Interoperability Will Be Critical as Language Tools Gear Up for Content's Modular Future

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Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Donald A. DePalma, Benjamin B. Sargent on July 28, 2009 in the following blogs: Business Globalization, Translation and Localization, Web Globalization, Technology, Best Practices
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The choice of which computer-aided translation (CAT) or translation environment (TEnT) tool is not a simple one, primarily because translators and agencies have varying needs depending on their clientele. Over time, we believe translation suppliers will gravitate to those solutions offering the most integrations and the greatest interoperability.

Freelancers working as individuals handle a wide range of projects, from product packaging to manuals to websites. These lone practitioners process handwritten or faxed documents as well as digital source files. However, once these singletons begin collaborating with in-house staff, language service providers (LSPs), and other freelancers, the minimum requirements for technology grow to include shared translation memory and a check-in/check-out module. Even in cases where the client doesn't specify the CAT or TEnT tool in the work order, a standardized translation memory (TM) output requirement dictates use of at least some formal translation technology.

The globalization software sector provides myriad choices in this sole practitioner and small workgroup category. Sooner or later, as we found in our recent report on freelancers and technology, translators choose their own preferred solution. As a freelancer expands his or her individual capacity by sharing out work to colleagues or working for a language service provider, the scope of projects and the types of content increase in complexity. Then the LSPs begin to evaluate translation management systems (TMS).

TMS solutions provide suppliers with a foundation for enterprise-wide management of shared linguistic assets, connectivity to other business software, and oversight capabilities for monitoring sub-contractors, calculations of profit and loss, workflow, and process automation. To be ready for future demands, TMS developers will have to:

Prepare their products to support increasingly modular content. Large-scale translation operations mean managing thousands of work units or "chunks" of deconstructed documents deriving from XML, DITA, and other component content strategies involving content management systems (CMSes) such as DocZone, Vasont, and SDL XySoft. As they process the chunks, translation tools must interoperate with ever-changing standards, enterprise applications, and content repositories.

Support burgeoning translation sources. Translation units can come from anywhere, including in-house translators, in-country employees, LSPs, freelancers, machine translation, communal translation memory (TM) and machine translation (MT) resources à la the TAUS data initiative, translation tweets, transcreation, asynchronously created content (that is, not translated or transcreated from the same source, but written independently), user-generated content (UGC), as well as community, collaborative, or crowd-sourced (CT3) translation. The challenge to tool-makers, LSPs, and corporate buyers alike is to avoid the mess that could result from this already apparent patchwork of content -- or risk the support, usability, and marketing costs of non-integrated content.

Consolidate, integrate, and standardize. Despite freelancer, LSP, and even corporate buyer concerns with too much consolidation in the translation automation business, there are good arguments for fewer suppliers in the ecosystem. Mergers and acquisitions done right could result in better, more integrated, and more functional products. Relying on industry specifications to stitch them together will also open them up to access by third-party solutions, creating an ecosystem as we've seen in the database and enterprise resource planning (ERP) sectors.

Currently, agencies and freelancers alike juggle a multiplicity of different tools. Translator tool nirvana will be reached when any given TEnT can be used for most projects, regardless of which LSP is contracted for what end-client, or which TMS is connected to what CMS. Vendors that best support interoperability -- from software integration to distributed process management to file and markup standards -- will gain the converts and loyal following needed to succeed in this fast-moving software sector.

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