Two members of the audience were unimpressed with Mark Childress’ lecture at TM-Europe. When he started speaking both looked up and showed a mild interest in this tall American with a deep voice who regularly quotes someone called Yogi Berra, allegedly a baseball philosopher. However, when Mark started talking our two unimpressed audience members seemed to take the view that terminology was worthy but dull and settled down to have a snooze. These two members of the audience were dogs. The people in the audience heard an excellent lecture on terminology. Kevin Lossner, who owns these two dogs will probably protest that they were in fact incredibly interested in everything that went on at TM-Europe 2012, but we know he’s lying.

Mark was the keynote speaker who opened TM-Europe 2012. The conference theme was The Future of Translation and we wanted to make a point by having a presentation on terminology open the conference. Mark gave a lecture and a very interesting lecture it was too. He brought up major issues with how terminology is used with real examples. He discussed how terminology can bewilder as well as inform. He also gave examples where using the terminology which is commonly understood rather than the terminology of the experts can save lives.

There is a lot of discussion at other conferences and on social and other media about the future of translation. Some commentators paint a future of automated, commoditized, lower quality translation. The people who are suggesting this is the future look like they know what they are talking about. This future of large LSPs brokering translation and machine translation vendors automating all in sight looks impressive. To paraphrase a wonderful line from Raymond Chandler: From thirty feet away they look like a lot of class. From ten feet away they look like they were meant to be seen from thirty feet away.

At TM-Europe we were discussing a different future. It was a future where words matter, language matters and there is absolutely nothing wrong with aiming for excellence. The second keynote speaker, Chris Durban made a very strong case for this pursuit of excellence and the premium market. Chris is an international business woman, a business analyst, a marketing expert, an entrepreneur and she has the words ‘Freelance Translator’ written on her business card. Her presentation received a lot of attention on twitter and in other blogs. Chris’ message is about being focused, being specialized and aiming for the premium market. She showed how she helped her clients to realize the importance of translation. Her stories of winning business always seemed to start with respect for the client and an understanding of their issues. She mentioned signing your work as way of taking responsibility for quality.

Stefan Gentz gave an excellent presentation on Change Management. He illustrated how we all have slightly different perspectives by asking everyone to stand up close their eyes and point north. As you can imagine not everyone was pointing in the same direction.

Reinhard Schaler took one particular aspect of the future, Social Localisation as the topic for his presentation. It is often the case when Reinhard gets up to speak he uses a video or music clip to illustrate his point. This time he used Randy Newman’s song Political Science (No one likes us – I don’t know why!) to illustrate the ‘Why don’t they just speak English’ attitude of some developers. Reinhard’s account of TM-Europe is available here: http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Alain Chamsi, CEO, JiveFusion Technologies, Martin Beuster of Context and Doug Strock of Global Language Translations and Consulting gave excellent presentations on process and project management. The Technology Showcase had presentations from Paul Filkin of SDL, Gábor Ugray of Kilgray and Bastian Enners of Plunet. This was followed by an overview of research in NLP and other technologies from Dr. Maciej Ogrodniczuk of the Polish Academy of Science and Piotr Pęzik, of the University of Łódź.

Kevin Lossner, the owner of the dogs mentioned above, said somewhere his presentation was a rant. I am not sure of this but it certainly was a lively heart full opinion on a range of subjects. He wrote about it on his blog: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html. Kevin spoke together with Doug Strock and Michal Tyszkowski of Centrum Lokalizacji C&M on a panel dealing with machine translation. The title of this presentation asked whether MT was hype. The discussion here had little hype and those using MT had a very realistic view of how it can be used. Michal compared it to packet soup. He pointed this was widely used a base ingredient for other things and rarely used on its own. Michal claimed the same was true of MT.

We had hoped that the translator, Miguel Llorens would join us for the MT panel and for The Warsaw Pact Debate. Sadly he died a few weeks before the conference. We used a presentation made up of twitter and blog quotes from Miguel as a background for the MT debate. As I got to decide which quotes to use I was able to include one of my favourite tweets from him which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject being discussed: The main question archaeologists of the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?"

You can download the full presentation of Miguel quotes here: http://www.tm-europe.org/sites/default/files/Miguel-quotes.pptx

I took part in another panel discussion on standards along with Jerzy Czopik,Freelance Translator and Odette LIÉTAR of IDEST. Monika Popiolek chaired this lively discussion where there were many interesting contributions from the floor.

The conference ended with The Warsaw Pact Debate. We had Chris Durban, Mark Childress, Doug Strock and Reinhard Schaler. I only realized later that this combination of translator, end customer, lsp and academic was perfectly balanced. However, that was not the reason we picked these people. We picked them because we thought they would have some interesting things to say. They did! It was a very lively and interesting debate. One of the things I got out of this is marketing is crucial to improving your business and career and you need to allocate time for marketing.

This was the fifth TM-Europe conference. Susan Starling suggested that with the amount of people blogging about TM-Europe it might lose its reputation as the best kept secret of translation Industry conference. It would be great to welcome more people next year as well as welcome back those who attended this and previous year. I would to thank everyone who made it a successful conference, the programme committee of Mark Childress, Kevin Lossner, Monika Popiolek and myself, the speakers, those who blogged and tweeted and above all those who came to the conference.

See you for TM-Europe 2013.

Reinhard’s blog

http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Kevin’s blog on TM-Europe

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-future-of-translation-now-in-warsaw.html

Kevin’s blog on Kevin’s presentations

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html

Valerij Tomaranko’s blog

http://anmerkungen-des-uebersetzers.com/2012/10/08/tm-europe-2012-putting-a-face-to-a-name/

Jayne Fox’s blog

http://foxdocs.biz/BetweenTranslations/the-bulk-vs-premium-translation-market-inspiration-from-the-tm-europe-twitter-stream/

TM-Europe Facebook Album (thanks to Stefan Gentz)

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.189691217832483.46812.100003748172867&type=1&l=34bf32297f

If anybody was 'April Fooled' by our Breaking News Announcement (see below) published on 1 April then we've had our fun.

Now it's time to own up and reveal the full extent of our duplicity.

The press conference was not held in the Four Seasons Hotel (Istvan would never, ever pay for that - that was a significant clue).

Word has it that they actually want to make their conference 'a twitter-free zone' but don't want others to copy this great idea, so they are obviously trying to keep it secret.

The sophisticated "Dashboard" concept was slightly over the top - any old plain dusty dashboard will have to do for the 'watch dogging'.

They have admitted under pressure that they are actually only interested in saving the world by selling affordable memoQ licences to everybody on the planet. They have decided to leave the other major challenges to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - for now.

The other rubbish content of the fake announcement does not interest them because they do not understand what it means.

They don't have to worry so much about interoperability because their own wares are fully interoperatible. But if other people want to watch them, they will happily return the compliment and watch them too.  

The "joke" logo is not really a Kilgray logo but was used courtesy of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights  - organisers of the annual Watch Docs Human Rights in Film Festival (see the proper logo below). Both the organisation and the festival are great and have our utmost respect These are real non-profit activits who are working hard to make the world a better place to live for everybody!

Watch out for more Breaking News on April Fools Day 2012.

  *******************************

Kilgray have just announced that they are following the new generation globalization trends and not only will their user conferences become Twitter Free Zones from now on but they are also launching a new Industry All Standards Watch Dog Dashboard Programme (ASWDDP) at the MemoQ Fest!

The Kilgray spokesperson, Istvan Navtsi confirmed this evening at the Budapest Four Seasons Hotel press conference that Kilgray have been inspired by key industry speakers to give up on the idea of selling software and decided to invest in saving the world by seeking input from localization buyers and suppliers, tool developers, and various partner localization and standards organizations and exploring funding options for a long-term, stable standards program that is available to all in the industry.

Kilgray have confirmed their commitment to this new groundbreaking initiative by changing their logo, re-branding, and donating all their TM and MT assets to various industry charities registered as not-for-profit corporations.

Warsaw is really beautiful at the end of September.  I know you possibly have images of white winters in Poland but trust me, summer likes this city and usually tries to stay that bit longer and amazes us with spectacular Indian Summers. Hence, Warsaw is a great place to spend the last few days of September. You will be feeling very good after the brilliant presentation you have just delivered at TM-Europe 2011. A dozen or so attendees will have tweeted immediately about how insightful your presentation was and one will even tweet about how well you looked. You are finishing a beer with some new friends and notice from the business cards that these are the people your sales director told you to meet. What could be more pleasant?

Now you want to know how to achieve this dream. It is very simple  - go to the TM-Europe 2011 website and have a look at the call for papers, http://www.tm-europe.org/callforpapers2011, then write down what you've been meaning to say for years, and submit a proposal. You have until April 30th to submit a paper. This year the conference theme is “Process Management and Standards for the Translation and Localisation Industry”.  The conference gets quite a few submissions and the ones which get selected are those that adhered to the criteria announced in the call for papers and present the most insightful views and original angles.

The second XLIFF Symposium takes place on the pre-conference day of TM-Europe 2011 and the call for papers for that event will be published within a couple of weeks.

The TM-Europe International Conference is a lively event where you get to meet many translation industry people who do not notmally attend other conferences. One of the great things about the conference is the level of expertise, originality and good humour among the audience. It is also a great opportunity to enjoy Warsaw in September and enjoy the famous Polish hospitality.

Following a presentation by Jaap van der Meer at the LISA standards summit a number of people have been expressing the view that translation memory as we currently know it will not be around in five years. I think they are wrong and I would like to explain why.

Those that claim that translation memory is on the way out have come to this conclusion because they believe that statistical machine translation is becoming more and more important and as the corpus for large MT engines such as the Google one grow, translation memory will become increasingly irrelevant. There are even claims that while translation memory may be here in five years it will not have an economic value.

There is a huge volume of commercial translation which goes through translation memory tools and a relatively small volume using machine translation tools. However, recently the amount of commercial organisations using machine translation has grown and there is a very large amount of non-commercial machine translation being done, particularly through Google. That said, if an organisation wants a quality translation for professional purposes they are likely to use a translation agency or translators who uses a translation memory tool.

One of the ideas behind the belief that the translation memory is on the way out is that the larger the corpus the better and we will soon get to a stage where an enormous corpus will produce almost perfect results from statistical machine translation engines. I believe there is an optimum level with statistical machine translation. The law of diminishing returns kicks in when you get beyond this level. There are more possibilities for errors in both the corpus and how systems manage it and even for creative sabotage. Google give translators and everyone else the opportunity to provide a better translation. While this will usually improve it, there is an opportunity to sabotage the corpus or at least make it funnier. Use Google Translate to translate ‘Quid Pro Quo’ from Latin to English for an example of this. However, I have no idea what the optimum level will prove to be.

The value behind translation memory is that a professional translation has worked on the matching segments or corpus. Translation memory is of greatest value when the content of the translation memory matches closely the content of the document to be translated. Translator and translation agencies are often specialists. They may work for the same customers for a long time and often concentrate on particular subject matter. Statistical machine translation such as Google’s may be able to offer a gist of a document but unless the corpus has matches which originated from a professional translator and matches their areas of expertise it cannot offer the same value as a well maintained translation memory. As long as translation memory continues to make translation work easier it will be used. I believe that in five years there may be changes but we are more likely to see improvements with translation memory than its demise.
 

At the end of February 2011, LISA, the Localization Industry Standards Association, announced it was insolvent and was closing the organisation. LISA has been around since 1990 and it is interesting to note that all of the translation companies who were involved in founding LISA (Berlitz, Mendez, Softrans, Stream International and Bull International Localization Organization) no longer exist as separate companies.

For me, and I think many others, the most important part of LISA’s work was on standards development. They managed to attract a number of people at any early stage who made an important contribution to the development of technology standards for our industry. The three most important LISA standards are TBX, TMX and SRX. The other standards which LISA’s OSCAR group worked on are:

• Global information management Metrics eXchange (GMX) - Standard word and character counts for consistent costing and estimating.
• XML text memory (xml:tm) - For storing text and translation memory in XML documents.
• Term Link - The lightweight standard for linking XML documents to terminology resources.

All the LISA standards are important but GMX, xml:tm and Term Link are not as well developed or widely used as TBX, TMX and SRX and may not have the momentum to attract people to continue developing them.

It is clear that the LISA standards or the ideas behind the standards benefit the translation industry and at the very least TBX, TMX and SRX should continue to be developed in some way.

TBX has already been approved as an ISO standard and ISO TC37 will presumably lead its future development.

The closure of LISA may give an opportunity for some consolidation among standards development. For a relatively small industry we have a lot of standards but very few people actually involved in developing them. I have been involved with the development of XLIFF since the beginning and this standard is unusual in that you have a vibrant, active and enthusiastic technical committee developing it. There have been far fewer people involved in the OSCAR standards committee at LISA. There has also been problem for some time and that is getting work done on these standards. The most recent revision of TMX was published in 2005. At the time there was a lot of discussion about TMX 2.0 and plans for a major revision but instead only minor changes were made.

I doubt if there would be many objections if one of the effects of LISA’s closure was to consolidate XLIFF, TMX and SRX. XLIFF is already capable of being used as an exchange format for translation memory which is what TMX does. Some experts have commented that one thing missing from XLIFF is an ability to list the segmentation rules. SRX would provide that. A consolidation like this would also deal with the problem of not having the people to develop the standard. Many of those involved in OSCAR are also members of the XLIFF TC. The translation industry would benefit by consolidation of these standards and I hope it is something which LISA and OASIS looks at very supportively.