TAUS Review#7 - April 2016 by TAUS

TAUS RE VIEW of language business and technology

The Quest for the Translation Unicorn Review of Language Business and Technology in Africa. Columns by Nicholas Ostler, Lane Greene, Luigi Muzii and John Moran. First edition of our Translatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Profile PLUS an Interview with Guylaine Tritton (Alpha CRC)

April 2016 - No. VII

memoQ.com

â&#x20AC;&#x153;memoQ is a very intuitive,

user-friendly, easy to learn, and easy to integrate translation tool. In addition, the level of support provided by their team is excellent.

â&#x20AC;?

Birgitte Bohnstedt FLSmidth A/S

Magazine with a Mission How do we communicate in an ever more globalizing world? Will we all learn to speak the same language? A lingua franca, English, Chinese, Spanish? Or will we rely on translators to help us bridge the language divides? Language business and technology are core to the world economy and to the prevailing trend of globalization of business and governance. And yet, the language sector, its actors and innovations do not get much visibility in the media. Since 2005 TAUS has published numerous articles on translation automation and language business innovation on its web site. Now we are bundling them in TAUS Review, an online quarterly magazine. TAUS Review is a magazine with a mission. We believe that a vibrant language and translation industry helps the world communicate better, become more prosperous and more peaceful. Communicating across hundreds – if not thousands – of languages requires adoption of technology. In the age of the Internet of Things and the internet of you, translation – in every language – becomes embedded in every app, on every screen, on every web site, in every thing. In TAUS Review reporters and columnists worldwide monitor how machines and humans work together to help the world communicate better. We tell the stories about the successes and the excitements, but also about the frustrations, the failures and shortcomings of technologies and innovative models. We are conscious of the pressure on the profession, but convinced that language and translation technologies lead to greater opportunities. TAUS Review follows a simple and straightforward structure. In every issue we publish reports from four different continents – Africa, Americas, Asia and Europe – on new technologies, use cases and developments in language business and technology from these regions. In every issue we also publish perspectives from four different ‘personas’ – researcher, journalist, translator and language – by well-known writers from the language sector. This is complemented by features and conversations that are different in each issue. The knowledge we share in TAUS Review is part of the ‘shared commons’ that TAUS develops as a foundation for the global language and translation market to lift itself to a high-tech sector. TAUS is a think tank and resource center for the global translation industry, offering access to best practices, shared translation data, metrics and tools for quality evaluation, training and research.

TAUS Review is a free online magazine, published four times per year. We invite TAUS members and nonmembers to distribute the magazine through their websites and online media. Please write to editor@taus.net for the embed code. TAUS Review currently has about 8,000 readers globally. Publisher & Managing Editor: Jaap van der Meer Editor & Content Manager: Mick Rooney Design, Distribution & Advertisements: Anne-Maj

Disclaimer The views or opinions expressed by the various authors in the TAUS review do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of TAUS. While we try to ensure that the information provided is correct, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the material. If you do notice any mistakes then please let us know.

van der Meer Enquiries about distribution and advertisements: review@taus.net Editorial contributions and feedback can be

sent to: editor@taus.net

without permission is prohibited. For reprints and

Submission Guidelines

e-prints, please email editor@taus.net.

Content

Leader

Features

5. Leader by Mick Rooney

32. An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

8. News

Reviews of language business & technologies 10. The Quest for the Translation Unicorn by Isabella Massardo 14. In Africa by Serge Awono

Columns 18. The Linguist’s Perspective by Nicholas Ostler 21. The Journalist’s Perspective by Lane Greene 25. The Translator’s Perspective by John Moran 27. The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

38. Translator’s Profile by Johanna Lindroth

40. Directory of Distributors 43. Events Calendar

Leader

by Mick Rooney

TAUS Review #7, TAUS World Tour and innovation and game changers 2016, we wanted to examine technology and the user and customer experience in the translation industry. decided on a theme for

keeping a link with our

Serge Awono, from Yaoundé in Cameroon, joins TAUS Review for the first time as a guest reporter. In his global review, he examines the power of the Internet for the localization industry and the potential market in sub-Saharan Africa. For a long time this region has suffered a technology lag in the fields of telecommunications and reliable access to the internet through fixed networks. A digital boom in recent years has led to more than 160 mobile networks on the continent of Africa. Half of all mobile users are now accessing the Internet using their phones. However, Internet penetration in some areas still remains relatively low and this has presented particular challenges for emerging professionals and startups in the localization industry. John Moran reports from Dublin on the value of sharing ideas in the translation industry by recounting a personal frustration he has dealing with tags in CAT tools. It is one thing to have frustrations as a translator, another to find workarounds, but even better to come up with an idea that leads to a solution. Sharing those frustrations is as important as sharing innovative ideas in an effort to find a solution. Sharing that idea is what is important, not whether you intend turning it into a product or service. Every year TAUS brings the translation industry together in a series of forums, summits and roundtables, not just to discuss and celebrate innovation and the great game changers, but to brainstorm and find a roadmap to solutions and an enhanced user experience. In his regular persona perspective column, journalist Lane Greene looks at an underserved market for small translations. Pondering on our

technology and user theme, Lane asks an important question. “Why would a journalist not be a natural user of translation? In an ever more globalized world, whatever your beat, be it politics, business, finance or culture, and no matter what your first language, much of what is important to most journalists will be happening in another language.” Certainly a journalist, like anyone, can use a free online machine translation engine like Google or Bing. But the user must decide if the translation is good enough for the purpose it is needed for. A rough translation may not be good enough to indicate the value and relevance of the source material. Lane suggests that millions of customers, including journalists, could constitute an underserved market for small translations that would fill in the gaps in the workload for freelance translators. Nicholas Ostler also asks the question — what is good enough? — and concludes that it is crucially dependent on the users’ thirst for the content, and that in turn comes from its desirability, possibly magnified by its inaccessibility. In his persona perspective column entitled Trusty Words are Not Fine, Ostler notes that children watching foreign language cartoons may hardly realise they are not comprehending the dialogue, to the point of beginning a passive acquaintance with the language. He then takes us on a journey back to

Every year TAUS brings the translation industry together not just to discuss and celebrate innovation and the great game changers, but to brainstorm and find a roadmap to solutions and an enhanced user experience.

Leader by Mick Rooney

one of the first mass markets of translation. “Something similar to this unconscious uptake seems to have characterized one of the earliest markets in mass translation — the growing availability of Buddhist texts in Chinese over the first seven centuries of the Common Era.” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a well-known spaghetti western from the 1960s. It’s also the framework translator and consultant Luigi Muzii uses in his persona perspective to examine innovation and user experience. Yet again in this issue, we are reminded that progress in any industry requires more than just a platform of discussion or innovation alone, but also the sharing of ideas and data, collaboration, and a willingness to learn from diverse user experiences and needs.

TAUS Review #7 introduces a new feature for this edition, Translation Profile, where we invite language and service professionals to answer a series of questions about their career and views on the industry and technology. We are pleased to say that Senior Translator and Language Lead Johanna Lindroth at Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd (STP) is first onto the TAUS stage.

Luigi begins The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with some lessons he has learned after thirty-four years in the language services and technology industry. No two clients are ever the same and disruptive innovation often comes from new external influencers, rather than from established industry players, and innovation is customer-driven. However, debating innovation alone is not enough.

Send your comments or questions to review@taus.net

“If this was enough, the translation industry would be second to none, but its players have always been lagging behind their customers.” The language services and technology industry

has witnessed nearly 200 startups over the last decade, and that includes nearly $40m in funding in just the last nine months. Smartling’s founder and CEO Jack Welde took to Twitter during February to reminds us that “Everybody wants to be a translation marketplace,” however well-prepared or long that new startup lasts.

We finish off this quarter’s issue with the TAUS Review interview. Anne-Maj van der Meer caught up with Guylaine Tritton, a Solutions Architect at localization provider Alpha CRC for a detailed interview about the working life of a Solutions Architect (and what exactly that is), the bridge that still exists between academia and the translation industry, interoperability and the XLIFF standard.

Mick Rooney Mick joined the TAUS team in 2015. He is a content strategist and in charge of TAUS localization projects. Mick’s career has spanned three decades, from working in various roles in the entertainment industry, retail, warehousing and logistics; to journalism and consultancy work in the publishing industry.

News Google Will Fully Integrate AI Deep Learning into Google Translate Some may not realise that Google Translate already harnesses deep learning technology. It’s used to power immediate visual translations when you use smartphone camera to translate words. Artificial intelligence deep learning technology is not used with Google’s standard text translator. However, that is set to change. Google Senior Fellow, Jeff Dean, revealed in an interview as part of the Structure Data conference held in San Francisco during March that the Google Brain team has been working directly with the Google Translate team “to scale out experiments with translation based on deep learning.” The work is based on technology that was the subject of a 2014 paper — Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. You can find out more on what Dean had to say at the Structure Data conference here.

European Union Awards Translation Services Contracts to 31 Vendors At the end of January, the European Union awarded contracts to 31 language service providers with a total value of EUR 67.5m. The contracts were originally tendered out by the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Parliament on behalf of the European Court of Auditors, the Committee of Regions, and the European Economic and Social Committee. The contracts covered the supply of translation services of documents “relating to the interests and activities of the European Union.” Luxembourg-based Amplexor was awarded nine separate job with a value of EUR 33.7 million. The original contract notices included a maximum duration of four years and will be awarded for an initial period of one year, to be renewed tacitly on a yearly basis.

Why Don’t Companies Invest in Translation? Portuguese translator Teresa Sousa has been looking at studies of a different kind in one of her latest blog posts. In one study, carried out by Alexandra Albuquerque, a professor at ISCAP, she learned that a strategy used by companies is to hire staff with foreign language skills to deal with multilingual communication situations, where ad hoc mediation skills (translation or interpretation) are expected. And while companies don’t always invest a great deal in translation, they are still aware of how important it is to speak the client’s language. This leads Sousa to the killer question: “... if companies understand its importance, why do so few of them invest in translation services?” However, Albuquerque’s study concluded that it was down to two main reasons, cost reduction and confidentiality. Sousa sourced further and read another study by JukkaPekka Peltonen. The conclusions in this study were that in-house employees undertake a lot of translation work for their companies, which is not always included as part of their workload. The same employees are sometimes not always skilled enough or best resourced to carry out translation work and this ultimately impacts on their other work. All of this has its own emotional impact on employees, leaving them feeling anxious about the time and quality of the work produced, and taken for granted. Sousa herself draws the conclusion that the onus is on companies “to make decisions and implement a language management strategy with the best benefit-cost ratio.” You can read more on her blog post.

News

Translated Selected as One of Europe’s Fastest Growing Technology Businesses There is no doubt that the translation sector is now one of the leading growth industries for technology and innovation. Another sign of this is the announcement that Translated, a company founded to bring innovation to translation services, has been selected as one of the 50 fastest growing European technology businesses, alongside companies such as Alfresco, SoundCloud, and Elasticsearch, by Tech Tour. Tech Tour is a platform which brings together investors, corporate strategic partners, and high-tech entrepreneurs. The companies on the Tech Tour Growth 50 list were selected based on quantitative parameters such as revenue, growth, economic value, and qualitative measures. They were judged by a committee of leading investors and advisors from Good Energies, Almaz Capital, Endeavour Vision, Gimv, Amadeus Capital, Bank of America, Accel Partners, DN Capital, Earlybird, Silverpeak, International Venture Club and the World Economic Forum. Translated was founded in 1999 and CEO Marco Trombetti commented: “With Translated we have always aimed to revolutionize the translation industry, leveraging big data and artificial intelligence to provide efficient, quality translation services. This award is a further incentive to continue on this path.”

Microsoft Neural Network Translation Goes Offline for Android Neural networks are systems of computers capable of thinking and understanding like humans. While neural networks have been around for a long time, it is only in recent years that scientists are fully harnessing them for practical applications. For a long time Microsoft has been researching ways to best use these neural networks for language translation. However, it is only since 2013 that Microsoft has focussed on language and translation as its first commercial implementation of neural networks. Microsoft’s translate engine is powered by neural networks and it is of course part of the Bing search engine. In our roundup last month, TAUS reported that Skype’s real-time translator tool had been rolled out to desktop users and dedicated apps for iOS and Android. This month further features are rolled out, one of which allows users of the Android and iOS translate apps to get real-world translations, wherever they are, including offline. Users are required to download free offline packs for the specific language they want translation for. The online version of the Android translator app was released in 2015, and this new offline version provides ‘near online-quality’ translations.

The Quest for the Translation Unicorn by Isabella Massardo

In February 2015, TAUS CEO Jaap van der Meer published a blog post entitled “The Brains but not the Guts.” In this opinion post, Jaap van der Meer lamented the European Commission’s lack of courage regarding technology. The Quest for Funding What prompted the post: in a swift and unpredictable move, the European Commission decided to put the kibosh on the funding allocated for research in translation technology. Only some of the projects that had been developed over two decades (Moses, Eurotra and Verbmobil, to name just a few) had found a following among a small number of startups. As a result of the European Commission’s decision, Google and Microsoft had the translation-technology field all to themselves: The New World’s innocence and gutsiness had defeated the Old World’s traditionalist mentality. In more recent news, the European Union issued a tender worth EUR 5.8 million. This represents the EU’s intention to select translation tools and services, as well as test of a number of machine translation systems for eventual purchase. This raises the question: Which translation organization(s) will have the necessary resources to win this tender? Will it be a “unicorn” translation company or a more traditional one?

How to Spot a Unicorn In startup lingo, a unicorn is a private company valued at over $1 billion, although it doesn’t generate any profit, at least not in the beginning. According to VentureBeat, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite technology websites, as of January 2016 229 unicorns exist in the wild. This includes AirBnB and Uber. (Facebook, by the way, is considered a super-unicorn, even though it’s not a startup anymore.) The highest concentration of unicorns is in the Silicon Valley, although some have been spotted in China (Xiaomi, for example) and India (Flipkart) as well. The impressive amount of capital is one of the two main characteristics of a unicorn, the second being a new generation of disruptive technology. But consider the abovementioned companies more closely: Is the disruption really technological—or is it more related to new business models?

In a swift and unpredictable move, the European Commission decided to put the kibosh on the funding allocated for research in translation technology.

The Quest for the Translation Unicorn by Isabella Massardo

The Convergence Era Versus the Unicorn Era Let’s flash back to 2013, when TAUS predicted the future of the translation industry. You can see the graphic here above. That prediction is now a reality: We are approaching the year 2020 and swiftly entering the Convergence Era, where translation is so embedded in everything we do that it’s becoming almost invisible.

We are approaching the year 2020 and swiftly entering the Convergence Era, where translation is so embedded in everything we do that it’s becoming almost invisible.

Take a closer look at your mobile phone, tablet or what have you: You will find a translation functionality on every device, on every screen, in every app. And the choice to have

a text translated or not is entirely yours. Did you know that most of the translated words is machine-generated and delivered to you in real time? Now, with the advent of the Internet of Things, whereby billions of objects (“enchanted objects”, as David Rose from the MIT Media Lab calls them: objects that make the fabric of our daily life and that, through technology, can meet our needs for information, directions etc.…) are connected to one another, translation is fulfilling its potential: becoming an omnipresent, yet invisible bridge between people and cultures. Unfortunately, the European translation industry hasn’t really entered the Convergence Era yet. It is still at the integration phase (around 2010 in our graphic). At the moment we see technological partnerships being forged in the cloud, through numerous API integrations, which bring, in turn, a good number of benefits - new customer acquisitions, increased revenue, new service offerings and, in some cases,

The Quest for the Translation Unicorn by Isabella Massardo

resource sharing - none of which has to do with the much coveted technological disruption. Unicorns in the Translation Industry? In the translation industry, the first wave of technological disruption took place some time ago with the development of statistical machine translation - notably, Moses. Google Translate, entering the translation stage in 2007, was the original disruptor that opened the doors to cheap translation available anytime, crowdsourcing and the sharing economy. The question that is on everybody’s mind is: Who are the unicorns of the translation industry? Can Gengo or Unbabel bear this moniker? Text United, a somewhat older player promising “a new, chaos-free way to get translations for your whole business”? Maybe Say-Hello, a platform where you can “order and receive translations from native speakers around the world”? Localize, boasting clients of note like Uber? Or, again, the Chinese Stepes, billing itself as “the Uber of translation services”?

Google Translate was the original disruptor that opened the doors to cheap translation available anytime, crowdsourcing and the sharing economy.

In reality, the admired Uber business model is a more modern replica of the same old “end client-intermediary-service provider” chain that has been applied for years now in the translation industry. Unicorn or Cockroach? Tech Tour is an organization whose goal is to champion innovation in the European region and to gather funding and support for the most innovative companies. In March 2016, Tech Tour presented a list of the 50 fastest-growing European companies selected among a long list of 151 organizations.

Among them, only one belongs to the translation industry. It’s Translated SRL, the Italian company that has given the translation industry technologies like MyMemory and MateCat (developed with EU financial contribution) and the same company that in 2015 was listed on 4033th place by Inc. 5000 Europe’s list of fastest-growing technology companies. A baby EUnicorn, according to VentureBeat.

The question that is on everybody’s mind is: Who are the unicorns of the translation industry?

But the next focus shift is on the European horizon: Business Insider UK warns us that investors are becoming weary of the unicorn bubble and are more interested now in what Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, called the “cockroaches”, companies that grow slowly and steadily, build interesting products, keep an eye on costs and add fewer but smarter people to their teams. We look forward to seeing cockroaches spring up in the translation industry.

Send your comments or questions to europe@taus.net

Isabella Massardo Isabella Massardo is a localization professional.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Serge Awono

The Power Of The Internet For The Localization Industry In Sub-Saharan Africa Africa

represents

undisputed

digital

potential.

It has 167 million internet users and about 70% of the population are using a mobile phone. Africa has also a GDP take of 18 billion USD for information and communication technologies. Potential is increasingly tapped by state institutions, multinationals, business people and developers; better, this tool has gone beyond its initial target and now provides increasing population access to certain services.

Digital Africa:

technology

promoted

innovation

from the mobile phone which facilitates

bank transactions and payment of bills, to the

Internet

which makes the purchase of the latest

goods much easier.

Whether buying stuff online,

exchanging, working... the ordinary citizen can now enjoy reserved privileges.

Digital Technology Trends and Scenarios Sub-Saharan Africa, which has long been lagging behind technology-wise, is gradually catching up in the fields of telecommunications and the Internet. According to the Cameroonian Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT), the telecommunications market in Africa is expressed mainly through the mobile due to difficulties in accessing fixed networks. A boom

in development of telecommunications and a change in mobile operatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; monopoly has been observed in many countries. To date, 160 mobile network operators occupy the telecommunications landscape of the continent of Africa, which is an average of three operators per country. The continent has witnessed a boom in mobile telephony. In 2013, 66% of mobile telephone subscribers were recorded (617,279,080 people) and half of these mobile phone users were accessing the Internet through their mobile networks (USB, internet data, Wi-Fi connectors). We should nevertheless note that despite this strong development of the telecommunications landscape in Africa, the mobile broadband penetration rate is still very low.

Source: Development of telecommunications companies in emerging countries, Bearing Point 2013

In the context of this very slow development of the digital economy in Africa, several ICT professions and practices have difficulties emerg-

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Serge Awono

ing. This has been the case with localization, which refers to content adaptation to accommodate various cultures and cultural preferences. It also includes language translation and adjusting content to capture the meaning of the message, as well as consideration of various web design features such as the use of appropriate colours, navigation tools, preferences etc.

According to the Cameroonian Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT), the telecommunications market in Africa is expressed mainly through the mobile due to difficulties in accessing fixed networks.

Development And Localization of Software in an Environment where the Internet Penetration Rate Remains Very Low Parts of the African continent have the lowest internet penetration rate in the world, according to a map presented by two researchers at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Ralph Straumann and Mark Graham summarised on a world map all the countries with the lowest Internet penetration rates thanks to data obtained from 2013 World Bank development indicators and those of Natural Earth1. The researchers — who highlight that there is no threshold that can enable us to call Internet penetration adequate — confess to have done this job to identify those who have Internet access and those who don’t. 1 Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10 million (1 cm = 100 km), 1:50 million, and 1:110 million map scales. Featuring closely integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth one can make a variety of maps with all commonly used cartography and GIS software. Natural Earth is designed to meet the needs of experienced cartographers using a variety of software applications

This map highlights most of the regions that are not connected. According to the study published on the website of the GEONET2 project, the core of this low penetration rate is subSaharan Africa. These facts help us realise how difficult the development and localization of software is in an environment where people have almost no real access to the Internet. It has been reported that more than 20 billion devices in the world use apps and software that are localized in several languages and cultures and connected through the Internet. African governments should invest in a fast and reliable Internet connection if they are concerned with the evolvement of the software industry, more, they should strive to make it accessible to anybody. The growth of the Internet has a huge impact on the software industry, from the ease of creating new businesses to the processes that companies use to develop, distribute and support their products. Software architectures and platforms for web-based applications differ significantly from traditional desktop and client-server applications, and require a new generation of programming language and development tools. Developers make extensive use of open source software, par2 The GEONET project at the Oxford Internet Institute investigates the geographies, drivers, and effects of Sub-Saharan Africa’s emerging ‘information economies. It asks whether these economies represent a new era of development, and how information and communication technologies impact on older processes of dependence, underdevelopment, and economic extraversion.

We should nevertheless note that despite this strong development of the telecommunications landscape in Africa, the mobile broadband penetration rate is still very low.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Serge Awono

ticularly at the infrastructure level of their applications. Translation and localization teams can easily collaborate online, either on free collaborative translation platforms like Pootle3 or paid ones like Smartling, using translation and localization management tools. Development teams can easily use web-based tools for collaboration. Product m a r ke t i n g now emphasizes attracting prospective customers to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website. Companies can release products over the Internet, which seems to be the more efficient and less expensive way to sell their products.

It is now clear that the proliferation of mobiles on the continent and increased access to the Internet network are testimony to the great economic and social transformation in African societies.

With these facts in mind, there is no more doubt about how useful a fast and reliable Internet connection could be to the localization and translation industry in sub-Saharan Africa. The impact of the Internet in the current localization industry is incalculable. It has revolutionized the way software developers and localizers work and communicate, made it possible for millions of people to use software and applications translated into their native languages, and enabled the expansion of hundreds of other language related professions.

societies. Nevertheless, African Governments should endeavour to improve infrastructure and build competencies for the construction of a sustainable ICT industry and the promotion of research, development and innovation in the digital sector to have a competitive advantage over other regions in the world. This development will pave the way for better localization opportunities and use of software applications, giving more chances to translators and localizers to collaborate, use online tools, meet, share experiences, and more importantly, improve their skills.

Send your comments or questions to africa@taus.net

Serge Awono Serge

holds

translation Institute

Interpretation

African Governments Should Take Action It is now clear that the proliferation of mobiles on the continent and increased access to the Internet network are testimony to the great economic and social transformation in African

from

Diploma the

Higher

Translation

and

(Cameroon)

and a Certificate in software localization from the University of Washington (USA). He has been working as a Senior Translator & Interpreter at the Ministry of Social Affairs - Cameroon for the past 5 years and started working as a localization consultant for Africa in

3 Pootle is an online translation management tool with translation interface. Pootle is intended for use by free software translators, but it is usable in other situations. Its main focus is on localization of applicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; graphical user interfaces as opposed to document translation.

December 2011. Currently he is the founder Quezil, a Cameroon-based language services company where services like Translation, Interpretation, Localization and Proofreading are offered. Most major European and African languages are handled.

The Linguist’s Perspective by Nicholas Ostler

Trusty Words are Not Fine… Let

us step back a pace or two from users’ ex-

perience of machine translation.

Judging the MT output

quality, or even the acceptability, of

is very far from the application of an absolute scale.

What

pendent on the

“good enough” is users’ thirst for

crucially de-

the content,

and that in turn comes from its desirability, possibly magnified by its inaccessibility.

Children watching cartoon films with dialogue in foreign languages may hardly notice that they are not comprehending the soundtrack, though they may gradually become at ease with it, to the extent of beginning a passive acquaintance with the language. I can’t claim personal experience of this, because in my childhood, even in the early days of television, animations were always dubbed — but Czech films, exotic as they were in England, were sufficiently common to make it clear that KONEC meant “The End”. Something similar to this unconscious uptake seems to have characterized one of the earliest markets in mass translation — the growing availability of Buddhist texts in Chinese over the first seven centuries of the Common Era. The transmission of Buddhism to Chinesespeakers began ca. 68 AD with two Indian sages Kāçyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna. Accommodated in the White Horse Monastery in the then capital Luoyang, they somehow Did bilingual produced a Chiconversation inspire an original nese text, the in 42 SecChinese guide Sutra tions. There is written by early no known Indian converts? original. Did bilingual conversation inspire an original Chinese guide written by early converts? Although it contains some basic technical details of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, it is mostly made up of

telling similes: an earnest pilgrim, for example, is like a log in a river, inevitably progressing if he avoids entanglements. After this, Buddhist monasteries started to appear across China. Knowledge of Buddhism grew in an environment where “the Way” (though a less active and resistive one than the Buddha’s) had been preLokakṣema pared by translated several Taoism, and “the Law” advanced level of righteous texts from Sanskrit behaviour to Chinese. He had likewasn’t a nativewise been speaker of either laid out by language. The the domitranslations were nant official imperfect but p h i l o s o p hy of Legalism. accepted by the B u d d h i s t Chinese converts as texts did not the best available. scruple to avoid these central terms (Dawh and Puap in early Middle Chinese), but took them over and tried to give them new content. Although the Buddha and nirvana remained as borrowed terms, by and large the attempt was made to cloak the

The Linguist’s Perspective by Nicholas Ostler

new teaching in Chinese words. Buddhism was characterized as the “Dark Learning” on the edge of Chinese wisdom. Between 178 and 189 AD, the Kuṣāṇa scholar Lokakṣema translated several advanced level texts from Sanskrit to Chinese. He wasn’t a native-speaker of either language. The translations were imperfect but accepted by the Chinese converts as the best available: the troubling times of disorder at the end of the Three Kingdoms period would have made the Buddha’s serenity highly desirable. Where we have both the Sanskrit originals, and the Chinese versions, we can anatomize the translation process, identifying the mistakes that were made, and hence the limitations on even the most learned foreigners’ knowledge of Sanskrit in this period. Seishi Karashima has analysed Lokakṣema’s version of the Lotus Sutra, and Daniel Boucher Dharmarakṣa’s version of the same, made some 100 years later at the close of the third century. The work was typically undertaken at cities such as Kucha on the Silk Road, not then in China, where multilingual help could perhaps be more easily found.

Yet despite all this gathered expertise, the resulting text is full of mistakenly recognized words (attributable to inexact learning of Sanskrit phonology), and gaps in knowledge of Sanskrit morphology.

ered and issued the 27 chapters of Lotus Sutra , conferring it upon the lay Buddhists [4 named Chinese] who together took it down in writing. There were also another seven Chinese who “took pleasure in assisting” and more Indians, Kucheans and an Indian who collated the translation. Yet despite all this gathered expertise, the resulting text is full of mistakenly recognized words (attributable to inexact learning of Sanskrit phonology), and gaps in knowledge of Sanskrit morphology. Even bhūta (being) is mixed up with buddha (buddha), and jñāna (knowledge) with dhyāna (concentration, zen) and dāna (donation). The present participle for Atmanepada voice, ending in –māna-, (or Prakrit –mina-) is often confused with manas (mind); and the Indians’ much-beloved abstraction ending –tva is taken as a reduced form of stūpa (burial mound). Chinese Buddhist had to learn from some heavily garbled texts, which could talk of wú zhuó tǎ “the no-attachment stupa” where the original was arhatva (being enlightened). To an extent, the errors are mitigated by Dharmarakṣa’s spread-betting: he doubly

It is particularly instructive to look at Dharmarakṣa’s work, because we are told that it was the product of a regulated production system, led by the chief translator as presiding sage: On [15 September 286] the Tokharian bodhisattva from Dunhuang (a outpost of China), Dharmarakṣa, holding the foreign scriptures in his hand, orally deliv-

The Linguist’s Perspective by Nicholas Ostler

translates words where his vague grasp of phonology makes them consciously ambiguous to him: so, e.g. lokavidu (world knower) is translated as 世之聖父 (world’s sage father), since it might just possibly have been lokapitu (worldfather). This could be a useful, if humbling, addition to strategy for machine translation!

Translation is an intermediary skill, which invites its audience step outside their comfort zone, and recognize truths of foreign origin.

Yet despite this noisy channel of communication, Buddhist translations continued to inspire Chinese converts. (It did not hurt that the Tabgach Turks who conquered China in the 450s made Buddhism their official religion.) And with the sustained contacts between Indians and Chinese (and many others) along the Silk Road, the reliability of bilingual translators improved markedly. In the 300 years between Kumārajīva, also from Kucha, (402) and the Chinese pilgrims Xuanzang (ca. 650) and Yijing (703), the Diamond Sutra, always a favourite, was translated six times, apparently with full understanding and — especially in Kumārajīva’s case — with considerable style in the target language. But in a way translation was the victim of its own improvement. Thereafter, the Chinese reverted to their long-term norm, wrote their own sutras, and gave up refreshing their understanding from foreign texts altogether. Transla-

tion is an intermediary skill, which invites its audience step outside their comfort zone, and recognize truths of foreign origin. It must live dangerously, and (to complete the Taoist dictum in our title) “fine words are not trusty.”

• See further in my recent book “Passwords to Paradise – how languages have re-invented world religions” (New York and London: Bloomsbury 2016). • More details of the Chinese translators’ struggles to convert texts in Indian languages can be found at • Boucher, Daniel, 1998, Gāndhārī and the earliest Chinese Buddhist translations reconsidered: the case of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra, Journal of the American Oriental Society 118.4, pp. 47190 • Karashima, Seishi, 1992, The Textual Study of the Chinese Versions of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra in the Light of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Versions. Bibliotheca Indologica et Buddhologica 3. Tokyo: Sankibo Press

Send your comments or questions to linguist@taus.net

Nicholas Ostler Nicholas Ostler is author of three books on language history, Empires of the Word (2005), Ad Infinitum (on Latin - 2007), and The Last Lingua Franca (2010). He is also Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a global charitable organization registered in England and Wales. A research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, he has also been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and L.N. Gumilev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Latin, Greek, philosophy and economics, and a 1979 Ph.D. in linguistics from M.I.T. He is an academician in the Russian Academy of Linguistics.

The Journalist’s Perspective by Lane Greene

Underserved Market for Small Translations Customer experience of translation services — the theme of this edition of TAUS Review — is not an easy topic for a journalist to write about. But this itself could be considered strange. Why would a journalist not be a natural user of translation? In an ever more globalized world, whatever your beat, be it politics, business, finance or culture, and no matter what your first language, much of what is important to most journalists will be happening in another language. The average reporter in my position has a few options. Imagine discovering a piece of background research or a primary source written in another language. It could be useful, it might not. The options for finding out are a mixed bag. Putting the source into a free online translator, like those offered by Google or Bing, will almost certainly result in a usable gist — and nothing more. At this point, we have determined nothing more than that the source might be useful. (It still might not.) At this point, our reporter might get truly creative, and call in a favor with a friend who speaks the source language. “Could you take a look at this and tell me if you see anything about…?”

Why would a journalist not be a natural user of translation?

But the problems here are obvious. If the document is long, the friend may not have time to scan properly. But more importantly, the friend will not really have an exact feel for what the reporter is looking for. The specialist knowledge is locked in the journalist’s head, while a half-decent knowledge of the language (but no professional translation skills) is all the friend can provide. Even all this, it should be said, is a rare scenario. Many people in my profession will simply

not look for documents in another language, or upon finding them, will simply look elsewhere for something easier to use. Needless to say, most English-speaking journalists — with the exception of experienced foreign correspondents — will not be fluent in another language. And many non-English-speaking ones will speak English as their only foreign language, and nothing else. So most of the world’s reporters, though they would eagerly acknowledge the importance of globalization to their jobs, accept silently that there is much of the world’s thinking that they will never have access to. Why do more journalists not think to do what many readers here would do? If you need a problem solved, you call a specialist: mechanic for the car, plumber for the drain, Genius Bar for the Mac, translator for

Needless to say, most Englishspeaking journalists — with the exception of experienced foreign correspondents — will not be fluent in another language. 21

The Journalist’s Perspective by Lane Greene

the foreign text. Yet I literally do not know of a single journalist who has ever told me that they have paid for the help of a professional translator to understand a source text. Budgets could be of course one reason: perks, entertainment and even salaries are all under pressure. But news-gathering requires some expenses be paid, and headquarters still pays for travel, internet connectivity, offices and the like, the basic tools of the trade. In fact, news organizations make it clear that they consider translation important in another sense — when they translate out of their source languages.

So most of the world’s reporters, though they would eagerly acknowledge the importance of globalization to their jobs, accept silently that there is much of the world’s thinking that they will never have access to.

My own employer, The Economist, has highquality translations of a selection of articles into Chinese (simplified and traditional, even) for a new digital publication, the Global Business Review. A controversial Economist essay on the uses and abuses of the history of the Second World War was translated into Korean, Chinese and Japanese, with quality rigorously checked to make sure that the original was not skewed in any sensitive ways. We are not alone in such endeavors: a highprofile investigation by the New York Times into the hazards of workers in America’s nail salons was translated into Korean, Chinese and Spanish, complete with a social-media effort (tweets and such in all three languages) to reach the people most affected. The series has been attacked on the credibility of its underlying facts, but it remains nonethe-

less an example of what publications do right when they take advantage of their role in a global and multilingual world. Even if only bigger publications like mine and the Times have the needed money, they can show the way and act as a lodestar for the industry. Why, then, do I never hear of colleagues taking advantage of translation in the other direction? Part of the blame, surely, lies with journalists themselves. We do not think of availing ourselves of sources in other languages because of that biggest of mental barriers: habit. But some of the responsibility must surely lie with the lack of an accessible, well-known, well-advertised service for small and medium-sized translation jobs. Amazon got us used to buying books (and eventually, anything they could ship) online. AirBnB has gotten many spare rooms and vacation-apartments rented, creating a market for

The Journalist’s Perspective by Lane Greene

many small merchants where hardly any existed before. Uber has gotten millions of people into strangers’ cars. Yet nobody has quite figured out the model for getting the world’s armies of freelance translators together with a world of potential clients. The businesstranslation industry that readers of TAUS Review will know so well could be just the tip of the iceberg; millions of customers, journalists and so many others, could constitute a market for small translations that would fill in the gaps in the workload for freelance translators.

Yet nobody has quite figured out the model for getting the world’s armies of freelance translators together with a world of potential clients.

A translator I met in Brazil asked for my support for his idea to get a startup off the ground; it would pool several potential clients looking for a translation together until they could joint-

ly fund a project. Each would pay only a small amount for the translation; the total would give the winning bidder on the translation a nonetheless decent income. I found it a good idea, and told friends and Tweeted about it. Sadly, my contact’s project got just 2% of its requested funding on a Brazilian version of Kickstarter. I don’t know who exactly is to blame: people in professions like mine for insufficient demand, or more professional backers for lack of vision, or my acquaintance for not getting the pitch quite right. But what’s clear is that more good ideas are needed to reach a potential world of translation customers who — like my colleagues in journalism — just don’t know what they’re missing yet.

Send your comments or questions to journalist@taus.net

Lane Greene Lane

Greene

business

and

correspondent Economist

finance for

The

based

Berlin, and he also writes frequently about language for the newspaper and online. His book on the politics of language around the world, You Are What You Speak, was published by Random House in Spring 2011. He contributed a chapter on culture to the Economist book “Megachange”, and his writing has also appeared in many other publications. He is an outside advisor to Freedom House, and from 2005 to 2009 was an adjunct assistant professor in the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.

• The ribbon, particularly for new users and others who are not aware of all the settings in the old menu structure • Much more accurate Concordance search results • Speed improvements • Virtual merge and autosave • Improved display filter • Easier access to the various help resources • New TM fields and field values are immediately available • Very stable Nora Diaz Freelance Translator - Mexico

Join the conversation noradiaz.blogspot.co.uk @NoraDiazB #Studio2014

www.sdl.com/studio2014 www.translationzone.com/studio2014 Take it further, share projects with Studio GroupShare 24 SDL www.translationzone.com/groupshare2014

Purchase or upgrade to SDL Trados Studio 2014 today /sdltrados

The Translator’s Perspective by John Moran

Bill Gates

once said that intellectual property

has the shelf life of a banana.

This

might not be

true in life sciences where molecules for useful drugs are patented and in disciplines where the fruit of an engineer’s labour can be held in the hand, but in software development patents provide only limited protection.

This is because — as every programmer knows — there are many ways of writing code to do the same thing. For example, the simplified text editor called Omm I am using to write this piece on my Macbook could be recoded any number of times to produce software with exactly the same features.

I’m not completely against patents (even software ones) because I understand that R&D requires investment. The problem is that they are expensive to defend so their advantage to a small business with a limited legal budget is itself limited. Using a strategy called patent crowding a large company can easily register several similar software patents. If the little guy tries to defend his patent, the corporate with deeper pockets can threaten spurious counter-claims that the little guy’s software infringes one of their patents. Is it even possible to steal a software idea? I had my passport stolen once on a train in Barcelona about 15 years ago. I only had one passport prior to the theft and afterwards I had none. Presumably the thief was not the kind of person you hope will marry into your family. He stole the item safe in the knowledge that his gain would be my loss and we can only speculate that this did not cost him sleep.

If the little guy tries to defend his patent, the corporate with deeper pockets can threaten spurious counterclaims that the little guy’s software infringes one of their patents.

Software is not like this. If someone looks at a new feature in a CAT tool and thinks

“oh, that’s a good idea, it would save our users time too — I think we’ll put that on our roadmap,” has the originator of the idea lost anything other than a Unique Selling Point? I would argue not and USPs are nebulous concepts at the best of times. This is what makes software development in the translation industry so much fun. It is a small industry relative to say oil and gas, aeronautics or the automotive industries. The number of desktop-based CAT tools used by more than a few thousand translators can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The webbased CAT tools that are often used for shorter texts like marketing materials are more numerous, but the community of people behind them is still pretty small relative to — say — Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management systems like SAP and SalesForce. If there is a new useful feature or plugin for Trados, we translators don’t have to wait too long to see it in memoQ and vice versa. Everyone has to stay on their toes. As a translator, I hate tags. Really. There is nothing good I can say about them. They get in the way of my productivity and rarely, if ever, provide me with useful information to do my job. I have any number of ways to deal with them. Sometimes I copy to the target segment and overtype the German or delete the German between the tags and insert my translation. Sometimes I use the next tag

The Translatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Perspective by John Moran

function in OmegaT. In some CAT tools I just copy and paste the damn things, one by one, from the source into the target segment after I have typed or dictated the target sentence. Just thinking about that lost time makes me angry. I could be using the time to climb mountains or binge on Netflix. Thanks to MT because there is a solution to this problem, though. In the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, a while ago, we applied for a grant to develop a version of OmegaT that uses word alignment data to implement a feature to project tags from the source into the target segment once the target segment has been typed (or dictated). We called it dynamic segment-level tag projection. The idea is to use word alignment information between the source and target sentences to guess where to put tags. Unfortunately, the grant was turned down and I never got to test the theory. That happens sometimes. Some time later, I had a private dinner in Dublin with Jack Welde, the CEO of Smartling. I explained the idea and told him to do whatever he wanted with it as I had decided to focus my attention on Transpiral (my translation agency) and a translator productivity analytics product rather than an editor. Jack understood the benefit to translators immediately and was enthusiastic as it fit in with his world view that MT has much to offer translators beyond just post-editing. He in turn shared it with a computational linguist called Spence Green who was working on a new kind of translation editor that uses interactive MT. I have no doubt that Spence would have implemented a tag projection feature in Lilt without my involvement. It is an obvious thing to do once you have word-alignment data, but Jackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enthusi-

The idea is to use word alignment information between the source and target sentences to guess where to put tags.

asm for the idea on behalf of Smartling shortened the timeline. You can test it for yourself on Lilt. com.

Did I lose anything by discussing the idea with Jack? No. I shared it in exchange for a delicious bowl of Kimchi in my favourite restaurant (Ukiyo in Dublin)!

Did I lose anything by discussing the idea with Jack? No. I shared it in exchange for a delicious bowl of Kimchi in my favourite restaurant (Ukiyo in Dublin)! Translators share ideas all the time when they request new features in CAT tools. Now I and the translators who work for Transpiral can use the Lilt.com editor to translate with state-of-the-art interactive machine translation without having to muck about with tags. Score!

Send your comments or questions to translator@taus.net

John Moran John

Moran

software

engineer

translator, and

the

owner of Transpiral, a technical translation

agency

based

Dublin, Ireland. He is also a published researcher and conference speaker on how computational linguistic technologies impact on words per hour productivity.

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly After

thirty-four years in the language services

and technology industry, thing or two.

First,

two

identical

think

I’ve

clients

learned a

exist,

the

experience of one is never the same as the other.

Second,

no disruptive innovation has ever come

from industry players, with all innovations being customer-driven.

Innovation

is actually a much debated topic at

trade events. If this was enough, the translation industry

would

second

none,

but

its

players have always been lagging behind their customers.

The Good There’s no evidence that Henry Ford ever uttered, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Yet, this is often used to support the idea of innovations coming from prophetic visionaries. Indeed, one of the five dangerous lessons to learn from Steve Jobs says, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And, as Evgeny Morozov observed, “Apple’s most incredible trick, accomplished by marketing as much as by philosophy, is to allow its customers to feel as if they are personally making history — that they are a sort of spiritual-historical elite, even if there are many millions of them.” Another blow to the customer feedback myth recently came from the toy industry, when Mattel unveiled curvy, petite and tall versions of its Barbie doll, to be sold also in an assortment of skin tones, eye colors and hairstyles. After decades of criticism for Barbie’s unrealistic shape, Mattel is wriggling to curb the double-digit declining of sales through a wider demographic and keep the doll relevant to little girls who do not look like it and play with other toys, maybe making their own with 3D printers and design apps.

So, customer feedback could be as naïve to foolishness as insightful to hampering. The Bad Perception is everything. Perceived quality is so critical and pivotal that products are increasingly engineered around features that could convey the perception of ‘well-done’ items. In fact, French carmaker PSA publicly acknowledged that the benchmark for perceived quality in development and production processes was the market leader for its quality-evoking features.

More than prediction or factual knowledge, Alec Ross’s article is wishful thinking.

Seven years after President Obama’s commitment to “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation,” in an article for the WSJ, a seemingly forgetful Alec Ross, former senior adviser for innovation to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote that “the language barrier is about to fall” and that, “within 10 years, earpieces will whisper nearly simultaneous translations — and help knit the world closer together.” More than prediction or factual knowledge, Alec Ross’s article is wishful thinking. Maybe he read the WSJ interview to

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

new technology that translates Bibles into any language. What about IBM’s Watson for POTUS, then, implementing transhumanism? At a 1971 meeting of PARC, American computer scientist Alan Kay said, “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Although largely attributed also to a wide array of personalities, this is a conceited lie. Predicting the future consists in seeing something that is already there and most people cannot see yet or possibly don’t want to see. So, Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of machines reaching human levels of translation quality by the year 2029 is definitely more trustworthy.

Barbara Beskind soliciting “a device where you speak into it in one language and it comes out in another” to help immigrants caring for the elderly speak better English. Or maybe he read of ili. However, Mr. Ross is right when writing that “the research and commercialization for these breakthroughs are coming from the intersection of the private sector and the defense and intelligence communities,” since most of today’s technologies are heirs of publicly funded — mainly defense — projects. Yet, user experience is not a primary interest for the military. Also, he is not alone in envisioning a device to “instantaneously communicate with people in the farthest reaches of the world without breaking a sweat” and “even a single credit hour of exploratory language class.” Indeed, the excitement for gadgets crumbling down language barriers is real, if the UK’s Independent relaunched on Mr. Ross’s enthusiasm and financial service entrepreneur Tony Amaradio declared his profound admiration for

The Ugly Innovation is the birth of time, it is “only” an interpretation of the new, almost always in continuity with the past, a matter of path dependence. This is why innovation does not amount to new technology; indeed, in many cases, technology is only a part of the innovation process, not even the most important. Bitcoin was supposed to transform the global currency system, but, in the words of former core developer Mike Hearn, it has failed, and from being a solution to the opaqueness, inefficiency and expensiveness of currency and transaction systems, it has become a resource for criminals. What has this to do with customer experience and translation?

Most of today’s technologies are heirs of publicly funded — mainly defense — projects. Yet, user experience is not a primary interest for the military.

To paraphrase a largely disputed statement attributed to Albert Einstein, Bitcoin was de-

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

vised using the same kind of logic used to shape those systems, and this is close to what happened with translation, especially with translation quality assessment.

packages to provide subtitles and narration in different languages, although strictly post-edited by bilingual journalists before broadcasting. The driver? Facing cuts.

Also, for decades, machine translation should have been solved in a few years riding technology advances. Indeed, despite the admirable progress, it is only seen to allow people abroad to order a beer or find the bathroom. Ultimately, users are getting increasingly more tolerant of inaccuracies, to the point of no return in technological naturalization.

This is consistent with the stream of nearly 200 startups entering the language services and technology industry in the last decade, with nearly USD 40m in funding flowing in the last nine months alone. As Smartling’s founder and CEO Jack Welde pointed out, “Everybody wants to be a translation marketplace.”

“Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

According to TAUS Director Jaap van der Meer, singularity in translation could gradually happen in the next ten to twenty years and will be a big accelerator for global trade. Universally available FAUT — a Frenchie pun for Fully Automated Useful Translation — is already here and it is expected to lead to an increase in demand for really creative translations, wiping away the boring tasks. It comes as no surprise, then, that the BBC is piloting machine translation for short news

Ending The best example of user-driven innovation is the AK-47 assault rifle: simple by design, convenient, sustainable, easy to use, fast, accurate, efficient, and, most importantly, reliable. Consulting with customers and gathering feedback is conventional industry wisdom, but seldom conducive to innovation. In fact, in most cases, customers are not the best source for innovation, and can make a consultant’s job dreadful, but a salesman a fortune.

The best example of user-driven innovation is the AK-47 assault rifle: simple by design, convenient, sustainable, easy to use, fast, accurate, efficient, and, most importantly, reliable.

All innovations in translation have been seeking to make it easier and faster, cutting out middlemen, shortening the gap between clients and vendors. Eventually, though, they end up looking all the same. Indeed, the translation industry has never distinguished itself for pushing boundaries and doing the unexpected. Innovation is good for

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

presenting and blustering at events, reality is another kettle of fish. For example, agile is good for marketing, but everybody knows that no agile methodology can be applied with the current industry-wide modus operandi. Also, according to business analyst Seth Grimes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Calculating the contribution of NLP, within the value or revenue of a larger product or service that applies NLP... is a challenge.â&#x20AC;? In other words, when dealing with the language services and technology industry, the best effort is an educated guess. Innovators are not intimidated by their limits. They dare and are not afraid of failing, nor do they take into account the opinions of others. So, there will still be room for innovators in the language services and technology industry.

Send your comments or questions to research@taus.net

Luigi Muzii Luigi

Muzii

has

been working in the language for

industry than

years as a translator, localizer, technical writer, author, trainer, university localization,

teacher and

terminology

consultant.

has

authored books on technical writing and translation quality systems, and is a regular speaker at conferences.

and

Check out the TAUS Quality Dashboard and sign up for a free subscription

Machine Translation System

Boost the value of your TMs! Lower costs

Shorter delivery time Increased productivity

@globalesem www.globalese-mt.co

An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

Ever since we launched the TAUS Review, I feel it has been dominated by male authors and male voices. I thought it was time for a new female voice. So this quarter I sat down with Guylaine Tritton for the TAUS Review Interview. Guylaine is a Solutions Architect at localization provider Alpha CRC and has been in the localization industry her whole working life.

We talked about the bridge that still exists between academia and the translation industry, interoperability and the XLIFF standard and she explained to me what a Solutions Architect actually does. Guylaine, can you please take a moment to introduce yourself? My name is Guylaine Tritton and I work for Alpha CRC. I first started working at Alpha a long time ago, in 2002. I now work as a Solutions Architect, but I have held several roles at Alpha. I first joined as a Senior Project Manager and after that I became head of the Project Management team. I then moved away from project management to operations and set up the Operations Group with Steen Kesmodel, then a senior linguist at Alpha. I am based in France, but work with clients across the world, as well as the Alpha Sales team, which is spread across several local offices. I have dual French/British nationality. I was born in France, so French is my mother tongue, but English is my main working language. I use a little bit of German and I also studied Russian at university. Was the language and translation industry always an area you wanted to work in? I actually first got a job in localization straight after my master’s degree. It’s funny, because even when I was doing my master’s degree in translation in ‘97, I had never actually heard of the word localization. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a localization industry. We were all studying translation, so we knew of course that there were translators out there, but we always thought that they were just freelance translators, either translating novels or legal paperwork.

The applied side of translation was never really touched upon, even at university at that stage. I remember that we offered to take part in a practical of two sessions to learn about Trados Workbench. But that was it. That was as close as we got to localization. Mostly we were just translating interesting newspaper articles. Everything was still very much paper-based. I know that students now have to use computers when submitting translations, but when I was studying for an MA, we relied on paper, handwriting and printed dictionaries. So you had your first job in translation? Yes, I was very lucky. I was basically in the right place at the right time. When I was studying my MA at the University of Surrey in Guildford, a localization agency got in touch with the department because they needed native French speakers. The department secretary got in touch with me to ask if I was interested, I went for the interview and got the job. I was extremely lucky. I loved it, although I didn’t know anything! Well, that is, I knew how to use a computer, but it was a huge learning curve for me. It was very exciting for me to learn so much about an industry I never knew existed. I was working with people who

Everything was still very much paperbased. I know that students now have to use computers when submitting translations, but when I was studying for an MA, we relied on paper, handwriting and printed dictionaries.

An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

were very good at teaching me various skills and techniques. I learned a lot in a very short space of time. I never really considered leaving the localization industry, just because my experience at the beginning was so good. I was learning lots of different things by working on different projects. I was able to use my language skills and I really enjoyed that. Can you tell us a bit more about Alpha CRC and how it serves the industry? Alpha is one of the top ten localization providers for the IT industry globally. We serve over a third of the global top 100 IT companies. We have about 500 employees in 18 offices across 14 countries, in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company was founded in 1987, so it’s been around for a long time in localization terms.

It was f o u n d e d by Isabella Weiss, who is still very much active as one of our Directors. She was a translator at the time, but recognized the need for translators to work together under one roof, which was a fairly new concept back then. Alpha offers a very broad range of services. We do still manage what you would call really small projects (less than 1000 words), but at the other end of the spectrum we also offer end-to-end solutions for top companies around the world. Some of our clients have outsourced their entire localization needs to us, and in effect, we act as a localization department within that client’s company.

We don’t just provide translation services. In some cases, we obtain material for translation directly from content developers and apply engineering, DTP, audio work and QA until we have a fully localized product. You mentioned you’re a Solutions Architect, but what does that mean exactly? In my previous role within the Operations Group I was more of an inward looking person, but as a Solutions Architect I now work with clients and with Alpha’s Sales team. Clients come to Alpha with a set of requirements, asking for a solution that best fits those requirements. Obviously they want a solution that is most effective and affordable. Sometimes the answer is very simple, but other times you might have to develop software to respond to their needs, customize Translation Management Systems, use connectors and APIs and so on. My role is really to obtain information, analyse the information and suggest a solution that meets all expectations, both for the Client and for Alpha. I am also part of an on-boarding team for strategic accounts. Once a solution is in place, I detach myself from the account and focus on new business again. Fifty percent of my work involves working solely with the Sales team. Alpha is a tools-agnostic company, meaning that we do not impose tools or technologies on Clients. We do not tell them that they must use a specific Translation Management System, CAT tool or MT system. We have many technologies available to us, and we really take on board the Client’s needs and try to come up with the best solution for them. Because of our open philosophy, I need to be aware of what is out there in terms of technology and pass on this information to the Sales team. They need to be able to go out and speak to existing or new clients armed with the correct and latest information and be aware of the latest technological developments in the

An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

industry. I do a lot of knowledge gathering and summarise the key parts before passing it onto the sales team. Can you share something about the challenges and rewards of that position? I suppose the challenge is that sometimes you come across companies, especially large enterprises, that already have a solution in place and have no reason to adapt to your best-case scenario, and rightly so. You are the one providing a service, and you therefore need to tailor yourself to the client’s needs. This can be quite difficult, but is fully expected. At the other end of the spectrum, there are companies who have never really heard of localization. You need to educate them, always remembering that you are talking to people who are very new to the industry and do not need to be overwhelmed by technical concepts or localization lingo. You have to keep things very straightforward, move step by step, and realise that what you consider to be obvious may require some explaining. This can also be challenging, but it is not a problem. It’s just part of the job and it can be very rewarding when what you suggested takes off and you end up with a happy customer. Obviously you know a lot about the technologies that are out there, with that in mind, what do you think our industry lacks? Where do we need to innovate or change? Something that’s been on the table for a long time now is interoperability and the XLIFF standard. XLIFF was supposed to be the solution to our interoperability headaches, but there are now so many flavours of XLIFF that

you still cannot move seamlessly from one tool to the other. It is true that you can export files as XLIFF from one tool and import them in another tool, but you’re always going to have problems with metadata and the way word counts are calculated. One translation memory in one tool will not be working as well in another tool and so on. Although XLIFF was supposed to get rid of all those problems, they’re still out there and they’re probably going to get worse. There are more and more companies who develop localization applications, and each one uses its own metadata and applies their own way of interpreting that data. On the plus side, what is great is that there are so many more ways of connecting tools and systems together. We can now rely on APIs and connectors to make tools talk to each other, which we certainly didn’t have five years ago.

You have to keep things very straightforward, move step by step, and realise that what you consider to be obvious may require some explaining.

Another challenge that is probably more apparent to anyone working at Alpha, because of our in-house model, is that we as localization providers are still trying to win the hearts and minds of translators who have to work with machine translation. I don’t think they regard it as a threat anymore, but the fact is that it is harder for them to work with MT than it is for them to let their minds be creative. I think that if you work for a LSP that outsources work, you know that the supplier has to make a living. The fact of the matter is if they want to make a living or hold on to you as a customer, they

An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

have to adopt MT because that’s what’s being sent to them. Obviously Alpha’s in-house teams do not have a choice either, but because we work and interact with our translators so much more closely, we can see (and understand) that post-editing and translating are very different tasks that involve very different cerebral gymnastics. Nevertheless, machine translation can be very useful depending on specific projects and represent huge gains in time and costs. The message we try to convey is that just like a translation memory or a glossary, machine translation should be regarded as an aid. The key is knowing how much time should be spent on deciding whether an MTed sentence can be used or not. Before we started the interview, you mentioned that you’re not really the person within Alpha who attends events or at least the TAUS events. Do you attend any other events perhaps? Well, I’m not sure if you would count them as events, but I do religiously take part in the TAUS webinars. I find them really useful. They’re quite short and you get 2 or 3 speakers doing a quick demo of their solution or tool, followed by a Q&A session. These sessions really help me focus on what is out there in terms of latest technology and they also help me categorize solutions. In one glance, I can find out what’s out there in the field of machine translation, QA or crowdsourcing, for example. So I always listen to the webinars and save the link to the recording so I can go back to them. I rely on the webinars when sharing knowledge with the sales team and I do refer back to them quite a lot. I can also use them as a starting point before visiting these companies’ websites and maybe take part in or request demos from them. Do you have a personal motto or mantra that you use in your daily work? I wouldn’t say it was a one-off experience that triggered the way I work, but it started early

on when I became a project manager. Before that, I worked as a localization engineer and had fairly structured tasks to do. People would assign work to me and told me what to prioritise, so I didn’t really have to think too much about time management other than getting things done on time. When I became a project manager everything started happening at once and everything was urgent, or at least it felt that way. Very quickly I needed to work out a way to avoid getting overwhelmed by everything.

That’s why I try to be as structured as possible in the way I work, and that in turns helps me keep as calm as possible. When you know that you have 10 or 15 things to do in one day, why worry about all of them at the same time? Just take it one step at the time. Do the quick and easy things first so that they’re out of the way. Only then focus on the more time-consuming or more mentally demanding tasks. There’s one thing I always tried to do as a PM, and that was to have so few emails in my inbox that there would be no scrollbar there. I would move emails into specific folders as soon as I had dealt with them and used what was left in my inbox as my “to do” list. Keeping a clean inbox prevented me from being overwhelmed and helped me focus. I think the way that I work now is still pretty much based on this. In terms of mantra, it is not something I ever

An Interview with Guylaine Tritton by Anne-Maj van der Meer

really thought of, but perhaps I would say: listen, understand and learn. One of the reasons I love this job is because I am still learning. I may be responsible for providing solutions, but I cannot do that effectively if I do not keep up with what is going on in the industry. You also need to be aware of what is being asked of you and you can only do that if you listen and understand. This applies to working with clients, but also with people you work with on a day-today basis.

In terms of mantra, it is not something I ever really thought of, but perhaps I would say: listen, understand and learn.

What’s been the worst experience in your working life? It’s quite trivial, but I’m sure it’s happened to everybody, or anybody who has been a project manager... Picking up a phone to call up a client and announce bad news. Thankfully it didn’t happen to me that often, but I hated it. I had one experience where I was working with a vendor whose PC died, never to be resurrected. The PC took 30,000 words of translation down with it.

eral translators. The deadline would be missed and all I could do was apologise. In this case the client was actually very understanding, but I never enjoyed those heart-sinking moments. Let’s finish with your best working experience. I don’t really have a “yeeha” moment, but I just get a lot of satisfaction from moving things along in the right direction. As a project manager, you do that without thinking. You receive something, you process it and you deliver it. When I was in the Operations Group, my colleagues and I implemented a lot of internal systems at Alpha, and these saved people a lot of time and a lot of headaches. My role is now to do the same thing with clients. Knowing that the time you invested on a specific account has paid off or that you helped a salesperson close a deal is extremely satisfying.

Send your comments or questions to review@taus.net

All I could do was call the client as soon as I found out and spread those words across sevAnne-Maj van der Meer

Guylaine Tritton Guylaine

began

her

career

Localization Engineer in 1998 and joined Alpha CRC in 2002 as a Senior Project Manager. Guylaine has held the positions of Head of Project Management and Operations Manager at Alpha CRC. As a Solutions Architect, Guylaine’s role is to work as a consultant to strategic accounts. She is also part of Alpha CRC’s on-boarding team and advises on best practices, workflows and technology.

Anne-Maj has been with TAUS since 2007 and transformed from bookkeeper and accounts receivable into manager of web

content,

events

and

member services. As of April 2016 she is the Events Director of TAUS. She is also the editor of TAUS Review and responsible for its layout. She has studied English Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam and Creative Writing at Harvard University.

y mrofni lliw I An artificial intelligence approach touotranslation oitalsnart otwill hcaorevolutionize rppa ecnegilletn i laicďŹ business. itra nA gnikcehc ret fa your .kcots ruo

To realize a society in which everyone can interact freely across language barriers with the use of machine translation technology, and thereby contribute to invigoration and innovation in businesses. https://miraitranslate.com/en/

A thousand different workflows. One Solution. The Business Management System for the Translation Industry

www.plunet.com

Translator’s Profile by Johanna Lindroth

A new segment this quarter is the Translator’s Profile. In this segment we ask a translator in our industry to give us some more insights on their work. How did they get into the translation industry? Are they using technologies? Do they regard technologies as enemies of their jobs or as helpful tools? What do they think are the current game changers of the industry? Find out this and more in our first edition of this feature below. My name is Johanna Lindroth and I’m a senior Swedish translator and language lead at STP. Our company specialises in professional translation work from English, French and German into the Nordic languages, and from most source languages into English.

The widespread use of translation tools is the main change I’ve seen over the years. There were few, if any, commercially available tools when I was first starting out.

Working remotely from Gothenburg, Sweden, I translate and revise all kinds of texts, from commercial brochures and product manuals to computer software and medical leaflets. I mainly translate from English into my mother tongue, Swedish. How did you get into the translation industry? I have always been interested in languages and linguistics, and I have a Master of Arts in Computational Linguistics from the University of Gothenburg. However, I did not set out to be

a translator from the start. During my last year at university, a translation company offered me extra work translating the Windows operating system. I said yes, and I continued to work for the same company after I graduated. At the beginning of my career I did mostly technical, IT and software-related jobs, because this was my main area of expertise. Do you use translation technology and in what ways has your role in general changed over the years? I use several different translation tools in my daily work, including memoQ, Trados Studio and Across. This makes my job easier, as it means I can draw on previous translations and have instant access to glossaries and term lists. Many clients also have their own tools that they ask us to learn and use.

There is a risk in becoming too dependent on technology, however. If I lose my internet connection, for instance, I cannot work.

The widespread use of translation tools is the main change I’ve seen over the years. There were few, if any, commercially available tools when I was first starting out. The company I worked for back then did have some proprietary tools, but I think that was fairly unusual at the time. It was a great advantage for the company, though. Another big change, of course, has been the rise of the internet, which has transformed the way translators do their research, communicate and transfer files, among many other things. Our technical environment has also gradually

A Day In The Life by Johanna Lindroth

changed over the years, with a shift from local to global. I used to have everything installed locally on my own computer. Now I use online tools and server applications that someone else in the company installs and updates. This has enabled me to focus more on the act of translating, and has reduced the amount of time I need to spend on the technical side.

I once heard a translator say that MT was as threatening to him as a translator as the scissors are to a hairdresser. We all know how to use scissors, yet we continue to go to hair salons.

There is a risk in becoming too dependent on technology, however. If I lose my internet connection, for instance, I cannot work. I also use the internet a lot for researching terms and concepts in a way that was simply not possible before. These days it is hard to believe how we ever managed without it! In recent years, STP has received an increasing number of requests involving machine translation, and we’ve seen raw MT output from various sources and of varying quality. This type of work is a growing trend, so we have invested a great deal of time and money in training our staff to handle it. MT is here to stay, whether we like it or not, and I try to keep an open mind. I once heard a translator say that MT was as threatening to him as a translator as the scissors are to a hairdresser. We all know how to use scissors, yet we continue to go to hair salons. I try to see MT as just another tool of the trade, creating a base to start from. What are the important things you value in your role – for you and for clients? I take pride in my work and always strive to deliver quality translations. Caring about every little detail makes my job more interesting and challenging, and it’s an approach that’s cer-

tainly beneficial to our clients. Who or what do you think are the game changers in the industry? The use of self-service automatic translation tools will probably grow in the future and they are indeed changing the industry landscape. However, professional translators will always be able to offer quality as a competitive edge. A good translation can be very valuable to a company or a brand. Hopefully clients will continue to recognise this, and set aside the time and money to do things properly. What advice would you give to someone starting out in the industry? Working as a translator has its pros and cons. The pay is not always great, and there is no obvious career path. It can also be a lonely trade, but nowadays you can work from anywhere in the world, as many translators do. If I were starting out today, I think I would try to specialise in a particular area, like medical or scientific texts, because I’d be able to charge more for my expertise. I’d also recommend developing skills such as creative translation and copywriting, because these services are in growing demand. Above all, enjoy your work – because translation should be fun!

Send your comments or questions to review@taus.net

Johanna Lindroth Johanna has been working as a language professional since 1992, both as a translator and technical writer. She has also worked in a number of projectmanagement roles within the language services industry.

She

joined

Sandberg

Translation

Partners Ltd (STP), the world’s largest translation company specialising in Nordic languages, as a Swedish in-house translator in 2004.

Directory of Distributors Appen Appen is an award-winning, global leader in language, search and social technology. Appen helps leading technology companies expand into new global markets. BrauerTraining Training a new generation of translators & interpreters for the Digital Age using a web-based platform + cafeteriastyle modular workshops. Capita TI Capita TI offers translation and interpreting services in more than 150 languages to ensure that your marketing messages are heard - in any language. Cloudwords Cloudwords accelerates content globalization at scale, dramatically reducing the cost, complexity and turnaround time required for localization. Concorde Concorde is the largest LSP in the Netherlands. We believe in the empowering benefits of technology in multilingual services. CPSL Multilingual language provider for global strategies: translation, localization, interpreting, transcription, voice over & subtitling. Crestec Europe B.V. We provide complete technical documentation services in any language and format in a wide range of subjects. Whatever your needs are, we have the solution for you! Global Textware Expertise in many disciplines. From small quick turnaround jobs to complex translation. All you need to communicate about in any language. HCR HCR works in conjunction with language partners to deploy software products and linguistic services globally in core industries such as IT, Automotive and more. Hunnect Ltd. Hunnect Ltd. is an MLV with innovative thinking and a clear approach to translation automation and training post-editors. www.hunnect.hu Iconic Translation Machines Machine Translation with Subject Matter Expertise. We help companies adopt MT technology.

iDisc Established in 1987, iDISC is an ISO-9001 and EN-15038 certified language and software company based in Spain, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.

InterTranslations Intertranslations LLC is based in Athens, London and Nicosia offering translation and localization services in all languages. IOLAR Founded in 1998, Iolar employs 40 highly-skilled linguists and engineers specialised in translation of highly demanding documentation and software localisation. Jensen Localisation Localization services for the IT, Health Care, Tourism and Automotive industries in European languages (mostly Nordic, Dutch and Spanish). KantanMT.com KantanMT.com is a leading SaaS based statistical machine translation platform that enables users to develop and manage customized MT engines in the cloud. Kawamura International Based in Tokyo, KI provides language services to companies around the world including MT and PE solutions to accelerate global business growth. KHAABBA International Training and Language Services KHAABBA is an LSP company for African languages based in Ethiopia. Larsen Globalization Ltd Larsen Globalization Ltd is a recruitment company dedicated to the localization industry since 2000 with offices in Europe, the US and Japan. Lingo24 Lingo24 delivers a range of professional language services, using technologies to help our clients & linguists work more effectively. Linguistic Systems LSI provides foreign language translation services in over 115 languages and unlimited subject matter. Contact us at 877-654-5006 or www.linguist.com Lionbridge Lionbridge is the largest translation company and #1 localization provider in marketing services in the world, ensuring global success for over 800 leading brands MateCat MateCat is a free web CAT tool for LSPs and translators. Use it to translate your projects or to outsource to over 120,000 professional translators in one click. Memsource Cloud An API-enabled translation platform that includes vendor management, translatio memory, integrated machine translation, and a translatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s workbench.

Directory of Distributors Mirai Translate Mirai Translate will custom-build a translation A.I. which make innovation happen for your business and create an exciting “MIRAI (future)”. Moravia Flexible thinking. Reliable delivery. Under this motto, Moravia delivers multilingual language services for the world’s brand leaders. Morningside Translation We’re a leading translation services company partnering with the Am Law 100 and Fortune 500 companies around the globe. MorphoLogic Localisation MorphoLogic Localisation is the developer of Globalese, an SMT system that helps increase translation productivity, decrease costs and shorten delivery times. Pactera Pactera is a leading Globalization Services provider, partnering with our clients to offer localization, in-market solutions and speech recognition services. Plunet Plunet GmbH develops and markets the business and translation management solution Plunet BusinessManager for professional LSPs and translation departments. Rockant Consulting & Training We provide consulting, training and managed services that transform your career from “localization guy/girl,” to a strategic adviser to management. Safaba Translation Solutions, Inc. A technology leader providing automated translation solutions that deliver superior quality and simplify the path to global presence unlike any other solution. SeproTec SeproTec is a 25 years experience Multilingual Service Provider ranked among the Top 40 Language Service Companies in the world. Sovee Sovee is a premier provider of translation and video solutions. The Sovee Smart Engine “learns” translation preferences in 6800 languages. sQuid sQuid help companies integrate and exploit translation technologies in their workflows and maximize their use of their language data.

STP Nordic Translation STP is a technology-focused Regional Language Vendor specialising in English, French, German and the Nordic languages. See www.stptrans.com. SYSTRAN SYSTRAN is the market historic provider of language translation softwaresolutions for global corporations, public agencies and LSPs tauyou language technology Machine translation and natural language processing solutions for the translation industry text&form text&form is an LSP with expertise in software & multimedia localization, technical translation, terminology management and SAP consulting. Tilde Tilde develops custom MT systems and online terminology services, with special expertise in the Nordic, Baltic, Russian, and CEE languages. TraductaNET Traductanet is a linguistic service company specialising in translation, software and website localisation, terminology management and interpreting. Trusted Translations Internationally recognized leader in multilingual translation & interpretation services. Committed to providing clients with the highest quality service. UTH International UTH International is an innovative professional provider of globalization solutions and industry information, serving customers with advanced technologies. Welocalize Welocalize offers innovative translation & localization solutions helping global brands grow & reach audiences around the world. Win & Winnow Provider of translation, multimedia and desktop publishing services founded in 2004. We are one of the top ten language services providers in Latin America. XTRF XTRF is a platform for project management, quoting, invoicing, sales and quality management, integrated with CAT, accounting and CRM tools.

Get your insights, tools, metrics, data, benchmarking, contacts and knowledge from a neutral and independent industry organization. Join TAUS!

TAUS is a think tank and resource center for the global translation industry. Open to all translation buyers and providers, from individual translators, language service providers & buyers to governments and NGOs. 42

taus.net

Events Calendar

Upcoming TAUS Events

Upcoming TAUS Webinars

TAUS Executive Forum 19-20 April, 2016 Tokyo (Japan)

TAUS Translation Technology Showcase Easyling & Localize 1 June, 2016, 5 PM CET

TAUS Executive Forum 25-26 April, 2016 Beijing (China)

KantanMT & PangeaMT 7 September, 2016, 5 PM CET

TAUS Roundtable 12 May, 2016 Barcelona (Spain) TAUS Roundtable 1 June, 2016 Riga (Latvia) TAUS Industry Leaders Forum 6-7 June, 2016 Dublin (Ireland)

Translation Automation Users Call Lilt 5 May, 2016, 5 PM CET Altlang & Seprotec 29 September, 2016, 5 PM CET Translation Quality Webinar Translation efficiency and business intelligence 20 April, 2016, 5 PM CET Localization challenges at Start-ups 22 June, 2016, 5 PM CET

check out the rest of the 2016 agenda! Machine Translation Quality: are we there yet? 21 September, 2016, 5 PM CET

Industry Events LocWorld30 13-15 April, 2016 Tokyo (Japan) EAMT 30 May - 1 June, 2016 Riga (Latvia) LocWorld31 8-10 June, 2016 Dublin (Ireland)

Do you want to have your event listed here? Write to editor@taus.net for information.

People-powered translation at machine-like speed. Translation should be fast, whether youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re ordering 1 word or 1 million, for yourself or for enterprise. Our platform, designed for speed, quality and high capacity, puts over 12,000+ skilled translators right at your fingertips, both online and through the Gengo API. Experience how fast for free at gengo.com/taus