The profit of sharing
The profit of sharing
Collective wisdom
TAUS User Conference 2009, Portland, 28-30 October
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society
SCENARIO: SINGLE/REGIONAL LANGUAGE SERVICES PROVIDER
You are a small language service company. You specialize in a few language pairs. Your clients are domestic firms who export to neighboring countries and global language service providers. You would like to service global corporations who localize into your languages. However you have no direct access to them and would risk relationships with global language service providers if you approached their clients. Your domestic clients are extremely price sensitive. You use industry standard technology tools and standards. Your domestic clients have not expressed a need for real time translation. You understand that global clients have growing needs for real time translation in your languages. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to increase your domestic market share and target global clients? Why? Group 1 Premise of the question is that it makes good business sense for the small provider to go after the global corporations. This may not be the case. Solutions 1. Identify the specific market segment – preferably one that is under-served – and focus on that. 2. Find niche specialty technology solutions that are accessible to smaller providers and that differentiate you as a provider. 3. Provider should find out from large clients why they might have changed vendors. Was it pricing, was it service delivery? Use these findings to position yourself to global clients. 4. Approach MLV partners and propose a partnership based on multi-year agreement with an end customer, based on a specific strategic foundation. 5. Approach smaller, complimentary service providers to create a more en—to-end solution. 6. Avoid over-specialization (based on a specific language, specific area of focus, etc). 7. Invest in development of proprietary technology to connect to bespoke real-time translation solutions (for example MT) or large data repositories (like TDA). This could be a single web developer or a small team. 8. Consider creating or participating in a marketplace for real-time type assignments, offered on a first— come-first-serve basis to a broad network of small providers. Group 2 1. Do exactly what translated.net have done 2. Specialized post editing expertise 3. Build / improve baseline automation on workflow 4. Improve / develop marketing & relationship through industry membership (e.g. GALA) 5. Apply TM + MT technology to maximize efficiency in domestic client 6. Consider “partnership” in the form of M&A? 2
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: GLOBAL LANGUAGE SERVICES PROVIDER
You are one of twenty global language service providers who service customers in many industries and languages. Your presence is stronger in some sectors compared to others. You have your own set of tools for clients and a best of breed partering approach to more niche technology. You are growing at a double digit rate year-on-year. You are acquisitive. Around eighty percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of customers who are mainly large corporations . Your customers’ translation needs are growing at an accelerating rate. Most of your customers’ translation budgets are not growing. Your customers have a growing need for real / near -time translation. Your customers want open standards and open systems to ensure portability of their linguistic resources. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to deliver on your clients needs and matintain/increase growth rates? Why? Group 1 1. Define additional, higher value and consultative type services. Productization of new services to offer clients such as MT training. 2. Improve on skills to help clients automate and innovate. 3. Transfer existing skills to new domains e.g. freelance translator management to crowd or community member management. Group 2 1. Internal consulting to clients • See how much translation is needed by other departments within the organization 2. Opening up possibilities for MT with or without P.E. 3. Help the customer open new markets with the efficiencies gained above.
3
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: SEARCH GIANT
You are a search giant. Your vast revenues are built on advertising. You are yet to monetize your many other innovations. You have the reputation of being a progressive company with an open innovation culture. You have developed a free statistical machine translation engine with many language-pairs. Some languagespairs are thought to work quite well. Others do not. Machine translation supports your advertising business and is also good for your reputation. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to improve the quality of machine translation to support the need for better subject/industry specific translation inorder to continually improve the quality of your reach for users and advertisers? Group 1 1. Clean the existing data – use the engines data cleaning functions 2. Improve Terminology consistency – run against established term base (domain specific dependant) 3. Incorporate additional MT offerings and allow end user rating of the individual systems Also for consideration Incorporate a TM validation rating. Get advertisers involved in rating out. Optimize data for ad applicability? Improve domain specific information: Create a categorization for input so that additional content comes into domain specific repository Categorization based on identified industry key terms Group 2 Three actions to do next year to support better in-domain translation: 1. Join the TDA and improve in-domain coverage through access to TDA data 2. Setup the community that will submit the post-edited content back to the corpus 3. Monetize APIs (when the SMT engine is used in other applications) 4. Parse input text for domain identification and call the appropriate engine
4
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: TRANSLATION BUYER
You contract a few large language service providers. This has helped to ensure consistency of translation quality, and minimize project management overhead. Your translation/localization department is a cost centre. The department is shrinking over time. Your volumes are growing rapidly. Your budget is not. Your near real / real time translation needs are growing. Your want greater leverage from your translation memories. You want flexibility. This means open standards and open systems to ensure portability of your linguistic resources. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year? Why? Group 1 1. Join TDA a.
Consider especially when starting up new markets
b.
or work through your LSP
2. Deploy MT a.
Identify content suitable for MT.
b.
Suggest 3 classes of content i.
Raw MT
ii.
Slight PE
iii.
Heavy PE
3. Find appropriate communities for community translation a.
Deploy crowdsourcing interface or do via GMS
4. Integrate advanced leveraging into your TM workflow Group 2 1. Join TDA 2. Buy an MT engine 3. My translation Workspace as a collaborative working platform Group 3 •
3C’s - Crowd, Cut, Consolidate
•
Change from cost centre to profit centre…charge your internal clients
•
Single source..force cuts in content
•
Collect vendor TMs…drive TMs into MT
•
Crowdsource as post editor
•
Customers to vote on quality
5
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY SUPPLIER
You are a small company with leading edge technology. You specialize in a specific area of the industry where you provide outstanding tools.Linguistic data is key to your tools. Your goal is to be the leading provider in your area. You lack a strong presence and marketing muscle. You do not have deep pockets. You have strong relationships wth existing clients. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to achieve your goal? Group 1 We take three actions to acquire linguistic data: 1. Ask our customers them to share their data with us. We incent them with a pricing discount or the promise of improved products and services. Critically, we do not ask them to make their data public, as they may be reluctant or face internal obstacles. Instead, we rely on the strong relationship between us and our clients. 2. Offer a “freemium” or “community edition” of our tool that can be widely used by the public, and capture data entered by the crowd. We still sell a “professional” edition that may have more features or not require data sharing. 3. Join TAUS Data Association.
Group 2 Definition of the company: - Small language tech company, operating in a niche market, owner of a leading edge technology [ e.g.: advanced leveraging, or Terminology, or MT ] There action items: 1. Join TDA and convince your clients to join TDA: If you have strong relationships with your clients you can convince them to join TDA. And btw, if you convince 5 clients you get your membership for free. 2. Track the TDA integrations so you can build business cases for clients in the same domain. You can show them how productivity levels and quality went up by leveraging TDA 3. Join open source initiatives and consider giving back to the community part of your inventions
6
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
TAUS is a think tank for the translation industry, undertaking research for buyers and providers of translation services and technologies. Our mission is to increase the size and significance of the translation industry to help the world communicate better. To meet this ongoing goal, TAUS supports entrepreneurs and principals in the translation industry to share and define new strategies through a comprehensive program of events, publications and communications.
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society
www.translationautomation.com
Collective wisdom
TAUS User Conference 2009, Portland, 28-30 October
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society
SCENARIO: SINGLE/REGIONAL LANGUAGE SERVICES PROVIDER
You are a small language service company. You specialize in a few language pairs. Your clients are domestic firms who export to neighboring countries and global language service providers. You would like to service global corporations who localize into your languages. However you have no direct access to them and would risk relationships with global language service providers if you approached their clients. Your domestic clients are extremely price sensitive. You use industry standard technology tools and standards. Your domestic clients have not expressed a need for real time translation. You understand that global clients have growing needs for real time translation in your languages. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to increase your domestic market share and target global clients? Why? Group 1 Premise of the question is that it makes good business sense for the small provider to go after the global corporations. This may not be the case. Solutions 1. Identify the specific market segment – preferably one that is under-served – and focus on that. 2. Find niche specialty technology solutions that are accessible to smaller providers and that differentiate you as a provider. 3. Provider should find out from large clients why they might have changed vendors. Was it pricing, was it service delivery? Use these findings to position yourself to global clients. 4. Approach MLV partners and propose a partnership based on multi-year agreement with an end customer, based on a specific strategic foundation. 5. Approach smaller, complimentary service providers to create a more en—to-end solution. 6. Avoid over-specialization (based on a specific language, specific area of focus, etc). 7. Invest in development of proprietary technology to connect to bespoke real-time translation solutions (for example MT) or large data repositories (like TDA). This could be a single web developer or a small team. 8. Consider creating or participating in a marketplace for real-time type assignments, offered on a first— come-first-serve basis to a broad network of small providers. Group 2 1. Do exactly what translated.net have done 2. Specialized post editing expertise 3. Build / improve baseline automation on workflow 4. Improve / develop marketing & relationship through industry membership (e.g. GALA) 5. Apply TM + MT technology to maximize efficiency in domestic client 6. Consider “partnership” in the form of M&A? 2
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: GLOBAL LANGUAGE SERVICES PROVIDER
You are one of twenty global language service providers who service customers in many industries and languages. Your presence is stronger in some sectors compared to others. You have your own set of tools for clients and a best of breed partering approach to more niche technology. You are growing at a double digit rate year-on-year. You are acquisitive. Around eighty percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of customers who are mainly large corporations . Your customers’ translation needs are growing at an accelerating rate. Most of your customers’ translation budgets are not growing. Your customers have a growing need for real / near -time translation. Your customers want open standards and open systems to ensure portability of their linguistic resources. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to deliver on your clients needs and matintain/increase growth rates? Why? Group 1 1. Define additional, higher value and consultative type services. Productization of new services to offer clients such as MT training. 2. Improve on skills to help clients automate and innovate. 3. Transfer existing skills to new domains e.g. freelance translator management to crowd or community member management. Group 2 1. Internal consulting to clients • See how much translation is needed by other departments within the organization 2. Opening up possibilities for MT with or without P.E. 3. Help the customer open new markets with the efficiencies gained above.
3
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: SEARCH GIANT
You are a search giant. Your vast revenues are built on advertising. You are yet to monetize your many other innovations. You have the reputation of being a progressive company with an open innovation culture. You have developed a free statistical machine translation engine with many language-pairs. Some languagespairs are thought to work quite well. Others do not. Machine translation supports your advertising business and is also good for your reputation. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to improve the quality of machine translation to support the need for better subject/industry specific translation inorder to continually improve the quality of your reach for users and advertisers? Group 1 1. Clean the existing data – use the engines data cleaning functions 2. Improve Terminology consistency – run against established term base (domain specific dependant) 3. Incorporate additional MT offerings and allow end user rating of the individual systems Also for consideration Incorporate a TM validation rating. Get advertisers involved in rating out. Optimize data for ad applicability? Improve domain specific information: Create a categorization for input so that additional content comes into domain specific repository Categorization based on identified industry key terms Group 2 Three actions to do next year to support better in-domain translation: 1. Join the TDA and improve in-domain coverage through access to TDA data 2. Setup the community that will submit the post-edited content back to the corpus 3. Monetize APIs (when the SMT engine is used in other applications) 4. Parse input text for domain identification and call the appropriate engine
4
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: TRANSLATION BUYER
You contract a few large language service providers. This has helped to ensure consistency of translation quality, and minimize project management overhead. Your translation/localization department is a cost centre. The department is shrinking over time. Your volumes are growing rapidly. Your budget is not. Your near real / real time translation needs are growing. Your want greater leverage from your translation memories. You want flexibility. This means open standards and open systems to ensure portability of your linguistic resources. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year? Why? Group 1 1. Join TDA a.
Consider especially when starting up new markets
b.
or work through your LSP
2. Deploy MT a.
Identify content suitable for MT.
b.
Suggest 3 classes of content i.
Raw MT
ii.
Slight PE
iii.
Heavy PE
3. Find appropriate communities for community translation a.
Deploy crowdsourcing interface or do via GMS
4. Integrate advanced leveraging into your TM workflow Group 2 1. Join TDA 2. Buy an MT engine 3. My translation Workspace as a collaborative working platform Group 3 •
3C’s - Crowd, Cut, Consolidate
•
Change from cost centre to profit centre…charge your internal clients
•
Single source..force cuts in content
•
Collect vendor TMs…drive TMs into MT
•
Crowdsource as post editor
•
Customers to vote on quality
5
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
SCENARIO: TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY SUPPLIER
You are a small company with leading edge technology. You specialize in a specific area of the industry where you provide outstanding tools.Linguistic data is key to your tools. Your goal is to be the leading provider in your area. You lack a strong presence and marketing muscle. You do not have deep pockets. You have strong relationships wth existing clients. Given what you have learnt at this event, what three actions do you undertake next year to achieve your goal? Group 1 We take three actions to acquire linguistic data: 1. Ask our customers them to share their data with us. We incent them with a pricing discount or the promise of improved products and services. Critically, we do not ask them to make their data public, as they may be reluctant or face internal obstacles. Instead, we rely on the strong relationship between us and our clients. 2. Offer a “freemium” or “community edition” of our tool that can be widely used by the public, and capture data entered by the crowd. We still sell a “professional” edition that may have more features or not require data sharing. 3. Join TAUS Data Association.
Group 2 Definition of the company: - Small language tech company, operating in a niche market, owner of a leading edge technology [ e.g.: advanced leveraging, or Terminology, or MT ] There action items: 1. Join TDA and convince your clients to join TDA: If you have strong relationships with your clients you can convince them to join TDA. And btw, if you convince 5 clients you get your membership for free. 2. Track the TDA integrations so you can build business cases for clients in the same domain. You can show them how productivity levels and quality went up by leveraging TDA 3. Join open source initiatives and consider giving back to the community part of your inventions
6
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society Copyright © 2009 TAUS
TAUS is a think tank for the translation industry, undertaking research for buyers and providers of translation services and technologies. Our mission is to increase the size and significance of the translation industry to help the world communicate better. To meet this ongoing goal, TAUS supports entrepreneurs and principals in the translation industry to share and define new strategies through a comprehensive program of events, publications and communications.
T A U S
Translation Automation User Society
www.translationautomation.com
