Don't surrender freedom again - demand interoperability

Once upon a time, in my youth, communication, including translation, used media that were more or less common standards. Any pen or pencil could write on most any paper or vellum, and while one might have preferences in a brand of typewriter, the choice mattered little to the end result. Transmission by postal mail, courier, teletype or (later) fax also used mostly compatible protocols, and fewer things got lost in the pile of junk mail, as the kinder, gentler form of "spam" was called in those days.

Then the rise of IT and media technologies in the commercial and consumer world shattered this pax, and a myriad of information fiefdoms rose and fell, with users as the foot soldiers and cannon fodder in their conflicts. Eventually, on the main stages of IT, the vendors were forced to realize that their futures depended not on information fortresses but in open exchange and interoperability. 

In IT backwaters such as the translation "industry", old practices persisted like medieval kingdoms and customs around the Himalayas, but eventually modern data sanitation reached even this provincial niche, which had adopted some computer tools while ignoring most best practices to maintain proprietary strangleholds. But eventually, the march of progress reached even those altitudes, and TMX, TBX and XLIFF became common parlance. And all is well or shall soon be. Really?

In the 203rd edition of his Tool Box Newsletter (premium version), Jost Zetzsche discusses a recent article in Forbes magazine (Cloud Computing's Vendor Lock-In Problem: Why the Industry Is Taking a Step Backward) and its implications for IT service consumers, including those involved in the translation business. The original article and Jost's commentary are very much worth reading (which is why I subscribe to the full content of his newsletters). His insights included the following comment:

"While we have data exchange standards that are more or less well supported (TMX for translation memories, TBX for termbases, XLIFF for the translation data, and the upcoming Linport for translation packages), there are no mechanisms that enable tool A to enter into the server- or cloud-based workflow of tool B. So, if your client sends your project not as data but as a login that you can use within a tool to access an online-based project or -- even more simply -- to actually log into an online-based tool that automatically gives you access to online-based data, all the hard-fought-for advances in widely accepted data exchange standards are nullified."

This is one of the problems which has concerned me, along with the loss of platform freedom for translators currently wanting to work on server-based projects. Although I know some translation companies, such as Translators International in the Netherlands, who use their server-based memoQ and other technology to make translatable content available to their language pair teams in a variety of best practice, compatible formats, in too many cases, server-based projects lead to a kind of lock-in which ultimately is in no one's best interest. Across Systems, with its wicked policy of deliberate incompatibility, represents the worst case I know, because it is not even possible to work with data exports of some kind as one can with respectable systems such as some SDL technologies, memoQ, Ontram and others. 

Various influencers within SDL, Kilgray, Atril, MultiCorpora, Andrä AG and elsewhere are probably quite tired of hearing me pluck the strings of my dream harp loudly and repeatedly in their presence: I want to see online server communication standards which enable a client user of Trados Studio or Wordfast Pro to connect to a memoQ Server project, or someone with a memoQ Translator Pro installation to connect to an Ontram or SDL server project and work most effectively using the ergonomic tools with which the translator or editor is most familiar. I don't buy the arguments of "difficulty" at face value; just look at all the integration plug-ins that are being released by various vendors, with remote TM or termbase access, and it's fairly obvious that at least some degree of online interoperability should be achievable without much pain.

Jost's commentary concludes with a quote from the Forbes article: 

"Only one thing will eliminate or reduce the risk of vendor lock-in in the long run: if end-user customers start demanding standardization and interoperability, just as they have in the past with on-premises applications... providers will fall in line."

All of us - individual translators, translation companies and corporate customers who manage their own translation services with server-based technologies - need to demand that all the credible providers of translation environment technologies "fall in line".

memoQfest 2011 off to a strong start training trainers

Though it's hard to have a bad day in Budapest, where even the police are uncommonly kind to stupid foreigners who can't deal well with their nightmarish traffic messes and troublesome parking, both serving to highlight the value of the city's excellent public transportation system, today was an especially good day thanks to a well-organized, superbly presented "train the trainer" session at Kilgray's headquarters. The instructors were Gábor Ugray, one of Kilgray's founders and current head of development, Gergely Vandor, Life Cycle manager at Kilgray, and Angelika Zerfass, one of Europe's finest trainers for translation environment technologies such as Trados and memoQ.

Angelika Zerfass sharing her expert understanding of

      effective training for any translation tools.

The guys from Kilgray shared important insights into memoQ technologies such as the termbases and recently introduced LiveDocs feature, and advanced tool for creating collections of reference information from monolingual and bilingual sources. Gábor gave an excellent summary of important configuration techniques in memoQ termbases to increase the value and effectiveness of the automated quality assurance tools for translations.Almost as an aside, he shared gold-plated tips on approaches to setting up projects to take advantage of folder structures, future plans for qterm, Kilgray's advanced server-based terminology module, which will soon include reporting features which will facilitate compensating translators for their contributions to a project's terminology. But the most valuable part of his presentation I think was the absolutely basic advice on how to use stemming techniques to improve term matching and QA in many languages. Trainers adopting his approach to sharing this information with memoQ users will make a great contribution to their clients' productivity.

Gergely gave a comprehensive overview of "LiveDocs", a simple yet sophisticated set of tools for automated alignment and collections of reference documents that currently has nothing on the market to offer it a real challenge for the convenience and efficiency it offers users for looking up information and applying it to their translations. His presentation was also sprinkled liberally with valuable tips such as the use of memoQ's backup feature to create "jump points" for training presentations. Another important point made was that a LiveDocs corpus can be a simple way to organize projects and create multilingual reference collections for large team projects involving many languages.

About half the day's training was offered by Angelika, whose presentations rank at the top of all the software training (and other training) I have attended in the past 25+ years. A respected leader for Trados training and project consulting, she has had an eye on memoQ since its earliest day and now gives the product her full endorsement as the best solution in most cases for SMEs. Although her presentation often included specific examples and structures relevant only to memoQ, the majority of what she shared is relevant to any training. I have been involved with adult continuing education in many forms for 27 years now, and the only training I have experienced in that time which offered clear, relevant insights at this level was the training for Apple Education Sales Consultants, which was one of the key factors for Apple's early dominance in the education markets. The high opinion I have had of her work for a decade now has been confirmed time and again by colleagues who have had the fortune to be trained by her. Every time she opens her mouth I learn something important, and she's one of those rare German trainers with modesty, subtlety and insight that would make her effective with most international audiences. And the partners in her consultancy are of equal caliber. It's a privilege to know people of their character and competence and an even greater one to be able to learn from them.

After a brilliant conclusion to the day's training (with a rhetorical trick that still has me smiling), there were a few hours to relax and eat before the evening party at Kilgray's headquarters. It was a great pleasure to meet familiar and new colleagues from Canada, Latvia, France, the US and many other countries and chat about anything and everything. The only downside to the evening was the shocking absence of Unicum. How a Hungarian company can hold such a gathering without one of the country's key drivers of innovation is utterly baffling to me. But then Kilgray is good at offering alternative solutions for the challenges faced in our profession, and Kilgray's general manager Peter Reynolds deftly mixed several Irish coffees that caused the Unicum problem to be forgotten quickly. Throughout the evening I was impressed time and again by the openness of Kilgray's team and the respect they have for their competitors. When I hear serious praise for other industry leaders backed by real expressed intent of cooperation, it's hard not to believe that some of my silly hopes for great advances in interoperability for competing translation tools might not in some way become a reality that will benefit all of us. In the next few days, some of these important competitors will be here in Budapest at memoQ to share ideas, build trust and explore models of cooperation and probably spy a bit on the most innovative provider of translation technology on today's market. I look forward to meeting them and doing all I can to see best practices combined in the interests of translators, translation project facilitators, and translation customers.

Atril is dead!

Long live... ? The e-mail messages the other day announcing the "investment" in Atril by PowerLing, the odd French company hastily formed a few years ago to botch the marketing of Déjà Vu X, and the subsequent merger of the two companies under the name "Atril" was no great surprise, but it was a disappointment nonetheless. The "Atril" web site has a new look, in your face right away with the option to add products to a shopping cart, though at the moment it's really not clear which products:

Like any site managed by the clueless crew formerly known as PowerLing, the content is unfinished, chaotic and will probably mutate into something over time. And yes, it is true that Jesus is coming soon. He's tired of waiting for the promised new version of Déjà Vu to be released first.

Atril and its product Déjà Vu were critical to my translation business for many years. But markets evolve, and the product has failed to evolve with them in an effective way. Right now if someone were to ask my recommendation for a translation environment tool offering a broad scope of source format access and good productivity features, I could not recommend this tool with a good conscience any more. I think the best picks for freelancers these days among the commercial tools are probably SDL Trados Studio if you like pain, memoQ if you prefer pleasure. For LSPs and corporate users same deal (memoQ being the best for performance, flexibility and ease of maintenance, SDL being... well... SDL) unless you need something like the Ontram workflows for your production of marketing brochures.