Question: What keeps us from growing and makes us vulnerable in times of economic downturn?
Answer: Low IQ!
This is equally true for a whole industry as it is for individual players. Protectionist behavior and lack of interoperability kills innovation and frustrates customers. TAUS has been fighting for industry collaboration and open sharing in the translation industry for several years now. So it was very gratifying to read the article by Michael Schrage in The Financial Times (February 5) about the interoperability quotient (IQ) as a measurement for innovation. How closely this applies to the translation industry!
Neither the translation industry's product nor its actors lend themselves easily to standardization and openness. The product - language - is a living thing, and as such cannot be captured in a single quality definition. The actors - translators and language service providers - are happy to maintain and defend their own resources, definitions and processes in order to keep and protect their business. The result: an industry that misses tremendous opportunities for growth and innovation.
But the tide is changing... The pressure to open up massive amounts of information to more people, speaking more languages, faster and even real-time, makes it impossible to hang on to old paradigms. Automation, collaboration and innovation are the key to breaking the growth barrier.
At the TAUS Executive Forum in Edinburgh on March 25-27, Lionbridge will announce that it will no longer maintain Freeway and Logoport as exclusive, proprietary services. SDL will introduce an open bridge from TRADOS to any TM server. Welocalize is presenting the open source roadmap for Globalsight, and Moravia will offer an open source route with Tiny TM. And Asia Online and Translated will make pitches for sharing TMs to improve the output of MT engines.
All well and good, but at the end of the day the proof lies in accurately measuring that vital interoperability quotient. We shall only achieve maximum benefits from industry collaboration and interoperability if language data (TMs and terminology) can be used agnostically across any translation tool. In TAUS terminology, we call this separating of ‘infra' from ‘lingua'. Our vision is to create a super cloud for the global translation industry that contains all translated data. This ‘lingua' super-cloud will enable the translation industry to boost productivity and innovate the service infrastructure.
Skeptics will say that ‘lingua' is too variable so there may not really be much of an opportunity for leveraging this data mix. Well, reality is already outperforming their imaginations! Google's MT engine is trained on massive language data from variable sources and continually returns useful translations to millions of people every day. The skeptics will say that translation memories are too precious to be shared, ignoring the fact that all published translations can no longer be protected from use by smart software developers.
Language data sharing is now a leading item on the industry agenda: 50% of the respondents to the current TAUS survey mark language data sharing as the path to service innovation. The TAUS Data Association (TDA) is delivering on this agenda, offering TM Sharing, Data Pooling and Language Search services. Our goal is to achieve 100% IQ in language data exchange. Along with our Founding Members we are convinced that successful interoperability can dramatically cut the costs, risks and complexities of hooking up.
But our success will very much depend on the choices made by each of the industry players. As Michael Schrage writes in his FT article: "The interoperability imperative creates a new innovator's dilemma: will greater market share or profitability come from making one's innovation more interoperable . . . or less? What IQ do current customers and potential prospects prefer? How should we collaborate, and compete, in the context of inter operability?"