Over the last two decades our industry has spent a lot of time and energy making the localization process increasingly more efficient. Dollars spent in the process are highly leveraged thanks to the application of translation memories and machine translation, together with sophisticated expert systems and static analysis tools that help ensure that quality can still be achieved at scale. Companies that release products internationally know how to write global-ready code and content, standards exist and are generally adhered to. Companies wishing to extend into international markets for the first time have a deep bench of partners and suppliers that they can rely on to get the job done. Localizing products is not always a trivial task but it is one that is well understood by a mature industry.
On 15 March, the Imperial Riding School Renaissance Hotel in Vienna was transformed into a battlefield of ideas on new trends and topics related to translation automation during a TAUS Roundtable meeting. The Roundtable was organized around questions on the market viability of translation data, on innovative ways of measuring localization effectiveness and on machine translation quality.
I recently had the luck to participate in the BabelNet Workshop that was organized by the European Commission, the Publication Office and the European Parliament, in Luxembourg on the 2nd and 3rd of March.