The Future: My Thoughts

The other day, I was at a fast food restaurant to... get food, fast. I noticed that their value menu, formerly their dollar menu, had changed since the last time I had been there. The main thing that I noticed, since a side benefit to fast food is also that it's cheap, is that one of my favorite sandwiches, that had been $1.00 for years, had gone up by about $0.30.

Now, like just about everyone, I'd rather not pay more for something. I do understand, though. Inflation. Cost of ingredients. Making money. (As a side note, I find it very odd when someone complains that all a business or employee wants to do is make money. To a degree, that's true for every business, every profession. It may not be their only goal, but if they didn't make money, they would go out of business).

What do my food cravings have to do with localization? Well, it's not just the food service industry that follows this trend. No matter the business, and whether it deals in goods, services, or both, prices go up with the times. People bemoan the rising price of gas. Others probably compare the price of a haircut now to what it was when they were young. Sure, everyone wants to pay less, but the reality of economy is that things tend to get more expensive.

Enter the localization industry. Like every industry, they want to make money. That's no secret. As I mentioned in my side note above, everyone does. Unlike other industries, though, and this is according to what I've observed in several companies and not one in particular, they have a funny way of showing it. Clients who want translation or localization done, who don't understand what a mentally taxing job translation can be, who don't seem to understand sometimes that translation isn't just writing something down in another language, demand better, faster, cheaper translations. Who can blame them? I want cheaper gas. I want a cheaper fast food sandwich (and I wouldn't mind if it were better or came faster, either). Unlike other industries, though, where eventually prices rise, prices have fallen. Deadlines have gotten shorter. Quality expectations have gone up. It sounds pretty good from a client's perspective.

Enter the translators. They, like everyone else, want to make money. They don't mind (to a point past which it becomes practically impossible) to give you better quality faster, but they want more money for their work. Who can blame them? Inflation. Higher levels of stress and mental taxation. All valid reasons to ask for a higher rate.

Enter the language service providers. They are the middle men, and absolutely necessary in the world of translation and localization. They may hire full-time translators, but most of what they do is see that your translation gets done. They usually have a vast network of freelance translators that they turn to, so that you, as the client, don't have to find an individual translator for each language every time. They maintain glossaries and translation memories, to help make the work more efficient and consistent in quality.

And they want to make money. They need to charge more than their freelance translator charges. They need to cover their costs and keep their employees happy. And they have a lot of pressure coming from both sides. I'm sure that this happens in more industries than translation and localization, but this is what I know. The clients want more, better, faster, cheaper. The translator can, to a point, give you more, better, faster, but they want more money for it. The client threatens to go to someone else if you can't give them a better price. The translator does the same. The middle man tries to manage the expectations of both, but eventually gives, raising the rates for the translator, and lowering them for the client.

How do they survive? By juicing every bit of efficiency out of existing technologies. Translation memories can eventually provide big savings. Once you've translated a sentence, you don't need to translate it again. Machine translation is the way of the future, they say, and it can provide some time and money savings if used correctly. (More on machine translation, how it works, and what its limitations are, is planned for a future blog post). But the technologies have their limits. Something's going to give.

Here's what I think is going to happen. Eventually, something is going to give, maybe not all at once, and not across all parts of the industry, but something is going to give. Eventually, language service providers, the essential middle men, will implode, or at least feel enough pressure. They'll realize that translators still need to eat, so they won't push quite as much for lower rates. They'll still make as much use as they can of available technologies, and hopefully work to improve and add to those technologies. And clients will realize that quality translation is essential. They won't like it, and who can blame them, but they'll start to accept some higher rates. An equilibrium will be reached, until the point is pushed again and the cycle continues anew.

Why is this here?

Hello all,

Someone once told me that an expert is someone who uses jargon without realizing that they're doing it. I don't really consider myself an expert in the field of localization, but I might just fit that definition. I find myself talking about alignments, TM updates, segmentation, concatenation, character encodings and formatting, and I'm sure that some people look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language. Still, I don't know everything, and I don't know that I ever will.

I do see things, though, and I want to share some of them. This is the place that I've chosen to do that. I know that, as of writing this, this blog only has two followers, one comment, total, but who knows? Maybe someday someone will see something that will help them. Until then, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

My rough schedule for updating this blog is the first and third Saturdays of the month, which makes this post over a week behind. The next scheduled blog post, which should happen on April 5, will be another tool review. I'm planning on making a special post, though, this coming Saturday, about the trends that I've seen in the industry and my thoughts on those trends.

Until then, keep localizing!
-Dale

Tool Spotlight: PortableApps

Occasionally, I run into a program or a set of programs that I just want to share with the world. Today, I'm going to talk about PortableApps.

I first ran into PortableApps several years ago, when I purchased a USB drive. My thought process was, essentially, like this:

"Gee, I wonder if I can set this up to be like a portable computer..."

Enter PortableApps, one of the results that came up when I was looking through my favorite search engine. As long as you're on a Windows computer, and you have access to your USB drive, you can have a set of programs that you can use.

PortableApps itself acts kind of like a Start menu. It shows up with the rest of your running background programs, by default on the lower right of your screen, along with your network connection, volume, etc. You click on it, and it allows you to launch any programs on your USB drive, as long as they follow a pretty basic directory structure.

While this doesn't seem like much, and might not even be much if you have a tablet that you can use as a computer, it means that you can borrow someone else's computer and use it like your own. If you're a hobbyist developer, you can put all of your projects, development environments, etc. on your thumb drive and not worry about a different computer having a different version of that environment. If you like listening to music and want to take that music to work with you, set your PortableApps environment up with a media player, stick your music on there, and have it to go.

Again, you may not fit into this category, but even if you don't, remember the link to the PortableApps website. Besides this nifty environment they offer, they have a pretty sizable library of free apps. All of the apps that they have are free. And you can install them anywhere. And since they're designed to work from a thumb drive, they install to one folder. Since they don't modify any system files at all, you shouldn't even need installation privileges. To uninstall, simply delete the folder. So if you quickly need a photo editing program, they've got you covered. If you need a little widget that you only need once a month or less, just download it, use it, and get rid of it.

So, yeah, use PortableApps. Discover what you can do with it, and what it can do for you.