The future of translation now. In Warsaw.

Beautiful crowdsourced Warsaw.

This year’s Translation Management Europe conference was held at the Hotel Mercure Warszawa Grand, short walk from the reconstituted Olde Towne of Warsaw. This pleasant district is said to have been built in large part by non-professional crowdsourcing after some of Poland’s neighbors had repurposed too many of the qualified builders as fertilizer and pulverized the original city structures. This magnificent recovery from nothing should put into perspective the widespread sense of doom about the future of translation, which was in fact the theme of TM-Europe this year.

The road trip to get there was an adventure with German to English financial translator Susan Starling, Kilgray’s Gábor Ugray, Stridonium founder and Dutch to English legal translator and interpreter Christina Guy (my copywriting partner),  Ajax vom Bernsteinsee, Csővárberki Jámbor and myself packed into a minivan with luggage and provisions for the week and hurtling down the new EU-funded superhighway that crosses Poland. Due to a few delays we missed the Kilgray reception the evening before the conference, but we were able to chat with a few straggling colleagues for a bit before turning in to rest for the start the next day.

Thursday morning, after a brief greeting by the conference organizers, Mark Childress of SAP gave his keynote talk unplugged, sans microphone and slides. Goed zo, as the Dutch say: he needs no props for his message.

After the conference, one participant expressed a bit of puzzlement about the choice of terminology for a speech to open a conference on the future of translation. Too specific she said. I disagree. Terminology is a general problem in most translation and localization projects, and getting it right before you get started cuts costs and time overall by about a third according to figures Mark quoted (which I have encountered elsewhere – EU data I think). Cost savings like that are very, very important to the future of translation.

A lot of specifics were in fact presented, but these merely emphasized the universal importance of terms and intelligent management of terminology. He spoke of synonyms used to help potential customers to find the right product in a search, branding and semantic influences. The dark side of terminology was presented, how “term criminals” use words to distort and deceive, but how this is also becoming harder with better access to information through the Internet.

"New" languages are emerging in the commercial arena as economies around the world develop. There is a great need for proper localization in the countries of Africa and elsewhere to bridge the communication gap between Western-trained doctors with their English and Latin terminology and those who understand only the local lingo these medical experts disdain. This is not just a problem in emerging nations; in my host country Germany I often see the alienation of older citizens who cannot understand modern advertising communication in Denglish. To the localizer will go the profits as now “unimportant” regions grow and flex new economic muscles.

Localization consultant Stefan Gentz (who kindly supplied the pictures used in this post) followed with a lively talk on change management, the motivations of companies that introduce it and how to get it right. This is an easy subject to get me snoring, but Stefan failed miserably in that regard; the talk was too well presented and interesting to allow me to catch up on my sleep deficit.

Stefan is a unique individual, a German brimming with optimizing and a humility that is all the more surprising given his great competence. I met him earlier this year at memoQfest 2012; he introduced himself as the author of a blog post that had drawn a few scathing comments from me. I don’t remember what it was all about, but I suspect that if Stefan was in fact wrong about whatever irked me at the time, his graceful way of dealing with matters probably puts him on the right side of most things. He is an enormously creative problem solver whose infectious enthusiasm is probably just what the doctor should order for companies needing a guide to effective change management with their language technologies. I found his lecture fun and inspiring and the occasional phonetic stumbles just added a bit of pleasant spice.

Stefan’s most important point, I think, is that change management is not crisis management. If you wait until you are in a crisis, it may well be too late.

Reinhard Schaler followed with a talk on trends in localization that was interesting but not necessarily relevant to the commercial world I and many of my colleagues inhabit.

"Social localization" represents the greatest growth opportunity, he said, but many of the examples presented involved harnessing the free time of those who have their living secured in other ways. There were a few contradictions in the presentation that were never resolved to my satisfaction: on one hand, the short shelf-life of information and its loss of value before traditional translation processes can be applied effectively was emphasized, but a few minutes later he spoke of vast archives of old wisdom in urgent need of recoding for other languages and cultures. Not a contradiction, really, as I think I probably agree with him on the specific examples he’ll cite – I think we’ll both agree with the opinion of the late Miguel Llorens that the content tsunami has less a wave of valuable content than my puppy unleashes on the sidewalk on a typical walk, and his observation that the Common (Non)sense Advisory has not reported on community translation because it is not yet of obvious commercial interest and they cannot sell reports about it is probably an accurate observation despite any intended humor.

Reinhard commented that a trillion hours of free time is up for grabs each year… I wish someone would spread a bit of that wealth my direction. I work for a living and have little desire to be spending my bit of free time doing more of the same work for nothing. Reinhard does not see this use of unprofessional translation as a threat to the pros, and I largely agree with him. And when it is, I think of the likely result in many cases and remind myself that these are good times for those who have studied tort law.

The case he cited of drug companies selling pharmaceuticals around the world with labels and directions for use only in English is appalling and morally criminal. When he talked about this point I wondered about the viability of recorded phone messages with directions in local languages and how these might be accessed using codes on a package. I was disappointed at Reinhard’s failure to offer viable paths to action for working language professionals, but I do care about many of the matters he touched on.

He delivered one of my favorite lines at the conference: The Titanic was built by professionals, the Arc by amateurs! A very good point, but Noah was a pro at manure management. Most crowdsourcing companies have yet to master that skill.

A panel on standards followed, with interesting background on the EN 15038 standard, its development and politics and future incarnations under discussion. Various national standards in Canada and elsewhere were discussed, and there was a good exchange between the audience and the panel members.

Chris Durban with her book, The Prosperous Translator. Photo: Stefan Gentz

Chris Durban (in the audience) pointed out that the need to purchase copies of the EN 15038 standard posed a barrier  to its adoption, and she described how her French association (SFT) had negotiated a bulk purchase deal to help overcome this.

After lunch I was full of excellent Polish food and tired from the effort of concentrating on the morning’s presentations. A colleague in the US once suggested to me that breaks at these conferences should be long – much more than the short hour here. I agree. Two or three hours would have allowed for a refreshing, much-needed nap or more networking time with interesting international colleagues.

Though I was desperately tired, Paul Filkin’s talk on migration issues from SDL Trados 2007 to the latest versions of SDL Trados Studio – “Making the Leap” – kept me alert and interested. It was a competent overview with relevant test data on leverage differences, compatibility strategies and more. A good time for an extra coffee break if you stay well away from the Trados Jungle, but a valuable guide for those in it who prefer to avoid the snakes, quicksand and tigers. Paul is one of the best explainers of the cabbalistic secrets of SDLarcana that it has been my pleasure to meet over the years, and the great services he has done to user communities with improved customer service and support as well as the SDL Open Exchange and his excellent tips blog even make things look easy sometimes.

Gábor Ugray followed with a talk on the Kilgray constellation of tools. It was a useful overview for those unfamiliar with the suite, but the focus on server solutions was a bit aside from my personal needs, and I was having a terrible time understanding parts of the talk, because his microphone was defective. I did, however, manage to extract some useful information regarding development plans with Kilgray’s terminology tools that will affect development and publishing plans of my own. When asked about plans for possible further web-based offerings (because Paul had mentioned various SDL plans) there was a deadpan pass on mentioning anything specific or interesting. Praiseworthy caution perhaps, but a little disappointing, because the rumors of things ahead are quite encouraging.

There were further presentations that afternoon from Plunet and others, but a severe need for caffeine, fresh air and a walk for the dogs caused me to miss it. That’s always a problem with conferences – not enough time and/or caffeine to take it all in. Thus ended the first day of TM-Europe 2012.

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and a vigorous debate on the language "industry". Photo: Stefan Gentz

Not quite, actually. A few hours later, after a suitable break for rest and relaxed chats, we met again at the conference hotel and walked to the venue for the event’s gala dinner at Pod Gigantami. It was a smaller gathering than last year, but the food and the atmosphere were better than last year’s rather nice evening. I had the pleasure of sitting with colleagues from Russia, Germany, France, Sweden, the US and the Netherlands among other places (with some overlap) and hearing them share their thoughts on marketing strategies and the challenges of the profession. I was pleased that Chris Durban was at the table to share her thoughts, particularly as problems related to an illness the next morning caused me to miss her keynote speech and most of the other presentations that day.

The program the next day was quite a good one, but illness and the need to prepare for my own presentations caused me to miss the talks I had looked forward to most. I was to take part in the panel discussion of whether machine translation, a 70-year old technology that always seems to be five years short of perfect implementation, is perhaps overrated as a technology of the future. The other panel members, Doug Strock and Michal Tyszkowski, are credible technologists with a clear understanding of the practical limits of MT and the honesty to state these limits and warn against their abuse, but the member of the panel who was unable to make it at all due to his untimely death at age 41 of a heart attack spoke most entertainingly and clearly through insightful and irreverent quotes projected in the background and the memories many have of his vigorous defense of real common sense. I stumbled in late, a bit disoriented, and shared a few of my skeptical concerns about the mind-numbing and warping effects of machine translation post-editing on a good human brain and as well as my thoughts on research data presented last year at TM-Europe by Indra Sāmīte discussing Latvian MT experiments which clearly showed an increase in serious errors after editing machine  translation supported work. I'm not actually sure that what I had to say was relevant to the preceding discussion, but damage to one's professional writing skills through exposure to linguistic garbage has been a concern of mine for many decades, which is why I don't watch much television or correct crappy human translation work either.

My afternoon rant on responsibility for the future of translation was originally scheduled for the morning, but Doug had kindly agreed to switch times, and I explained as best I could my cautious optimism that things can in fact work out better than many of us expect - if we remember that there are people behind all our "processes". I'm not sure the point really worked, because in the Q&A afterward, one fellow chided me for my pessimism, telling me that translation agencies should do everything for freelance translators so we all can just type. Oh well. In his future perhaps.

The final Warsaw Pact Debate for the meeting of 87 delegates and two dogs from 21 countries saw Doug Strock, Chris Durban, Reinhard Schaler and Mark Childress summarizing and dissecting each others' visions of the future of translation and localization. Just as there is no single translation market, there is no single future for our profession, and listening to these colleagues and others discuss their thoughts and fears for times ahead is a great help to me in choosing my own future rather than accept one that others might choose for me.

The Buck Stops Where?

When I was asked last summer to speak at TM-Europe 2012 in Warsaw, I discussed possible topics with the organizers, Peter Reynolds and Monika Popiolek. There are so many challenges facing us in the future of translation, not all of them having to do with machine translation. These include:

• ever shorter project cycles
• rising cost pressure in many segments
• a greater than ever need for business savvy to survive
• increasing use of technology in many areas: it's not enough to be a good translator; one must often be an IT expert or have access to such expertise
• radical "scoping" policies, i.e. discounts based on match scales

Solutions to these and other issues may be technical; often they are matters of policy.

It is hard – impossible, really – to look ahead and see with any certainty the technical shape of the future. But I believe that the most important elements of the future are known and knowable.

The title of my talk is taken from a well-known saying of former US president Harry Truman: the buck stops here. What does that mean? It's about responsibility.

But responsibilities in many areas of our profession are often not clear, or the lines are becoming blurred.

More and more, stakeholders – I hate that word – in translation processes try to pass that buck, making others, such as individual translators, responsible for technical preparations which lie outside their areas of expertise.

Really, this is not a technical problem. It is a human issue.

I said that the key elements of the future of translation are known or knowable. I believe that these are the elements of our human nature. How we choose to work with others. How we decide to train the next generation. How we share responsibility.

In our drive to optimize our processes we must, if we are to recognize the solutions for the complex challenges of our future, allow a certain inefficiency in which our subconscious minds are given scope to process these challenges and find solutions. Often, we need to sleep on it.

You know the old saying: work smarter, not harder. Not like a hamster on a wheel. But this requires space. And quiet. Time to talk, and negotiate, and understand our partners and customers and help them understand us.

The buck stops where??? Who is responsible? We have to think about this, talk and decide.

An example of a critical decision for the future came out in a discussion with Doug Strock and others as we prepared for the panel on MT and its role or lack thereof in the future. When I mentioned to Doug how few specialists there were in my areas, how difficult it is to find a research chemist with an understanding of patent law and high-level translation skills, he commented that this is why we need machine translation. I'm sure he was joking. He said that we are the last generation of real subject matter experts translating in such areas. After we die out, there will be no choice but to rely on machines to understand the texts we translate today. Bollocks.

Let's forget the question of quality and the impossibility of achieving the necessary accuracy of translation with machines and post-editors ignorant of the subject matter. Why can't we simply develop the human resources we need instead? We did it after the launch of Sputnik. The United States and other countries transformed their education systems.

I have a lot of personal ideas for how to solve specific challenges facing us now and in the future of translation.

For a long time, I have been an advocate of including formatting – such as tags – in piece rate translation quotation.

With regard to the technical qualifications and competencies for using technology in translation, I have been carrying on a private campaign to persuade tool vendors, professional associations, translation agencies and others to develop outcome-based testing and certification of basic problem-solving skills for translation using technology, to determine, for example, whether a translator truly understands how to work with embedded objects in a compound document or translate tagged formats such as HTML or an XML for which the tags containing translatable content must be specified.

But it's not my ideas that are important and offer the best solutions for our common future. Nor are they yours most likely. It is the ideas and solutions that we develop together in discussion and negotiation, with as little "noise" as possible.

Therefore I would like to close this rant and send you all off to the coffee break early to talk and decide for yourselves how to share responsibility in a sustainable way, to decide where the buck should stop – now and in the future. 

Photo by colleague Valerij Tomarenko: TM-Europe 2012 in Warsaw, Poland

TM-Europe 2012: managing translation, not memories

Last year I attended the annual international translation management conference in Warsaw (TM-Europe) for the first time. Other than a guest post on the XLIFF symposium, this event wasn't mentioned on the blog, because shortly after the event my dog nearly died of babesiosis from a tick bite, and I had other things to think about for a long while, so many other tidbits, such as My Dinner with Andrä (well, lunch, actually) never made it to publication at the end of 2011.

Despite the silence, there was much worth telling about the event in Poland. I went on a lark because I had never been there before and wanted to see a few of the attendees I knew, and I was greatly surprised by what was possibly one of the most personally interesting conferences for translation I have ever attended. Despite the word "management" in its title, the presentations and discussions were very relevant to my freelance business as well as to agency and corporate attendees.

One of the highlights of the conference for me wasn't a presentation, but a conversation with one of the great creative developers for translation tools, Daniel Benito of Atril, whose insights and ideas on terminology mining still have my mind spinning with fascinated speculation on their feasibility and potential. Yves Champillon, the creator of WordFast - a product I don't like much at all - gave a presentation so fascinating that I actually found myself testing that suite of products again and developing interoperability solutions for agencies in my consulting clientele. The quantitative research on MT post-editing presented by Indra Samite was excellent, though I thought the conclusions overly optimistic and unsupported by the data, which rather spoke for itself. Paul Filkin's presentation on SDL Trados Studio 2011 was absolutely superb and helped me to understand an environment with ergonomics that often leave me baffled. The networking opportunities were superb, with leading experts, developers, professional organization heads, corporate language specialists, translation agency personnel, freelancers, consultants and others from around the world mingling and sharing ideas in a personal atmosphere.

The 2012 conference has the future of translation and localization as its theme. But don't expect the future vision of dark, Satanic post-editing mills propagated by the Common Nonsense Advisory and TAUS acolytes. Like last year, machine translation is part of the program, but here there will be an open discussion about whether its role is not being oversold just a wee bit, with MT advocates trading polite, professional blows with skeptics such as Miguel Llorens who see the future as having more of a human component. Freelance transcreator and consultant Chris Durban will speak on the mass market versus the premium one and why you should care about the difference for your future.

Mark Childress of SAP will speak on the future of terminology management. Given his deep expertise in that field, I would go to Warsaw on a bicycle to hear him. Fortunately, my carpool arrangements in a colleague's van newly converted to LPG promise to be more fun and comfortable. And my dog hates riding piggyback on the bike.

Have a look at the event program for 2012 (with information still being added). It has a good balance of presenters from all sides of translation and localization and promises once again to be an excellent forum for exchanging ideas to do our business better.

Early bird conference registration closes tomorrow (September 7th - not the 5th as stated on the web page... the organizers do an excellent program, but the written pre-conference communication this year has been a little confusing sometimes). However, registration is possible until the event itself as far as I know.

The conference will be held from October 4th to 5th; on October 3rd there will be a pre-conference workshop on project management and an evening welcome reception sponsored by Kilgray.

Notes from the XLIFF symposium in Warsaw

Some months ago at memoQfest 2011 in Budapest, I was invited to attend the TM Europe conference in Warsaw, Poland, at which the Interoperability Now! initiative would be discussed. Although the initiative and its goals interest me very much, I was undecided about attending until a friend said simply that we should go, and the matter was decided. I had very little time to think about it after that, and in the end I came a day late and left a day later than planned, and two days after that I've still not made it home to my pigeons, Ajax and I having been kidnapped by an alien. My lack of real planning caused me to miss the XLIFF symposium on the first day, about which I heard many things from its participants, mostly positive. As the main conference was the most interesting event of its kind which I have ever attended, most notably for the quality of participants and presenters alike, I was quite intrigued to be told time and again that I should have heard some particular matter at the XLIFF symposium, because the information shared was so much deeper than the particular gold nugget I was admiring.

Thus I asked a new friend if he would be kind enough to share his impressions of the day I missed so that I might enjoy subsequent vicarious attendance and that others might share some of the lessons he took home with him. A single event is many when seen through different eyes, and this is one man's journey through the day. If you attended a different conference, please tell us about yours.

And now, without further ado, I offer you the notes he shared with me, and I thank him for his anonymous insights.

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Here are the thoughts on a few of the presentations that struck a note.

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The most interesting translation buyer presentation was given by Kirill Soloviev, who runs localisation at Acronis, a small software company.  He described the overhaul of his company's software localisation process, from sending a non-standard (simple text-based) resource format to the translation vendor, to converting to XLIFF in-house and sending that instead.

To me, the eye-opening part is not the new, XLIFF-based process, which seems sensible and straight-forward.  It's the fact that the old process ever existed in the first place.  I know it happens all the time, but it still baffles me that anyone would send an ill-specified in-house file format directly to a translation vendor, with a prayer of getting it back intact.  I guess when it comes time to translate, software companies underestimate how fragile their file formats are—or overestimate the engineering competence of their LSP.  You can make it work, but (as Kirill showed) at the great price of time, money, and frustration.

The problems were what you would expect.  Up-front, the LSP charged engineering for the non-standard files.  Acronis was locked into the only LSP that understood them.  The files came back broken anyway.  Often, this required sending them back to the vendor.  The release was delayed unpredictably.  Everyone was frustrated.

Kirill quantified the costs (except the frustration), which I appreciate.  I don't have the numbers handy, but the engineering cost was the least significant.  That alone would not justify the overhaul for years.  (For Acronis, that is—given the number of back-and-forths required, the LSP probably lost money on engineering.)  Beating lock-in was bigger.  Acronis could now shop around.  But more important than money was time.  Testing corrupt files and back-and-forth with the LSP wasted employees' time and delayed releases.  I wouldn't be surprised if they missed ship dates, though Kirill didn't say.

Whose fault was it?  The buyer takes some blame for not foreseeing the misinterpretation and corruption of their format.  This is typical of the somewhat sloppy internationalisation practices of software developers.  But it's understandable, because localisation is not their business.  The vendor takes the weight of the blame, in my opinion, for accepting the job without completely understanding the format.  LSPs seem to assume it is their problem to deal with random formats, yet they overestimate their technical ability to do it correctly, and fail to set expectations (and pricing) accordingly.  If this were estimated diligently before signing the contract, both parties would probably see it's cheaper for Acronis to process their in-house format themselves.

Lesson: The more standard the format you send to the translation vendor, the better results you should expect.  XLIFF is the logical extension (in theory at least).

One other observation is that a pure-XLIFF delivery appears to work well for resource files because they have no context to preserve.  So converting to XLIFF doesn't lose anything.  But this success is somewhat illusory, because (as Kirill acknowledged) the lack of context is a problem for translation quality.  This is an important problem that neither Acronis nor XLIFF has solved.

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On XLIFF itself there were two panels, which I might title "The Problem" and "The Solution".  "The Problem" I might subtitle with a quote from panelist Angelika Zerfass: "What do you mean?  What are we supposed to do?"  Angelika trotted out a menagerie of freakish XLIFF that would make the stoutest Technical Committee member shiver.  Angelika is a localisation trainer, and all of these mutants come from her real-life experiences.

This led to a lively exchange, dominated by echoes that XLIFF is not clearly defined, and implementations regularly get it wrong.  Producers see XLIFF as a great place to dump data, without realising how many assumptions they are making about how the data will be treated.

Angelika called for education, guidance, examples, and use cases for XLIFF producers from the standard, and nobody disagreed that this is sorely lacking.  The point I would question is her claim that producers need to understand the process that their XLIFF will go through.  I believe if XLIFF were well-specified, XLIFF producers could be confident about how their data will be treated—and what they can expect back at the end—while remaining relatively ignorant of the translation process.  But this may be hopeful speculation on my part.

Daniel Benito (creator of Déjà Vu) made some points about the lack of workflow information in XLIFF, and claimed that alt-trans was designed without thought for how tools would deal with it.  This led to a notable comment from someone not on the panel that XLIFF was designed without tools developers involved at the beginning.  That explains a lot.

Shirley Coady (MultiCorpora) noted that the lack of a compliance test for XLIFF allows producers to create whatever they want and call it XLIFF.  LSPs (and even tool vendors) seem to accept they are stuck dealing with it.  This is the same backwards thinking I pointed out regarding Kirill's talk.  LSPs should push back—but they could use a stronger standard, with compliance checking, to back them up.  With strong standards, they can show clients that their XLIFF is wrong, and educate them on how to fix it.  The world becomes a more harmonious place.  (As someone from the audience noted, we could use more translators and PMs in the standards process to bring about this happily ever after.)

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"The Solution" was a panel of XLIFF Technical Committee members David Filip, Shirley Coady, and Lucia Morado Vazquez, who explained how XLIFF 2.0 will bring about a golden age of localisation interoperability.  OK, so that's a little optimistic, but let's look at what hope they offer for the future.

David cited the new requirement for a conformance clause in OASIS standards as an opportunity.  He advocates a conformance clause that mandates processing requirements for every element.  With XLIFF 2.0, you either conform or you don't; there is no ambiguity.  Everyone seems in favor.

Also widely agreed is that XLIFF 2.0 will have a simpler core, with additional functionality enabled by modules.  But the line between core and module has not been drawn.  David indicated that the distinction may be guided by considering a set of core use cases.  He pointed to the model of the UBL standard, which begins with 40 pages of "business processes" that are supported by the specification.

Some important questions remain.  The first is how backwards-compatible XLIFF 2.0 will be.  Shirley made a statement implying that 2.0 wouldn't be much of a change for tool developers.  But I didn't hear consensus on this point, and it seems at odds with the goals of simplification and tighter specification.  An earlier presentation showed parts of the current XLIFF 2.0 schema, and they had clearly diverged from the current standard.  So the story on compatibility is unclear.  There's a lot of fervor for a fresh start in 2.0.  And maintaining backwards compatibility while at the same time removing ambiguity seems a major undertaking.  But are implementors willing to rewrite their XLIFF support?  I'm not sure anyone knows.

Also missing was any project data on XLIFF 2.0.  XLIFF 1.2 was published in February, 2008, over three and a half years ago.  Yet there's not much visibility from the outside on the progress towards XLIFF 2.0.  David estimated 2.0 in the second quarter of 2012, but I'm not sure how he arrived at this.  David did call for feature owners to commit the resources necessary to do the work.  And Lucia asked for more industry contribution.  But neither answers the question of who is signed up for the core work.  I hope I've just missed something, but I'm suspicious of the current dates given the scope of the goals.

Finally, I can't help noting the absence of most of the XLIFF Technical Committee from the Symposium.  Not to dismiss the contributions of the others present, but David Filip was the only representative to make many meaningful statements about work being done.  Missing were most of the heavy hitters:  Committee Chair Brian Schnabel, Yves Savourel, Rodolfo M. Raya, Arle Lommel, Christian Lieske (due to last-minute emergency), and anyone from IBM.  I don't mean to blame them.  Budgets are tight, and it's hard to justify conference expenses.  But it was a lost chance for the TC to communicate its message, and for the industry to engage them.  With so much uncertainty around XLIFF 2.0, I think that's a real missed opportunity.

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And in the miscellaneous category was a fascinating talk by Ian O'Keeffe.  Ian made a compelling case for the increased importance of sound (sound effects, background sound, music) in virtual experiences, and predicted that sound will increasingly be localised to convey the intended meaning to other cultures.  He's written a clever tool to vary a piece of music (tempo, pitch, rhythm, ...) and study how listeners from different cultures hear the differences.  His provocative idea is that perhaps, instead of localising sound by choosing or composing a different sound, we might modify the original to evoke the right response.

He ties this to localisation and XLIFF by pointing out that whatever method is used, we need to know the intended meaning of a sound in order to localise it.  He proposes putting metadata about the source sound into XLIFF. This is all fine, but sound is a red herring.  We need translation unit metadata for all sorts of reasons.  And we already have it. XLIFF 1.2 even enshrines some rather (ridiculously) specific metadata (coord attribute, anyone?).  Moreover, it allows for extension within the tag, so anybody can put there whatever metadata they want.  While there were a few extension-phobes in the audience, I don't see what alternative they could offer, or what harm they see in this kind of use.