The Localization Industry: Past, Present and Future

Published in 2007!The same can still be said today – 2014!

Disclaimer• Subjektive nicht objektive Sicht.

• Lücken, nicht vollständig.

• Das Eine oder Andere ist vielleicht nicht richtig.

• Einige Folien habe ich von Jaap van der Meer geklaut.Danke Jaap!

• Als Anstoß zum Weiterreden gedacht…

1950‘s Business Tools

1960‘s Revolution: Computers for Companies

1980‘s Revolution: Computers for Individuals

1980‘s Revolution: Privately Networked Computers

1990‘s Revolution: Publicly Networked Computers, Web and Internet

Business Tools in 1990‘s• Internet

• Web

• Modems

• Bulletin Boards

• FTP

• Fax machines

• Courier Services

• Zip disks

• Networks

• Cell Phones

Business Tools in 2000‘s• I do everything(except cook…maybe next year!)

The Original Problem

An Early Solution (196 BC)

Famous Translators (note tools)

Translator Tools in 1950

Globalization Tools in 2000‘s• Workflow Engine

• On demand MT and TM

• Speech recognition

• Portals

• Corpora

• GMS

• TMS

• GIM

• CMS

• XML

• SOA

• CRM

• XLIFF

1950-1980 Translation Industry• Inhouse translation departments (IBM, DEC, XEROX, etc.)

• Little or no outsourcing

• No tools (well, mainframe word processors and SGML)

• Updates cut-and-paste on paper or manually retype

• DTP (typesetting) a separate, expensive science

• Local Translation Agencies with Freelancers for personal documents

• Fax machines and modems were huge innovations!

1980-1993 INK leads the way• 1980-Jaap van der Meer starts INK in Amsterdam, which provided translation, writing and localization services

• 1987-INK develops its own computer-aided translation software and dictionary management tools

• Quickly expands with offices all over Europe

• Becomes the blueprint for localization companies with distributed offices and freelance translators and other resources

• 1993-sold to R.R: Donnelley

The 90‘s Big 3, 4, 5, …• US and European based

• Berlitz, Alpnet, INK, SDL, Lernout&Hauspie, Xerox

• Then Lionbridge, Bowne Global Solutions

• Now Asia: TOIN, watch out for India and China…

The 1990‘s – Dublin Becomes World Software Localization Capital• 1970‘s and 1980‘s Irish government provides great tax incentives to foreign corporations

• Hungry, English-speaking, well-educated, low-cost workforce

• Many multinationals move their European HQ to Dublin

• Easy to get Visas for foreign workers (translators!)

• Universities offer advanced translation training, and especially software engineering

• Microsoft also has localization HQ in Dublin

Interlude: The Softrans-Berlitz Story

Berlitz• 1878 German immigrant Maximillion Berlitz establishes a language school in New York

• Develops the „Berlitz Method“ of total immersion languageteaching

• Company grows through WW II, begins offering translationservices on the side (mostly personal docs)

• Establishes language schools all over the world

• Berlitz acquired and sold by big publishing companies such as R.R. Donnelley

• 1987 Berlitz acquired by Fukutake Publishing (Japan!)

• 1988 Berlitz Translation Services becomes independentBusiness Unit

Softrans• 1986 the „fab four“ get tired of working for Apple Computer, seea „Marktlücke“ for software localization services and foundSoftrans in Dublin

• Rapid growth with huge contracts from many of the Ireland-based European HQ‘s of big multinationals

• Company is engineering-oriented, technically savvy, but Euro-centric, needs Asian reach, scalability, access to US customers

• 1993 Berlitz acquires Softrans: a match made in heaven and lubricated with copious amountsof Guinness

Softrans + Berlitz = Berlitz GlobalNET• BGN becomes one of the top 3 localization companies with26 offices in 24 countries, and the first to crack the $100 Million revenue barrier

• Grows, acquires geographies, technologies, resources

• 2001 Berlitz International (Fukutake) decides that their corecompetency is language instruction, not localization

• 2002 BGN acquired by Bowne Global Solutions (which was puttogether out of acquisitions of Mendez, GECAP and others)

• 2004 BGS acquired by Lionbridge (which was put togetherfrom acquisitions of ALPNET, ITP, …)

• 2008 Lionbridge acquired by VIPRO ???

Sideswipe: Microsoft Dirty Laundry• Microsoft became an early driver of software localization and has continued to be one of the first companies to tackle new, obscure languages

• MS early strategy was to completely dominate a small, in-country translation company demanding complete transparency

• MS dictates everything from human resources to processes to tools to allowable margins to timelines to total profitability

• Of course everyone wanted to work with MS, but MS destroyed many excellent, small in-country vendors and in the early to mid 1990‘s many vendors refused to work with MS because they feared for their lives

• MS continues to be aggressive and quasi-dictatorial, but they have learned that they have to treat their suppliers as partners or else everybody loses

How do I Get Into the Localization Business?

• Sideways, no real training for localization specialists or engineers or DTPers or Project Managers or other resources: parallel to the early days of technical writing or software engineering; new industry, no standards, no best practices

• By accident

• Training starts in earnest only in the late 90‘s

• University of Limmerick, Dublin, Rosario, etc. Translator training

• Localization training Monterey, University of Limmerick

• Localization Certification: CSU CHICO, Localization Institute, etc., LISA

Information Pyramid

Corporate

Products

User interface

User documentation

Enterprise information

Communications, Patents

Support, Knowledge Base

Corporate brochures 2,000 words

Product brochures 10,000 words

User interface 50,000 words

Manuals, online help 200,000 words

HR, Training 500,000 words

Email, IM, Reports 5 million words

Call center 10 million words

Partly multilingual

1

Translation•Glossary

•Proofreading

Localization•TM tools

•Linguistic verification•Functional testing•Project tracking

•Vendor management•Quality assurance

Globalization•GMS, CRM, CMS integration

•Workflow, TM Server•SGML-XML standardization

1950

1985

2000

“must”bookletcost

opportunityproductquality

strategyenterprisetime

Evolution of the Translation Market

Translation?

Languages Spoken by Number of speakers Percentage

8 > 100 million 2.3 billion 40%75 > 10 million 2.2 billion 80%

264 > 1 million 825 million 93%

Clients

MLV’s

In country

offices/partners

Distributed

translators/authors

4 to 30 vendors

10 to 40 languages

100’ to 1000’s

translators/authors

Vendor Management Project Management

Quality Assurance Translation Memory

Account Management

Resources Management

Quality Assurance

Project Management Translation Memory

Resources Management

Quality Assurance

Project Management

Translation Memory

Quality Assurance Translation Memory

Cascaded Supply Chain

Translation•Glossary

•Proofreading

Localization•TM tools

•Linguistic verification•Functional testing/Project tracking

•Vendor management/Quality assurance

Globalization•GMS, CRM, CMS integration

•Workflow•SGML-XML standardization

1950

1985

2000

“must”bookletcost

opportunityproductquality

strategyenterprisetime

Transmutation•ontology, taxonomy

•search, MT•customer self-service

•two-way direction translation

utilityembedded2008

From Globalization to Transmutation

From localization

… to enterprise wide

globalization …

… to “translation out of

the wall”

Cheaper

Faster

Real-Time

Tide is Changing

Customers’ needs are

instantaneous…

Tide is Changing….Grrrr… I can’t read

Integrated Hybrid Translation Model

TM

MT

Shared

TM

C P-E

T R

Terminology

Workflow

P r a c t i t i o n e r s

Source Control

Translation

Localization

Globalization

Transmutation• ontology, taxonomy• advanced leveraging

• search, MT• customer self-service

• two-way direction translation

The Vision“Translation is just a language transfer”

Four Scenarios for Change

• Fully Automatic Useful Translation

• Language intelligence

• New payment models

• Sharing language data

Embrace the Imperfection of Machine Translation

• Benefits

Security

Quality

Expand customer base

More job opportunities

• Needs

Standard interfaces

Develop best practice in post-editing MT

Learning MT systems

Hybrid MT systems

Everyday more words are translated by machines than by professional translators…Integrate MT in existing translation infrastructure and other applications (search, intranet, support)

Develop Language Intelligence

Translation 1.0

(translation)

Cost

Translation 2.0

(localization)

Opportunity

Translation 4.0

(transmutation)

Embedded

Translation 3.0

(globalization)

Strategy

Market size

La

ng

ua

ge

in

tell

igen

ce

TranslationProofreading

Glossaries

Project management

Translation

Memory

Terminology

management

Functional testing

QA

GMS

WorkflowTM Server

XML

CMS

CRM

TaxonomiesOntologies

Unified

Terminology

Search

MTSemantic

Technology

Introduce new Payment Models

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0,05

0,10

0,15

0,20

0,25

0,30

0,00

2,00

4,00

6,00

8,00

10,00

12,00

14,00

16,00

18,00

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Wo

rd r

ate

s

Ma

rket

siz

eTranslation industry

How low can you go….?

Why do we communicate?

Natural Next Step

from desk-top TM …..

to …. Enterprise server …..

to … Industry-shared language data repository

Industr

y

Sub

-secto

r

Company

Product line

IT

Financial

Ora

cle

Inte

l

Telecom

IMF

Pa

yP

al

Sie

me

ns

Medical

Mo

lin

a

Public Index

Private Indexes

Do

ma

in In

de

xe

s

Data Structure: Cooperation

How the Co-operative WorksUser scenarios

o Language search freely available on public index:

Translation matches of terms and phrases

Possibly an attribute for domain

No attributes for organizations or products

o Language search on domain and private indexes (only for members):

Translation matches with attributes for domain, company, product, date of use and other metadata

o Advanced leveraging:

Process documents to retrieve best matches for all terms and phrases

Output in industry standard format

o Automatic translation:

Automatic translation engines trained on domain and private indexes

Output in industry standard format

Languages and Global Coverage“We have around a billion users today – what we’re all interested in is where the next billion users are coming from.”

Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel at a United Nations Meeting of technology leaders and representatives of developing countries, March 2007

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: Microsoft boss Bill

Gates wants to double the number of computer

users to 2 billion by 2015.

What languages will the next billion users speak?

Vielen Dank