Most Popular Blog Posts of 2010

Award winning picture, part of the Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year collection.

As I have been watching people summarize the year in many ways I decided to look into the traffic stats on the eMpTy Pages blog to see what were the most popular posts (in terms of traffic anyway). And here is the list in order of traffic popularity. 

The top 3 entries were written in July so it appears the thoughts and the news were really flowing at the time. 

1. The most popular entry was the summary of a conversation that Renato & Bob had at the IMTT Vendor Management conference in Las Vegas and my additional comments on this issue. This is an ongoing discussion and far from over, we will see more unfold on this subject in this coming year I expect.

The Coming Disintermediation and Disruption in the Translation Industry

2. My thoughts and analysis of the SDL acquisition of Language Weaver, which was clearly between a rock and a hard place in 2010 after doubling manpower/sales investments and overall expenses and seeing hardly a budge in revenue or translation quality of their systems. The facts speak for themselves in spite of careful PR efforts to create impressions that suggested growth and momentum.(Yup Mark, some of us do realize there was hardly any revenue growth in the last three years.)

Is SDL Getting Serious About MT? Does It Matter?

3. This next one seemed to resonate with all the MT enthusiasts in particular.This one got a lot of comments as well.

What is Holding the Wider Adoption of Machine Translation (MT) back?

4. I am surprised that this entry was as popular, but it is clear that TAUS is becoming more relevant and a great place to find some information (though not always the best and most accurate info IMO) on MT deployments throughout the corporate world.The understanding that clean data does matter is growing and that can only help the quality of future MT systems developed with TAUS data. I hope that TAUS will lead the charge in helping us all understand what are the driving factors behind really good MT systems. My sense is that everything we have seen so far is just about getting familiar with the technology and was mostly driven by localization ROI rather than real raw MT quality tuning efforts. The best is yet to come.

Highlights from the TAUS User Conference

5. This entry was I think the best entry of the year, even though I did not offer any solutions. I think it was the clearest articulation of the problem and explanation of why standards matter and why we need better solutions. I hope that this discussion continues and grows in 2011. I saw that it was also a major issue and area of concern at the AGIS10 conference in Delhi. I am much more optimistic that the best thinking and solutions on standards will come from the non profit translation world since the corporate localization industry has barely delivered a real TM standard after 10 years of trying. There were also many interesting comments and feedback on this entry and I hope we will see more discussion emerge from this. PostRank also tells me that this article continues to get steady traffic over time and might be influencing others.

Are There Any Standards in Translation?

6. This was a summary of an interview with Rob Vandenberg, CEO of Lingotek about community collaboration tools for translation which is likely to become much more important in future.

Emerging Technology for Community Translation

7. This was a summary of key messages from ATA leadership to the AMTA community. Hopefully this dialogue grows even though there are some  strident voices on both sides. I think the recent admission by Google that they have reached the limits of what is possible in terms of driving MT system improvements by just feeding more data to the engines. This I think will lead to an increasing awareness that getting linguistic experts involved and improving information quality (yes, clean data rears it ugly head again) is necessary for continued progress. Another one with interesting comments.

The Machine Translation Community Building Bridges with Translators

8. This focused on my view of where the highest value translation work would be in the future. I do not believe that transcreation is the best definition of high value/high skill work in translation. Value has to be determined by what customers find most useful at critical stages (pre and post sales) of their relationship with a company, brand or product.

Going Beyond Transcreation and Finding High Value Translation Work

9. This is a summary of key messages from my keynote presentation at ELIA Dublin which was possibly my favorite conference of the year. This article summarizes some details about the content explosion and how it may be impacting global customer interactions and how this relates to the world of professional translation.

Megatrends and Their Impact on Professional Translation

10. And more on standards in the localization industry, a subject that will be key to make real progress on, to raise productivity and  respond to the very growing volume of content.

The Problem with Standards in the Localization Industry

I wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year. I think 2011 will be memorable in many ways, and translation will continue to grow in strategic importance for both global businesses and for countries that are rising economically and entering the knowledge economy.

We are seeing a lot of forecasts as is typical at the beginning of the year but most of these are very technology focused. I found a really interesting forecast  that casts a much wider net and is the most interesting one I have found on the world at large. They have a pretty good track record for 2010 as well. Good news for my new friends in the Ukraine, they see the region rising in 2011. This is worth taking a look at.

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence.

Going Beyond Transcreation and Finding High Value Translation Work

As I have recently been considering the downward price pressures and increasing commoditization of traditional professional translation work, I thought that it would be useful to consider what high value translation work looks like. The key question in determining value, I think is, is it related to how you translate or what you translate?

It is currently becoming popular to say that something called  “transcreation” is what value-added translation is and many LSPs are seeking to position themselves as transcreation firms rather than translation firms. (I would have chosen “culturally sensitive translation”).

Common Sense Advisory defines “transcreation” as a process by which new content is developed or adapted for a given target audience instead of merely translating existing material. It may include copywriting, image selection, font changes, and other transformations that tailor the message to the recipient.

Sounds suspiciously like localization doesn’t it?

I think the word is unfortunate, as it conveys nothing about what is involved and even people who have spent many years in professional translation, often have no idea what is meant by this word. Even worse, most potential customers for this type of service will have no idea what the word means. It is like calling a laptop a chipboard input/output mechanism. (As if “localization” was not bad enough.) Quite honestly, I can’t see very much difference from what this word suggests and what most people understand and mean when they use the word localization. You can see some banter about this in the MT meets Transcreation blog entry if you read the comments between Gordon and me. Generally, when real people, customers and friends (not industry insiders) have to ask what it means, I think you marginalize yourself and most would agree that obfuscation is not a great sales and marketing strategy. (Why are so many people who are involved with professional translation so averse to using the word translation in describing what they do? Could it be related to how they treat translators?)

LSPs involved with transcreation are generally focused on advertising and marketing communications messages which often have a higher profile than the SDL (software and documentation localization) that most in professional translation are involved with. Since marketing often has higher status than documentation/packaging/localization within most companies, it is often felt that this is higher value work. But is it really?

We see that the world of marketing is undergoing a transformation and what used to be considered critical corporate messaging is increasingly viewed as “corporate-speak” and is not trusted by the end-customers who matter the most. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a prescient blog entry three years ago where he predicted this shift. Several of his readers felt that the essay was important enough to translate, and it is now available in 11 languages. (Fan translation!)


Many others have added to these initial observations and Simon Mainwaring also has an interesting article on The death of corporate websites. The basic thesis of his essay is:

In the not too distant future static corporate websites will be replaced by their social equivalents.

This will happen because more and more consumers are engaged in daily conversations, often involving brands, across multiple applications, platforms and networks, wholly independent of these sites.

As these conversations become increasingly independent of these sites, falling traffic will render them ineffective in their current form. Instead, the online presence of each brand will necessarily expand out into the social space to stay in touch with their audience.

As a result, the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

Of course not everybody agrees, and some say this is more true for B2C than for B2B, but the need for changing the website approach is clear to most. Corporations still need websites and they still need advertising but they also need to understand what information has the greatest value, is trusted and learn how to create it or connect to it. They need to understand what is necessary to keep these websites relevant. Owyang points out that evolution from the website of yesteryear to one that is seamlessly integrated to relevant social networks is an evolutionary process and provides a path and road map.

This issue of the relevance of corporate websites matters, because increasingly, customers are making decisions about products long before they get to the corporate website. It makes more and more sense to follow these conversations in social networks as often this is where the highest value content will be. Valuable content is linked to influencers and dynamic conversations that naturally evolve in online social spaces. This content influences purchasing behavior and helps to form brand impressions and build brand loyalty. It is unwise to ignore it, as this is where brands, market dominance and leadership positions are increasingly being built. Remember that the whole point of localization or transcreation is to enhance and drive international business initiatives.

So while one definition of higher value is the extent of transformation during the translation process, I think the more important driver is the value of the content per se. My view of some of  the emerging high value content:

• Conversations that are trusted by potential customers at various stages of the purchase process (e.g. Amazon, C-Net, Orbitz, Travelocity etc.)
• Conversations and content that help build customer loyalty (this could include support and reseller community content as well)
• Articulate and unfiltered opinions and reviews on the customer experience (Amazon, Orbitz, Expedia etc..)
• Leading Bloggers who influence and help form brand impressions
• Content that is co-created with customers that often facilitates comparison with competitors
• Content that encourages collaboration with customers and key partners (e.g. Dell IdeaStorm)

So what is necessary to be a translation partner to an enterprise who is focused on this higher value content? These are new and still emerging customer requirements and to some extent really quite undefined, but here is a list that could provide some initial definition and possibly leverage:

• Understanding of social network platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc..)
• An understanding of the linguistic characteristics of the new “high-value” content
• An understanding of MT and other automation tools to enable rapid low-cost solutions to be delivered to meet changing needs
• Strong MT customization and post-editing skills so that high-value content can be quickly translated and good translation solutions developed 
• The ability to rapidly turnaround the translation of high value content to impact active ongoing conversations
• Rapid linguistic quality assessment skills to drive automated tools
• Growing foundation of linguistic assets that go beyond traditional localization content TM and glossaries

I see that leading edge practitioners in professional translation will increasingly help customers solve linguistic problems around making high-value content multilingual as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. The skills needed, go beyond what most localization projects require, as we head into a world where the amount of content/traffic on the web is expected to double every 2 years.

So what do you think? Does this make sense or would you also prefer to focus on the transcreation of “really honest advertising” like Gordon who gives you his view here?