Some say translation technology has gone to the dogs, and
this was certainly the case in Budapest this year as Ajax
and Benny noted to their satisfaction.
|
The next two years confirmed the wisdom of this leap of faith as the
company raced from strength to strength despite a few stubbed toes; the advance
of memoQ clearly played a role in improving other leading tools like DVX and
SDL Trados, the latter borrowing generously from Hungarian innovation or using
it and the unmatched service ethos on the Danube as an inspiration to overhaul
the catastrophic mess of legacy Trados and enter the modern age of CAT tools,
even surpassing memoQ in a few points, though with the current Renaissance of
creative development in what appeared just a few years ago to be a dead-end IT
ghetto, it's not an easy guess as to who will stay ahead anywhere for long.
These are indeed good times for users despite the renewed threats of lock-in
posed by the current misguided server politics of most providers.
Nonetheless, Kilgray's rapid growth has not been without difficulties,
and despite anticipating most of the challenges long before they arose, the
team doesn't always put in the performance its demanding fans expect. This is
often to be expected when a company experiences the exponental growth which can
obscure long-turm interests in the confusing melee of daily business. And the
product which seemed so fresh and clean just a few years ago is beginning to
look like a car that has been taken on too many roatrips without a good
cleaning, has hauled too many dogs and needs new tires. But last week I saw
clear signs that there may be a new Maserati getting a tune-up in the
development garage. The hints regarding memoQ 6 and the company's further
roadmap led me to scratch of most of the items on my technical gripe list. The
organizational wishlist has gotten longer, but it's clear that the
"refactoring" process at Kilgray is not limited to the software, so I
think I can trust them as I did four years ago when few could have anticipated
the company's impressive track record.
I almost did not go to Budapest this year. When I read the published
schedule, it sounded far too skewed toward corporate interests, a bit like a
sell-out now that server sales revenue has far surpassed that from Translator
Pro licenses. And bad calls like the confused differences in implementation of
versioning features in memoQ 5, weariness from providing support for issues
arising from a lack of professional service consulting in the sales process
with some of my agency clients and my own stupidity of forgetting to vaccinate
my puppy against rabies before the trip (which required me to leave him with
someone else for the first time) had me considering a week of vacation at home.
That would have been a mistake. I only expected to draw value from one
presentation - regular expressions by Polish guru Marek Pawelec - and even
there I didn't expect to understand very much. Instead, every one of the rather
random sessions I attended had a lot to offer, even for a freelancer. The
agency presenters who talked about their approaches to challenges in complex
translation projects shared a great deal of information that is directly relevant
to my agency and direct client business and can help make it better. And the
general talk on refactoring your business through innovation by Richard Brooks, which I expected to be the
biggest hot air balloon of the week, was the absolute highlight for me. I might
even have gotten something out of the Asia Online keynote on machine
translation, though an idiotic quote I read from the speaker about how we need to get on
the MT boat or drown suggests perhaps not. I do hold out some hope he might
have been misquoted or taken out of context, however. It's the least I can do
in a world where people still believe in the Tooth Fairy and US Republican
politics.
When Kilgray releases the videos of the talks, do watch them. I do hope
the sound and picture quality will be good, because too often I really did wish
I could have been in two rooms at once.
The Twitstream shared a lot of the gritty details of the presentations;
the hashtag #memoQfest or an archive established by a Ukrainian user will show
these for a while at least. And I'll be drawing on the tweets, my other notes
and the memories of conversations in the breaks to share insights, many quite
trivial, all of which confirm that memoQ is the right choice for most of my
translation IT needs. The only thing I'll say now is that in memoQ 6 the versioning
features will be the same in all editions of memoQ. Big deal. For some of us.