If Content is Exploding, Why are Translation Prices Still Falling?

In my last entry I talked about three macro trends that are causing downward pressure on translation prices. And I got a fair amount of feedback, some agreeing and some challenging things I said. I also found out that I am being lumped together with others in the “Localization 2.0” camp. This confused me, since as a child I was denied the camp experience in apartheid based South Africa (no darkies allowed!), and CSA just released research that says that “Localization 2.0” is a failed experiment that was a non-starter and really, in the end it is all about translation. However several good questions were raised from this feedback that I would like to address here.

Am I “against” the TEP model?

I am not proposing tearing down the TEP model. I am suggesting that it has a place and is best suited for static content that has a relatively long shelf life. The TEP model made a lot of sense in the late 90’s and even early into the 2000 decade. But it is much less useful as a production model for the more dynamic content that is more common for global enterprises today. This "new" content is more voluminous and often has a half-life of 3-6 months or even less, but could be very valuable during this peak time. Much of this new content is user or community generated and strongly influences purchase behavior, so it is risky to ignore it. However, manuals and software still need to be localized and I do not advocate discarding this proven model for some kinds of content. I do expect it will need to evolve and connect to new technology and infrastructure.

If we are experiencing a content explosion and there is a shortage of human translators, how can prices be falling? This does not jive with standard market behavior where increasing demand typically results in higher prices.

On the surface this does sound illogical and inconsistent with standard economic theory. Usually, more demand = higher prices. However, for the longest time, we have seen enormous amounts of content on the web unavailable to customers and communities around the world. And why? Because traditional translation processes have been largely unaffordable and too slow for many of these new applications. By this, I mean content and communications such as web pages, intranets, knowledge bases, social network feedback, product documents, IM’s, blogs and emails.  I believe that the demand has always been there, but unable to fulfill itself in the cost/time scenarios that traditional translation production models were based on. But now the urgency created by globalization and internet based commerce makes this a much more pressing issue.

So we see global enterprises asking: How do we reduce costs, maintain quality and increase the productivity and speed of the translation process?  And we see localization managers asking: Is this MT/crowdsourcing stuff really going to affect the area of focus for the “commercial grade localization” market?

The explosion of content has an impact in three ways that I can see on the commercial grade localization market.

Firstly, it raises questions of value at an executive management level. 

Most professional translation is done to facilitate and drive international revenue. If the product and sales line-managers receive feedback that end customers (who generate international revenue) do not care about the “traditional” content, then I am sure some of these managers who are P&L driven, will seek to reduce this spend. This may reduce the need and the volume of traditional content or may cause price pressure, because it is felt that the value of the traditional content is low, and thus can be cut back without damage to revenue flows. Localization managers in global enterprises are generally not power players in the corporate hierarchy, and are often just told to do more with less. However, some of this content (GUI, Brand Marketing Content, Legal Terms) cannot be compromised, and it is likely that there will not be any price pressure and possibly even see rate increases for this type of content. So corporate localization managers have to cut budgets on documentation and other relatively “low value” content.

Secondly, as managers become aware of the automation possibilities they begin to consider it for use in “high-volume” commercial grade work. I have been involved with several automotive OEMs who produce 2,000 and 3,000 page manuals for their dealer and service networks. Customized and tuned SMT makes great sense here, as there is a lot of data to train with, the content is repetitive and MT can deliver measured productivity benefits. The net gain from using MT: manuals done significantly faster and at a much lower ongoing cost, at the SAME QUALITY levels of the old TM-based process. While editors/translators are usually paid lower rates they have much higher throughput and most actually make more money under this scenario. Note that I said CUSTOMIZED MT, not Google. 

Thirdly, for those companies that have products with very short product life-cycles (usually in consumer electronics), custom MT based automation can greatly speed up the documentation production process and over time reduce the actual net costs for each new manual. Again post-editing ensures that HT quality levels are delivered. 

Custom MT is the equivalent of building a production assembly line – it can make one or a few products very efficiently and give you a translation factory that gets more and more profitable as the production volumes increase, since the marginal cost continues to fall. In every case I know of, if you want publishable quality you still have it go through human post-editing. However, MT is a strategic long-term investment and production capacity asset in my opinion, (though several RbMT experts claim it can be used on a project to project basis). Real leverage for commercial grade localization comes from domain focus and continuing enhancement of these systems. To produce HT quality, it will ALWAYS be necessary to have a post-editing step in the process.  An informed SMT engine development process will deliver continuing improvements and starting point quality. This task of producing an ever-improving translation production line is relatively new and we are just beginning to understand how to do it well. Don’t believe the experts who tell you they have done this before. This is new and we are all still learning. Just as cars have gotten much more reliable as automation technology evolved,  we will see that effective man-machine collaborations will produce both, compelling quality and efficiency.

The most polished human translations (TM) will, I think, generally produce the best systems and the most skilled correction feedback will produce the biggest ongoing boost to the quality. If you want human quality you will need to have a modified form of TEP to make that happen, with more objectivity and more automation. I believe, growing use of SMT in particular will create new eco-systems and tools that require strong human linguistic skills. I believe there will be a need for more skilled linguists in addition to translators and cheap editors who may not even be bilingual but have subject matter expertise.

Expanding use of MT and community collaboration does not mean that QA, process control and quality concerns go away. I actually think there is much more room to build differentiation as these skills are broader and deeper than you need with TM. I expect that both at the translator and the LSP level there will be more room for differentiation than there is today.

Google continues to improve their MT systems and so will Microsoft and maybe even IBM now  (finally!) with assistance from Lionbridge. These are all largely SMT technology initiatives which are all a little bit hybrid nowadays. I am still betting that domain focused SMT systems developed by agile and open minded LSPs and translators, working in collaboration with technology partners like Asia Online will easily outperform anything the big boys will produce. The key to excellence is still the quality of the collaboration and the dialog between these players, not just the technology.

Falling Translation Prices and Implications for Translation Professionals

I recently saw an active discussion in the Localization Professionals group in LinkedIn. The key point raised initially was that lower prices cause lower quality and thus begins a discussion on who is to blame. (There has to be someone / something to blame, right?) Since people’s livelihoods and bonuses are at stake, the discussion can quickly become emotional. The culprits according to the discussion are bad localization managers, freelancers who accept lower rates, lack of standards, lack of differentiation, lack of process, the internet, marketplaces becoming more efficient etc.. In some way all these reasons are valid, but is there something else going on?

I would like to present another perspective on this issue that points to larger forces that are driving structural changes and are also driving prices down and putting pressure on the old order. These forces exist independently of what we may feel about them, they simply are an observable fact of the translation landscape today.

 

The Increasing Volume of Content

Most global enterprises today, are facing huge increases in content volumes that increasingly demands to be translated. However, they are usually not given increased translation budgets to match this increase in content volume. So they have a few options to deal with this situation:

1) Refuse to translate the content that is out of budget range

2) Reduce prices to current translation suppliers (but increase volume)

3) Look for ways to increase translator productivity (MT, CAT Tools, Crowdsourcing) which can enable them to get more done with the same money i.e. raise individual translator productivity from 2,500 words/day to something much higher (10,000+?). 

Thus, one of the driving forces behind lower prices is the need to make  more and more content available for the global end-customer. The web and the growth in demand for dynamic content affects all kinds of global businesses. We can expect this content growth to only increase in future and the demands for productivity will get louder.  This does not mean that rates will automatically go lower but we are seeing that it does have an impact and that this content growth is also possibly driving interest in MT. How else do you cope with 10X to 100X the content volume?

 

The Value of Localization Content

Another dimension that should also be examined is the value of what we translate. Most of the professional translation industry is focused on SDL = Software & Documentation Localization and a relatively small and static part of corporate websites. However, it is increasingly being understood that while this “traditional localization content” is necessary, and will continue to be so, it is not where the greatest value lies for a global enterprise trying to build global customer loyalty. Very few people read manuals, in fact, some say that translators are often the only people who actually read manuals, especially in IT and consumer electronics industries. If users do not value this documentation we will continue to see price and efficiency pressures for this kind of translation. Customer and community generated content is increasingly more important, especially for complex IT and Industrial Engineering products. So we have major IT companies like Microsoft, Dell and Symantec who find that the localization content they are translating and producing only services 2% of their real customer inquiries. The customer need and expectation for having a large amount of searchable content continues to grow, and given the velocity of information creation, translation automation and MT become necessary. This is another source of downward pressure on prices, though we also see higher volumes and new attitudes and definitions of translation quality. Global enterprises realize that new quality standards are required for this massive content and new production models and approaches are sought as standard TEP costs and process are not viable to meet these needs.

 

The Global Demand for Translation & Knowledge

The third dimension is the raw demand for knowledge, information and collaboration from the world beyond the professional translation world. The thirst for knowledge across the globe is driving new collaboration models like crowdsourcing and development of open source software/tools, Open Data initiatives like the Meedan, EC, Opus, World Bank continue to build momentum. It is not clear that costly, membership-only initiatives like TAUS,  will prosper unless they do in fact provide higher quality data and add some real value. We should expect to see the growing use of amateurs as we see at Yeeyan and TED. We also see the growth of fan translations that prove that fans can create viable long-term initiatives, and again this shows that it is possible to reduce translation costs when motivated communities can be built. Adobe recently decided to use the crowd and a technology platform to manage the crowd to further their core business mission of developing international market revenue. And guess what one of the outcomes of this is? Lower translation costs.

So the poor translator and most LSPs are caught in these major shifts which are clearly out of the control of any single player in the localization world. We all (Buyer, LSPs and Translators) have to learn how to deal with these forces as they affect us all. In future, we should expect that ongoing productivity improvements will matter, and skill and experience with translation automation will be increasingly valued. 

I think skill with SMT (I am biased) will especially matter, as it is a technology that brings together TM, crowdsourcing, project management expertise, linguistic competence and collaboration infrastructure in way that can demonstrate and deliver higher productivity, lower costs per word and yet maintain quality. Traditional localization work will likely be under increasing price pressure because of it’s low relative value, and we will begin to see global enterprises that seek to do 10X to 100X the volume of current translations to be done. The price drops perhaps also signal that we are seeing the collapse of the old business model of static repetitive content done in a TEP cycle. While this is painful for all concerned, it is also a time where some will learn how to bring the technology, people and processes together to be able to deliver on new market demands. Recent announcements from Lionbridge and others show that change is necessary but making it mandatory and punitive is to my mind clumsy and ill-advised. (This old command and control mentality is really hard to subdue).  I suspect that change initiatives that do not create clear win-win scenarios for all the parties concerned will struggle and face growing resistance.  

I think that initiatives that marginalize, exploit or strong arm translators, are doomed to fail.  Willing, motivated and competent translators have been the key to delivering quality in the past and will be even more so in future. Disruptive change is not all it is cracked up to be. Even Google and Microsoft found that revolution consisted of a continuing sequence of small changes as they built their empires, and I suspect that, that approach will also work best here. It would not surprise me to find new leadership emerge from outside the industry, for these are surely interesting times, and openness and real collaboration are hard to find in the professional translation world.

 

Innovation & Collaboration

So how do we respond to these forces? What is an intelligent response to these kinds of macro changes?

I don't have many answers but list some possibilities below, and I do understand that this is very easily said and not so easily done:

-- Find out how to increase productivity while maintaining or even raising quality (Better, more efficient automation processes and effective use of MT especially data-driven SMT that learns and improves.)

-- Work together with global enterprises and find out what the highest value content is. Then learn how to make it multilingual efficiently and effectively as a long-term partnership mission. ( I doubt that this content is software and document localization or a few select pages on the corporate website)

-- Develop better, collaborative relationships with customers (the translation buyer) and the translators who are the keys to quality to build long-term leverage and benefit or all the parties in the game.

-- Develop higher value add services like transcreation (is there really no better word) in addition to basic translation services

-- Develop new business models and new ways to get high-value content done where there is a much tighter and longer term commitment from buyers, vendors and a team of translators i.e. a common and shared mission orientation rather than single project management and orientation. 

This is a time of big structural change and it will require innovation and collaboration on a new scale. The question that I have been asking and I think the market is also asking is:

How do we reduce costs, maintain quality and increase productivity and speed up the translation  process?

I know this is somewhat vague, but I think it should start with a new way to look at the problem. If we look at this as an opportunity or challenge rather than as threats that we bash and attack, we might find some constructive and useful answers. Today, I see overwhelmingly negative feedback on MT, crowdsourcing, open source and even collaboration initiatives from many in the professional translation industry in social forums. Very few trying to understand these forces better. People often go through a sequential emotional cycle of attack, fear, despair before they learn to cope, and eventually even thrive when facing disruptive change. Those who get get stuck at fear and despair, often end up as victims.  It is said that those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Maybe, we should be talking much more about the Luddites and the “luddite fallacy” at all the conferences we hold. If the Luddite fallacy were true we would all be out of work because productivity has been increasing for two centuries. Perhaps the biggest change we need to deal with these forces is to adopt a new, dispassionate and open view. A new view is Step 1 in developing new strategies and new approaches to managing these forces, and technology is only part of the solution. I predict we will only see real success, where technology, process and collaboration come together.

Collaboration and Localization

This is a copy of an article that was published in the April/May 2010 Issue of Multilingual magazine. It was co-written with Michael Cox, a L10N project management professional, formerly at Intel and now at the Worldify Consulting group. He is also responsible for the L10NCafe site – a perfect example of a growing collaborative knowledge sharing community.

In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman divides modern history into three periods. Globalization 1.0 occupied the years between Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Americas and the 1800s. It is characterized by collaboration at a country level. That is, things were generally accomplished within a national scope, and people were concerned with how their country fit into the world. 

Between 1800 and 2000, we graduated to Globalization 2.0, where companies became the primary vehicle by which we experienced the world. More recently, we progressed to Globalization 3.0 and now have the ability to experience, work and collaborate with the world as individuals apart from the companies or countries to which we belong. This is a big change and is greatly influencing both our personal and professional lives. 

The growth of open source illustrates this change. Open source solutions are becoming increasingly popular, even more so than their traditional counterparts. According to the book Wikinomics, 2006 was the year when Flickr beat Webshots, Wikipedia beat Britannica, Blogger beat CNN, Epinions beat Consumer Reports, Google Maps beat MapQuest, and Craigslist beat Monster. About half of all web servers are now powered by Apache, and 1.2 million people download OpenOffice every week. The number of open-source projects doubles every 14 months. By 2012, according to Gartner, 90% of companies with IT services will use open-source products of some type. Clearly, a lot of energy is associated with collaborating to provide products that are more interactive, higher quality and less expensive if not free. 

In our own industry there are collaboration groups and associations such as TAUS, LISA and even LinkedIn groups. While these organizations serve important functions, we will demonstrate that there is also a need for a peer-to-peer network where experts are voted into place by the community and that authority is earned based on contribution, sharing and the quality of interactions.
 

Collaboration Terminology

Social networking and collaboration in particular are often confused with each other. Social networking is concerned with creating and maintaining relationships, getting people together and coordinating their activities. Collaboration is concerned with accomplishing a task, project or goal. Of course, accomplishing anything usually requires people, and any time people are involved there is a social aspect to their interactions. Therefore, collaboration solutions usually include social networking features to help the work along. 

Collaboration can happen either synchronously or asynchronously. Phone calls, meetings and webinars are examples of synchronous collaboration where everyone is working together at the same time. E-mail, blogs, wikis, lists, documents and workflows are examples of asynchronous collaboration where people participate at different times depending on their location, availability and priorities. 

Internal collaboration refers to intra-company interactions or working with other employees of the same organization or company. Organizing the knowledge of people “owned” by the company is a natural step towards more open collaboration. Some of the fears and obstacles associated with open collaboration are avoided by working exclusively with others who are bound by the same rules and organizational culture. However, many are realizing that no matter how smart or numerous their employees, ideas and opportunities exist outside their companies. To avail themselves of this external knowledge and creativity, companies have begun collaborating on specific initiatives with select partners — a few companies that share similar goals, rules and culture. Many choose to continue collaborations after the initiatives that instigated them have ended and are turning increasingly towards more open or external collaboration. 

Collaboration Features

In the past, if you asked people what collaboration tools they used, most would mention e-mail and the telephone. Though these tools still reign supreme, blogs, microblogs and the like are becoming more common. It seems almost everyone has a blog now. Many of us are tweeting, and wikis are prevalent as well. 

Today, robust collaboration platforms contain a growing list of features including blogs, microblogs, wikis, versioning, alerting, rating, RSS, metrics, user management, security, podcasting, search, mobile support, chat, polling, user profiles, dashboards, workflows and calendars. Integration with e-mail, online services and the ability to add external widgets from sites such as Flickr is important. Project management features such as task tracking and sharing are becoming more important. For example, Microsoft is strengthening the tie between Microsoft Project and SharePoint for its 2010 release. 

The better platforms can also manage web pages, documents, graphics and videos along with their source files. They also integrate with content creation tools. Unfortunately, the ability to schedule, host and document web meetings with desktop sharing and telephony usually requires using multiple services. While this is an obvious gap for many platform providers, plenty of vendors specialize in these services. Some even offer free internet meetings for small numbers of people. Knowledge management is a newer area to emerge and includes expert location, knowledge networks, idea management, talent development and information organization. 

With Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, we have become familiar with social networking and its associated features of finding people and establishing networks. Some platforms emphasize these features while others emphasize collaboration features. The large platform vendors have seen the need for both and are moving to shore up weaknesses in both areas. 

Who are the major collaboration platform vendors? According to research conducted by Gartner, of the hundreds of providers, only three are considered to be leaders in the platform space for the workplace: Jive Software, IBM Lotus Connections and Microsoft SharePoint. Most of the smaller vendors focus on niche areas, such as WordPress does with blogs or Zoho does with online meetings. Though many of these services provide plug-ins or APIs to offset their weaknesses, putting them together in a coherent way that provides security and interoperability is nearly impossible. That’s why most companies opt for a collaboration platform that provides the most desirable features along with a framework that ties them all together for security, search, maintenance and so on. While small vendors work to make their products integrate with the platforms, the platform providers are working to include the goodness of the smaller vendors into their own products. 

While social networking is often free, collaboration tools usually are not. There are many ways vendors can charge for and provide these features, including software as a service, hosted service, on-premise installations as well as pay-per-use or pay-per-user subscriptions. The communities using these platform tools are often internal to a specific company. This is because the collaboration platforms have been cost prohibitive for external, grass roots communities. However, free, open and less expensive options are available and improving all the time. 

Why do we collaborate?

First, there are internal, self-motivating reasons for collaboration. For example, we enjoy the recognition and validation we receive from peers for our ideas and our work. After all, our peers are often more capable of appreciating and valuing our accomplishments than our employers. So, collaboration fills an emotional need. It also provides an outlet for our causes or at least a vehicle through which to accomplish them. Most of us have our causes — special topics or issues we are passionate about and want the world to better understand so that others will value them more as well. Collaboration provides a way of accomplishing that — a way to get the word out, educate people and gather like-minded people. Once gathered, these people can be mobilized to aid the cause. These causes might be anything from helping people with rare forms of cancer to organizing an industry to better tackle its challenges and fulfill its purpose. 

Current trends toward increased collaboration are at least partially due to generational differences. Generation X, those people born between 1961 and 1981, tends to value loyalty, seniority, security and authority. However, Generation Y — also known as the “Next” or “N Generation” — values creativity, social connectivity, fun, freedom, speed and diversity. These values make Generation Y more collaborative by nature. 

There are also external reasons for increased collaboration, as noted earlier. Consumers benefit by getting software for free or at a much-reduced cost. A motivator for companies is profit, especially profit via cost savings. Companies that have switched to open-source software such as Apache, Linux and OpenOffice claim to have eliminated most of their costs in these areas. Some companies with competing products have switched from duplicating competitors’ efforts to joining open-source communities and contributing to foundation code that is shared by all. They then create software to enhance the foundation code and sell that as a new way to generate revenue.
 

Collaboration Opponents

Here are some common issues and fears relating to collaboration in the Globalization 3.0 world along with their common counterpoints. 

First, it is increasingly difficult to monitor all the communications, tweets, conversations, Facebook statuses and text messages of employees. Companies fear employees may compromise their intellectual property, disclose release dates or disclose other confidential information. However, this risk can be mitigated by educating participants and other means. Also, some of the less confidential information companies protect might be exchanged for knowledge that is more valuable to them, such as something they don’t already know. 

Second, increased collaboration, especially in regard to open-source initiatives, will result in more things becoming free. This is great for consumers but not for developers who are unable to secure rewards for their creativity and hard work. On the other hand, these efforts often serve to standardize platforms that minimize the duplication of platform work and integration issues. Developers can make money building and supporting add-ons to the standard platform. 

Third, collaboration fosters a sort of collectivism that places the needs of the group over the needs of the individual. While this is how some cultures operate, some Western cultures fear anything that hints remotely of socialism or communism. This may be answered by taking it slow. Though it is difficult to predict the future or to assuage political fears, we can take one step at a time. 

Fourth, you can’t be sure of what you will get from strangers or crowds as they contain experts as well as opinionated non-experts. It’s a mixed bag. The counterpoint to this is that with the right process, technology and oversight, you can corral the efforts and knowledge of the crowd to produce a quality product, in many ways better than any subset of people could create. Wikipedia, Apache, OpenOffice and Linux have proven this.

Current Industry Collaboration

We have seen the first few examples of crowdsourcing translation in the last two years. Common Sense Advisory defines collaborative translation as an emerging approach to translation in which companies use the elements of crowdsourcing in a controlled environment for working on large corporate projects in short periods of time. Common Sense also talks about an experience that mixes community, crowdsourced and collaborative translation to offer a translation that is quick, of good quality and in tune with users’ experience. It can involve professional translators or not. We see that the lines between internal and external get much less clear, and collaboration and cooperation become an imperative. Recently, we have seen success at Facebook and many others, and some uproar at LinkedIn. But this formula of community, open collaboration platform and a common purpose appears to be gaining momentum, and it behooves us to try to learn how to best leverage these emerging models to further our professional objectives. 

Once a functioning and active community is assembled and organized, there are significant benefits for all. We are beginning to see several examples from outside the professional translation industry that are now driving the development of collaborative communities and platforms. It is not improbable that these outside initiatives could eventually bring about fundamental and enduring changes to the professional translation industry as well. 

Some examples clarify this and show that this combination of community (paid and/or volunteer), collaboration platform, increased automation and common purpose can exist both inside and outside the enterprise. 

-- The TED Open Translation Project has translated over 4,200 talks into 63 languages in just six months after building a platform and issuing an open call for volunteers. Another 4,000 more are in progress, and new languages are added constantly.

-- IBM is using bilingual employees to develop and improve the quality of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems designed to make cross-lingual chat communication easier and more effective.

-- Yeeyan in China has steadily translated whole issues of the Economist and the Guardian on a regular basis into Chinese, using a network of 8,000 volunteer translators and a larger community of reviewers around a collaboration platform. In spite of occasional skirmishes with censors, it continues today. They do not use translation memory (TM).

-- Adobe, Cisco, Symantec and others are similarly exploring translating high value customer support content.

-- EMC, Symantec, Facebook and others are expanding their localized language coverage using the community in carefully managed and administered collaboration platforms.

-- Meedan regularly translates news content between Arabic and English to promote understanding and are even giving away a one-million-word TM to anybody who wants it.

-- Microsoft is having highly motivated Most Valuable Professional partners edit and improve its machine translated knowledge base content to continue to improve the customer support experience.

Implications

We can expect that the processes and tools will get better. The forces that are driving these initiatives are not based on cost savings, as many believe. LISA recently conducted a survey showing that increased language coverage and deeper engagement with customers motivated many global enterprises into exploring community collaboration projects. 

The global enterprise faces an explosion of content. It is increasingly recognized that product-focused community content often has higher value in terms of building customer loyalty and is useful to translate. Some say the increase in the volume of translation-worthy content is at least tenfold and possibly as much as a hundredfold. Clearly, the old model cannot be the foundation for all of this new content in future, either in terms of process or cost. 

Last summer, the Open Translation Tools Summit held in Amsterdam was attended by tool builders, translators and publishers motivated to make more information available across languages. Open source initiatives and tools now exist for many linguistic data management tools. Few from the professional translation industry were present at this conference, and it is yet to be seen if the initiatives from it will gain real momentum. 

Some in the professional translation industry are waking up to this changing model. Lionbridge, GlobalSight and Lingotek come to mind, and hopefully we will see others embrace openness and standards. Already, the open-source Moses-based statistical engines are outperforming machine translation available from Google and other vendors. 

These emerging trends present an opportunity for the most agile translation industry companies, who will lead the change rather than resist it. It is important for us as a community to begin to collaborate and explore how to leverage these trends. We need to understand how to evaluate and use collaboration platforms, when and how to expand our use of automated translation technology and when, where and how to engage invested and willing communities whenever possible. These are the needs that new platforms such as the L10NCafé are hoping to fill. 

Clearly, our industry is in the early stages of organizing itself for productive collaboration. The suggested model to develop this is to implement a collaboration and communication platform to improve and multiply our interactions. The community using such a platform could be much larger than any single organization, company or group. This seems unlikely today with the large number of associations, conferences and fractured interests that we see, but our industry perhaps more than many others is actually well-suited to develop effective collaboration models in an online community. In an open and trusted community, experts would emerge over time for all to see and consult with. Many of these experts would be people you will never meet at a conference. 

Business author Peter Drucker has his own way of reconciling the past and future. He believes the acquisition of knowledge will supplant the acquisition and distribution of property and income that dominated recent centuries. That pursuit is all about who can assimilate and make use of the most relevant information the fastest. Collaboration, especially the open/ external type, provides an efficient way to assemble, filter, validate and disseminate knowledge. We can therefore expect to see much more of it in our future. 
 

I have written previously about collaboration, actually inspired by this article, in an entry titled Learning to Share in Professional Forums: Collaboration

Michael W. Cox, a project management professional, has worked as a Chinese translator, localization engineer, resource manager, localization strategist and GMS/TMS integrator. He is now now at the Worldify Consulting group. He is also responsible for the L10NCafe site – a perfect example of a growing collaborative knowledge sharing community