But translation memory requires using translation memory software, which has for years largely meant using SDL Trados software.

When a company hires a translation agency and requires that they use translation memory — not only must that agency have Trados software, but so too must the freelance translators — who are often located all around the world. This is a nice business model for SDL, but it has been a pain point for translators and agencies for years.

For agencies, the more acute pain point has been that SDL not only sells TM software but also sells translation services. Nearly every translation exec I have spoken to has openly asked for an open-source alternative to Trados.

Well, now we have one.

IBM has partnered with LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association), Welocalize, Cisco, and Linux Solution Group e.V. (LiSoG) to launch an open source project that provides a “full-featured, enterprise-level translation workbench environment for professional translators.”

It’s called Open TM2 — and it’s basically a scaled-down version of what IBM has developed and used internally for years. I haven’t used the product yet and there’s understandably quite a bit of work involved to get this software to a point where it’s easy for translators, agencies, etc. to consume.

I’m not prepared to say Open TM2 is going to put an end to Trados. After all, Linux didn’t exactly put Windows or OSX out of business. But I am excited to see it out there in the world. Open source keeps software vendors on their toes. I’ll be very curious to see if developers embrace the code,  and what they come up with.

To learn more, I interviewed one of the partners behind Open TM2, Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize.

Here is what he had to say:

Q: Why did IBM decide to open source its software in this fashion? What does it hope to gain?

Bill Sullivan can answer this question better than I, but as he stated, “Freelance translators are the backbone of the localization industry. These translators have longed for free and open translation tools to increase their productivity. There is a recognized and growing need for standards in the localization industry. Despite our best intentions, however, standards themselves can often be vague and open to multiple interpretations. What is needed are reference implementations and reference platforms that serve as concrete and unambiguous models in support of the standard.”

In my opinion, productivity and standardization go hand-in-hand. By releasing Open TM2 as an open source product with a standards-based, data-exchange goal, not only is there potential for increased productivity – flexibility and freedom of choice also increase.

Q: And what do you hope to gain from this effort?

I like to use the mobile phone analogy. I can travel just about anywhere in the world, turn my phone on, and it works. This is possible, because competing carriers and hardware manufacturers collaborated to be able to offer that seamless user experience across global networks and handset protocols. Consider the user experience in our industry. There is really no ability for a client to turn on a translation supply chain and have it work out of the box across various content types, tools and translation vendors. The clients I speak with are demanding that this change.

GlobalSight, Joomla and Open TM2 are being used to demonstrate an example of a seamless data exchange based upon a set of standards. LISA will play an important role in documenting and sharing these standards so that they can be applied uniformly to other integrations. To put it simply, we need a variety of tools to be able to talk to each other in an automated way. This is where I think we can improve time, cost and quality results and greatly improve the user experience. Ultimately, I expect Welocalize to gain an increase in productivity, interoperability and freedom of choice in configuring the best set of tools for each client’s unique translation supply chain needs. If we can get under the hood, we can tune the engine; otherwise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain time, cost and quality advantages from the old way of doing business.

Q: Who is going to use this software? And what software will it replace?

Many translators are already using TM2 in delivering work to IBM. I expect Open TM2, as its features grow, will appeal to more translators as a desktop workbench. This is only an initial release of the open source product, and there is much work to be done. But the potential is there to collaborate and improve. Ultimately, I think Open TM2 has the potential to replace the Trados desktop workbench.

Q: When you talk open source, stability and support are common pain points. Who will be actively supporting this effort?

The members of the Steering Committee are currently supporting the effort, and the goal is to build a community which can support itself. This open source initiative is not unlike others, what one puts into it will determine the benefits one can pull from it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company create a business model to offer Open TM2 support. Support, training and customization are typical services that bloom around open source initiatives.

Q: What would stop a technology company from taking the source code and creating a competitive ™ product?

It is an open source product, so there is potential for companies to build a business model around the product. However, I doubt that will be a proprietary fork of the code. The appeal is an open source product with growing standards compliance, not yet another proprietary product. What is more likely are support, training and integration services. Anyone investing in the product naturally expects a return, and the better the return, the more healthy and diverse will be the community. I think that is a good thing. Competition drives innovation. However, if we can’t get the standard data-exchange protocols right, productivity across the supply chain will continue to lag the increasing velocity of change in the marketplace. Rapidly evolving time, cost and quality demands already exceed what the traditional translation supply chain can deliver.

Q: The source code is available now but documentation is lacking. What is your timetable for launching a more translator and agency friendly product.

I think the first step for the Steering Committee is to take the feedback that is already coming in about the product, good and bad, and use that to set priorities, responsibilities and a timeline. The idea is sound, but it must be tested in practical use and refined according to what the market really needs. Translators have the answers to many challenges in our supply chain, they are just not asked very often.

Q: How will this software be integrated? Is there is a goal of integrating it with the open source GlobalSight CMS?

Content creation, translation, workflow and performance metrics reporting – there are many systems and tools for accomplishing each of these requirements. However, very few of them can pass necessary data in an automated way. A lot can be accomplished with web services and open APIs, but widespread integration possibilities can only be realized with a critical mass actively using an industry-supported data-exchange standard.

In order to demonstrate this possibility in a live use case scenario, Joomla, GlobalSight and Open TM2 will be integrated with the resultant standards published by LISA. I think additional standards organizations will also need to participate to gain wider understanding, agreement and adoption. If enough of the industry’s thought leaders and leading practitioners get behind this standard data-exchange and tools integration challenge, I think all boats will rise. Without it, the industry will never be able to approach the growing volume of content which current production and cost models can’t support.

Link: Open TM2

Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll be out of business anytime soon. But I am saying that machine translation (MT) is going to find its niche and this niche will grow exponentially. There is simply not enough translators in the world to handle the content necessary in this increasingly global economy.

Enter Lionbridge and IBM.

In March, the two companies inked a multi-year partnership in which Lionbridge would have exclusive rights to market IBM’s Real Time Translation Service (RTTS) technology.

I recently asked Lionbridge COO Satish Maripuri about the deal.

Here is the interview:

Q: It appears that Lionbridge is trying to replace the legacy term “machine translation” with Real-Time Translation. Why do you think this new term is better?

Real-Time Translation is a more accurate term for the solution. We see machine translation as a technology that enables the solution.  Real time instantaneous translation is the solution. Also, within the localization industry, Machine Translation typically refers to using productivity tools to offset the cost and time associated with translation and usually ends with a heavy post edit (PE) to get the content to publication quality. That is different than instantaneous real time translation that delivers “good-enough” translation without post edit if a customer so desires.

Q: When you talk to companies about machine translation, what types of content are they most excited about leveraging through your MT engine?

The customer excitement is remarkable. This one announcement created more in-bound interest than any announcement in our history. Organizations are most excited about translating the enterprise content that they aren’t translating today due to cost and time associated with the traditional localization process. Examples include: user generated content, research  reports, eSupport, social media, knowledge bases, website content and real time instantaneous chat/email communication.

Q: We still live in a “cost per word” translation ecosystem. Do you see real-time translation as the beginning of the end of the per-word pricing model?

Details around the new pricing model will be forthcoming, but it will follow a SaaS model subscription fee and/or seat license for certain applications. This will be different than the traditional per-word pricing model.  Time will tell whether this will lead to a change in the way organizations view all translation pricing. But for real time translation technology, SaaS-based subscription pricing is clearly the right model.

Q: In my view, Google has done more than any language provider to demonstrate that machine translation has a valuable role to play in global communications. Is there any concern at Lionbridge, that Google might open up its MT engine to companies via its Apps platform?

Google’s automated translation tool is a highly visible application.  And you are right in that it creates awareness of the opportunity for automated translation. There are applications for Google’s technology, specifically in its ability to enhance search.  Our focus is on enterprise content – which is a different application for automated translation in that it requires higher levels of quality and utility within the enterprise.

For the last five years, Lionbridge has been using and continuously developing our translation management platform — Translation Workspace. This technology combined with IBM’s real-time translation technology will allow us to customize the engine to our customer-specific domains to provide levels of quality that far surpass any freeware translation technology. This customization combined with cloud availability through Translation Workspace differentiates our tool from freeware tools and creates a  highly valuable application for the enterprise.

Q: TAUS has been critical of the Lionbridge/IBM alliance as an attempt to “lock in” users via ownership of the translation resources. TAUS has called on Lionbridge to open up your data. What is Lionbridge’s response?

Customers who use Lionbridge’s real time translation technology are not locked in to Lionbridge for any service — post edit or other traditional managed service translation. We are only providing our customers with a technology application to support real-time multilingual communication.  As such, our customers would simply license the technology to support real time translation. If they choose to post edit the result, they can use any service provider they choose.

Q: What do you estimate will be the ratio of human translated content to machine translated content in a typical company — say from today to five years from now?

As machine translation improves over time we believe it will be used more frequently, especially on dynamic user-generated content. We also believe over the next ten years we are going to see a shift from “Just in Case Translation” — just in case someone happens to read to “Just in Time Translation” — translation after someone shows interest.

In addition, we believe that over the next five to ten years, there will be more acceptance in the market for “good-enough” translation. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to see a larger percentages of enterprise content translated using machine translation or Real-Time Translation technology.

For more information:

• Lionbridge announcement
• TAUS comments on the deal
• SDL comments on the deal
• Lionbridge response to SDL

And although most ECM developers will eagerly say their software is “global” — not all software is equal when it comes to supporting all languages and locales. As one point of reference, SharePoint 2010 will be available in 40 languages by year end.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst and Director of The Real Story Group, has been covering the ECM industry for years and I recently asked him a few questions specific to the globalization of ECM software.

Here is the interview:

Q: You mentioned in your 2010 ECM Market Analysis that international vendors continued to thrive. Can you provide an example or two of vendors who have been innovating in this area?

The best known vendors, the market leaders in Gartner or Forrester research papers tend to be American.  However the actual market is huge with a multitude of vendors that get no coverage at all from major analyst firms.  Most of these vendors are “local” to some degree, be that predominantly active in a country such as Germany (Fabasoft) or Australia (Objective) — or even within a local market such as Chicago.

Q: Your report also referenced the consolidation at the top end of the market. Is this a good thing, or bad thing, with respect to international support?

That’s a tricky question — in that though there is a great deal of consolidation at the high end of the market (and likely more to come), there is new entrants coming into the market every week so it sort of balances out.  Support in your time zone, in your language is one the most important thing we stress to buyers, and even though the high end of the market claims to offer 24/7 support globally, that typically only works for their major products (storage infrastructure/databases) rather than their content management products, which are considered niche.

Q: To what extent are international requirements playing a role in product selection?

Ever more so.  This past year we have seen a very notable pick up with larger enterprises really starting to address international requirements either for their customers or their employees.  Its a tough nut to crack, but some of the largest (tens of millions of dollar) projects in the ECM market today are focused on multi-language, multi-location issues.

Q: Supporting social networking across locales and languages is becoming a pain point for many companies. Do what degree are ECM vendors addressing this pain. What platforms are leading in this regard?

ECM vendors are struggling to know what to do with social networking.  On the one hand the press and analyst community are talking of nothing else, on the other hand there is virtually no demand from end users and buyers of this technology for ECM to address the pain.  In as much as the pain is no more than the the normal consumer world leaking into the enterprise world, usually restricted to a handful of people or teams.  If there is a compliancy problem (the usual concern) then best to ignore its happening than to start out on a major project that has little chance of success.

Q: Given the pace of change in technologies, social networks, etc. what advice do you have for companies planning to buy or upgrade their ECM platforms?

Open standards — always open standards — never ever proprietary.  Your ECM platform should be just that, a platform. Capable of chatting and interacting will all parts of your business and IT infrastructure, many fall short of that expectation. The other thing to say is be realistic, you can’t now and never will be able to manage all your organizations information/content – focus in on priorities, content that is genuinely mission critical and do that well.

For more information, visit www.realstorygroup.com

Lionbridge is hosting the webinar and attendance is free.

The date and time is May 20th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

You can register online here.

And here is what you’ll get out of the call (if I do my job well):

In this comprehensive one-hour webcast, John will draw on findings from his 2010 Web Globalization Report Card and provide insights on the best global web sites, highlighting language trends, navigation tips and emerging trends. Websites profiled include Facebook, Apple, Starbucks, and more.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

• The hottest languages on the web today
• Why Facebook was able to go from two to 70 languages in only two years
• How companies such as Apple and Google benefit from global design consistency
• How global communities can improve your localization efforts

And bring lots of questions! I hope you to see (hear) you there.

I’ll be speaking on, what else, web globalization — focusing on the best global web sites and what they have in common.

There will also be sessions by experts from SDL, RIM, and Microsoft.

The event is free and you can learn more/register here.

CEO Teddy Bengtsson periodically sends out “state of the business” updates which I always find interesting. I asked him if I could pass along his note and he said yes.

Here is what he had to say…

So – now that we are a couple of months into 2010 – can it be said we are past the worst in terms of the global financial crisis?  Too early to tell I think, but there are some signs suggesting there may be cause for modest optimism.  Up until the end of 2008, the effect of the crisis on IFL’s financial performance had primarily been that revenue growth was slowing down or come to a standstill.  The situation got worse during the first half of 2009, with year on year revenues down by 10-20% over the two quarters.  This pattern continued in the third and fourth, but for the latter it was only marginally down when comparing year on year and we saw a 12% growth compared to the third quarter (despite a seasonally slow December month).  I expect the first quarter of 2010 to be a turning point and we will see positive year on year revenue growth for the first time since 2008.  Naturally, this is partly due to the easier comparisons as the crisis was starting to bite for real early in 2009, but nevertheless significant in terms of direction.  Looking beyond pure financials, we are also seeing increased recruitment activity, growth in some existing client business and new customer acquisitions, adding to the reasons for a cautiously positive sentiment.

Several general and market specific factors continue to be very challenging however.  Price pressure remains as intense as it has been, but I get the impression that the industry is starting to realize it is being pushed too far.  We are seeing instances of returning accounts, i.e. business lost to cheaper suppliers is coming back to IFL as clients realize that a lower price does not mean lower total cost.  In fact, almost without exception the opposite is true as increased management overheads and post-processing costs quickly accumulate to eat up the superficial advantage of a word rate that is a cent or two lower.  Not to mention the truly high cost caused by late and/or sub-standard quality deliveries!  IFL neither can nor want to compete on price alone with the many agencies in our region operating with minimal infrastructures, but I remain confident that service quality and reliability will ultimately generate the true value that makes a partnership sustainable and mutually rewarding.

Market factors in our local production environments tend to be in stark contrast with most parts of the world.  In these times when deflation, salary reductions and declining property markets seem to be the norm, Argentina continues to run its own very different race.  Private consultants estimate that Argentina’s inflation in 2009 was the third highest in the world – only behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela – strongly contesting the cosmetically enhanced official number below 8% and stating the real figure as somewhere between 15-18%.  As you can imagine, this puts local companies servicing global clients looking for price reductions in a near impossible situation.  Especially larger companies like IFL with a high number of permanent employees, as we cannot simply pass the resulting problems further down the supply chain.  A saving grace has been the easing of the local currency by around 10% against the USD.

Inflation is less of an issue in Brazil, IFL’s other production location.  Although not inexistent – it was close to 5% in 2009 – the bigger challenge here has been the strengthening of the local currency.  When we saw the Brazilian Real going in the opposite direction in 2008, predictably we came under pressure to reduce pricing accordingly.  Unsurprisingly, few are equally eager to suggest that we now increase rates to compensate…!  Seriously though, a pricing correction of 20-25% from January 2009 levels would be perfectly logical from strictly an economic data perspective.  Furthermore, Brazil’s growing stature as a global power is making it an even more attractive target for international companies seeking alternatives to their existing, often troubled, markets.  This is becoming evident in increased competition for the relatively scarce competent translation/localization resources, so my recommendation is to expect to pay reasonable rates and make sure to find a partner you can trust.

But I guess I should expect nothing less from one of the world’s largest translation agencies.

Lionbridge wants to know what social media you use.

If you enter your email address, you’ll get the results.

Here’s the link.

PS: I just took it and it did take only 5 minutes. But it’s a rather clunky survey. At first I thought the only sites it would ask me about were Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. I had to click through to the next page where I found the “global” list of social media sites, which will be much more relevant to folks in, say Germany (Xing) and Brazil (Orkut).

London-based Today Translations is doing just that — offering a Name Audit Service for soon-to-be parents.

Do you think Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would have chosen Suri for their daughter had they known it meant “pickpocket” in Japanese?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

According to the agency’s web site:

Name changes later in life can be embarrassing, expensive and riddled with hassle. That’s why we offer a Name Translation Audit designed to help you consider the multilingual implications of giving your baby an unusual name.

For just £1,000, our brilliant team of 2600 linguists will check the meaning of baby names in 100 languages. Better safe than Suri.

Isn’t your baby worth it?

The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation industry — and its service is not even live yet.

The Translation Automation User Society does not appear to be as welcoming as I am of the Google Translation Center. A new essay on its site says:

Private companies will always seek world domination and customer lock-in. As a professional in the translation industry, the Google Translation Centre may help you on the short-term, but you only help Google long-term and you don’t help the world at all. Ultimately we pay the price for putting all translated words and sentences in the possession of a single company.

There is a distinct “evil empire” tone to this essay, which is understandable to a point. Google appears to be entering that evil empire stage of its development. Though I still use the search engine.

And the last I checked, Google’s “terms and services” page for the Translation Center had been taken down. So I can’t really say what Google’s policy will be regarding the translation memory (TM) that it may or may not leverage from this Center.

But it is no coincidence that TAUS is planning to develop a massive database of TMs of its own. I’m sure it wants readers to come away thinking that TAUS is going to be far more open with its TMs than Google will be.

TAUS says that its TM database will be free to the world for the looking up of translations of terms and phrases. But you’ll have to be a member to actually have access to the database (on a reciprocal basis) and membership is not free. I’m confident that this database will be of the highest quality as TAUS has some impressive corporate members, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle (Google does not appear to be a member).

Personally, I’m glad to see both services emerging — as well as services from Asia Online and Language Weaver (which is now offering a Web-based SaaS translation service). We are entering uncharted waters and it’s important to have a mix of large and small players, as well as a nonprofit, to keep everyone on their toes.

Is there a risk to the world if Google owns the world’s largest TM (which it might have already accomplished)?

Perhaps.

TAUS raises important questions. The answers have yet to emerge.

But here comes Google…

According to Blogoscoped, Google is about to launch the Google Translation Center.

This is an exciting development, though I don’t expect everyone to suddenly ditch ProZ for Google. Why? Because much of the appeal of ProZ is the community, which Google does not appear to be trying to support. Still, freelancers will certainly want to investigate this potential new resource.

I’ve called out ProZ as one company under threat from Google Translation Center. But EVERY translation agency needs to keep a close eye on this service. It could be a threat. It could also end up being something translation agencies use themselves — instead of paid platforms from SDL. Naturally, for this to happen this new platform has a lot of evolving to do. Still, I can’t help but wonder.

There is no mention of whether or not Google will support machine translation and/or translation memory. I’m assuming they will.

I have LOTS of questions and this service isn’t even live yet. So we shall see what happens. But this is big news, no question.

I wrote awhile back, that the translation industry as we know it is over. The technologists have taken over and they’re bringing brute force computing and massive networks to the table to reduce costs and increase time to market. This is just another sign of this macro trend.

What do you think? Is Google going to disrupt the translation industry or is this new platform going to fall flat?

(Thx Chris for the heads up!)

Update: I just read an insightful article on this Google’s service at GigaOm…

So after a slow start upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 OS on Friday, I’ve since had a chance to review a number of the apps and have been very impressed so far (though a few did cause the iPhone to crash).

As I reviewed the Apps in the iTunes store I began to notice that they were available only in English. Here is a screen grab from the AOL IM app:

Just to be sure about this, I also visited iTunes Spain and looked up the same AOL IM App. And as you see here, it is available only in English:

As far as I can tell, the only iPhone App currently available in a language other than English is Apple’s own Remote App, available in these languages:

I know it’s early yet. But keep in mind that the iPhone launched globally on Friday, which means there are a lot of markets that have a localized iPhone but only one fully localized iPhone App to use on them.

This means there is a HUGE opportunity for the software localization vendors of the world to help these software developers take these apps global. Apple says it sold one million iPhones over the past three days — and 10 million apps.

Here are some of the companies that currently offer non-localized apps: eBay, MySpace, Bloomberg, Travelocity, MLB.com, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

If you spot any iPhone Apps that have been localized outside of English, please let me know. This will be very interesting to follow…

UPDATE: Adam Houser just alerted me to  Anime Match by Jirbo, shown here:

This app is available in Japanese. It’s a catchy little game actually — and free!

Here are the details:

Web Globalization Trends to Watch
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

To register, click here.

And if you can’t make the call, it will be recorded for playback.

The topic is global navigation — why it’s so important and how to improve upon it. I wrote an ebook about this topic two years ago. Since then, geolocation and language negotiation have become more commonly used and an increasing number of companies have launched splash global gateways — like Intel, which launched its first splash gateway just last week.

If I have time, I also plan to talk about IDNs — internationalized domain names — and why companies will need to register them (and may in fact be required to register them).

See you on June 3rd!

And mark your calendars for June 3rd, when I will host a second webinar, also sponsored by Lionbridge, to discuss the many aspects of global navigation — from splash global gateways, to country codes, to geolocation. I’ll include lots of real-world examples.

The Webinars are sponsored by Lionbridge.

Mark your calendar for May 7th at 1 pm (EST), when I will present the first Webinar — The Best Global Web Sites (and why) — which focuses on key findings from The 2008 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Webinars are free and open to executives who manage global Web sites, or have plans to do so.

To register, visit the Lionbridge site here.

MySpace is also busy building localized Web sites.

I reviewed both Facebook and MySpace for the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, as part of the newly added Social Networking category. Also included in this category were Orkut, Last.fm, and a company based out of Germany called XING.

XING supports 15 languages, not including English, and an impressive language navigation interface. Which is why XING emerged on top of the Social Networking category. Facebook finished in last place.

But I should stress that Facebook and MySpace are only just getting started. Next year, we could very well see a different leader emerge.

SDL has posted an FAQ page about the deal here — but the list is absent a question I recently posed:

Does this acquisition mark the beginning of the end of SDL being a translation services provider?

I think it does. Or, at least, I think it should.

I haven’t received an official answer from SDL to this question. My guess is that SDL will say that it has many clients who want a full-service solution and that it will continue to offer these customers a full-service solution.

Nevertheless, SDL is much more of a software company these days than a translation services company. SDL has been gobbling up software companies over the past year and now owns some of the best translation workflow and content management tools on the planet, most notably Tridion and now Idiom. At some point it will have to ask if the benefits of providing translation services are outweighed by the negatives, which become more acute with the Idiom acquisition.

Idiom, as many folks in the industry know, had been living on borrowed time for quite some time. It was subsidized by the investment community going back 10 years. These investors wanted a return on their investment and Idiom needed a buyer who could give it a larger infrastructure and sales team.

Early last year, I heard from two up-and-coming translation agencies that were taking a hard look at buying Idiom. That SDL would buy Idiom can be viewed as much as a defensive move as an offensive move. And I think the timing is good because Idiom finally hit its stride in 2007.

I attended the Idiom Summit in 2007 and there was a real sense of excitement and optimism in the air. I wrote about the company in October, noting two developments in particular:

The “Full-Service” vs. “Freedom of Choice” Divide Widens
Idiom has been steadily positioning itself against SDL. Where SDL may call itself a “full service” solution, Idiom calls itself a “freedom of choice” solution. That is, SDL can provide you with CMS software, translation memory (TM) software, and actual translation services.

Idiom, on the other hand, provides only globalization management software, leaving the client free to select translators (or translation agency), CMS tools providers, and so on. Some clients may want to stick with separate vendors for different products and services — which benefits Idiom — while others may want a full-service SDL solution. This positioning makes good sense because it makes things clearer for clients who are often very confused by the array of products and terminology.

Demand for On-Demand Growing
Idiom thought that its On-Demand software would appeal mainly to small customers, but a number of large customers are now using it, such as Bank of America and HP’s internal translation group.

One interesting reason that Web-based software has been popular with some companies is that you don’t need to dedicate an IT team to getting started. Ironically, we have found that marketing executives in large companies with very skilled IT departments often feel as if they have very limited IT support because they must “take a number.” The Web-based solution allows a marketing team to bypass IT almost entirely. Even if they want to buy the software, they can use on-demand as a run-up to it. Idiom reports that 50% of its sales pipeline is devoted to Idiom On-Demand.

What happens when a “full service” company buys a “freedom of choice” company?
Right now, SDL says that Idiom is going to remain an autonomous company. And I suspect that many Idiom clients won’t particularly care if SDL is the new parent — and may actually be quite happy to get translation services from SDL.

But what about Idiom’s very popular “LSP Advantage Program” — in which it basically gave away its software to a large network of translation agencies. These agencies had played an important role in Idiom’s growth, functioning as a channel sales partner.

I spoke to the owner of a smaller translation agency — and Idiom partner — last year and mentioned that there was talk about Idiom being acquired by a larger translation agency. He was not at all happy to hear this. It’s safe to say that none of these translation agencies are happy with SDL owning their workflow software.

I’m not surprised to see this press release from across Systems today. Thebigword is promoting an alternative to Idiom as well. Meanwhile, Translations.com is marketing a “safe passage program” for clients who want to migrate away from SDL/Idiom.

SDL surely expected this reaction from its competitors. And all this confusion could actually help SDL sell more translation services as the smaller agencies find themselves migrating to new software tools. At a minimum, the next year promises to be very chaotic in the mid-tier of the services market, which could bode well for the leaders, which includes Lionbridge.

I believe that Idiom is an excellent acquisition for SDL, provided that SDL can hold onto Idiom’s network of supportive and enthusiastic translation agencies. If not, SDL risks giving rise (and momentum) to a “son of Idiom” in the years ahead.

I think SDL would be best served to focus fully on software — on streamlining its large and complex portfolio — and in letting the translation services vendors do what they do best. A SDL Services spin-off would make sense as well.

Perhaps SDL is already planning this. I hope to hear more from them in the days ahead and will keep you posted as I do.

Lionbridge evaluated the sites of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards on the Democratic site and Romney on the Republican side. It appears that Huckabee and McCain have more or less given up on the Spanish vote, as they offer no Spanish content.

The Clinton site offers 210 Spanish language pages versus 2,482 English language web page — 8.4%.

I know, this doesn’t sound like much, but it’s well ahead of Romney’s site, with just 4% translated content, and Obama’s paltry 1%.

What about Edwards? Edwards offers only one page of translated content, what I typically call a “local façade.”

I realize that language is a thorny issue these days, as it calls to mind thornier issue: immigration.

Nevertheless, Hispanic voters make up 9% of the electorate and could play a large role later this year in picking the next president.

Lionbridge also commented on several other issues, like quality, content, and navigation. Speaking of navigation, I like how Lionbridge notes that placing the “Español” link in the upper right corner is a best practice. This is something I have advocated for a number of years and I’m happy to say that more and more companies (and candidates) are placing their global gateways in this general vicinity.

To learn more, check out the press release.

• Arabic/Spanish
• Arabic/French
• French/Spanish
• Danish/English
• Greek/English

What’s interesting here is that Language Weaver is moving beyond language pairs that include English.

English is the “pivot language” of the translation industry, in which content either begins in English or is converted into English on its way to its target language. Taking English out of the equation isn’t easy, because there is often a smaller translation corpora to build upon, but it is ultimately where companies want and need to go to accelerate translation and improve quality.

Says the Language Weaver press release:

In international markets, companies want to be able to translate directly between any two languages. Despite the fact that some of these languages are spoken and written by multi-millions of people, very often English is used as a pivot language for the translation. For example, for an Arabic to French translation, a company might first translate the information from Arabic to English, and then from English to French; this two step process slows the translation down considerably.

Translation software offerings operating directly between languages such as French to Spanish or Arabic to French are less commonly available. However, Language Weaver’s statistically-based approach to translation allows it to quickly develop translation systems between any two languages without using English in the translation process. These less-common language combinations save a step in the translation process and give companies timely access to information.

The product is software designed specifically for German/English translation of content that falls within the mechanical engineering, construction, automotive manufacturing, and plant construction industries.I know; it’s a mouthful.

But the gist of it is this: It’s machine translation and workflow software designed specifically for an industry.

The quality of statistical machine translation (SMT) is easy to poke fun at when you rely on the mass-market free translation engines. But once you begin to optimize the SMT engine for a specific industry, where context and terminology have been narrowed considerably, the quality suddenly gets respectable.

Statistical machine translation software and translation workflow software are about as intimidating as software can get.

Traditionally, companies have had to exert a great deal of time and energy to customize machine translation and translation workflow products to their specific industries. But I think what Language Weaver and across are doing is a sign of things to come.

And this is great news for customers because it will allow them to see the benefit of this software sooner rather than later.

Says the release:

“New digital content continues to flood the manufacturing industries. With this package, we deliver significant productivity right out of the box, already customized and integrated with a translation management system — the hard work of aligning data for the machine translation already has been done for manufacturing companies of all sizes,” says Kirti Vashee, vice president of sales and marketing for Language Weaver. “So it gets easier and faster for translators to access appropriate translations for manufacturing industry phrases and sentences, which have a technical language orientation. That helps companies to bring products to market faster and provides the functionality for translation of content that has never before been translated.”

What’s the reason for this sudden transformation of the industry?

I believe the changes are due to the simple fact that the translation agencies are no longer leading the industry. The technologists have taken over, and they have a different vision for the future.

By technologists, I’m referring to software vendors, such as Idiom and Language Weaver and Clay Tablet. I’m also referring to the buyers of translation services, buyers who have seen how technology can make their lives easier and want to see their vendors make full use of this technology — from hosted project management software to machine translation.

While linguists focus on the “art” of translation, technologists focus on the “science” of translation. And that’s why we’re seeing the rebirth of machine translation as statistical machine translation (SMT). SMT brings the power of brute force computing to translation, to a degree that the pioneers of machine translation could have only imagined forty years ago.

SMT is not by itself going to disrupt the translation industry. But SMT, along with early adopter clients (by way of the Translation Automation Users Society), and the efforts of Google, are likely to change this industry in ways we can’t fully grasp right now.

The Translation Automation Users Society (TAUS) conducted a brief survey recently of its member companies and interested observers. About 55% of the 200+ respondents were translation vendors, while 30% were buyers of translation services.

TAUS asked if the “per word” pricing model used by the industry was outdated, and 65% of respondents agreed that it was. However, there was no agreement as to what model should replace per-word pricing. Respondents were evenly split between per-word pricing, per-hour pricing, and capacity (annual service agreement) pricing.

What this says to me is that we are standing at an exciting point in the industry — where there is a clear need for a new direction but no clear direction in which to head. In other words, the industry is searching for leaders, which is why the technologists have had so much sway lately.

The TAUS survey also found that 68% of respondents were in favor of the sharing of translation memory data. Not surprisingly, TAUS is going to make the sharing of memories a priority in 2008, and technology will play a key role.

The most definitive finding from the survey was that 75% of respondents felt that translation agencies should take the lead in investing in translation automation. I have seen recent signs of agencies doing just that — but only after companies such as Idiom and Language Weaver paved the way.

I do not believe it will be agencies that take the lead in translation automation.

I think it will be Google that will do more than any other company to promote the next generation of translation.

Many tech pundits say Google is in the process of “becoming the Internet” by not only powering search but by hosting content and applications and facilitating financial transactions. Right now, the search engine is just a means to the end — your company’s Web site. But what if Google became both the means and the end?

That is, what if Google became the multilingual interface to your company’s Web site? It’s not going to happen tomorrow or next year or possibly even this decade. But I think it will happen, and when it does happen, the translation industry as we know it will be changed forever.