This article was originally written in English. Text in other languages was provided by machine translation.
Each week I work on a wide variety of language technology challenges across an array of tools to determine what works, what doesn’t, and why. These projects come from within Adobe and from other groups and teams we collaborate with across the industry.
Over the past two decades, adoption of technology in translation and localization teams has boomed. My team benefited enormously when we adopted Trados from the translation memories they provided, consistency, throughput, etc. PDF was an incredible boon, eliminating Carl Sagan-scale hours at the fax machine from our collective lives. Our days (and hard drives) have become filled with tools to help us get our job done. Sometimes they do, and sometimes even a great tool just doesn’t help get anything accomplished.
Localization projects are generally a series of steps performed by different people who are often using very different technologies to get their work done. A ”great” new tool can be useless when it impedes the goals of our projects because it can’t share data with other tools needed to also accomplish the work at hand. Or when you need A and B to work together and B’s new version doesn’t support A anymore.
If I can’t make it work, I’m not going to ask the several thousand linguists, PMs, and Engineers who work on Adobe projects to try it either. This opinion is not meant as some injunction against innovation or a prejudice against disruptive technologies, PDF was a very disruptive technology in localization. I’m all for disruptive technologies that work to enable people to share with each other – loc is all about sharing more with more people.
Last quarter friends and colleagues in the GMS Users Group got together and discussed some things that were important to us like sharing, and meeting commitments and expectations. We came up with a New Years Wish List that was meant to be shared in the hopes that other makers of technology would be interested in listening. This Wish List is already being shared well beyond the initial publication in the MuliLingual 2011 Annual Resource Directory. Today I am pleased to read it on the TAUS website http://www.translationautomation.com/best-practices/gms-customers-new-years-wish-list.html.
Ben Cornelius
Language Intelligence Solutions Manager
