The events of the past two years have changed how we see the world—both from business and personal perspectives. Based on primary data, CSA Research has identified 20 localization industry trends that will shape the future of roles, responsibilities, and work environment for years to come.

Join Alison Toon, senior analyst at CSA Research, as she shares seven of the trends they identified for 2022 and beyond. From intensified data security to responsive MT to the multilingual metaverse, Ms. Toon will discuss the impact of technology and economic factors affecting the language industry and the global businesses they serve.

Alison Toon - Senior Analyst | Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research) Alison's background is in enterprise-scale translation management. For many, many years, she was responsible for Hewlett-Packard's (HP’s) globalization program, a transformational initiative across all of HP’s business units, products and customer lifecycle. Alison developed and managed the enterprise translation management architecture team, strategy and technology, and was responsible for the tools, operation and business processes used for managing all translations for HP. Since "retiring" from HP a few years ago, Alison has worked for language services and technology vendors including SDL and Smartling, and most recently as an independent global business consultant, managing complex content, translation, and globalization strategies by advising on operations, business processes, and technologies. Alison speaks English as a first language (both UK and USA variants), is fluent if a little rusty in French, understands Dutch better than she can speak it, and enjoys Polish grammar puzzles just for fun. She has published several fiction books, and is also a concert and festival photographer and blogger: music communicates across all languages!

Management is all about numbers. "You can't manage what you can't measure" is the mantra.

But how can translation memories be translated into numbers that management can relate to?

Translation technology is a black box outside of translation agencies and technical writing departments in many companies. This means that anyone who talks about translation memories and other translation gadgets is not always well understood. Especially in budget negotiations and in the task of demonstrating the benefits of a professional translation system, this can quickly become a disadvantage. But there are several ways to cast the reports and data from memoQ into crispy KPIs that can be understood even by people outside the translation business.

This session will show how to measure the monetary value of translation memories using exemplary products from Microsoft, such as Excel and Power BI. It will also show how the time saved by translation memories can be determined and translated into clear figures and charts.

Markus Arch - Senior Technical Editor, SKIDATA GmbH Markus Arch is a senior technical editor for SKIDATA GmbH, an Austrian-based company which offers access management systems. In this role, he is responsible for the documentation of online services. He also built up his company's translation processes and, based on this, introduced memoQ as a central tool. Today, he is responsible for his company's translation infrastructure, both as technical administrator and as process planner. Markus has an MA in Media and Communication Studies and an MSc in Technical Documentation.

Whether you are just starting or whether you have already been in the language business for some time, at one point you might wonder how to best (re-)organize your linguistic resources. It starts from choosing the right language variants, working with one or multiple translation memories and termbases, whether to use additional metadata or not and goes to questions like how to exchange data with suppliers, partners etc. Well, as we consultants tend to say: "It depends...".

In this presentation we will focus on the following aspects:

• Understanding the value of linguistic data
• What can we learn from language data?
• How can translation memory, terminology and other language data be used in other areas?
• What is data quality and how to assure it?
• How to (re-) organize language data?
• Cleaning up translations and terminology
• What to watch out for when migrating translation memories and terminology data to memoQ?
• Enriching language data using NLP

In this presentation, based on some mid-sized and large projects of the past years, we will share some of our learnings, solutions and best practices.

Note: While also containing takeaways for freelance translators and smaller language services, the main target groups of this presentation are medium-sized to large language service providers and organizations.

Daniel Zielinski - Managing director & Senior consultant, Loctimize GmbH Daniel Zielinski is the founder and managing director of Loctimize GmbH, a leading international expert in global language logistics. As a senior consultant, he and his team deal with issues related to language in globalization, internationalization and localization. The focus of his work is on language and translation technologies, process optimization and data analytics. In this context, he analyzes trends, evaluates new technologies and tools, and supports international organizations and language service providers in the selection and introduction of new technologies. Since 2017 Daniel also works as lecturer and researcher at the University of Mainz in the field of General and Applied Linguistics and Translation Technology.

The leverage loss myth is looming ahead all the time someone considers TMS replacement.

Everybody knows what leverage loss is, all the risks rooting from TM import, filters, tags, segmentation. However, often, these technology aspects are the farthest we look.
But we fear to ask about the temporal financial impact and calculate complex metrics that could support business owners to make the best decisions. How could we foresee the pace that the new native TMs in our new TMS take the place of the migrated ones and so leverage loss effect decays?

This presentation wants to bust some of the myths around these robust leverage loss metrics.

I aim at showing how data, math and technical wizardry can be combined to calculate such metrics and provide monthly breakdown of estimated financial impact.

Miklós Urbán - Senior Solutions Architect, RWS Miklós has been in the localization industry for over 20 years. He gained his experience through working on both the tool provider and the LSP side. Currently he works at RWS as a Senior Solutions Architect and responsible for the localization solutions provided for some of the most prestigious clients. He majored in Mathematics and Physics, and post-graduated as an IT engineer. Maintaining his focus on localization processes and technology, he worked in many environments and different TMS systems. He is renowned as a memoQ expert. He contributed to numerous technology migration projects and established his unique approach to calculate leverage loss.

Procurement professionals often use a model like the Kraljic Matrix (1983) to quantitatively measure supply risk Vs the impact on profits. Suppliers who are perceived as providing a service not being strategically important to them will be treated like a commodity (lowest price wins the deal). You can often tell which box you’ve been put in by the seniority of procurement professionals you deal with and the type of conversations you have (sales people being eternal optimists assume they’re in the strategic supplier box but very few actually are).

Your client facing teams need to counter this by being the messengers of value. The concept of value in B2B Sales can be thought of as being the impact on the customer’s business minus total cost of ownership. This needs to be calculated and presented in a format the customer can understand. Its not up to the customer to work this out and tell you, you have to tell them. To solve this conundrum the customer’s world needs to be analysed, understood and then shown how your service will impact upon it in a positive way (bonus marks for using financial calculations here).

This helps you have a much broader conversation. A place where innovation happens and one that moves you away from being focused on the lowest cost provider in the marketplace.

Templates are a very powerful and at the same time little-used feature of memoQ. They automate a lot of tasks around project creation and management and generally make life easier both for individual translators and project managers.

During this presentation I will show how templates can benefit both these groups, since with a little configuration effort templates can be used, for example to:

• Automate client-specific or domain-specific project creation with assignment of heavy resources like TMs, TBs, LiveDocs and light resources, e.g. custom spell-checking dictionaries or QA rules.
• Automate custom file import options, e.g. for change-tracked Word files, specific Excel configurations or automatically-selected XML filters.
• Automate project preparation stages, like analysis, pre-translation both with TM and MT, segment locking etc.
• Automate project clean-up stages, with file export and TM updates.
• For PMs: automate translators assignments, multiple project management tasks and reports generation

Marek Pawelec - memoQ expert | Freelance translator Marek Pawelec graduated in Molecular Biology at the Jagiellonian University in 1992 and worked as researcher at faculties of Medicine and Chemistry of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. In 2001 he began to work as a full time English to Polish freelance translator: started with literature, later also technical translations of medical, biochemical and chemical texts. Translated several millions pages of medical texts, mainly medical equipment manuals, but also a lot of pharmacology and clinical trials-related texts. Experienced computer aided translation (CAT) software user and trainer. Certified memoQ trainer. Presented lectures on several translation conferences. Teaches on practical aspects of freelance translation, CAT tools and translation related software. Interested in technical communication and terminology management.

In March 2020 a very small group of freelancer language service providers teamed up with health care professionals with the aim of providing information in Hungarian at the beginning of the pandemic. Two years later, the group has had around a hundred active members who translated just over 1.1 million words.
The first translations were done using Word. However, Ildi, a terminologist who has been working in the language industry for a long while, suggested going professional. She asked memoQ staff to kindly grant us a server. She got László Kovács on board as project manager.

So, in a few weeks time, there was a professionally organized group of dozens of people: doctors, biologists, pharmacologists, medical translators, terminologists, DTP experts, and we even got support from Balázs Kis.

Texts were translated, revised and proofread in memoQ. We provided memoQ trainings for healthcare providers and translator students, some of whom have never seen a CAT tool before. To support the work, terminologists have built a terminology database consisting of 4500 terms, and every term was validated by an expert of that domain.

Ildikó Szemők

Freelance terminologist, reviser, proofreader, editor, translator

Ildikó Szemők earned a college degree in 1993 at the College of Foreign Trade. After translating at a foreign trade company, she worked for a publishing house for 10 years, staring out as a copy editor and later becoming a managing editor, accumulating experiences in editing in general, and also in reviewing translations. From 2004 she is freelancing: beside editing textbooks, specialist books, and even fiction, and proofreading cultural magazines, she works as a reviser translator and language lead from English into Hungarian and Hungarian into English for the biggest Hungarian LSPs, specialising in trade, finance, insurance, law, economy, European Union, management, linguistics, and pharmaceuticals. In 2018 she became a certified terminologist at the Károli Gáspár University. From 2020, she is a headquarter member of the COVID1001 group of volunteers. From 2022, she is an external lecturer at the Kodolányi János University, teaching translation.

Papp, Eszter PhD

Covid1001 volunteer translator group; Translators Without Borders

Eszter holds degrees in English and Applied Linguistics, and a PhD in Linguistics. Having started her career in teaching English and language testing, she later moved on to technical translation and terminology. She gained experience in many aspects of language services: at a translation agency, as an in-house translator and also as a freelancer. She collaborated in several term base creation projects. She joined the Covid1001 group of volunteer translators as a reviewer and terminologist, overseeing the compilation of a term base of almost 5000 terms. She later became a project manager of the group and a mentor to new joiners. She has shared her knowledge teaching in the translator training programmes at various universities, and the MA in Terminology at the KRE. Currently she works as a Terminology Officer at TWB/CLEAR Global.

László Kovács

TEK Localizations

László earned his first degree as a Mechanical Engineer but moved to the field of technical translation before working on any actual real-world engineering problems. Since 2002, he runs his English-Hungarian translation business called TEK Localizations, where he gained knowledge and experience with a few CAT tools and translation technologies. He has helped many students to gain CAT experience at Hungarian universities including KRE and PPKE. He joined the Covid1001 volunteer group to help set up the translation workflow and the group’s memoQ server donated by memoQ, including the onboarding and training of CAT virgin volunteers. Currently, he still runs the TEK translation business, while running a coworking office.

Procurement professionals often use a model like the Kraljic Matrix (1983) to quantitatively measure supply risk Vs the impact on profits. Suppliers who are perceived as providing a service not being strategically important to them will be treated like a commodity (lowest price wins the deal). You can often tell which box you’ve been put in by the seniority of procurement professionals you deal with and the type of conversations you have (sales people being eternal optimists assume they’re in the strategic supplier box but very few actually are).

Your client facing teams need to counter this by being the messengers of value. The concept of value in B2B Sales can be thought of as being the impact on the customer’s business minus total cost of ownership. This needs to be calculated and presented in a format the customer can understand. Its not up to the customer to work this out and tell you, you have to tell them. To solve this conundrum the customer’s world needs to be analysed, understood and then shown how your service will impact upon it in a positive way (bonus marks for using financial calculations here).

This helps you have a much broader conversation. A place where innovation happens and one that moves you away from being focused on the lowest cost provider in the marketplace.

Richard Brooks - CEO, K International Richard Brooks is the CEO and co-owner of UK based Language Service Provider K International. He has spent 25 years+ in the localization industry and has held executive board positions at both European Language Industry Association and the Association of Language Companies. He formally learnt his craft at Cranfield School of Management where he completed his tripled accredited MBA majoring in economics and finance. He now sits on an advisory panel at Cranfield to provide real world experience to complement their academic research in B2B sales. Richard is also a fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals where he is helping them to develop strategic sales training for SMEs. He is an in-demand board advisor and business coach for the localization industry. He has helped several entrepreneurs create winning strategies, develop their customer-facing teams and unlock value within their businesses.

Machine translation is making big strides, but it is not always appropriate, and this may remain so until actual artificial intelligence exists.

Safety documentation is one problem area – the tendency of MT to make errors of meaning requires that such material be vetted line by line, often involving more work than human translation.
Medical documents also pose a big challenge. Context-dependent abbreviations and indeed source errors are stumbling blocks here. Pharmaceutical and clinical trial documents often require backtranslation where errors and ambiguities in the source must be maintained.

So much for content: what about style and humour? Marketing requires both of these. Subtitling and dubbing too.

This presentation will look at examples of these problems and ask what effect MT might be having on our writing – is there a tendency to write more simply and directly to optimise MT’s efforts?

Ralph Houston - Freelance translator | Clarke & Houston Language Services After working in many fields ranging from computer design to medical research, Ralph took up translation 15 years ago, the longest and best-paid activity to date. A big fan of memoQ, he is interested in the effects AI and MT are having on us all.

When it comes to software localization, there is no other tool on the market as versatile as memoQ. During this presentation I’m going to show how various memoQ features can be used to simplify and streamline software localization. These include:

• Variety of input formats used in software localization, like XML, PO, RESX, XLS, PHP, all mobile formats and almost any text-based format, which can be described with a regex-based filters. Plus some of the formats support multilingual files. And chain filtering enables painless processing of not-so-translation-friendly embedded content in different formats.
• Ability automate projects for fast turnover (e.g. with frequent updates), including automatic pre- and post-processing of translation files.
• Length limit information: there are three separate mechanisms for string length limitation verification.
• Context based both on string ID and file structure.
• Regular expression based tagging for excluding contents not to be messed with.
• Versioning for source and target, which makes mid-project updates so much easier to manage.
• Term bases with forbidden terms functionality and several matching mechanisms fit for various languages.
• LiveDoc corpora for reference materials and direct matches.
• Good control over auto-propagation.
• Views for joining or extracting content meeting certain criteria.

And many more. There are other programs offering some subsets of these features, but only memoQ includes everything. Plus translators like it, and satisfied translators do better job. Trust me, I'm a translator and I know.

Marek Pawelec - memoQ expert | Freelance translator Marek Pawelec graduated in Molecular Biology at the Jagiellonian University in 1992 and worked as researcher at faculties of Medicine and Chemistry of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. In 2001 he began to work as a full time English to Polish freelance translator: started with literature, later also technical translations of medical, biochemical and chemical texts. Translated several millions pages of medical texts, mainly medical equipment manuals, but also a lot of pharmacology and clinical trials-related texts. Certified memoQ trainer. Presented lectures on several translation conferences. Teaches on practical aspects of freelance translation, CAT tools and translation related software. Interested in technical communication and terminology management.