The Devil is in the Details!

With all the advances in technology and tools, sometimes it's important to remind ourselves of the basics. One of the key features of successful projects is efficient information exchange. This is true for all businesses including localization projects.

A translation management system is a great tool to help keep the project files and resources organized and available to all at any time of the day. It also greatly facilitates communication and collaboration. But often, while handling complex projects and multinational teams, it's easy to forget the power of the little details!

Here are a few examples where old fashioned communication trumps technology.

Recently, one of our sales reps mentioned to the project manager that a new client's preferred style of communication was via phone as opposed to email, which is the basic mode of operation within our translation management system. This simple piece of information resulted in the localization project manager calling the client for the initial introduction and kick-off of the project instead of sending an email, which started off the project on a positive note with the client. First impressions are always very important!

In another case, the client had a very tight delivery schedule for a new UI product. Requirements were discussed between the sales rep and the client without much success on increasing the localization time. The project manager then got involved and additional conversations took place with the client. Throughout this process, it became clear that translation consistency and quality were more important than the delivery schedule. As a result of that conversation, the schedule was reset to allow for correctly handling consistency and accuracy.

Introductions between the different stakeholders of the project can also help eliminate reoccurring problems. Introducing members of the localization teams to each other can provide a sounding board for specific discussions. When multiple languages are being localized, one language often moves ahead of the others uncovering issues that need special attention for all languages.

Nothing takes the place of efficient information exchange. If you have access to a translation management system, great! Use it! But as everything gets more fast-based and technology driven, don't forget the basics. The devil is often in the details!

Google’s free translation portal

Recently, Google released its Translation Toolkit enabling the translation of HTML and DOC files via an easy to use web portal that offers a WYSIWYG translation environment integrated with its Machine Translation engine.

If you don’t mind correcting machine translations, or retyping the English source text when you need to revert back to English, then the environment will be a plus for the average translator that does not currently use computer aided translation (CAT) tools.

Google smartly predicted that professional translators, which are a key crowd that Google wants to attract, will not be satisfied with just the machine translation option. So they included the ability to upload glossaries and translation memories. This helps produce more consistent and professional translations that machine translation cannot accomplish.

The WYSIWYG translation environment is helpful to visualize the source and get a better idea of the overall context; it is better than translating HTML at the text level and deal with all the tags and code. But the limits in language pairs and supported file formats (I was very surprised that they are not supporting XML and that only English source was allowed), and the fact that you need to work online, quickly offset the gained benefits for the professional translator, who is used to using similar CAT tools without these limitations.

So what will the impact be on the translation and localization industry?

In the short term, less experienced translators will be drawn to use the Google translation environment and will quickly learn the limits of machine translation and the benefits of translation memories and building accurate glossaries. This will help them mature and become more experienced translators. As more translators use the system to produce quality translations, it will help improve the Google Statistical Machine Translation accuracy, enabling Google to facilitate international markets reach, improving its bottom line.

Established CAT publishers will have to work harder to outdo Google or integrate with it. What Google built so far is not very hard to duplicate; Microsoft already has a similar environment to handle translations of its knowledge base. But long term, it will be very hard for others to keep up with the bilingual corpora that Google will amass. It is the corpus that the statistical machine translation industry is after to improve its Statistical Machine Translation engine.

Google still has to work on ensuring the protection of intellectual property to their rightful owners (the ones who pay for the translation in the first place). But as statistical machine translation quality improves, translation efficiency may significantly improve to possibly make this issue mute, or at least not as pressing. But this will not happen for many more years.

Some are cautioning that Google’s offering may not be free forever. That may be the case. But so what? We pay for other SaaS tools like CRM, online meetings, telecom, email… No one will mind paying a fee when the ROI is well justified!

Google Wave- The Future of Localization Collaboration

This month Google released the Google Translation Toolkit. But what overshadowed this release was the preview of its new Wave technology geared for release as an open platform at the end of this year.

Soon, emails, instant messages, blogs, forums, wikis, tweets, tickets, bugs, queries, docs… will all morph into a Wave!

The promise of Google Wave is to store all that information in a content manager and allow users, or collaborators, to access it simultaneously in an easy to use environment, eliminating local storage, check-in, checkout, locking and unlocking requirements.

Since there is no information sending and receiving (no ftp, pop or smtp servers), the information is static in location but dynamic in content, while simultaneously accessible to all needed users. It also fully tracks the users who create it, the ones who change it, and where and when the changes are introduced. Versionitis will be forever eradicated in a Wave!

Teams can communicate and collaborate to create content, expand it, update it, edit it, translate it, review it, proof it, all at the same time. A replay feature allows anyone to see the history from the origin of the Wave to its end. This ensures accountability and authenticity.

Let’s look at how riding this Wave can impact localization and translation tasks.

Imagine technical communication groups developing documentation in Waves, where all needed experts are simultaneously involved. Developers, technical writers, expert users and translators can contribute to help build the most useful source documentation needed by worldwide users.

Imagine also a localization collaboration environment where style guides, glossaries, translation memories and translation queries all reside in Waves, created, updated, answered and consumed by all the localization project stakeholders. These Waves will be living documents shared by translators, reviewers, editors, proofreaders and other localization resources around the world. The Waves live in the cloud and are used on all the projects that they are needed in and intended for.

Imagine translations being reviewed, edited and proofread in a WYSIWYG environment without the need to download or upload PDFs, without cluttered bilingual files, or tagged files, or separate translation memories, glossaries and other translation assets; and more importantly without having to worry about revision control and folding changes back into the source documents or the translation memories.

The evolution and growth of the localization industry is all about making the translator and localization professionals in the process more efficient. This often means giving them better access to translation assets and resources. In the short term, Wave technology can be used to manage evolving style guides and to address translation queries. Later glossaries can be developed and managed in a Wave while extensions link them to the source documents. Finally, translation memories can also be linked to Waves to enable translation reuse and consistency.

When the collaboration tools and processes in the localization industry catch the Wave, and they will over the coming years, the long term effect on the localization process will be phenomenal!