Preliminary thoughts on Localization World

Zia Daniell Wigder | October 17, 2007, 06:00 PM

I’m out in Seattle at Localization World, along with 500+ other attendees focused on the translation and localization space. Most of the people I’ve spoken with are on the vendor side – based on these conversations and the conference sessions themselves, a couple of observations as a first-time attendee:

The translation industry is still largely focused on the B2B marketplace. The majority of the vendors I met with cited the medical and software industries as their core constituencies (for software companies, it’s in R&D and documentation that a lot of translation has been done, not on their public-facing websites). The vendors are excited about what they see as rapidly mounting interest from consumer-facing organizations, but the translation of content on B2C sites remains a small part of the overall business in this area.

User-generated content is the piece everyone’s trying to figure out, but no one has yet. With an increasing number of B2C companies looking to translate their content into other languages – and an increasing number of B2C companies adding user-generated content to their offerings – the two will intersect sooner rather than later. Both the keynote by Jeff Howe (the Wired editor behind crowdsourcing) and the first panel at the conference dealt with community-sourced translations. Until machine translations can generate more sophisticated results, some companies have begun to eye online communities as a way to fill in the gap when it comes to translating some of their less critical (or more frequently updated) content. The critical piece for companies is now figuring out how to attract and retain passionate communities of users; the challenging part is that these users must have the skills and be willing to make the time commitment to translate content.

European and Asian languages are already commonplace; the Middle East is rising in importance. Vendors all translate content into the major European and Asian languages on a regular basis; the larger vendors cited Arabic as small in comparison thus far but one of their fastest-growing languages. Their clients are becoming increasingly interested in this part of the world, although to date there’s been little localization done for the region. The vendors said the audience in the Middle East is of increasing importance to their clients from a commercial (as opposed to a more political, eg CNN Arabic) perspective.

More after the conference.