so much from raw technology like MT, but perhaps it's real origin is the growing awareness that some of the work they are involved with grows less valuable to the customer’s real mission: which is to build and develop international markets. Perhaps the anxiety is really rooted in the fact that they sense that they are not involved in high value work. The real threat is not MT per se, but it is the growing awareness amongst international marketing executives (in global enterprises) that they need to focus on what their customers really care about - more and more often this is something other than getting a really great user manual out. Have you noticed that many leading edge companies like Apple, Sony have dramatically reduced their investment in user manuals? The iPhone simply does not have one (in the box but they do on the web). I am not suggesting that manuals are going away, but it is already clear that their relative value is diminishing. The content that drives global customer adoption and loyalty is changing and thus the relative value of traditional localization (software and documentation) work also changes.

I expect that new translation production models to build success in international markets will involve MT (and other translation automation), crowdsourcing as well as professional oversight and management. It is very likely that old production models like TEP will be increasingly less important, or just one of several approaches to translation projects as new collaboration models gain momentum.I think that the most successful approaches to solving these "new" translation problems  will involve a close and constructive collaboration between traditional localization professionals, linguists, MT developers, end-customers and probably others in global enterprise organizations who have never worked in "localization" but are more directly concerned about the quality of the relationship with the final customer across the world. At the end of the day our value as an industry is determined by how useful our input is to the process of building international markets and the requirements for success are changing as we speak.

The conversations at IMTT and the ensuing discussions suggest that while progress is being made in the understanding of translation technology, there is still a long way to go. I hope that at future IMTT conferences we see more discussion of approaches to translation projects where TEP may not make sense and automation and collaboration approaches can help solve different kinds of problems that also further international business initiatives. I expect that IMTT will be a leader in changing the current polemic and also expand the conversation to new stakeholders. This conversation is likely to require much more direct content with product management, international sales and support teams and the final end customer. Hopefully some of us in the industry get to lead or participate in  the driving this change through these new conversations.

While change can be difficult it can also be a time of opportunity and a time when leadership changes. Very few try to understand the forces of change better. People often go through a sequential emotional cycle before they learn to cope, and eventually even thrive when facing disruptive change. Those who get stuck at fear and despair, often end up as victims.

This little video shows that effective and heartfelt communication across cultures need not be heavily planned, ponderous or calculated. Sometimes simple and real is enough to create the change and build a connection to your customers.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.