Today I attended a localization technology roundtable that featured speakers from 5 different localization technology vendors: Adam Anses from LingoPort, Kirti Vashee from Asia Online, Kent Taylor from Acrolinx, Robinson Kelly from Clay Tablet, and Adam Blau from Milengo. It was a terrific round-up of interesting and advanced technologies, presented by some of the most well-known and knowledgeable people in the industry. In addition to the 5 technology companies, Salvatore Giammarresi, Localization Director at Yahoo! gave the keynote. The roundtable was very well-attended and extremely informative.
Here are a few things I learned at the roundtable:
- Learn CFO-speak. You must be able to articulate to your CFO and upper management how localization increases revenue.
- We’re exploding. More content was created in 2005 than in the preceding 40,000 years.
- Organizations have lost control. 70% of content is now user-generated.
- People are talking. For every assisted technical support call, there are 10 answered through self-service, and 30 are answered in communities.
- Talk is expensive. There are 51 ways to say “The end date must be later than the start date.”
- Loc guys know interesting tongue twisters. “I am a mother pheasant plucker, I pluck mother pheasants. I am the best mother pheasant plucker that ever plucked a mother pheasant.”
- Moms know this: Internationalization is software engineering that enables localization.
- Let it flow. Clay Tablet streamlines content sharing from the content creation environment to various translation environments.
- Don’t pick. LSPs should be technology agnostic.
- Get your snazzy on. Content Authoring systems are compelling; Translation Memory is not.
- There are a lot of smart people in the localization world. (Okay – that one I already knew, but it is worth repeating.)
Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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