The TAUS Annual Conference in Silicon Valley opened with a panel discussion about innovation led by Paula Shannon (Lionbridge) who skillfully introduced the concept of sustainable, disruptive and devastating innovation for her panel to discuss. Companies such as Airbnb and Uber were cited as examples of disruptive innovation and with the imminent TAUS Innovation Excellence Award to be given out, there was the distinct feeling that something new was about to happen.
The world can be overwhelming, so it’s tempting to try to make it smaller, more controllable. It’s the same with the world of localization. It’s overwhelming, so much content, so many languages. You would like to make it smaller, more manageable. I don’t want to make this a political debate, but I think we, localization professionals, know best that we cannot establish borders and keep them closed. The world is one. And in fact, if you think about it: our work is all about helping the world (and our customers) communicate better. Isn’t it great to work in a profession with such a noble ideology?
The translation industry is growing, but not fast enough! The amount of content published every day vastly exceeds the amount that can be translated by the few hundred thousand translators in today’s workforce. Machine translation seems to be a part of the solution, yet the world is still waiting for this technology to mature. How do we scale up the translation industry’s capacity for the massive potential opportunity?
A short impression of the 7th TAUS QE Summit held October, 2015 at eBay (San Jose, California).