A Buyer's Plea for Industry Innovation
At the Idiom User Conference last November in Barcelona Jessica Roland, Director of International Product Operations at EMC, referred to Idiom as the "Switzerland of the localization industry". That is history now. And yet, the separation of Infra from Lingua is a key condition for innovation in the localization industry. In our series of portraits and perspectives on Localization Business Innovation Jessica Roland pleads for independent localization technology platforms as a condition for translation automation and innovation
"The emergence of independent localization technology platforms has a beneficial effect on localization business innovation and translation automation. The technology platform, which TAUS refers to as Infra, plays a unique 'neutral' role between customers and their multiple Language Service Providers (LSPs), referred to as Lingua. Many large buyers of localization have in the past couple of years invested in neutral technology platforms as a way to be flexible and manage their language services independently. But there are nevertheless pain points for buyers in this new configuration, where the new neutral platform is competing with the proprietary platforms of a small number of leading LSPs. Customers are increasingly inconvenienced by this conflict, and are calling for a more open, global solution."
"Neutrality of technology infrastructure is extremely efficient for LSPs, who are not themselves promoting technology platforms. But unfortunately the interface between such platforms and the leading LSPs who are also technology proponents is far from seamless - so much so that it is really standing in the way of creating frictionless globalization supply chains."
"Even if a leading LSP does not claim to be in the technology business, and does not sell its technology to customers, the LSP may be tenacious about promoting its own technology model because they believe use of that technology model is critical to optimizing their internal cost model. And having invested so much time and energy into their own technology, they quite naturally believe it is superior to any other."
"We are centralizing all our TMs in our own TM database in a single XLIFF format without any filters, so they can easily be managed, controlled and transferred to LSPs. But we are finding that when we transport XLIFF files to vendors with proprietary technologies, they do not segment XLIFF in the same way as the other. This means that all our files have to be prepared once again. And these LSPs want to charge us for this repeat. That kind of inefficiency really slows down and adds cost to our globalization supply chain."
"Another key issue concerns machine translation. If this file re-preparation work is not carried out, LSPs' proprietary MT engines cannot seamlessly process customers' content. Machine translation is a cornerstone of our content globalization strategy. We believe in it and are working hard within the globalization community to advance MT standards and usage. But if key LSPs have proprietary MT engines that do not efficiently process segmentation in an industry-standard way, it slows the whole MT mission down. It is a disservice to the industry, as companies like us who are mastering the benefits of global content management and wish to leverage translation with MT technology, are now faced with a fundamental incompatibility inside their major suppliers."
"Obviously, the solution is not to insist that all LSPs use the same technology platform. On the contrary, what is vital is that translation buyers should have the freedom to choose their translation tools, and that LSPs should be able to use their own systems as well. This makes for a more efficient and competitive market place. But we do feel, that preparing files twice, losing the benefits of certain features, and being blocked from effectively using MT is a step backwards in terms of efficient globalization."
"I would like to make a strong plea on behalf of all my colleagues and partners in the translation industry. We need a consistent, industry-wide method for segmenting translation memories that all major system owners buy into, and that includes neutral technology players as well as proprietary platform users in the LSP community. Consistent industry-wide XLIFF segmentation would ensure that files can smoothly circulate around technology platforms without having to be reworked and, that full usage can be made of machine translation technology. This is also critical for current industry-wide TM and MT data sharing efforts. Note that TAUS intends to look closely at this issue of file processing standards in its meeting in Boston in March, where the next stages of the TAUS Shared Language Resource Repository project will be discussed."