TAUS - Enabling better translation

TRANSLATION IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

So many conferences have been organized, associations established, lectures given, and academic papers written about standards in the translation and language industries. All of this has certainly been necessary and relevant. But at the same time it seems to be ignoring the simple truth about standards.

There’s no incentive for market leaders to really adopt them

And in the end if these powerful few do not embrace open industry standards, the holy grail of genuine interoperability will remain a pipe dream for some time to come. Up to now there’s clearly been a conflict in balancing the profit motive with principled calls for openness. The latter hasn’t really stood a chance as our chosen market leaders have been able to advertize interoperability and standards compliance as attractive features of their products, but have then modified and “improved” them. The result is that users find that their texts, terminology and translation memories are locked up in closed software systems.

There are now good reasons for reversing this trend and embracing a new interoperability agenda.

Five factors are incentivizing change

These drivers mean it will be increasingly hard for any company to remain competitive and sustain a lack of commitment to across-the-board interoperability:

1. Users’ awareness is much improved. They are no longer accepting half-hearted, piecemeal support for standards. And they are starting to vote with their wallets.

2. Networked resources, cloud computing and multi-vendor service models are exposing the high cost of non-interoperability.

3. There are companies offering alternative products and services that are genuinely compliant with key industry standards such as TMX and XLIFF. These show that the problem is not the existence of standards, but their implementation.

4. New industry initiatives, such as the Interoperability Manifesto, have been launched to enforce, improve and promote much-needed standards.

5. And the über driver: connecting and collaborating are the zeitgeist. Recent developments across industry sectors tell us that closed shops are opening up to exploit new profit pools.

Beyond old conflicts

We no longer have to choose between being generous by helping the world and being mean because we put ourselves first.

Today, we can be good, help the world, and protect our bottom line, all at the same time. One of the noblest aims of our industry, surely, is to help the world communicate more effectively. We are most successful in pursuing this mission when we can ensure that our text, terminology and translation memories can move freely among tools, translators and platforms without losing their value, format or attributes.

The TAUS experience

As we build the TAUS Data Association language data sharing platform, our experiences affirm what we already know, that the devil is in the details, and that standards are the only way to solve or avoid sticky little problems and streamline our processes.

TDA is built on two key standards: TMX and XLIFF. Close to 3 billion words in 320 language pairs are shared and stored in the TDA repository in TMX 1.4 format. But when users download a TMX file and use it in their own editor, they may well lose matches, simply because the original translation-tool vendors decided to apply a slightly non-standard TMX standard.

In the past four months our development team has worked hard to facilitate direct leveraging of translations from the TDA repository. This new Translation Matching service is based on the XLIFF standard, so that any editing, publishing or translation tool that is compliant with XLIFF can communicate with the TDA database and retrieve translation matches.

But once again, we are seeing that market leaders and others have used the extensions features of the XLIFF standard to differentiate rather than comply with the common way of tagging metadata. Others do not even attempt compliance.

Answering the TAUS call of duty

TAUS’s relentless push for open translation platforms, innovation, collaboration and sharing language data leads to this critical question: can you build successful service companies and at the same time serve the greater duty of our industry to benefit the world as a whole?

We believe this is both possible and desirable. And we call on industry constituencies to answer this “call of duty”:

• Market leaders in publishing, office productivity and content management software should explore ways to make their products truly XLIFF compliant. Imagine if Word and InDesign, for instance, had a simple File >> Export to XLIFF feature. Publishers would save 10% to 15% on their own localization costs (usually listed as ‘engineering costs’ on the bill). Their customers would gratefully save the same again on their localization costs. Translation tool vendors would no longer need to invest in (individually) developing filters for each subsequent release of every editing, publishing and CMS system.

• Translation tool vendors make your products fully compliant with standards such as TMX and XLIFF. This will enable translation memories to be used in every translation tool without losing any attributes or matching capacity. We would easily gain 15% to 25% by recycling previous translations across the industry. Resulting in happier translators and happier customers.

• Owners of translation memories (translators, and agencies or their customers) stop worrying that sharing translations with everyone else somehow means “losing” them. Upload what you can to the TDA repository. Clearly, confidential data should remain ring-fenced. Why not share the translations of products and services that are already on the market? If others can access your translations through a legitimate, curated industry platform, your products and services will be better translated, supported and understood. And will sell better. With access to the world’s translations, you will be able to translate more effectively and much faster.

This is a call for everyone to help themselves by helping the industry and the world we serve. Just imagine how much we can save in costs, how much more we can translate, and how so many more people can benefit from what we do. Including our market leaders!