Language Vendors Announce End-to-End Partnership

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Global Watchtower

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Posted by Donald A. DePalma, Nataly Kelly on August 9, 2010 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization
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This week, three language technology suppliers and a language service provider (LSP) launched a partnership to pull several advanced technologies together into a unified translation and localization solution. The four companies -- Acrolinx , Asia Online, Clay Tablet, and Milengo -- announced that they would work together to "create an end-to-end translation solution that delivers on the promise of the next generation of translation advances."

The partnership brings together three products that we have identified as class leaders, including Acrolinx for authoring improvements, Asia Online for machine translation, and Clay Tablet for middleware, all integrated within Milengo's production center.

The press release echoes our long-held contention that information is growing at a rate far greater than humans could process (see "The Business Case for Machine Translation," Aug09), and that there are significant "blue ocean" opportunities for translation that many companies can't even contemplate given current reliance on human translation. The importance of "cost-reducing" efficiency came up as well, a theme we saw throughout our recent research on translation pricing (see "Translation and Localization Pricing," Jul10).

While they did not name names, the four companies decided to position themselves mano-a-mano against the single-vendor portfolio-based solution offered by SDL, which recently announced its acquisition of machine translation supplier Language Weaver. In their approach to offering a single solution, the four have chosen a best-of-breed approach (see "Opposing Views on Language Technology Ownership," Apr10) built on products that they say will "all work together seamlessly" because they are standards-based. We push vendors to support standards, but their claims of support often stop just on the far side of lip-service. The proof, as always, will be in successful deployments.

Their goal is to deliver on some core supplier capabilities that we have long espoused in our research, including manageability, effectiveness, and efficiency (see "Translation Management Takes Flight," Mar09). At the same time, they hope to exploit sentiments against the market leader, SDL, in some sectors. While this best-of-breed type of partnership has the potential to deliver value to customers, the challenge for any solution built on technology from multiple suppliers is to make sure that customers aren't left at the intersection of the products wondering who's responsible for which component. This can be especially problematic when sales reps from four separate companies might be involved in a deal -- and could raise concerns as these various vendors struggle to support each other as well as the other LSPs in their portfolios.

As we pointed out in "How to Evaluate Partnership Announcements," potential customers need to review joint development efforts, look for the product integration roadmap, and review the plans for active joint marketing and sales. Tying together multiple technologies to create a streamlined experience for the customer is a great idea in theory, practiced by many companies. The big question always is how well does it work in actual implementation. We expect that more and more LSPs will create offerings of this sort through partnership approaches with technology providers – they simply cannot compete without doing so, building technology themselves, or buying it from a supplier that might also be a competitor. In fact, Asia Online has worked closely with Moravia Worldwide on machine translation issues and Clay Tablet lists 14 LSP partners at its website, including other best-of-breed solutions.

What's the real impact to the customer at the end of the day? While an end-to-end solution that starts with "quality at the source" via authoring is enlightened, our research on content source optimization reveals that most buy-side organizations have complex reasons for keeping localization separate from authoring. They also would need to reach a level of localization maturity that would enable them to truly take advantage of such an approach.Whether LSPs acquire technologies that serve all aspects of global content development or they partner in order to achieve the same effect, what really matters at the end of the day is whether the customer is prepared to use them.

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