The document discusses how cloud computing and collaborative translation technologies can help the translation industry meet growing demands by making processes more efficient through parallelization and leveraging online communities of translators. It explores how cloud-based platforms allow projects to be split into smaller chunks that can be worked on simultaneously by multiple translators, reducing timelines and costs. While technology helps increase speed and volume, the document emphasizes that human factors like process redesign and facilitation of translator communities remain essential.

1. Cloud Translation<br />Abstract<br />Has the washing machine changed the world more than the Internet? Do the latest technological advances really free translators or just tether them to their desks more than before? Why should one consider switching to cloud computing? We will search an answer to these questions by discussing cloud computing and collaborative translation technology to make process simpler, lean, and parallel and face the new translation industry mantra of “cheaper, faster, and better” to meet the growth in volume, velocity, and volatility. Doing more with less costs more, and technology is not enough; it must always be coupled with people.<br />About six years ago, I went to the gap to buy a pair of jeans. I tend to wear my jeans until they’re falling apart, so it had been quite a while since my last purchase. A nice young salesperson walked up to me and asked if she could help.<br />“I want a pair of jeans—32–28,” I said.<br />“Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?”<br />I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, “I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.” It turned out she didn’t know, but after consulting one of her older colleagues, she was able to figure out what “regular” jeans used to be, and she pointed me in the right direction.<br />The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that “regular” jeans were what I wanted.<br />Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, Why More Is Less<br />When Mirko Silvestrini asked me to speak at this conference on cloud computing for LSP’s, my thoughts immediately went to a cue that Oscar Wilde made Lord Goring, the main character, say in An Ideal Husband: «I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.»<br />In fact, cloud computing is a vague and obscure term used to convey a poetic vision of the Internet and of something we already know and do. Is it just a buzz, then? No, because the underlying technologies are mature, but it may sound just like this, and talking about cloud computing may thus be like talking about nothing.<br />Then my thoughts went to innovation and to what Wernher von Braun, the German-American rocket scientist that lead the development of the booster rocket that helped land the first men on the Moon, used to say when he was asked what was the purpose of the moon race: «What is the purpose of a new born baby?»<br />Innovation is not simply the introduction of something new, it is a change effected by implementing an invention. The Austrian-American economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power, and that innovation-originated market power could provide better results than the “invisible hand” and price competition.<br />The approach to crises is usually of two kinds, conservative or innovative. The conservative approach is typical of the language services industry, where any change is seen as a major change. Companies resorting to the conservative approach usually choose to cut costs, not by reducing staff (a rather impractical solution in an industry almost entirely based on outsourcing and freelancing), but by lowering pays and using, but not investing in, technology. On the other hand, as a recent Common Sense Advisory report showed, the translation industry is generally a low-tech industry where “do more with less” is an imperative that very few can follow.<br />As Tex Texin recently noticed, it is ironic that the localization industry, specialized in adaptation and customization, has been insistent on its existing process model and is not adapting itself.<br />Alternatively, the innovative approach to crises relies on products. However, since product innovation in a century-old activity is very limited, it could happen only with the so-called value-added services. This partly explains why many still look at translation as a cost, and the consequent competition on prices.<br />Competing on prices also implies that compensations are no longer enough to retain the best resources while attracting the worst.<br />Vendors should compete on the scope of services and responsibilities, but this raises the range of services and the required skill set while exposing vendors to the client's organization.<br />Therefore, only process innovation can be effective, but standards and interchange are needed to build productive solutions. Developing standards, however, is not enough per se; standards should be defined, promoted, and used, while industry fragmentation slows down or even impedes their adoption.<br />Again, technology is used to streamline processes because the new translation industry mantra is “cheaper, faster, and better,” but doing more with less costs more, and technology is not enough; technology can help increase volume and speed, but processes are made by and pivot on people. Therefore, the people in the translation industry must first redesign processes but very few people in the translation industry are willing to repudiate their education.<br />Schumpeter identified five different types of innovation: product, process, market, input, and organizational innovations. The last product innovation in the GILT industry dates back to at least two decades. The last input or organizational innovations are lost in the mist of time. Many market innovations have taken place, although all minor and pertaining to the business sphere. A few major innovations came, ça va sans dir, from information and communication technology.<br />The reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic. The first Harry Potter book appeared in 1997, just a year before Google launched its search engine. So Hermione Granger had to spend hours in the Hogwarts library to find out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion, while the kids in the movie theater poked their parents with a «Why doesn’t she just Google it?»<br />Are the current technological shifts in communication really unprecedented? Is the Internet changing the way we think? Is Google making us stupid?<br />According to Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang, the washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.<br />Nevertheless, when the washing machine was invented, there were people rallying that it was evil, others said that it would free women, while others claimed that its price would not pay out the price of the dozen books one just could buy.<br />Technological changes definitely influence work habits, and sometimes even radically change them.<br />No more than a decade or so ago, translation tools were not all that common, and online terminology databases were fairly limited, and yet, even so back then most of the typical translation work involved using a word processor, possibly a spreadsheet.<br />Do the latest technological advances really free translators or just tether them to their desks more than before?<br />Ten years ago, Marc Prensky coined the concept of digital native as opposed to digital immigrant. A digital native is an individual born after the introduction of digital technology, with a greater understanding of its concepts and value by having been interacted with it from an early age. A digital immigrant is an individual born before the introduction of digital technology who adopted it to some extent later in his or her life.<br />What is happening today with information technology happened with printing presses that Erasmus said would «fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.»<br />Let’s take the software market. The market of apps is growing rapidly, and so is the demand for localized apps. To meet this demand speed and readiness are prerequisites, more than knowledge and ability. Speed and readiness can be offered through community services enabling developers to start their localization projects in a matter of minutes, with a few clicks, with nothing to download or install.<br />At the moment, these services are possible via cloud computing only, with shared servers providing resources, software, and data on demand in a typical location-independent service-oriented architecture. It is an Internet-based IT service model, where virtualized resources are dynamically scaled and provided.<br />In fact, the term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used to represent the Internet in computer network diagrams. The computing is in the cloud, i.e. the processing (and the associated data) is not in a specified, known, or static place. This is in contrast to a model in which the processing takes place in one or more specific servers that are known.<br />The spreading of cloud computing is a consequence of the ease of access to the Internet. More and more frequently it takes the form of web-based applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if they were installed locally on their own computer.<br />Generally, cloud computing customers simply consume resources as a service and pay only for the resources they use, with everything they need being out in a cloud on the Internet, where hundreds of machines are working together.<br />The typical cloud computing architecture is a three-layer reversed triangle.<br />The first layer is SaaS (Software as a Service): the software is delivered over the Internet (virtualized) by a provider licensing it to customers on demand, through a subscription; functionalities are used to augment or replace real world processes.<br />The second layer is PaaS (Platform as a Service): a runtime system and application platform available over the Internet with the sole purpose of hosting application software.<br />The third layer is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): traditional computing resources, such as servers, storage, and low-level network and hardware resources offered on demand over the Internet.<br />So why should one consider switching to cloud computing? The advantages of this model are:<br />Accessibility from anywhere, through an Internet connection;<br />No local server installation required;<br />Pay-per-use or subscription-based payment methods;<br />Rapid scalability;<br />Reliability;<br />System maintenance included in service.<br />Cloud computing helps to bypass wasted time, money, and product limitations on traditional business applications, achieving a more efficient, centrally controlled business, and allowing access to all applications from anywhere the Internet is available, without worries concerning servers, office space, power, etc.<br />In fact, capital expenditure is reduced by not having to purchase servers or full copies of software, while SaaS can be deployed more quickly as no local installation is required freeing up resources to focus on core business activities.<br />The model also presents a few drawbacks, from security and data integrity issues to the increased revenue cost of paying for the use of the services, from the dependence on Internet connection availability to the lower flexibility and the higher customization costs.<br />Anyway, cloud computing is a major innovation also in the translation industry, with a deep impact on organization, process, and market, opening the door to real collaborative translation.<br />Collaborative translation is not crowdsourcing that is just one model of many to leverage massive online collaboration for translation.<br />A major implementation consists in parallelized process instead of the typical serial approach found in most translation workflow systems. This approach resembles the assembly line, and it is why Renato Beninatto and Don De Palma described collaborative translation as the end of taylorism in translation in a Common Sense Advisory report of December 2007.<br />The new translation industry mantra of “cheaper, faster, and better” comes from the impressive increase in technical and business content of today.<br />In a period of economic slowdown, companies apply strategies to reach new markets, and these strategies involve adding languages. According to Common Sense Advisory, the content requiring translation is growing at a rate of 50% a year.<br />Unless the analyses of Common Sense Advisory are only craps, information overflow alone should be enough to say that content is increasing. The success of the so-called Web 2.0 is in the offered ability for everyone to produce content. Of course, given its ephemeral nature, most of the content produced by social networks is not intended for commercial translation. Content grows because of the unprecedented ease of content creation that also makes the number of customers grow.<br />Anyway, a content growth rate of 50% per year is truly remarkable. Maybe it is no tsunami, but it is certainly impressive.<br />Not only do companies apply strategies to release their products more quickly while adding more languages, they also strive for localization readiness, more agile development processes, and to reduce the amount of content or leverage it.<br />‎Even though the number of customers interested in translation is rising, in a period of economic slowdown their willingness and capacity of expenditure is limited. In addition, these customers mostly see translation as a commodity, and no one wants to spend much for a commodity that is believed, as such, to be available in large quantities without qualitative differentiation.<br />Commodities go through boom/bust cycles where high demand leads to overproduction. This causes prices to drop to unsustainable levels, with production capacities eventually diminishing again through neglect, and then the cycle starts over again.<br />In companies where localization is not strategic, localization project management is not strategic as well, especially when it is not exactly what it is meant to be and should be. Therefore, the challenges of global business require a systematic re-thinking of the translation process.<br />The traditional translation process is a chain, as strong as its weakest link, and the longer the chain, the more weak links will be found in it. The supply chain in the professional translation industry still goes from the global enterprise content creator to the internal localization department to the MLV, to the SLV’s, to freelance translators who are the weak link in the supply chain. This means that the translation industry is still at a vendor management stage and makes LSP’s generally underdeveloped for a mature market.<br />Vendor management is the largest cost budget item that could be huge for companies with hundreds or thousands of vendors. It requires dedicated technology and staff and involves delicate tasks like quality assessment and several vendor managers to rotate to keep healthy relationships with vendors.<br />To keep pace with the changing situation, the translation process must be rearranged. Like the software industry a few years ago, “agile” should become the new buzzword of the translation industry. “Cloud translation” could be a solution.<br />A collaboration platform allows the client to outsource project management functions altogether, taking on the role of vendor manager and facilitator, helping many-to-many communications by reducing e-mail transactions, capturing knowledge for immediate leverage, and providing a clear assignee at each project stage.<br />Cloud computing is the foundation for cloud translation, which exploits SaaS platforms for large scale pooling of translation professionals, terminologists, and domain experts, as well as for sharing linguistic data. These platforms could also serve as online marketplaces for translators where customers and translators can be connected directly or with a minimal intervention by a middle man, thus opening the way to disintermediation.<br />The largest translation buyers (along with their peers) are very technology-driven and typically highly involved in language technology initiatives. They lead the change in and are the great drivers for the language industry even though they don’t make up the standard business.<br />Translation technology has laid dormant for a decade or more to evolve in the last few years because these very large translation buyers has been investing in classic translation technology, i.e. standard translation memory technology, before they started looking for workflow optimization, including content management and leverage.<br />This led these very large translation buyers to fragment their translation projects in smaller and smaller chunks. Therefore translation jobs are getting smaller, integrated, and instantaneous, while clients are expecting vendors workflows to be tightly integrated into theirs.<br />The essential flavor of collaborative translation is made of scaling and parallelism. The job is split into smaller chunks that are dispatched to the members of a group, who will process them concurrently. The work is kept unabridged since chunks are reassembled in real time. Scaling and parallelism can help reduce dramatically lead and turnaround time and overhead or make it possible to recruit specialists who might otherwise not be willing to commit to the full job.<br />In fact, in the collaborative translation model, projects revolve around communities that come together for each project. The project manager sets up the project in the community, and launches an open call for the best available resources (translators, terminologists, domain experts, client reviewers, etc.) to join the project community. Once the project is started, the project manager monitors the performance of the community to ensure that questions are answered, files are available, and deadlines are met.<br />Collaborative translation is not an end in itself, and it is only relevant to the extent that it can support business goals of an organization.<br />Just like in agile project management, the work can be tracked that is left to do, rather than the total work is referenced that is achieved to date. This will improve transparency of the remaining work and highlight revision costs, inconsistent authoring, etc., while marking the areas where the localization process can be improved.<br />Compared to the way in which translation projects are run even in the age of ftp, e-mail, and search engines, the main difference in this instance is the interaction in the community during the job. Translation is made on the web, all the time, by the best specialists available, regardless of location or ownership of desktop translation tools.<br />In a collaborative translation project, the project manager is actually a facilitator whose task is to create a community with translators, recruit a subject matter expert to answer questions about the topic, collect and provide all the tools to run the project, and assure support to translators where they need help. A few consultants will also be hired to handle the shared translation memories and the term base, develop the style guides, and tune the machine translation engine.<br />In a collaborative translation project, there is no need for reviewers and editors that could be disruptive for harmony and confidence in the project team, with the project facilitator and the consultant doing their best to have translators strictly follow the style guide and glossary.<br />In a study of 2009, Chang Hu of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland demonstrated that sharing knowledge across the language barrier is possible with a combination of machine translation, even of poor quality, language-independent communication, and existing background knowledge. This approach is more or less the same as that allowing Lin Shu, one of the most prolific Chinese translators, to translate more than 170 titles from English or French into Literary Chinese, despite his ignorance of any foreign language.<br />In collaborative translation, the LSP’s are more than ever at the center of the process: they are the community builders and facilitators. Their task is to create an infrastructure to enable the work to be done. They add value through preparation and planning.<br />To meet the growth in volume, velocity, and volatility, many companies are investing or will invest in machine translation, while others are simply trying to centralize and exploit translation memories at best.<br />Cloud translation allows for data centralization and resource decentralization, and the relevant technologies are widely available today, even for free.<br />Yet, the translation industry is still tied to the quality axiom. A corollary to the quality axiom says that fewer translators produce a more consistent output, as if a reader could distinguish some ten thousand words in a million.<br />In a survey recently conducted by Trad Online, a translation agency based in Boulogne, France, many respondents expressed concern about the use of translation memories as per quality control, intellectual property, impoverishment of the language, and value chain.<br />Nevertheless, another axiom derived from the quality axiom is the asset axiom, where glossaries and translation memories are assets, and, as such, are supposed to carry some value. However, glossaries and translation memories do not necessarily carry an intrinsic value, since in this case value comes from their exploitation, and exploitation, in turn, depends on the ability of highly skilled translators.<br />Crowdsourced translation is a typical implementation of cloud translation. It relies on online communities, distributing the workload across dozens, or perhaps hundreds of contributors for greater volumes, higher speed, broader consensus on meaning, and possibly lower cost.<br />This rent-a-crowd approach generally results in lighter workloads for individual translators.<br />Anyway, translation crowdsourcing is not free and does not necessarily rely on volunteers, typically amateurs. Actually, it costs money to manage work, whether workers are volunteer or paid, and build a collaborative translation capability.<br />A model is possible to blend efficiency with highly skilled professionals by recruiting specially selected communities of paid translators. Yet, a specialized back-end infrastructure is needed to bolster the productivity of the community.<br />In addition, everybody here knows that it could take months to recruit and pool a qualified staff, and months to run a localization project of some hundred thousand words.<br />Therefore, free is not the point. Time is.<br />Hence, not only are highly skilled individuals no longer enough, technology is no longer enough either. A close combination of the two with a new process model could be an answer. Continuously flowing content streams demand translation production lines. A possible solution could be to create and support communities on demand to maximize knowledge reuse and increase speed.<br />In fact, today, speed and agility are the drivers. Costs become truly important only when these two requirements are met. Speed is for volume, and agility is for content type, while quality is a prerequisite and is taken for granted, even though different thresholds are commonly envisaged.<br />Therefore, language service providers must learn to actually differentiate their service offerings to accommodate the trends in content and arrive at different levels of quality to meet their customers’ needs in terms of speed, cost, content type and quality.<br />Anyway, buyers won’t ever start going directly to SLV’s as this would require efficient processes and a collaboration technology infrastructure, and MLV’s could redesign their production workflows to tie translators rather than to pursue efficiency.<br />Yet, LSP’ are the only ones who see translation as a service. Buyers see it definitely only as a product. This product hardly presents any meaningful qualitative differences. LSP’s often struggle to make a convincing case to justify translation costs while buyers are willing to pay for the perceived value. Products presenting no meaningful qualitative differences are usually labeled as commodities, and the path to losing real and strong value-add is named commoditization. The shift towards online tools will increase the use of auctioning and a further commoditization, unless non-price factors prevail.<br />The outsourcing model itself has become commoditized, and companies are migrating to a managed service model to improve time-to-market and ROI, while reducing risks and exposure.<br />Along with the proceeding digitalization of our environment and the spreading of the Internet, our society has increasingly changed into an on-demand society, as people become more and more accustomed to things being available right away.<br />The new frontier could be translation as a utility, an always-on, on-demand, streaming translation service that can translate high value streams of content at acceptable quality for reasonable rates. Genuine TaaS is already a reality, introduced by a labor as a service company.<br />In a genuine TaaS model, a customer submits a job and the service will farm it out to eligible translators. Translators can also access the TaaS platform from everywhere to pick available jobs and arrange payment, even through an app. With each job completed, a translator earns a credibility rating that determines the types of jobs s/he is offered. Translators having no rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation.<br />This reaffirms the chance for cloud translation to reduce intermediation and open the way to disintermediation.<br />However, for full disintermediation in the translation supply chain, the translation market should be highly transparent for customers to be aware of supply conditions (e.g. pricing), and find a viable and sound alternative to traditional channels. In addition, factual bidirectional standards are required. Therefore, in a technology-driven disintermediation, buyers could simply purchase from wholesalers, who would resort to individual translators instead of using SLV’s as intermediaries but would require to pay less.<br />In general, LSP’s share the same pool of resources, and testing freelancers is expensive and not reliable. The solution to reduce overhead is then shortening the production chain. Therefore, the trend towards increased automation of translation processes will continue unabated. Collaborative platforms combining workflow and computer-aided translation capabilities into one application are the future. Humans can translate texts of any kind, rank the translation for accuracy and provide final edits, all via a browser from anywhere in the world. Machine translation will capture the translated texts and then suggest a possible translation when the words or phrases appear again, thus reducing the overall time and effort required for translation. No overhead for administrative activities, no duplication of work.<br />Anyway, collaborative models will still require resources for platform management, team management, quality management and intelligent work assignment. Therefore, domain expertise and competence with technology and collaboration platform will become a differentiating factor for LSP’s, together with the ability to retain any professional, knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced staff.<br />There will also be room for small LSP’s for neighborhood shops in the market, even though small customers never lead or make the market. The future is for wholesalers; even retailers, at least the smaller ones, will be expunged from the market or marginalized since customers are now irreversibly accustomed to choose one stop shops that can meet all their needs. In fact, more and more often customers ask LSP’s to be relevant to their processes, and with the great changes in content, even in smaller clients, this is becoming increasingly hard even for a mid-size LSP.<br />Cloud translation platforms (like Google Translator Toolkit, XTM Cloud, Lingotek, or Wordbee) operate independently. Like XTM Cloud, Google Translator Toolkit comes from a player outside the industry and has its own API’s to help integration into any project management workflow, but it’s free.<br />Everybody within the GILT industry talks about innovation. Google developed the technology because the translation industry was not providing the solution they needed.<br />The future of the GILT industry is probably in collaborative translation, but it will depend on how vendors, certainly not customers, will use the cloud, implement collaborative platforms, and integrate translation memory management, terminology management, workflow management, project management, as well as accounting and billing applications.<br />For its intrinsic scalability, cloud translation could also help redefine the business model of an entire industry, which is now visibly obsolete, allowing LSP’s to find themselves a size that fits.<br />In the years immediately ahead, the survival of the translation industry will be played around linguistic data (corpora, translation memories, glossaries) and on the ability to deal with it. Today the focus is on compatibility and interoperability of formats and platforms: when they are fully achieved, tools will be unimportant, one will equal another.<br />On February 18, a “general strike” was launched in ProZ “against TRADOS and other expensive CAT tools”, i.e. that cost more than 100 euro for a permanent license or more than 50 euro per year for an annual license. However paradoxical the idea itself may even seem, the discussion lasted for days, occupying 18 pages of the forum.<br />Online work environments promise both simplicity and completeness, bringing work tools, business administration, collaboration, and other resources together into one easy-to-learn, easy-to-use web interface.<br />To have broad appeal, these environments need to be open and gather a cluster of LSP’s that must build specific capabilities and applications within the platform.<br />Stop, breathe, think: a problem is a problem only when it has no solution. Instead of throwing more resources onto a problem, just throw more process improvements on it.<br />Bio<br />Luigi Muzii has been working in the documentation field for almost 30 years, as a translator, localizer, technical writer, and consultant. After 12 years in several departments of a major Italian telecommunications company and two in a broadcasting service company as education manager, taking part in many projects, on both the domestic and European markets, and developing a sound technical and technological expertise, some a decade ago he started a consulting firm to act as an information design and delivery consultant. He was a founding member of the Italian Association for Terminology and of Gruppo L10N, a group of GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation) professionals 'volunteering' in localization educational programs. He published a book on technical writing, and dozens of papers and articles on documentation, translation, and terminology, speaks regularly at conferences, and holds seminars and workshops. At present, he is also a visiting professor of terminology and localization at the Libera Università degli Studi per l'Innovazione e le Organizzazioni (LUSPIO) in Rome.<br />