TechGist05

This is a slightly updated post that has been already published on the SDL site . The holiday season around the world today is often characterized by special holiday shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These special promotional events generate peak shopping activity and are now increasingly becoming global events. They are also increasingly becoming a digital and online commerce phenomenon. This is especially true in the B2C markets but is also now often true in the B2B markets. The numbers are in, and the most recent data is quite telling. The biggest U.S. retail shopping holiday of the year – from Thanksgiving Day to Black Friday to Cyber Monday, plus Small Business Saturday and Super Sunday – generated $24.2 billion in online revenues . And that figure is far below Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, which in 2018 reached $30.8 billion – in just 24 hours. When we look at the penetration of eCommerce in the U.S. retail market, we see that, as disruptive as i...

This is a guest post by Aaron Schliem, who writes on  fundamental globalization questions. Most of the agencies in the translation industry are involved in brokering human translation services, which is increasingly under price pressure, because most agencies add very little value to the production process beyond brokered project management, and we also see that MT is getting "good enough" to solve many enterprise needs to communicate multilingually. However, value is added by humans who understand the bigger picture, and tune business content creation processes to improve the overall customer experience regardless of locale and language. As all major enterprises today become more global, both in their internal workforce composition, and their primary market outlook, new, more culturally informed approaches are needed. The problem is not just at agencies, as Aaron says: Global business presently operates within an overly simplistic paradigm that assumes translation of produc...

There has been much talk amongst some translators about how MT is a technology that will take away work and ultimately replace them, and thus some translators dig in their heels and resist MT at every step. The antagonistic view is based on a zero-sum game assumption that if a computer can perform a translation that they used to do, it inevitably means less work for them in future. In some cases this may be true, however this presumption is worth a closer look. While stories of MT mishaps and mistranslations abound, (we all know how easy it is to make MT look bad) , it is becoming increasingly apparent to many in the professional translation business, that it is important to learn how to use and extend the capabilities of this technology successfully, as the technology also enables new kinds of translation and linguistic engineering projects that would simply be impossible without viable and effective implementations of expert MT technology . Generally, MT is not a wholesale replaceme...

In my last post I talked about various viewpoints on the emerging trends in the industry and I noticed that the post very quickly established itself amongst the most popular of the year. In fact second only to a March posting on post-editing compensation, a subject which continues to draw ongoing attention. In many ways this post is an expansion on some of the points that were raised in the last post . When one considers the general focus of translation work done by the professional translation industry, I think we see that a large part of the work is related to translating content that facilitates and enables international commerce. The world of localization, to a great extent focuses on the content that is closely related to the final packaging of products that are sold in international markets. This focus is the software and documentation localization mindset that is at the heart of the largest translation agencies work in the business translation industry. So much so tha...