October 12, 2010 at 16:00Translation Industry Goes Into the Cloud
2010 turned out to be very rich in alliances between translation companies and companies producing linguistic software. We wrote in sufficient detail on the ABBYY Language Services blog about the partnership between IBM and Lionbridge , as well as SDL and Language Weaver . In addition, in August two more unions of a slightly smaller scale were announced almost simultaneously. Sajan made friends with PROMT and plans to integrate machine translator into his translation project management system. And Milengo announced a partnership with Asia Online (machine translator), Acrolinx (software for preparing text for translation) and Clay Tablet (software for managing glossaries and translation memory databases). These companies are going to integrate their products and services into a single solution.
These are not the first such alliances and, obviously, not the last. Before our eyes, the world's leading translation companies are gradually intruding deeper into the territory of linguistic technology developers, both in the traditional licensing model and in the now fashionable SaaS version. Let's try to figure out why this is happening.
Currently, most of the translated corporate content is manually transferred along a long chain from the creator of the text to the translator and vice versa.
Of course, depending on the specific situation, individual parts of this supply chain may fall out. Content creators can independently contact a translation company, the department for working with suppliers can work directly with translators, and so on. But the more globally significant content is created in the company, the more difficult it is to organize its high-quality and prompt translation, and the more links in the chain.
The role of translation companies in this chain is the selection of final contractors (translators and editors), the organization of their work and quality control, that is, project management and resource management. The company collects, and then constantly replenishes, filters and ratings the database of performers (translators, editors and other specialists), full-time and freelance, located around the world. Having received an order for translation, she determines the time and cost, selects a team of the best performers, distributes tasks, and monitors the quality of their implementation. And in the end, it guarantees that the client will receive localized material in the right quality and within the agreed time.
If the customer’s need for translation is small, he can try to independently select the translators to suit his needs, organize their work and control the quality. However, a professional translation company will usually do the same for less and more efficiently.
What has changed in the last few years? First, the emergence of a global information space on the Internet has led to a significant increase in the need for translations. (For more on this, see the post “How Google Translate Increases Demand for Professional Translation . ” ) Secondly, the quality has significantly improved and the cost of “cloud” technologies has decreased, allowing many users to work together with information. Thirdly, broadband access to the network came to almost every home.
To meet the growing demand, the world's leading translation companies optimize their business processes: exclude intermediaries and connect the end links of the supply chain with the help of a “cloud” infrastructure for joint translation work.
This infrastructure includes the latest translation services (a trained machine translator, translation memory engine and databases, dictionaries and corporate glossaries, a text editor with the ability to work together tailored for translation), as well as tools for the automated distribution of work among performers (translators and editors). Moreover, the performers can be both professionals and amateurs (if the customer decided to use crowdsourcing).
For the translator, such an online system is a full-fledged workplace with a set of necessary tools. For the customer - a single service with which you can solve all the tasks of the company related to multilingual content.
The process of organizing a translation in a similar system for a customer may look like this:
1) upload the translated file to an online service,
2) choose one of the options - professional translation, amateur translation (crowdsourcing), post-editable machine translation,
3) get the result.
Moreover, with the "cloud" translation service, you can integrate any content management or creation system, whether it be a website CMS, authoring environment or electronic document management system. This allows you to send text for translation directly from the place where it was created, and get the finished result in the same place. For example, a page in Russian is added to the CMS of a multilingual website. After that, it is automatically or manually (by pressing a single button) sent to the translation in selected or pre-registered languages. Translated pages in the appropriate languages are also automatically loaded into the CMS, after which the content manager can only upload them to the “working” version of the site. Thus, the most efficient and effective synchronization of foreign versions of the website is supported. Those,
At the same time, all costs and translation execution time are objectively reduced, since the number of intermediaries in the chain is reduced - first of all, on the customer side, and secondly, on the side of a large vendor (MLV), which gets the ability to effectively manage the final contractors instead of SLV.
In view of the foregoing, it becomes clear what additional value such a platform provides to the end customer: cost reduction, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of managing multilingual content.
Today it is already clear that in the next few years, the transition to "cloud" services for collaboration will be the dominant trend in the Russian and world translation industry. However, it is unclear what part of the industry will be able to adapt to the “cloud” model and how many companies will be able to succeed along this path. Now everyone is at different stages: the largest Western translation companies are completing the construction of the technological infrastructure, most small firms have not even heard of such an opportunity.
Since 2004, we at ABBYY Language Services have been using a self-developed information system (Translation Management System), which provides interaction between customers and translators. Now a new, improved version of this system is being prepared for launch, based on a cloud infrastructure and providing online access to a number of linguistic technologies developed by our company. About this system, code-named ABBYY Translation Platform, we will talk more about this later in a separate post :)
Of course, the old methods of managing multilingual content in the foreseeable future will not disappear. Just as for telegraphs and fax machines, there is a place for them. But it is obvious that in the next two or three years, most corporate customers who have already appreciated the "cloud" services of Google and Salesforce will go into the "clouds", including when solving their linguistic problems.
The original of this post and other materials (copyright and translations) about translations, start-ups and innovations can be found on the ABBYY Language Services blog .
Egor Zaikin
ABBYY Language Services
These are not the first such alliances and, obviously, not the last. Before our eyes, the world's leading translation companies are gradually intruding deeper into the territory of linguistic technology developers, both in the traditional licensing model and in the now fashionable SaaS version. Let's try to figure out why this is happening.
Currently, most of the translated corporate content is manually transferred along a long chain from the creator of the text to the translator and vice versa.
Of course, depending on the specific situation, individual parts of this supply chain may fall out. Content creators can independently contact a translation company, the department for working with suppliers can work directly with translators, and so on. But the more globally significant content is created in the company, the more difficult it is to organize its high-quality and prompt translation, and the more links in the chain.
The role of translation companies in this chain is the selection of final contractors (translators and editors), the organization of their work and quality control, that is, project management and resource management. The company collects, and then constantly replenishes, filters and ratings the database of performers (translators, editors and other specialists), full-time and freelance, located around the world. Having received an order for translation, she determines the time and cost, selects a team of the best performers, distributes tasks, and monitors the quality of their implementation. And in the end, it guarantees that the client will receive localized material in the right quality and within the agreed time.
If the customer’s need for translation is small, he can try to independently select the translators to suit his needs, organize their work and control the quality. However, a professional translation company will usually do the same for less and more efficiently.
What has changed in the last few years? First, the emergence of a global information space on the Internet has led to a significant increase in the need for translations. (For more on this, see the post “How Google Translate Increases Demand for Professional Translation . ” ) Secondly, the quality has significantly improved and the cost of “cloud” technologies has decreased, allowing many users to work together with information. Thirdly, broadband access to the network came to almost every home.
To meet the growing demand, the world's leading translation companies optimize their business processes: exclude intermediaries and connect the end links of the supply chain with the help of a “cloud” infrastructure for joint translation work.
This infrastructure includes the latest translation services (a trained machine translator, translation memory engine and databases, dictionaries and corporate glossaries, a text editor with the ability to work together tailored for translation), as well as tools for the automated distribution of work among performers (translators and editors). Moreover, the performers can be both professionals and amateurs (if the customer decided to use crowdsourcing).
For the translator, such an online system is a full-fledged workplace with a set of necessary tools. For the customer - a single service with which you can solve all the tasks of the company related to multilingual content.
The process of organizing a translation in a similar system for a customer may look like this:
1) upload the translated file to an online service,
2) choose one of the options - professional translation, amateur translation (crowdsourcing), post-editable machine translation,
3) get the result.
Moreover, with the "cloud" translation service, you can integrate any content management or creation system, whether it be a website CMS, authoring environment or electronic document management system. This allows you to send text for translation directly from the place where it was created, and get the finished result in the same place. For example, a page in Russian is added to the CMS of a multilingual website. After that, it is automatically or manually (by pressing a single button) sent to the translation in selected or pre-registered languages. Translated pages in the appropriate languages are also automatically loaded into the CMS, after which the content manager can only upload them to the “working” version of the site. Thus, the most efficient and effective synchronization of foreign versions of the website is supported. Those,
At the same time, all costs and translation execution time are objectively reduced, since the number of intermediaries in the chain is reduced - first of all, on the customer side, and secondly, on the side of a large vendor (MLV), which gets the ability to effectively manage the final contractors instead of SLV.
In view of the foregoing, it becomes clear what additional value such a platform provides to the end customer: cost reduction, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of managing multilingual content.
Today it is already clear that in the next few years, the transition to "cloud" services for collaboration will be the dominant trend in the Russian and world translation industry. However, it is unclear what part of the industry will be able to adapt to the “cloud” model and how many companies will be able to succeed along this path. Now everyone is at different stages: the largest Western translation companies are completing the construction of the technological infrastructure, most small firms have not even heard of such an opportunity.
Since 2004, we at ABBYY Language Services have been using a self-developed information system (Translation Management System), which provides interaction between customers and translators. Now a new, improved version of this system is being prepared for launch, based on a cloud infrastructure and providing online access to a number of linguistic technologies developed by our company. About this system, code-named ABBYY Translation Platform, we will talk more about this later in a separate post :)
Of course, the old methods of managing multilingual content in the foreseeable future will not disappear. Just as for telegraphs and fax machines, there is a place for them. But it is obvious that in the next two or three years, most corporate customers who have already appreciated the "cloud" services of Google and Salesforce will go into the "clouds", including when solving their linguistic problems.
The original of this post and other materials (copyright and translations) about translations, start-ups and innovations can be found on the ABBYY Language Services blog .
Egor Zaikin
ABBYY Language Services