Localization trends for 2013. No news, good news?

(This article was originally posted in the Moravia blog)

Every year, around December or January, I have written a blog entry with predictions and trends for the next year. We are now two weeks into the new year, and I didn't find anything special to write about 2013.

So, it ocurred to me that this might be a year when things are settling down. A year for evolution, rather than revolution. A period when trends tend to consolidate and take ground. There are five movements that have started sometime ago, but that I feel are now part of the gestalt of the localization business.

• Content style is moving from formal to informal in all languages. Companies are not doing major rewrites of their manuals, but new products are written in a friendlier tone. Another way to put this: "All localization is marketing related."
• The job of localization managers is expanding beyond language and culture. Global customer satisfaction and business requirements demand other activities like support, community moderation, usability adaptation, and local relevance. The relationship with vendors changes accordingly.
• Voice and video content become more localization-friendly and language-aware, now that it actually became "normal" to use your voice to control your phone, car, computer and even your TV.
• Continuous localization or on-demand translation becomes the norm, not the exception.
• African languages appear on everybody's radar, especially when it comes to the localization of mobile devices and apps.

Of course, nothing prevents a revolutionary product like holographic telepresence for interpretation services or a pill that makes you speak Chinese from being launched this year or next, but it feels like 2013 will just be another good year for the language services industry.

What I expect for 2012

As the song goes, "it's the most wonderful time of the year". It's the time to make predictions.

Before going into my expectations for 2012, I took a look at what I wrote last year, and I believe that my predictions for 2011 materialized.

Content is indeed being served in smaller chunks and requiring faster turnaround times. There is more demand for multimedia translations such as video, and also for interpretation both on-site and over the phone. So voice was in fact more in demand in 2011.

Last week, LinkedIn announced that their website was now available in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Korean. Several other companies have done the same. Brazilian Portuguese was one of the fastest-growing languages, but also one with the most quality and delivery problems.

What didn't happen at the pace that I expected, was the number of mergers and acquisitions in the industry in 2011. There have been some, but no major mergers.

The topics that I expect to hear about in 2012 are more related to startups. There is going to be an increased focus on on-demand translations. Companies like Speaklike, MyGengo, Smartling, Translated.net, LanguageWire, Tolingo, and OneHourTranslation will be all over the place. Larger players will also offer their own solutions. Companies will be able to find efficiencies in moving down to smaller projects.

I also believe that we are going to be talking about marketplaces again. This sounds so 1999, but companies like Cloudwords and OpenBorder will be offering an online marketplace for translation companies to bid on projects of traditional buyers. Proz tried that before, but who knows... the times are different.

The automation of small project workflows, will require an increased productivity on the part of project managers. The most requested job in the translation industry will actually be project management, but the role of the project manager will shift more rapidly from closely managing resources to managing exceptions.

I don't think that the economy is in shape for many mergers and acquisitions. But we will hear about some of them happening. Companies like Welocalize and Transperfect still have plenty of cash, and there are companies for sale in the market. It is just a matter of finding the right price point.

From Managing to Monitoring － From Drops to Drips

After the recent IMTT Conference in Córdoba (Argentina), my friend Cecilia Piaggio was kind enough to offer me a ride to Rosario the next day. During the five-hour drive, we had a chance to talk about some changes that have happened in the translation industry in the past several years and to think about the changing roles of translators, project managers, LSP owners in a world where content is ubiquitous and streaming constantly.

She told me that one of the things that she noticed is that more and more clients were moving from the traditional project model — where files are dropped in an FTP server, work is done, and files are delivered again by FTP or e-mail — to a continuous flow of strings and small files that need to be picked up, processed and published within a short period of time. Or, as she aptly put it, we are moving from drops to drips.

If we combine this with the constant advance of automation of processes and repetitive activities with the use of tools like Plunet, XTRF, and Multicorpora, it becomes clear that the role of the project manager is also shifting. In fact, if you look at the performance of highly efficient companies like LanguageWire in Denmark, you will notice that project managers have become a lot more productive in the last few years. And the explanation for this is that instead of managing projects or drops, that traditionally require manual preparation and a lot of file shuffling, project managers can now focus on monitoring the process.

In other words, we are moving from active involvement in tasks to managing by exception. The project manager only interferes in a process when the systems show that something is not going according to plan. This allows a PM to work on many more projects, just monitoring his dashboard for red flags.

More projects and more automation lead to fewer human errors and higher yields. Good times!

Revenue Opportunities for LSPs

Innovation and new services are regular topics in my consulting engagements. My clients want to know how they can differentiate and increase their margins. They want to go beyond calling prospects and offering translation for cents per word.

Recently, while on-site at my clients, I happened to come across requests that I thought could become opportunities for starting new conversations with potential translation buyers. After all, calling a prospect to offer translation services is a losing proposition. To use the words of Anne-Marie Colliander Lind: to be successful in sales, you have to talk about activities that will generate translations, and not translation itself. Here are some examples:

• Video subtitling. In the middle of my consulting session, a project manager asks permission to talk to the LSP owner about an urgent project that required subtitling in two languages. Using the traditional processes, the transcription, translation, and subtitling would have taken four days and cost $3,000.00. I introduced them to dotSub, a site that I first mentioned here back in 2007. In a few minutes we had an account and I walked them through how to do the job. Few hours later, the translation was ready and we downloaded the HD video to deliver to the client for no cost at all (except our effort). 
• Tape transcription. Same scenario: PM brings a client's request for the transcription and translation of the recording of a Board Meeting that was held in English. Finding foreign language transcribers is not always easy, especially on short notice. Enters CastingWords, a crowdsourced web-based transcription service with fast turnaround and prices varying from $1.00 to $2.50 per minute. Low cost transcribers can also be found on Elance and other freelance sites. The result was that the transcription was done in 24 hours by native speakers and the translation was ready the next day. Point, set, match! 
• Streaming content. Hot day, no air conditioning (you guessed, I was in Europe!), my client tells me that he recently lost an opportunity because his client had short sentences that needed to be translated within 5 minutes for the duration of a sporting event every Sunday. These were newsflashes and game statistics that needed to be broadcast in several languages and my client lacked the infrastructure and the linguistic resources to fulfill the need. The project never materialized. I explained to him that companies like SpeakLike specialize in this type of service, and that he could have outsourced the solution for as little as $0.06 per word, giving him enough room to mark it up and make a profit, without having to invest in the technology infrastructure.

The action item following these three events was clear: Productize the request and call potential buyers asking questions that will generate translations. 

So in the first case, the question could be: "Do you ever receive training videos in other languages that you need to share with your employees?" 

In the case of transcriptions, the LSP could call administrative assistants (or secretaries as they are still called in some countries) and ask if they ever have to transcribe audio from meetings in English (if you ever had to do it, you know it is a pain).

As for streaming content, any website that publishes news is a candidate for on-demand translation. Financial sites, sports associations or events, news organizations, all need to provide information fast and accurately. After all, news has as very short shelf life. In theory, a Czech hockey player in Canada might want to have his Twitter feed and news published in Czech, English, and French to satisfy his fan base.

Using creativity to transform project challenges into new and innovative products is a good practice. All you need to do is say yes to your client requests, and maybe give me a call.

Argentina, Holland, Russia, and Greece: Next Events

This week I am preparing presentations and topics for the next event season that is kicking off. I am particularly excited about four events:

• The 7th Language and Technology Conference in Córdoba, Argentina, which kicks off on August 20th. I have been attending this event organized by IMTT since 2005, and it has consistently ranked among the best events in my opinion (Kirti Vashee and I also discussed it in a video conversation posted previously here). This time, the Cecis are taking a plunge and adding a Portuguese language track to the event, trying to congregate the two major Latin American markets under a single conference. A quick look at the program shows that the organizers have invested in high-caliber speakers with content that is extremely relevant to the translator community. If you are in Argentina, Brazil, Chile or Uruguay, there is still time to register and show up!
• On September 9th, the Dutch Association of Translation Agencies is hosting their annual event called TMT - The Future is Here. This is my first time attending and speaking at the Dutch ATA, but I like their model of having one keynote and several workshops after it. Very hands on, very practical. The topics will be around tools, marketing/media, and post-editing.
• Translation Forum Russia, September 23-25 in St. Petersburg, has just published its program with four tracks filled of high level content and great local and international speakers. Last year was my first foray into the Russian market and I find it to be vibrant and in clear expansion. The organizers were kind enough to ask me to keynote the event, but I am actually very interested in checking out some of the local business-related tracks. The event is in Russian and English and I hope that they provide me with a personal interpreter, like they did last year, so that I can enjoy the local sessions. Bert Esselink (the guy who wrote the book on localization), Luigi Muzii (who just published a book of his own), Alison Toon, Anne-Marie Colliander Lind, Doug Lawrence, Noël Muylle are the international speakers and Irina Alexeeva, Ekaterina Ryabtseva and Vladimir Fakov the local stars.
• In November, ELIA - the association of which I am president - will be hosting its Networking Days in Athens. I am very involved with the program and I must say that, as usual, we will have a fantastic roster of speakers and unique topics of special interest for European LSPs. This time there will be a full track on Medical and Pharmaceutical translations. Among the confirmed speakers are Federico Garcea, from Microsoft MT; Mirko Plitt, from Autodesk; Artur Raczynski, from the EPO; and many others.

I will also be attending and presenting at Localization World, in Santa Clara, and Tekom, in Wiesbaden, both in October. These are much larger and customer centered events. I will be writing about them in another post.

European Patent: Almost There

European Union governments have been negotiating the issue of a single EU patent for decades. Taking advantage of the fast-track procedure – which came in with the Lisbon Treaty and allows a group of countries to go ahead with EU legislation even when not all 27 member states agree – Ministers met Monday and hammered out a so-called "general approach," which is the governments' position on a European Commission legislative proposal that will create a single patent for the EU. I have discussed this matter previously in this post about the creation of a European patent system.

Italy and Spain fear discrimination because patents would be filed only in English, French or German. The two countries have filed a legal challenge with the European Court of Justice (ECJ), arguing that the new enhanced co-operation procedure should not be used to bring in the patent system. In fact, efforts to get an EU-wide agreement on patents have been blocked for many years by language disputes and the lack of unanimity.

At the moment, the European patent requires validation in each member state, and a full translation of the patent in the official national language. The new single patent system is expected to be in place by 2013, and should cut the current €32,000 it costs to get a patent across the 27 EU countries (€23,000 only for translations) to €2,500 for the 25 countries participating in the project (all but Italy and Spain), and further down to €680 at the end of a 12-year transitional period. In the U.S., a patent filing costs about €1,850.

Implications for the Language Services Industry

This is not good news for LSPs, but companies have been preparing for sometime. In fact, RWS Holdings, the biggest patent translations company in Europe, mentioned in its 2010 Annual Report that "The thrust of our acquisition strategy since 2005 has been to target technical translation businesses which have zero exposure to any developments in the patent field."

Lingtech, the Danish company that developed machine translation solutions for patents into Scandinavian languages, saw its revenues dwindle since the London Agreement and was recently acquired by Kommunicera AB.

But not all is gloom.

• Translations will still be required between English, French, and German, and in some cases into each European language. 
• The expectation is that the number of patents registered in Europe will increase because of the cost savings. So the reduction in number of translations could be offset by the increase in the number of documents filed.
• Asian countries file more and more patents every year. Those patents will need to be translated into European languages for filing. This means that there might be also a shift in the language pairs required for patent translations.

Even though I personally believe that the cost of translation is just a cost of doing business and that respect for linguistic diversity is a core EU value contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, I think that the train has left the station and a Single European Patent will be reality LSPs will have to contend with.

No One Wears Shoes Here

Last Sunday was Father's Day here in the United States and I spent the day catching up on my reading while the children played around me. Among a series of interesting articles and OpEds in BusinessWeek, Fortune, the New York Times, and other publications, I found an interesting column by Rana Foroohar in the Curious Capitalist section of Time Magazine called "Why the World Isn't Getting Smaller."

The spirit of the article is that globalization is not such a big thing as some of us want it to be, and — using Thomas Friedman's image — that the world is not that flat.

Rana points to some facts:

• More than half of global trade, investment and migration still takes place within regions — much of it between neighboring countries.
• Some 80% of global stock-market investment, for example, is in companies that are headquartered in the investor's home country.
• Exports represent about 25% of the global economy.
• Less than 20% of Internet traffic crosses national borders.
• Only 2% of students attend a university outside their home country.

The author also discusses the fact that one of the effects of globalization is actually more demand for localized products as emerging markets now have money and confidence to call their own shots and demand for customized products and solutions.

My father was the son of a shoemaker from Italy and grew up in a small town in Brazil and he used to tell a joke that came to my mind as read this column. It's the story of two shoe salesmen who were sent to Africa to see if there was a market for their product. The first salesman reported back, “This is a terrible business opportunity, no one wears shoes here.” The second salesman reported back, “This is a fantastic business opportunity, no one wears shoes here.”

Whether the world is getting smaller or not doesn't really matter. The reality is that as countries become wealthier, populations start to demand products to meet their needs, and they want these products in their own language. So for the language services industry, I would say that the world is a fantastic business opportunity, no one speaks all languages here!

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