Translation Workspace: Benefits Beyond the Obvious
Posted on Mon, Oct 26, 2009
Nic McMahon, Lionbridge VP of Global Technology Solutions, shares a few thoughts on today's announcement about Translation Workspace...
Today is a big day! Thousands of hours, hundreds of resources and millions of dollars in investment finally get their coming out day. Beyond the initial "WOW" factor of SaaS, Clouds and Real time assets, I think potential users will quickly see that the Translation Workspace is also a fundamentally different way to work that will directly increase productivity and efficiency for the entire global supply chain.
Email and even workflow automated email is just not efficient for resolving quality issues or carrying out review tasks. We have all found that having a super cool $1m system that can automatically send my quality rejection back to my linguist does little to create greater in-market user adoption or even reduce my total attracted cost of translation. Quality and language development are collaborative, real-time tasks and so it makes sense that the technology used to carry out these tasks should be too, if I want to improve my efficiency meaningfully over current TM tools.
It is very arguable that the actual working day for 80% of the industry has been technologically disregarded for some time with very little improvement or development at the actual linguistic level since Trados first innovated TM technology. Now with Lionbridge's Translation Workspace there is finally a product release that refocuses the industry on the most important and impactful resource efficiency - the work and quality of the professional linguist. As even a week in the localization industry will tell you, supporting greater linguistic efficiency and quality does more to speed up delivery and improve end customer acceptance of our products dollar for dollar than ABSOLUTELY ANY other type of activity.
As a final note, and even beyond the benefits themselves, it is great to see some genuine innovation. With no new thoughts or approaches, we are all doomed to stagnation.