Eighteen months ago, TAUS identified open translation platforms as a necessary and inevitable innovation trend in the translation space. For TAUS, open refers to any combination of open source software, open interfaces between software components from other vendors, and open access for all translators and translation service vendors.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes This potential was largely confirmed at the TAUS Executive Forum held in Edinburgh in March of this year. A number of major LSPs and technology providers showcased various ways for connecting their workflows or technologies to various kinds of industry resources through open standards or interfaces.
At this TAUS User Conference, these companies and others returned to the podium to report on recent developments to their open platform stories. They also presented these platforms as innovation drivers that help their communities – translators, smaller agencies, and sometimes translation buyers – move forward into new forms of collaboration and sharing.
GlobalSight’s recent history is symbolic of this whole industry tendency. As Gary Prioste of Welocalize reminded everyone, this translation management system was first launched as a proprietary product back in 1999, but in 2008 was rearchitected by the LSP Welocalize and launched in 2009 as an open source/ open standards platform. Today it has over 2000 registered users.
Welocalize positions its brainchild as an innovation platform. Classic globalization management systems (GMS) can now be found everywhere, but centralized TMs, terminology and workflows are now part of the woodwork. To address the new regime, GlobalSight has opened up the system to provide XLIFF support for translators, an expanded web services API, and API for supporting Google Translate and ProMT, TM hierarchies, CVS integration and crowdsourcing.
In the case of the CrowdSight crowdsourcing service, for example, launched in August, the system integrates with TMs and term bases to enable a community to seamlessly carry out and monitor translations and review processes.
As with many similar systems, the open GlobalSight emerged from internal utilization at Welocalize, backed by a plan to monetize the system by providing training, services and support.
Moravia, the LSP headquartered in the Czech Republic, has fully engaged with the open innovation imperative by developing an “Open-Open” translation platform. This is built using the Project Open and OpenACS toolkit and integrates open source technology such as TinyTM (a translation server), OmegaT (CAT client), and the OKAPI framework for filters. It is positioned as a ‘triple win’ strategy, which enables translators, LSPs and enterprises to handle the new regime of rapid content growth, user generated content, continuous translation, massive collaboration and a heterogeneous mix of translation automation tools in a unified manner.
This platform is currently in pilot phase and is due to be launched by 2010. It will offer localization project management and tool integration, an integrated Asia Online SMT solution, and other tools and environments. Moravia believes that this kind of development offers a good opportunity to upgrade and extend its technical capabilities.
Lionbridge showcased its Translation Workspace, powered by Logoport technology. This is designed to simplify translation processes (using XLIFF, OASIS, and SOAP standards) for freelancers, agencies and enterprises by putting all resources and processes in a mini cloud and making them available as SaaS. One-click access to TDA is one of the functionalities.
Presenter Nic McMahon called this a “maturity shift”. The strategy is to target various kinds of communities that are enabled by the platform. The Translation Workspace plans to integrate the TAUS Search feature in 2010.
Standards are by definition designed to ensure that different parts things can plug together to create an effective whole. But they do need to be observed. Andrew Bredenkamp of acrolinx called attention in his presentation to the fact that even a fundamental translation industry file standard such as TMX is not systematically enforced in infrastructure transactions. An open agenda – a fundamental condition for large-scale data sharing - will only be effective if the value chain abides by such standards, and where necessary agrees on new ones to handle, for example, new forms of metadata needed to track SMT training data.
In Edinburgh, SDL, claiming an 80% share of the translation desktop market, announced that it was going to connect all its translation tools through open APIs to the TDA cloud. It has now moved to its SDL Common Enterprise Application Framework, an integrated development platform that among many other things enables translators to plug into an open web-service environment via SDK/API.
Other emerging translation platforms that provide smoother; more interconnected supply chains, or easier access to data sources such as TDA are being proposed, including those from the LSP SDL, the technology supplier Clay Tablet, and the open source development platform World Wide Lexicon, who were unable to attend the conference at the last minute.
OTHER ARTICLES ON TAUS USER CONFERENCE 2009
- Let a thousand MT systems bloom
- Putting language data sharing to work
- Taking the MT decision: selection, build-out and hosting
- Community building
- Localizing content for Customer Support
- Collective wisdom: Next steps for the industry