Lionbridge and IBM have announced an alliance to beat their competitors and improve top lines. This marks a new era for the translation industry.
Lionbridge has accumulated billions of translated words in the past ten to twenty years. IBM has developed a very powerful statistical machine translation engine. In fact they invented this technology back in the 1980s. IBM needs billions of high quality translated words to customize and train thousands of new machine translation engines. Selling translation technology is difficult in a world where the translate button is a freebie on every search page.
Joining forces IBM and Lionbridge can offer good machine translation in an ever more popular Software-as-a-Service model. Together they can do it: one plus one makes three. It all makes perfect business sense.
Perfect sense for the partners in this deal does not mean it is good for the market. It is quite natural that companies seek market dominance by trying to control either the infrastructure or the resources. Technology has been the differentiating factor in the translation industry for as long as anyone can remember. Whoever owned the translation memory software, ‘owned’ the customer.
The unfortunate effect of this ‘service lock-in’ model was to block innovation and put the brakes on fair competition in our industry. Until recently translation memories (TMs) were considered a sacred, protected asset. The focus of the search for dominance in our industry – as illustrated by the Lionbridge-IBM alliance – is shifting from control of the technology to control of the resources. Anyone who controls the words (the ‘data’) can develop the translation engines of the future.
Two years ago, forty companies jointly established the TAUS Data Association (TDA) with the objective of making translation easier, better and faster for everyone. TDA developed an open platform for sharing translation memories.
TDA was established precisely to prevent the emergence of new constraints that would hamper the growth and innovation capacity of the translation industry. It is very hard to defend legal ownership of individual translation units (segments as strings of characters). So long as the original translated document cannot be recreated, the words and phrases are free for open use (like entries in dictionaries) and can help translators or feed translation engines.
TDA’s mission is to share the entire world’s translated words via a supercloud of open TMs. The words we translate are a natural resource that no single company should take control of. We strongly believe in our mission to “make the world communicate better".
We congratulate Lionbridge and IBM for having the vision to form this strategic alliance. In support of the greater mission of our industry, we encourage both to copy all those translated words to the TDA repository. After all, if these words are shareable, then nobody owns them; or rather we all own them collectively.
TAUS Data Association Consultation
We invite you to take part in the TAUS Data Association Roadmap Consultation to ensure this shared industry resource for making translation easier, faster and better continues to be developed with your and the wider industry's needs in mind.
