Last week, I had the chance to present at Tekom, one of the biggest conferences in the localization industry, thanks to the proposal
submitted by one of our clients. We tried to give some insights into the integration of a macine translation tool into a medium-size Language Service Provider (LSP). And I think it was worthwhile, because a number of issues arised after our talk, e.g. how clients perceive machine translation, if translators are paid by the hour or per word, for which language pairs and domains it is best-suited to apply those technologies, which is the throughput per day for a normal translator, etc. Besides, we had the chance to present our terminology extraction tools, as well as our quality check report for the translation industry.
I was impressed big the size of the event, and by the language spoken. Many booths had the materials in German and some people did not even speak English, although there were many interesting products and services that could be sold throughout the world. In particular, I learned a lot from the authoring perspective, which is a market we are addressing now with our natural language processing tools. Since the most powerful technology brands are German, the authoring is primarily done in that country either in English or German. And the industry is several steps ahead of what is being done in Spain. No worries, we are good at other fields within the sector.
This made me think about the importance of the environment to succeed globally. It makes no sense when countries and governments try to create a market or an industry out of nothing. If you have the seeds, trees can grow, otherwise all your efforts will be futile.
