Change before you have to

I was in Berlin last week, not for the Champions Final, but for two major localization events, the TAUS Industry Leaders Forum and Localization World. The week was fruitful, and what I valued most were not only the conversations with some old friends, but also with new ones such as Adam LaMontagne, Dragos Munteanu, or Deepan Patel. Adam and their group at Moravia are doing great things, I share the view of NLP technologies presented by Dragos at the TAUS event, and I truly enjoyed the conversation with Deepan on Wednesday. Exponential gains of networking.

The keynote at LocWorld by Gerd Leonhard was interesting, with a mention to Gengo in our small translation world. I had already seen all he presented, but the way Gerd put everything together was worth the listening. The big question that came to my mind is: if the translation industry is rapidly becoming a high-tech industry, why do LSPs have more Project Managers (PM) in their staff than IT people? If you still want to have a competitive advantage in the near future, I feel you need to invest more on IT on the one hand, and on sales on the other. But forget about PM, if their job can be automated, it will be automated sooner or later.

Another fact: how many LSPs offer their services through APIs? Just the innovators and early-adopters... APIs are already the present for the 80 unicorns (valued at more than $1 billion) Gerd mentioned in his presentation, so if you want to serve those fast-growing companies, you need to know about the technology tools they are experts at. Today, you can even buy flowers through an API! Gerd advised that your job as a company is to be above the API. Are you working on it?

Quality discussion. What I do know regarding this topic is that end clients either want to communicate to the world (the basic need we're solving) or to sell. In this case, sales is the metric. By the way, this information provided by Moravia in the conference bag is really valuable, as well as the page What do you know about localization? given by Lionbridge. During the conference, Lionbridge announced the integration with Zendesk, a good way to be above the API. What quality level is needed in that integration?

I presented three times during the week, you can see the slides here. First, at the TAUS Industry Leaders Forum, I summarized our solutions for social media monitoring and multilingual team communication. Second, at the Technology Showcase, I outlined the gains of an innovative business model approach taken by Nova Language Services with our machine translation technology below. Finally, I participated in a panel on the State of Post-Editing. Quoting Jack Welch, my last slide in these three presentations is:

Change before you have to