Archive for category: Internationalization

As part of Lingoport’s upcoming webinar, “2020 L10n Planning – Technology Automation, Strategy & More” we interviewed our featured guest speaker, Tucker Johnson, Founder of Nimdzi and Author of the book “The General Theory of the Translation Company”. Tucker provides us with some quick insights into future of i18n and L10n in 2020.

What do you feel is the biggest opportunity to improve i18n & L10n processes in 2020?

Tucker Johnson: The conversations that we have been having in the industry have been shifting, and we expect it to shift more as we move into 2020. Take, for example, the conversation around machine translation, which is no longer seen as a “nice to have” but rather a prerequisite for any self-respecting localization program. The lines between TMs and MT will begin to blur and become the new normal for the industry.

Furthermore, the lines between “language technology” and every other technology will continue to blur. Currently, language technology is a niche industry that is not well understood by traditional technology companies (or investors, for that matter). This has allowed for a proliferation of TMS and CAT tools on the market, some of them more effective than others.

The reality is that most globalization teams don’t want to be forced tow work in a third-party translation management system, and so it becomes a high priority to focus on seamless integrations. It is no longer enough to have an API – globalization managers expect out-of-the-box integrations with their systems. The companies that are best situated to address this challenge are today’s technology providers and some of the more technology-focused LSPs.

What are the most common L10n challenges localizations teams faced in 2019? How do you see this changing in 2020?

Tucker Johnson: One thing that we have been seeing a lot of chatter about in the industry is a reviving conversation around quality as well. The current quality metrics used by mature localization programs were developed years ago, and they have failed to progress along with the times. Advancements in technology and automation have made many of the traditional quality measurement practices obsolete, though the industry has not landed on a new solution at this time. We are going to see a shift towards user-driven KPIs to measure quality. The whole concept of quality is shifting away from having translations that are error-free to having translations that truly resonate and connect with the end-user. The focus turns from catching translation and internationalization issues after the fact to developing innovative new systems and processes for ensuring quality at source.

Which L10n technology do you feel is underutilized in the industry and why?

Tucker Johnson: When most people talk about L10n technology, we are typically referring to CAT, TMS, or MT. All of these are important and can lead to much efficiency gains. However, to focus only on these technologies is to neglect other technologies and automation that may be less fancy because they are not focused strictly on language services. There are a host of solutions out there for project management, supply chain management, finances, email automation, video conferencing… you name it. Most large localization programs consist of project managers rather than in-house translators, and so it would make sense to focus on tools that can help these people with their day to day activities.

How has automation changed the L10n and i18n landscape?

Tucker Johnson: Necessity is the mother of all invention. With the increasing agile demands of continuous development teams, the localization industry has been forced to adapt. Continuous localization is not just a buzzword, it is a requirement for many programs. Without working (and reliable) automation in place, it would be impossible to meet these demands, no matter how many project managers and translators you threw at it.

Automation is allowing us to process higher volumes, with smaller hand-off sizes, coming much more frequently. For language technology solutions, the goal has shifted from who has the best features for translation to who has the best and most integrations with other systems, allowing for seamless integration.

Where do you see localization 10 years from now?

Tucker Johnson: In 10 years, we are going to be spending a lot less time “educating” our stakeholders about localization. Today, the number one challenge faced by many globalization managers is evangelizing their services with their internal stakeholders. Convincing senior management to invest in international initiatives can be an uphill battle. This is largely because many of today’s senior managers grew up in a time when being international was a second priority. Today, the most successful startups are thinking about their international strategy from day one. They realize that it is no longer an option to be global. If you are online, then you are online everywhere. As more cloud-based services develop, and global supply chains evolve, so will the international opportunities grow, further driving the demand for localization into more and more languages as companies compete for increasingly diverse niche and developing markets.

Date/Time

• Date: January 28th, 2020
• Time: 9AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, 18:00 CEST
• Duration: 45 minutes, plus audience Q&A

In this webinar, Lingoport CEO, Adam Asnes, and special guest, Tucker Johnson, Founder of Nimdzi Insights and Author of the book “The General Theory of the Translation Company,” will be discussing strategies, tactics, and technology to help you lead globalization efforts in 2020 and beyond.

Topics We’ll Cover:

• • • How to identify market opportunities and take advantage of them
    • The leading technology advancements and why you should be using them
    • How to get ahead of development…and stay ahead
    • Strategies for 2020 and beyond

Featuring Special Guest, Tucker Johnson

Tucker has served in many different capacities throughout his career, from engineering to senior management. Jack of all trades, and master of a few… His special experience lies in on-boarding and building out large scale localization programs, supply chain governance, global team management, and advising business leaders on international strategy.

Tucker and his co-author, Renato Beninatto, published “The General Theory of the Translation Company”, to the delight of many in the localization industry.

Tucker’s latest endeavor is the founding of Nimdzi Insights, the new market research and consulting company with a focus on the international market. Nimdzi works with international businesses, language service providers, universities, private equity firms, government agencies, and anybody else who is interested in learning more about the intricacies of competing in today’s global marketplace.

As part of Lingoport’s December webinar, 5 Steps to Create a Software Globalization Culture, we interviewed our featured guest speaker, Elizabeth Riley, Solutions Architect at Vistatec, to get some quick insights into the current state and future of localization. Elizabeth explores internal team processes and how cross-team collaboration is affected by technology and G10n knowledge/support within your organization.

How has Localization evolved since you began in the industry? Where do you see the industry 10 years from now?

Elizabeth Riley: The industry has changed a ton since I began working in it. There has been so much technological innovation it’s affected pretty much every aspect of the work and made previously unimaginable gains in productivity become new benchmarks for throughput.

Personally, I feel like the localization biz is experiencing something like an industrial revolution whereby translations have heretofore been done “by hand” and are moving to a method of “machine” production that’s powered by automation and of course machine translation. Of course, at present, use of MT is far from being standard practice and is still seen by many as a novelty if not an outright joke. At the rate that automation, MT and NMT, and other yet-to-be seen technologies are emerging and developing, however, I’d be surprised if in ten years we’ll still see it as standard practice to employ a “hand-crafted”, 100% human-powered translation process.

This doesn’t mean that I think human translators will be phased out in ten years and replaced by bots. When we talk about innovations in translation, there’s always a risk it’s perceived as this scenario where automation leads to mechanization and the complete eradication of human translators. But I have a more optimistic view of things. While we may be undergoing a sort of “industrial revolution” in our industry fueled by technological innovation, our “output” is still, ultimately, foreign language. As a human construct, I believe that language, and by extension, translation and localization, will never be completely mechanized even with vast technological innovation. In the future, innovations will allow those of in the industry to best apply our knowledge and intelligence; say, in curating foreign language content, post-editing NMT output, evaluating translation quality, rather than repetitively spend our time engaged in the execution of repetitive manual tasks like sending files, downloading updates, or gathering data.

How have advances in L10n technology impacted G10n processes and internal team collaboration?

Elizabeth Riley: The advent of tools like translation management systems have allowed for huge improvements in internal collaboration, not to mention process improvements. Modern enterprise TMSs have tons of features that permit substantial and extensive automation of processes that were previously done one at a time: think automated assignment of linguists to a project, workflows that automate project kickoff and task routing, even vendor quality ranking and allocation. Centralization driven by TMSs also allows teams to best leverage shared content, such as memories, glossaries, and the like, and made it much easier to do this as well. On the process side, I hardly know where to begin; we now have tools that are sophisticated enough to visually render web pages and certain applications that allow for certain software QA tasks to occur far earlier in the project cycle, which is a huge benefit for globalization because of course it allows internationalization and localization issues to be caught sooner – or eliminated altogether.

What is the biggest opportunity to improve L10n processes?

Elizabeth Riley: I honestly think that the biggest opportunity to improve localization processes rests in educating customers/localization project and program managers on the depth and breadth of tools that are already available on the market to automate, centralize, and streamline our work. It’s true that innovation continues to happen, and at a very exciting and rapid pace. But I feel the thing that would bring the most benefit to the greatest number of folks working in localization would be something very simple – just greater awareness of the tools already out there and some education on how to quickly start using them. There is so much already available that can be used to solve common—but still complex—problems. People should be better made aware of them and it should be easier to use and master such tools.

What would you describe as the number one globalization challenge organizations face?

Elizabeth Riley: I really like this question. I’ve worked with customers in a variety of industries, from medical device to gaming, religious organizations to startups creating dating apps, and what I’ve noticed is that everyone thinks their worst globalization challenges are unique to their organization, when in fact their challenges are just variations on a theme that everyone else has probably experienced at some time. So I’d answer this by saying that the biggest challenge organizations face is lacking awareness of how common their localization problems are – and by extension, how much information, insight, knowledge and tools are out there already to help them solve them. I suppose what I’m saying is that the biggest challenge is everyone’s lack of awareness how certain things are intrinsic to localization, regardless of industry or vertical, and as such, there are myriad suitable ways to solve those problems that are already in use by those who have come across it already. There could be more knowledge-sharing across verticals. The commonalities are greater than the differences, I think.

How does a lack of support and understanding from leadership teams impact globalization quality and efficiencies?

Elizabeth Riley: When leadership and management don’t understand localization, or even language, for that matter, it has an enormous effect on quality and efficiency. A great number of quality issues can be obviated or at least minimized at a process stage far sooner than by the time software gets sent out to be localized. This is an inefficiency in terms of cost but also time, of course. But if an organization’s management sees localization as an afterthought, it is—as we’ve all frequently seen—relegated to the last stop in a project process and subject to numerous time and cost pressures. If global organization leaders understood language and localization better, you might see localization departments brought to the forefront of any process development as a way to introduce quality at source, both in-language and in English, and save substantial amounts of money not having to test and fix issues later.

Date/Time

• Date: October 24th, 2019
• Time: 9AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, 18:00 CEST
• Duration: 40 minutes, plus audience Q&A

As part of Lingoport’s October webinar, Bringing a Human Touch to Continuous L10n, we interviewed our featured guest speaker, Paul Hegarty, Head of Engineering at Iota, to get some quick insights into the current state and future of localization. Specifically, Paul explores how advances in automation technology is impacting the customization, speed, and quality of localization output.

How has Localization evolved since you began in the industry? Where do you see the industry 10 years from now?

Paul Hegarty: Massively. I started in the l10n industry in 1994, and large QA teams were a part of all l10n providers. Manuals were printed, software was mass produced on disk sets and CDs, online was really only in its infancy. Cloud computing has completely changed how we work, QA is now a mixture of shorter, targeted test passes with the ability to fix issues almost “live”. Updates are now much more frequent and less static, they can occur at any time, and for numerous reasons. The cloud has completely changed how we work, how we communicate, how projects are run and delivered. Online technologies have replaced a lot of the desktop technologies we used – documentation is now usually built via web based build systems rather than compiled on a desktop. In another 10 years I see the industry being further distanced from the concept of “desktop” computing – everything we do will be in the cloud, and we’ll become more and more device agnostic.

Why has customization become so important for L10n?

Paul Hegarty: The variety of file types, the content within those file types and how dev teams address l10n (which is often a low priority) mean that what we actually get to translate is far from a standard format. While some long established dev teams have their product well prepared for l10n, many of the products we see are new (that’s becoming more common), with the result that a proper l10n strategy has not been defined. In a lot of cases, a proper strategy might never be defined as these products are under constant change. Hence, we often find ourselves having to customize solutions for individual projects to make sure our translators can access everything they need to access, in a manner that is productive for them, whilst hiding them from the material that they don’t want or need to see. The other element to this is the very granular requirements around some of the projects we see, where certain components of a project might be translatable in one language but not in others. So not only are we customizing for a massive variety of file formats, but the complexity of translation requirements of the overall project is increasing also.

How have advances in L10n technology and processes impacted the quality, speed, and needs of L10n??

Paul Hegarty: I think the demands of l10n customers are driving the l10n technologies, not the other way around. Our industry and the technologies we employ are driven by the increasing demands of our customers. Speed is crucial as release schedules get tighter and tighter, and volumes continue to grow. Efficient reuse of previous translation is critical to the success of projects that are constantly being updated.

What would you describe as the leading challenge of blending technologies and customizability?

Paul Hegarty: For me, that is deciding when you employ and pay for an off-the-shelf technology compared with a customized solution. For established projects with large volumes and lots of updates, where the workflow is defined, it makes sense that a technology solution will work (and importantly will be worth paying for). For new projects, not so defined (dev teams unfamiliar with l10n), with smaller volumes and constantly changing formats and requirements, customized solutions are the answer as the overhead in terms of time and expense for technology solutions often will not be an option.

What is the biggest opportunity to improve L10n processes?

Paul Hegarty: Hard question to answer – in the ideal world, l10n being part of the dev approach to product design – all to often, l10n is an afterthought. From our perspective, being able to adapt to our customers’ needs, advise and educate on best practices around l10n and always reviewing our processes and approach to our customers’ projects is the answer. Improvement is a continuous goal.

Date/Time

• Date: October 24th, 2019
• Time: 9AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, 18:00 CEST
• Duration: 40 minutes, plus audience Q&A

As part of Lingoport’s webinar, Learn Continuous i18n & L10n, and Buy a Droid Too!, we interviewed our featured guest speaker, Allison McDougall, SVP of Global Sales at Amplexor, to get some quick insights into the current state and future of globalization including processes, technology, communication, and opportunities for improvement.

How has i18n technology evolved since you began in the industry?

Allison McDougall: Evolution from traditional ‘train-the-trainer’-style teaching developers how to develop code with localization in mind; evolution from identifying potential I18N issues once development is finished to agile-based, ‘real-time’, continuous I18N. It’s been incredible to witness the combined evolution of both Technology as well as overall global awareness!

What would you describe as the leading challenge of blending technologies and service?

Allison McDougall: Ah, great question! I would say “Understanding the BUSINESS need and ensuring that all team members continue to stay on the same page in terms of requirements, interdependencies, and communication.”

How do you feel globalization will evolve over the next 20 years? How will the technology continue to evolve?

Allison McDougall: Most of us are feeling the effects of increased automation and AI in the industry now … Content and software DEVELOPMENT will become much more automated, as will globalization efforts. Content data stores will be used to create more content, and we’ll be able to globalize much faster using existing technologies that embed AI and are able to make complex decisions ‘on the fly’. People working in this industry will become even more strategic, more valuable, more consultative as we educate clients and executives about the pros/cons around developing software and content that most effectively aligns with business goals.

What is the biggest opportunity to improve globalization processes?

Allison McDougall: Identify your internal Champion. Move up the value chain, insist upon your ‘seat at the table’, create globalized software and content at source — something we have been evangelizing for well over a decade. Globalization can no longer be an after-thought.

Date/Time

• Date: September 26th, 2019
• Time: 9AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, 18:00 CEST
• Duration: 40 minutes, plus audience Q&A

Ready to learn more? View the webinar today!