SDL Buys Idiom

I read in Common Sense Advisory's Global watchtower that SDL has bought Idiom.
http://globalwatchtower.com/2008/02/11/sdl-buys-idiom/#more-479

This is another merge or adquisition that brings together two big names of the industry.
I believe the competition between Idiom and Trados Translation Management Solution was good, since both tried to create and innovate in order to outperform the competition.

I personally doubt this will continue, although the information from both parties states that Idiom will continue autonomously until a planned integration of the platforms in 2010.

Hopefully this will bring new players in the market and options for smaller translation automation providers.

CNN: Internet failure hits two continents

CNN: Internet failure hits two continents
"Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope."

BRRRR. In an industry where outsourcing is key and worldwide communications are vital, news like this make you tremble. Is really a boat cutting an undersea cable such a threat?

SMTS=Statistical Machine Translation Software

Wikipedia contains a very complete article on Machine Translation. Specially interesting, the Approaches section where are described the different methods the different software applications are using.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation

 

Is Machine Translation technology ready for production?

Interesting Webinar hosted by Idiom Technologies, Language Weaver and TAUS (Translation Automation User Society).

 

Nothing radically new was exposed, but as it always happens in this webinars, some interesting conclusions.

 

Jaap van der Meer presented in very general terms the applications of Machine Translation. The most important ones being the increase of productivity that translators can gain from combining other technology like Translation Memories together with their own linguistic skills, and an increase in the overall content being translated or made available to the user. eSolutions, Knowledge Databases, together with real time communication (email, SMS, IM) platforms can gain from MT.

 

Of course the topic of quality was discussed. I agree with the presenter that the most important factor to measure quality regarding MT is User Feedback. Basically if the content serves the purpose, it is ok to use whatever technology available. Users must be able to find and access the information they are looking for, their problem must be solved. In order to evaluate the quality of MT a few factors are considered. As a first reaction: rejection. However TAUS is performing Surveys and Statistics to get to an objective conclusion, sometime in the future.

 

Funny to note that depending on the country, the results of the satisfaction surveys vary a lot.

 

My conclusions:

 

MT makes sense in specific contexts. Big corporations with an enormous amount of content where it “would be nice” to have an idea of what information is available in different languages. I insist in the “Nice” factor: if the information is really vital, using these tools can lead to big trouble. (Sorry I’m still not convinced that MT works perfectly OK). In such a context, a workflow solution (like the one Idiom wants to sell) is a very good idea. That workflow will combine TM, Terminology Databases, Machine Translation in order to generate translatable content. It was mentioned in the presentation that the content could get out to the market at the moment that it becomes usable.

 

It is very true that the use of MT should not be seen as threat, as it is seen in the GILT industry by many translation providers, but as an opportunity: an opportunity to have increased access to knowledge, information; an opportunity to generate new business by combining MT generated material with Human translated material.

PMI Spain Chapter: Interesting Thought: Why to volunteer?

We had elections today at PMI Madrid Spain Chapter.
I've been elected as member of the new Board of Directors, a new interesting challenge for me.

PMI objective is to promote Project Management as a profession. One of the outgoing Board members expressed a thought that I found very interesting: Being part of an association like this has mainly 2 big motivations. Both of these motivations have pros and cons and do not need to be necessarily bad. The first is to help winning some new business, the second to grow in ones own company. I do not necessary agree with the statement, but there is some truth in it I can't deny.

There is also the possibility that the motivation is simply to network with the goal of professional and personal growth.

Regarding localization or globalization, I believe Professional Project Management is not very popular in Language Providers here in Spain. I do not believe there was anybody else from the GILT industry in the meeting today. I ignore if there are people from the industry participating in PMI Spain. It's kind of sad, in a way I believe it shows that Spain's a little behind in project management maturity at least in what the globalization industry is concerned.

I hope to be able to convince more people from Spain of the importance of project management professionalism in our industry. In today's competitive world, and for Spanish which is spoken in many countries besides Spain, Project Management can be a real and tangible added value. In fact I believe it is imprescindible if you want to provide a good service. Not only Multilingual Service Providers will benefit from it. But there are not so many MLVs in Spain after all.