Heads in the Cloud? Or somewhere else?

As noted in my last post, concerns are growing over the trend toward "Cloud-based" translation management solutions and the potential negative impact on interoperability between TEnT systems with the wrong approach. As Jost Zetsche noted, there is a need to push solution providers such as SDL, Kilgray, Atril, Wordfast et alia to develop working, open interfaces so various clients can be used with a given server solution in online projects.

From a somewhat different perspective, Hungarian translator Csaba Bán noted that bits and dribbles of text translated via project management tools in the Cloud, while perhaps offering some efficiencies for an LSP or other company, too often unnecessarily fragment and waste the translator's time for inadequate compensation under most current schemes. I've heard a number of my clients talk about developing web-based "instant interfaces" for quickie translation service, and I know of a number of companies who have had something like this for years, but it all seems a bit like a sleazy back alley encounter on the fringes of a Red Light district with too great a chance of the translator's business suffering ill health from such indulgence. Cloud solutions which do not cleanly integrate with a translator's working environment tools but which require copying and pasting in various fields and windows are simply inefficient (despite some tools offering Clipboard integrations) and not very attractive. And appropriate minimum charges and premiums to offset the disruptions caused by too many dribbles during the day are called for. This requires some thought, and I can't pretend to offer any brilliant solutions to the dilemma, as I think each situation will have to be considered individually until a good set of general principles for best practice emerge. I have one such case I'm puzzling over myself right now: how to charge for "tweet translation" for a long-term client who runs a PR agency. So far I haven't, because the volume has been modest and fits well enough into the ordinary flow of our business discussions, but the case has me thinking.

As readers of this blog probably know, I am also involved in other types of Cloud-based project management for translation. When I began to encounter the first web-based administration interfaces with my agency clientele a decade ago, I hated them. In fact, I have dumped several otherwise rather good clients, some paying rates on par with decent direct clients, because I found their systems too cumbersome and prone to fault. One of the worst was a custom mess from an international LSP whose Swiss branch was a frequent customer; half the time, secure deliveries via their portal were simply impossible and I had to resort to insecure e-mail attachments. (Yes, these can be passworded, but that involves additional trouble.)

Gradually, decent standard solutions emerged. A number of my clients are happy with the German Plunet solution; I favor LSP.net's OTM, not because I localize the English interface but because it's comprehensive, legally secure, provides robust processes and archiving, is software as a service (SaaS) at modest cost, and I don't have to screw around with the infrastructure at my dilapidated country estate with its lousy bandwidth availability; and there are other acceptable alternatives beside the rather nightmarish mess of the Open Source solution I once tortured myself with for several months (Project ]open[ Translation). A good online administrative solution like this has many advantages over desktop or LAN solutions, and I have discussed many of these benefits in previous posts about OTM. Even the best solutions I have seen, however, have one glaring weakness: login management!!!

This is a big problem with many online applications. We all have too many damned passwords to juggle. When suddenly I have another dozen or two dozen logins to translation project administration systems for my agency and big corporate clients, things begin to get dicey if cookies, utilities like KePass or other methods are not applied. Personally, I would like to see options for OpenID and other integrations as one is beginning to see with some of the social media. Despite the hassles sometimes involved here, I think Cloud-based tools of this kind are among the most useful for managing translation-related processes and making them secure. I use my OTM for encrypted deliveries of confidential files and for providing clients with full access to their project backup archives. This is a blessing if I'm off somewhere taking a break and someone desperately needs a copy of a translation I did last year which has gone missing.

Safe deliveries

The process of creative writing has occasionally been compared to that of giving birth, though for most of us writing, the result is less miraculous as a rule. The same is true of translation. Yet an undeniable common element is the importance of a safe delivery, and indeed with some translations, such as urgent medical instructions or nuclear safety training materials, the consequences of a failed delivery have greater potential for harm than childbirth complications. In some cases, even minor delays can have longer term effects on the health of one's business.

A typical translation assignment for a typical translator typically does not contain life-critical instructions on follow-up medication and treatment or a plan for preventing a meltdown, but it usually is important to the translation buyer and it is often important that the work be received according to some sort of agreed schedule. It should be self-evident that some reliable system of tracking these delivery schedules is useful to reduce the chances of forgotten deadlines; this system should reflect the realities of one's working life and environment. For some, sticky yellow notes on the edge of a monitor work fine. A few others still use paper notebook schedulers, and increasing numbers of professionals rely on software tools such as the Outlook Calendar, AIT's Translation Office 3000, Plunet or the Online Translation Manager (OTM) to keep an overview of their job schedule.

Once a job is completed, however, there remains the challenge of getting it to the customer. At this stage a number of things can go wrong.

First of all, e-mail is by no means fail-safe. Just because a message was transferred to the Sent folder of your e-mail client does not mean that it made it to the client's Inbox. The messaging connection from your computer to mine is not direct, and along the way many things can go wrong with host servers, spam filter algorithms, virus or DoS attacks that shut down the relay stations temporarily and more. Lately I have even seen headers from one message grafted onto the bodies of others so that a mailed inquiry with confidential documents from one agency appeared with the name an e-mail address of a competing agency. Thank God I noticed that one before responding. By now most of us have probably seen e-mail messages that arrive hours after they are sent. Or days. Or months sometimes. Or never. I have mail accounts on four or five servers, and I have experienced intermittent problems with every one of these over the years. No e-mail system is foolproof when it comes to delivery on time all the time.

What can be done? In urgent cases when I think of it, I make a personal call to the client to ensure that the mail has been received, though often the person I want to reach is out of the office, in a meeting or using the office's sanitary facilities, so the important question of the delivery's arrival remains frustratingly unanswered. I'm not fond of this approach for other reasons as well. While I do enjoy talking with my clients, often one or both of us don't really have the time for the contact, and when I call ten times in a row and all is well each time I begin to feel a bit like Chicken Little and stop at some point. Then the next delivery e-mail doesn't make it. And of course I find this out when I'm far away from my office up to my knees in mud with a rifle in my hands looking for boars or trying to keep the dog under control. Not the best time to take a panicked client call.

My personal solution for this recurring problem was to adopt a bit of agency infrastructure for my freelance business and use translation business portal accounts from LSP.net, a platform for which I also now do the English localization. I've written about this online translation management system on my blog rather often, and I find that the 30 euros a month or so the company asks for a project manager account is cheap insurance among other things. The delivery e-mails from that system so far appear to be more reliable than with my various other hosting providers (Hosting Matters in Florida, ProZ in God-knows-where and some German company), but being somewhat paranoid I do not rely on this. Like many translation business portals, the SaaS solution OTM allows me to create free login access for my customers where they can check on their own to see if a delivery is ready, then download it without my intervention. This has proved useful a number of times in the past year when clients did not receive the files and called me as I was racing down the Autobahn at 160+ kph. With just a short reminder to log into their secure private area they got what they needed in just a few minutes.

Security is another important difference with portal solutions of this kind. OTM and others offer encrypted HTTPS access, far better than the common frightening practice of attaching confidential client files to insecure e-mail. Some of my clients are well aware of the problems inherent in ordinary e-mail attachment of unencrypted files and have in the past demanded various encryption schemes, some public key variations of which have caused havoc with my Windows operating system to everyone's confusion and consternation. Another occasional client has a system of passwords for zip files that I often find confusing when I am in a hurry, and when I substitute the wrong special character as a separator for the password elements the poor fellow tears his hair out trying to crack the file. A secure connection to an encrypted online portal solves this problem. It also provides a more convenient way to transfer large files, far less confusing that dealing with FTP servers, each of which has its own unique operating quirks. Clients can also upload large jobs to such a portal, avoiding the problems sometimes associated with large e-mail attachments.

Given the many vulnerabilities of an online business, it makes good sense to take the extra step in technology and use a secure online platform for business communication and data exchange. There are a number of solutions available, and the implementation expenses and effort fall in a range where any viable business can find a cost-effective option.

Why I moved on from a great tool like Translation Office 3000

I have to smile when I hear colleagues, even some who run agencies, tell me about how they run their entire business with Excel spreadsheets. Or how they had the perfect custom solution whipped together by a genius Access programmer. I used to do that shit. As part of my plan to give up medical device consulting, sell my farm and move to the urban horror of NRW, Germany I did a stint learning to develop database-backed web applications using Active Server Pages, Cold Fusion and other tools popular at the time. I was pretty good at it and used to annoy the Hell out of the developers at a transitional employer by scripting working solutions in hours that they had told management and customers would take many man-months of effort. Never believe what developers tell you; I don't think they are liars, they just don't have a clue, and I don't think all the recent fads of "lean" and "agile" development and whatnot have changed that much. There are organizations with plausible roadmaps that underpromise and over-deliver (Kilgray and LSP.net come to mind), but your average software cowboys, however skilled, aren't real strong in the project management and planning department. Thus these custom solutions are nearly all unsustainable or far too expensive in the long run.

A direct client of mine in the nutrition industry is a case in point. They have their labels, product literature, contracts, etc. translated into at least 20 languages. All this is done with Excel spreadsheets (where they keep trying to shove more text into the cells than certain versions can hold, so content is forever being truncated and lost). Projects used to be managed by the company's purchasing agent in his copious free time. I'm sure he used to be a PM at a major translation agency, but maybe not. Anyway, he's no dummy: he talked his bosses into hiring someone to coordinate those projects full time. And a full time job it is when you do everything with scratch pads and Excel sheets. After I spent several years advising them on the benefits of TM technology, they considered Déjà Vu and other solutions, but finally opted to have the head of their IT department write their own solution. Last time I asked (a year ago) the costs were in excess of 30,000 euros and all the system could do was import and export Excel spreadsheets. Conversion of the data to various layout formats still proceeds by copy and paste. They want and need the control offered by off-the-shelf solutions like Ontram, the memoQ Server, SDL Teamworks, OTM from LSP.net, etc. but somehow they are convinced that they save money and gain control by growing, rolling and smoking their own.

They're smoking something, alright. Take it from an IT fool with his foot in that swamp for nearly 40 years now: if you are doing more than minor custom integrations of off-the-shelf, well-supported solutions, you are probably driving blindfolded down a dead-end alley. Early in my career I saw Avery waste a fortune developing its own LIMS to handle data from the corporate analytical laboratory, only to dump it for a standard commercial tool that offered standard data migration options. The wealth of old data was probably never rescued - last I heard the custom database format could not be cracked. Things have gotten better since the 1980s, but not as much as some believe.

Which brings me to AIT's Translation Office 3000 and its proprietary database. At least the developers created some reasonable data export options; it's hard to imagine any viable application without that today. TO3000 is a popular solution for individual translators who do not outsource. I like it, and I used it for three years after my original tool (the agency version of LTC Organiser) was discontinued, and the disturbing lack of internal coordination at LTC in 2006/2007 caused me to pull back from adopting their new Worx solution. Customer support from the AIT team in the Ukraine is also prompt and cheerful, if not always informed on matters like local legal requirements for invoices. If you are a freelancer who never outsources or run a language services office that does everything in-house, TO3000 is a viable, affordable solution that is easy to learn and implement. I like the company and think they do great budget products for translators. That's why I have links to AIT on my blog, to help colleagues find respectable solutions for managing language service projects. Their support is also very good; I recently needed help to load my old database on a new system to handle a legal matter, and the AIT told me exactly what I needed to know and provided me with all the resources to accomplish it. I give them top marks.

Translation Office 3000 is a single-user desktop system. It includes a customer database, project quotation, scheduling and invoicing, some e-mail features and other basics needed to keep track of your business. The RTF templates are easy to customize to meet your personal or local statutory requirements. There is no database for suppliers (subcontractors), which is why I don't recommend it as a solution if you outsource. That requires a second tool, and the more places related data must be maintained, the more effort you have to maintain it and the greater the likelihood of some sort of organizational meltdown eventually.

It's a great system, but... I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that a healthy business really requires more to avoid wasting time and possibly losing clients and projects.

I'm a lone freelancer. I hardly ever outsource. Once in a while I'll work in a team on something, well, maybe rather often if you count those who edit my work, which you really should. Right there the issues with TO3000 begin.

But as I've mentioned elsewhere, there were certain specific issues that led me to look further:

• I needed a second person to access the records to enter customer and project data and issue invoices
• I needed to avoid the time and expense to maintain a local server, and I needed regular backups that could not be forgotten
• I needed to check the status of projects and correspondence while traveling 
• I needed to reduce the number of programs I juggled to manage my business
• Most of all, I needed reliable deliveries to my customers. With secure encryption. Deliveries kept getting swallowed in e-mail systems, and delivering huge projects was a major nuisance. If my partner at the time needed to make a big delivery, I had to do it, because she had no idea how to upload to the FTP or web server. All this was a huge drag on my time and created uncertainty. And clients were not happy to learn that the delivery had occurred hours or days before but never arrived.
• I needed to handle transactions in a legally compliant manner that meets international auditing standards. This includes a requirement for time-saving templates that are correct and do not require legal research on my part.

Although TO3000 is a great program backed by a great team, it fails on every one of these points. Its real advantage is price: for under 200 euros you can get a license and get started. But you're on your own for security, backups, legal compliance, etc.

So even for a "little" freelancer, a more comprehensive solution makes sense. And there are plenty of these. The Translation Office Manager (TOM) is one solution that I've looked at repeatedly as it has improved over the years, and one agency I work with in Düsseldorf has apparently made it the backbone of business there. AIT offers Projetex for agencies, though I never managed to get the database scripts to work, and feedback I've heard from others using it is not good. AFAIK both of these require local server maintenance: once again security, backups, legal compliance, etc. at your own risk.

The current Worx, Plunet and others provide a more professional approach with options closer to my needs and some that I would hope to see eventually in the solution I do use. However, the costs for these are hardly transparent upon casual inquiry, and they are inevitably higher than the system I adopted. I've done way too much IT support over the years; I am good at it, but I hate it. So I wanted a hosted solution that requires a minimal time investment on my part. And I need absolute reliability for my deliveries, easy, accurate record keeping and full legal compliance for an international business. (I may be small-time, but I have clients scattered around the world.) Most of the time TO3000 largely covers my project organization needs, but more and more I find myself in team situations for larger projects that require agency organization functions. And I am on a strict budget: paying full college support costs for a kid isn't cheap even in a country without tuition charges.

The Online Translation Manager from LSP.net offers me all the flexibility, scalability and access I need for a monthly cost that is half my rate for a single hour of work. I adopted this solution 14 months ago, and I have used it in 5 different configurations for various businesses and test systems. After half a year I began to support its localization, because I believe in the value of what the system offers and I see rapid progress in its development for the diverse needs of an international market. Right now I'm working on dialogs and instructions for the version 4.1 release scheduled for next Monday, a minor one, but one which contains more real improvements than I experienced with my other business management solutions in several years. This is not a perfect system. No system is, because requirements of users vary widely. But it is the best general system I have seen so far, and is likely the one with the most potential as evidenced by its support policies and development roadmap. Time and again I see parallels with Kilgray, a company with a product (memoQ) not ready for prime time when I first saw it a few years ago, now beating the pants off the industry "leader" SDL for functionality, user-friendliness, support and cost and charging ahead with useful new innovation at a rate that shows no signs of slowing. Which horse will you bet on? The charging thoroughbred leaving its competitors in a cloud of dust and gravel? Or the lame mare who plods along remembering former victories and daydreaming about a quiet pasture? (I have a nice one here at Vehlefanz Manor where she can retire.) I'll bet my small stack of cash on LSP.net, because OTM keeps me winning, gives me security and leaves me time for life.