Translation As a Force of Change

One of the things that I have always found interesting about the world of translation is that apart from facilitating global commerce, I see that it also has the potential to be a means to break down walls between cultures and also improve the lives of humans as information starts to flow more freely across languages. Poverty and lack of information are often very closely correlated.This is really powerful, but for the most part the professionals focus on documentation and content that is necessary but not considered especially high value. So who does the world changing stuff?

I tend to think that translation, collaboration and automation are closely related and that great things are possible as these key elements line up.

I wanted to point out some examples of this power already at work. I noticed several articles yesterday on Meedan which is an online meeting place for English and Arabic speakers to share viewpoints. A non-profit service that hopes to foster greater understanding and tolerance, translates content from the Arabic media to English and vice versa. The site uses machine translation, a community to help clean up MT output and already makes 3 million words of translation memory available to enable continuing leverage and encourage new English <> Arabic translation efforts. I met George Weyman last year and I am very happy to see this initiative grow in strength. Apart from being a peacemaker and bridge-builder, George is also a fine tin flute player as this video (starts at 2:28) of an impromptu music jam in an Irish bar shows. I joined them by drumming on the table. In time, I would not be surprised to find that Meedan becomes a model for building dialog elsewhere in the world. 

This meeting happened at the AGIS conference which was focused on building a community and collaboration platform to be able to launch initiatives against information poverty and bring translation assistance to humanitarian causes. Like the Open Translation Tools conference I wrote about earlier, these are fledgling movements that are growing in strength. I would not be surprised to see initiatives like The Rosetta Foundation become a source for more compelling innovation in translation than companies like SDL and other professional industry “leaders”. Collaboration, automation, MT, community management and open source were the focus at AGIS. This is in contrast to the same  localization themes we see repeated endlessly at the larger industry conferences. I would bet that revolution is more likely to come from hungry, motivated “world-changing” mindsets that I saw at AGIS than the professionals reeling under cost cutting from buyers, that we usually see at the major localization conferences. My sense is that people who feel awe can make shit happen.

Recently we also saw the power of collaboration and focused community efforts in Haiti. The following are just a few examples:

Haiti and the power of crowdsourcing which describes the Ushahidi platform and support efforts at Tufts.

Language Lifelines: describes a variety of language industry initiatives to help relief assistance.

GALA setup a site to coordinate language related efforts and Jeff Allen resurrected data that he had worked on at CMU to help Microsoft, Google and others to develop MT solutions that might prove useful to the reconstruction effort.

I was also drawn into a vision that Dion Wiggins, CEO, Asia Online had to translate mostly educational open source content into several South East Asian languages to address the information poverty in the region. Again, the foundation of the effort here is an automated translation platform together with community collaboration and high value content. While this project still has a long way to go, the initial efforts are proof that the concept can work.  There is a growing belief that access to information and knowledge not only raises the lives of those who have access, but  also creates commercial opportunity as more people come online.

We are also seeing that community members (the crowd) can also step up to engage in translation projects, sometimes on a very large scale. While Facebook gets a lot press, I think it is the least interesting of these initiatives as it only focuses on L10N content which probably was best done by professionals anyway. They did prove however, that using crowds is a good way to rapidly expand the language coverage and your global customer base. If they actually extend this to the user content, I think Facebook could become a major force in translation. And again in this case, a management and collaboration infrastructure platform was necessary to enable and manage crowd contribution. I cannot see them extending the translation effort to the real user content without engaging machine translation into the process and flow. Many IT companies have also started to explore crowdsourcing, including Adobe, EMC and Intel and will expand language coverage this way. The professional translation industry should take note that this makes sense for companies to do because “long-tail” languages are not easily done cost effectively through standard channels.

 

While many in the professional industry comment disparagingly about quality in crowdsourcing translation, there is evidence that it can work quite well. The three best examples I know of are the TED Open Translation project which now has translated almost 5000 speeches into 70 languages using a pool of over 2000 volunteer translators, and the Yeeyan project in China and Global Voices.

The Yeeyan project takes interesting content in English and translates it into Chinese just to share interesting, compelling material. The community involves 8,000 volunteer translators, who’ve created 40,000 translations and collaborate with the Guardian, Time, NY Times and others. This effort got them into some trouble with Chinese censorship regulations but it has already evolved into a platform that employs “translators” and is self funding. 

Global Voices is translated into more than 15 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the LinguaAdvocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. This a truly virtual organization that allows us to hear real voices from around the world. Check out the recently translated articles. There are many more initiatives that I give a shout out to in my Twitter stream.

I believe the professional industry is at a point where they need to understand collaboration, crowdsourcing, automation, MT, and open source. This is both an opportunity and a threat as those who resist these new forces, will likely be marginalized. Microsoft changed the world when they introduced PCs and a much more open IT model while IBM defended mainframes and became much less relevant. At the time, the management at IBM were not able to take a nerdy college dropout named Bill seriously. Maybe because he delivered his software on a single floppy or maybe because he did not wear a tie.  Microsoft in turn was caught completely off guard when Google introduced their much more open, free and cloud based model and became less relevant. This cycle will likely continue as innovation drives change and I predict that Google too will become less dominant in the not so distant future because they have lost the original spirit.

The Economist is also regularly translated into Chinese by a group that calls themselves the Eco Team. The founder had this to say:

"Like the forum name says, producing a Chinese version of The Economist is our goal. But we're still young and immature; very amateur, not professional. So what? Because we are young, we have the fervor, the enthusiasm, the passion. Because we are amateurs, we'll double our efforts to do our best. As long as we wish, we can be successful and do a good job!"

Ethan Zuckerman summarizes the implications of this very nicely. Change is coming to the world of translation, with or without the support and guidance of the professionals.

We are in an age where information is a primary driver of wealth creation. While the initial wave has been focused around English and European languages, this will increasingly shift to languages like Chinese. Social Networks in China are already proving that they can be innovators and leaders in the new digital economy. The value of information and thus of translation will continue to increase, and the understanding that knowledge can bring prosperity will hopefully gain momentum all around the world. I hope that some of us will help make this happen.

The Global Customer Support Translation Opportunity

Recently I have written about why MT is important for LSPs. MT is a key enabling technology to make large volumes of dynamic high-value business content multilingual.  I have also pointed out the significant business value of making customer support content in particular more multilingual.I would like to go into more detail on the specific challenges one is likely to face in translating knowledge base and community content and how this could be addressed.

In most cases support content is likely to be 20X to 1000X the volume, of even a large documentation project so using MT technology will be a core requirement. It is also important that stakeholders understand that human quality is not achievable across the whole body of content and that it is important to define a “good enough” quality level early in the process.

Understanding the Corpus

The first step to developing a translation strategy for “massive” content is to profile the source corpus and understand volatility, language style, terminology, high frequency linguistic patterns, content creation process,  and assess existing linguistic resources available to build an MT engine. It is usually wise to do the following:

-- Gather existing translation memory (TM) and glossaries for training corpus

-- Identify sections that must be human translated (e.g. security, payment processing terms and conditions, legal content)

-- Analyze the source corpus and identify high frequency phrase patterns and ensure that they they are translated and validated by human translators

-- Identify the most frequently used knowledge base and community content and ensure that these are translated by humans and used as training corpus.

Once this is done, an MT engine can be built and evaluated. While it is important to do linguistic evaluation, it is perhaps even more important to show samples of MT output to real customers and determine whether the output is useful.

It is generally recommended that new knowledge base content is run through the initial engine and the MT translation is analyzed and corrected by human post-editors and linguists until a target quality level is achieved. This process may involve several iterations to continually improve the quality. The whole knowledge base can be periodically retranslated as big improvements in MT engine quality are accomplished. It is important to understand that this is an ongoing and continuously evolving process and that overall quality will be strongly related to the amount of human corrective feedback that is provided.

It is worth restating that there are significant benefits to doing this as the customer support environment evolves with the general momentum behind collaboration and community networks.The ROI in terms of call deflection savings and improved customer satisfaction is well documented and is significant. But perhaps the greatest benefit is the expanded visibility for the global customer who cannot really use the English content in it’s original form.

Microsoft has clearly demonstrated the value of making their huge knowledge base multilingual. At a recent TAUS conference they reported that hundreds of millions of support queries are handled by raw MT and interestingly, surveys indicate that the successful resolution and customer satisfaction in many of these languages is actually higher than it is for English! Others are starting to follow suit and Intel and Cisco have also done similar things on a smaller scale. The CSI presentation by Greg Oxton at a recent TAUS meeting states it very simply:


Content is King -- Language is Critical

I saw recently that analysts in the content management community have identified the growing demand for multilingual content as one of the strongest trends of 2009 and see it growing further in 2010. The Gilbane Group has a big emphasis on content globalization in their upcoming conference this summer. I was involved with a webinar yesterday with Moravia that focused on the customer support content globalization issue. A replay of the webinar is available here.

The time is now, to focus on and learn how to undertake content globalization projects that start at ten million words and and can run into hundreds of millions of words. This is the future of professional translation and I think that effective man-machine collaborations will be a key to success.

Learning to Share in Professional Forums: Collaboration

I read an article that I thought was striking and worth sharing. When I look back at how I started this blog, I recall the first few entries were about censorship and a discussion about how we as an industry produce too many similar conferences which dilutes the consolidated effort and marginalizes localization professionals in the general corporate landscape.

I think that perhaps, one of the reasons the professional translation industry is so fragmented, is that there are very low barriers to entry and competition is reduced to price in most cases. This creates an environment where the level of distrust is high among the various players in the supply chain and the level of collaboration is minimal and guarded if it exists at all. This is quite visible in the translation technology (too many trying to do exactly the same thing), the relationship between freelancers and LSPs and even in the general status of localization managers in global enterprises. 

While I don’t really have any definitive answers, I do think it is worth asking some fundamental questions to see if there is a way to get the disparate elements working together. Why is the industry unable to build greater mass, visibility and momentum?

It is interesting to see that many of the most exciting things happening in the world of translation are happening outside the realm of control of the professional industry. Facebook, TED, dotSUB, Ushahidi, Global Voices, Meedan are all initiatives that have learned to harness motivated and willing crowds. These are exciting initiatives that are changing the world. Google Translate, a vibrant open source SMT movement (Moses) and upstarts like Asia Online and others are making the most waves in the translation automation sector. In contrast, most of the news about our industry trade associations (GALA, ELIA, TAUS, ProZ, ATA, LW, LISA etc..) has to do with continuing communication problems, fragmentation and difficulties in developing meaningful collaboration models.

We have seen massive change in the music, newspaper, customer support that is driven by collaboration, open technology platforms and open knowledge sharing by motivated communities in social networks. It would not be surprising to see that these same Web 2.0 dynamics and forces could bring big changes to the world of professional translation. A study by Deloitte describes this "Big Shift" where IT infrastructure development, free knowledge flows and public policy support together are fundamentally reshaping the economic playing field.

One of the keys to connecting to the energy that these new collaborative movements foster is learning to share openly which brings me back to the article that triggered this entry.  I think it starts with just how we as individuals share what we know about our business and expertise. The industry needs to develop stronger collaboration models. From my vantage point, I see that there is some sharing going on between translators but very little between all the key players and levels in the professional translation supply chain. The first step in building strong peer-to-peer networks and collaboration culture is learning how to share. The chart below shows how the Ogilvy PR group has mapped some of the drivers of influence and persuasion to a social media context, where sharing is a primary action and modus operandi.

The study referenced in the article talks about awe as a key ingredient driving sharing behavior. Apparently human beings like to share awe and humans who share awe can bring about change. They say:

“Awe-inducing experiences encourage people to look beyond themselves and deepen connections to the broader social world (Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman 2007). All of these factors suggest that awe should lead people to want to share."

I also saw another article that again made me think about the unrealized potential we as an industry have, if we learned to walk together. We need to evolve from standard command-and-control views to developing strong collaborative cultures.

I found a few more tidbits from the CSI site that attach to this thread and suggest a new model that we can adopt:

“If information is to function as a source of organizational vitality, we must abandon our dark cloaks of control and trust in its need for free movement, even in our own organizations. Information is necessary for new order, an order we do not impose, but order nonetheless. All of life uses information in this way…” – Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

“The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance—these are what may make a vast, complex, ever-growing, ever-changing, evermore specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1954

There are some signs of collaboration culture beginning to take root: The L10NCafe is one attempt I know of, I also believe that the Open Translation Tools summit will lead to something of substance even though they have humble beginnings. I am sure there must be others that I do not know or have not mentioned.

I sense that the translation industry is poised for dramatic change, not all of it comfortable and welcome. However, I think that translation will increasingly be a  force driving change in the world, not just for developing new commercial markets, but also to raise the quality of life for millions. And for me that is a truly awesome and wonderful idea. I hope that you too can find things that are worth sharing.