The third TAUS Executive Forum held in Brussels on November 29 and 30, 2007 welcomed thirty senior localization, translation and information industry professionals from the United States, Asia and Europe. This Forum was devoted to the critical topic of innovating the translation business model. Stimulated by contributions from among others Autodesk, CNH, Medtronic, Xerox critiquing the relevance of current business models for continuous publishing, user-generated content and customer support, the Forum broke out into groups to analyze the pros and cons of word-based translation pricing, and propose alternative models. Consensus merged around the need for an incremental shift towards managed services or trusting relationships between vendors and buyers conditioned by clear service level agreements. A number of participants, however, wondered aloud whether the current vendor model would survive at all.
Separate Infra from Lingua
"In the upcoming shift of the translation industry into the 'transmutation' phase entrepreneurs will need to think out-of-the-box", argued Jaap van der Meer. The industry is evolving to completely new models as illustrated by user cases such as the New Brunswick translator's co-operative network - a user case presented by Pierre Blais from Canada - and the 'continuous workflow' user case as presented by Matthieu Cresp from Autodesk. What both these cases illustrate is a separation of 'infra' from 'lingua'. 'Infra' stands for the combination of IT infrastructure and language data shared among a distributed pool of translators, reviewers, editors and volunteer workers providing the 'lingua' services. The pre-dominant model in the industry is a bloated and labor-intensive model in which language service providers manage a complex process consisting of sometimes more than forty individual steps to deliver a translated file.
The proliferation of translation workflow systems (or Globalization Management Systems) is changing the perception of the value that language service providers can offer. More than 75% of the simple manual tasks identified in a conventional localization process can be automated and will be automated. Question is: who is driving the effort of translation automation ....?
Seventy-six percent of the respondents to our recent market survey believe that the language service providers are responsible for translation automation. Take into account though that about half of the respondents represented the vendor community, and many argued in their comments that translation automation is a shared responsibility. The trend we see is that more and more corporate users are acquiring a scalable translation workflow system that stores all the language data under their direct control. Examples of vendors successfully deploying their proprietary infrastructure of translation technology are becoming rare.
Translation as a utility
As we are now moving into the Translation 3.0 - or 'transmutation' - phase of the industry evolution, we see that translation is perceived as a 'utility' rather than a strategic professional service. Publishers of content - and buyers of translation - need to respond to immediate needs from end-users. The fundamental shift from 'push' to 'pull' is affecting every organization and institution in the world. Gilles Martel reports at this TAUS Forum in Brussels that the Translation Bureau of the Canadian Government is building its translation infrastructure to be ready for the citizens to pull translations. Translation as a utility will be embedded in every application, Intranet, customer support site and government portal. End-user satisfaction is more important than the publisher's perception of linguistic quality.
Community-sourcing as a solution was debated at length at the TAUS Forum in Brussels. For Francis Tsang of Adobe, "localizing sophisticated products can be done very well by a community that knows the products and the languages. In the future, we may not be able to control deliverables in the old top-down way." Open source translation was in fact on show concurrently with the TAUS Forum at the first Open Translation Tools Convergence event held in Zagreb (Croatia) under the aegis of Aspirationtech. One of their aims was to see what it could learn from the mainstream translation community. For Ed Zad, a former manager at Lionbridge and currently director of operations and language services at dotSub, the innovative subtitling platform, who attended the OTTC, "these people have a wide range of sophisticated tools, are very well organized and have a surprising amount of volunteer translators available. I learned quite a bit and hope to apply it to the dotSub model."
New models are emerging inside and outside our known territory. The need to innovate is imminent, and it goes well beyong the way translators get paid. It is a tough call for entrepreneurs in the translation industry to look beyond the status quo.
Full report exclusively available to TAUS members >> Brussels Forum - November 2007
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