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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Another Blog of Interest: T&I Business

Check out Adam Wooten of Elanex’s T&I (Translation and Interpretation) Business blog.

Adam tells us it’s a blog “for the Business & Technology of Translation, Interpretation, Localization, & Other Related -tions.”

Adam also outlines the main findings from the Alternatives to SDL/Idiom session at the Localization UnConference, which he moderated.

T&I Business is a link well worth adding into your Blog Roll.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

First Localization UnConference A Big Success

The first Localization UnConference was held in San Mateo, California on 14-March-2008. About three dozen attendees contributed to a wide range of discussion topics, including community translation, alternatives to SDL/Idiom GMS tools (see Adam Wooten’s blog posting for more details of this), and the localization challenges of Agile development - in a spirit of collaboration and openness.

The UnConference was free to attend, so a big thank you to the salesforce.com folks for the use of their facilities and for the lunch AND to the attendees who were the real experience.  There was no reports of PowerPoint Karaoke outbreaks, though much writing on whiteboards with sharpies was in evidence…

I’ll have a more detailed report and some pictures published when I get Saint Patrick’s Day festivities out of the way. Let’s see some more of these events in the near future. An Internationalization UnConference would be very promising… any takers?

You can read more about the organization of the Localization UnConference here.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

End of PowerPoint Karaoke: The First Localization and Internationalization UnConference

Yes, the first Localization and Internationalization UnConference is being held next month in Silicon Valley. Very Web 2.0.

Building on the Mashup Camp experience, Ultan O’Broin of Oracle and Shawna Wolverton of salesforce.com are bringing a localization and internationalization UnConference to Silicon Valley on March 14, 2008.

It’s free, lunch and facilities kindly provided by salesforce.com, and an electronic voting system will allow everyone to suggest topics and vote on topics for discussion. Final decisions on topics the day of the conference.

It’s being held at the salesforce.com San Mateo campus.

If you think this sounds like something you’d like to join then sign-up details are here.

Watch out for more blog coverage...

Monday, November 12, 2007

And This One Time, At Mashup Camp Dublin ...

I was very impressed with the UnConference section of Mashup Camp, held in the Guinness Brewery Storehouse in Dublin. The format offers great potential for sharing of knowledge, and a challenge to the more traditional conference formats. 

Mashup Camp consisted of an initial 1.5 days of Mashup University, which, to be honest, was similar to many other conferences in our industry, mixing non-specific marketing and sales pitches with more brazen product promotion. I did learn a lot about Yahoo!’s developer network and what they offered, and loved the presentation by AOL delivered without any audio. However, the bulk of the balance had a sameness that was all too familiar. The presentation by Salesforce.com prompted some interesting questions about internationalized and localized mashups (’though er, no-one knew of any examples), but other than that, such topics remained well off the radar at the University section of the event. Furthermore, the contributions from AOL, IBM, Microsoft et al had problems relating mashup use cases to Irish scenarios, and we were left to ponder the localized possibilities of the demoed xamples relying on ZIP codes and NYPD crime reports, 3D virtual maps of London, iPhones (still not available in Ireland), and so on.

The selling and pitching over, we then moved into a more interesting format where the participants proposed topics they were interested in exploring (suggestions taped to a wall in a very non-technical way), and participants were free to attend what appealed to them.

A full list of the different discussions held over the 1.5 days of the Camp proper is here.

I prepared an ad hoc presentation on global mashup usability - including such areas as user experience, localization, internationalization, and accessibility. The gathering of about 20 that it attracted provided for a lively, candid exchange of experience, tips, ideas, and resources. I’ve captured as much as I can in the final presentation, now available online (Google Docs Presentation format).

Other events including speedgeeking (I declined), mashup competitions, and a social evening downtown. There is more blog coverage here.

So whatever about the promise of mashups (there is, but there are many issues, a lot of which - legal, security, quality, accessibility, internationalization - even making money - are not new), I think there is great promise for the UnConferencing approach. Will someone dare do a complete localization conference this way?

That said, the business challenge of funding such an event and participants obtaining travel authorization from a boss for a camp with no agenda fixed in advance remains another challenge.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Localization UnConference Please

Heard about UnConferencing?

Or Mashup Camp?

Who is going to be the first to try this in the Localization space?

Strikes me that the sum of intelligence of the people in the audience is always greater than that of those speaking.

You can hear an Irish radio broadcast about UnConferencing at: http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/1105/drivetime.html ("The Chatter")

Will anyone rise to the challenge?

PS: I’ll be attending Mashup Camp Dublin and will let you know my thoughts....

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

IMUG: How Acquisitions Affect I18N and L10N Teams: A View from the Client Side

I thought I would give a plug to my newly er, acquired Oracle colleague, Carrie Fischer, who will be speaking at the August 16th International Macintosh Users Group meeting in Cupertino about “How Acquisitions Affect I18N and L10N Teams: A View from the Client Side”.

Given the amount of consolidation we’re seeing on the client side, I’m surprised that this topic isn’t covered in the localization forums (conferences and publications) more often. Instead, we’ve already had too much written about consolidation on the vendor side.

I did touch upon the issue in my “Taking Care of Global Business” in Multilingual Technology and Computing (see the “Due Diligence: Translatability and Localizability Checklist” ), but I haven’t seen much else written. Carrie’s presentation is very welcome and should be well worth attending.

The IMUG ("A Forum for Multilingual and Multiscript Computing") is also a valuable resource for industry people in the Bay Area. Details.

Note: my opinions and thoughts expressed on this blog are not official Oracle ones.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

YouTube and Localization

Plans have emerged for YouTube localization, with plans for sites for Ireland, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

According to the press release on ENN, this “localization” means the sites will be:

...translated fully, with local homepages and search functions. Over time, an entirely ‘local’ experience will be added that will allow for country-specific video rankings and comments, as well as country-specific Video, Channel, Category and Community sections.

I’d imagine that the the UI of other language versions is a natural candidate for social translation, with the bulk of the localization actually coming from user-provided content.

On a related point, it has also recently been announced that Internet TV operation BabelGum is to set up HQ in Ireland, with former Oracle and Microsoft localization head Michael O’Callaghan as COO.

Meanwhile, the European Union, have stolen a march on events, and gone ahead with the Web 2.0 e-government approach of EUTube on YouTube.

Watch this space.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Localization Fusion Society

I have received an invitation to the next gathering of the Bay Area Chapter of the Localization Fusion Society. Hopefully, I’ll be in the area and will be able to drop in on the event in Menlo Park on June 20th.

The Fusion Society is a social networking event for folks involved in internationalization, localization, translation, and related activities. Think social aspect of localization conferences with the rule of “no selling.”

I always had great fun at these events in California, while successfully managing to avoid Renato Beninatto‘s (that’s him below) digital camera (er, I hope), a skill that would seem all the more important to shy retiring types like myself now that the good gentleman has discovered YouTube.

I wonder if there’s a chapter in Dublin, Ireland? We need an excuse to get to the pub.

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with the Menlo Park organizers, then please e-mail me .

Saturday, July 02, 2005

pi or omeros

Boing Boing reports (via the BBC) that a Japanese man managed to “remember” pi to 83,431 decimal places, doubling the world record. He took ‘several hours’ to deliver this mindless sequence of syllables (presumably in Japanese).

I would have preferred to have been around 11 years or so ago when Stephen Powelson used to beat out half a dozen books of Homer’s Iliad. Powelson spent 16 retirement years memorizing the poem’s more than 200,000 syllables.

Monday, June 20, 2005

SDL acquires Trados

A big event in the (smallish) localization business, but one long expected by insiders who tracked SDL’s rise and rise. Users at every level of the translator layer cake will want to know whether their (relatively pricey) Trados translation memory rigs will continue to be supported. Competitors will be looking out for opportunities to hit Trados clients worried about monopoly moves. For the most informed immediate commentary on this deal, see Common Sense Weblog.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

L without H

Blast from the past: Jo Lernout, half the notorious Belgian double act from the 1990s, has published a “my story” autobiography. He is interviewed in this sepia-tinted International Herald Tribune article about a life that came unstuck after the dot.com years.

"We absolutely had only one goal and that was being the leader in the language technology field in as many languages as possible,” he said. “We were not out to get rich in the first place because we never even bothered to cash out. I mean, even five years after the IPO we didn’t bother to cash out, which is putting me in a very harsh financial situation today.”

He is divorced, has no regular salary, owns no home and said he made no money from L&H.

L&H tried to use financial engineering (and funding from the Belgian public purse) to stitch together what looked like a natural technology empire for the Internet age to many in multilingual Europe at least: speech technology bundled with translation / search products and services in all strategic languages, backed by an archipelago of R&D labs. When it bombed, Bowne Global Solutions and ScanSoft picked up the best bits for a song, logically splitting the speech business from the ‘language’ side again. Despite the vision, speech technology and language technology appear to be different media, addressing different markets with different business models. Speech synergizes more with the vertical ‘telecoms device’ market, language technology with ‘knowledge management’ or ‘publishing’. Perhaps it was that name that best sums up the failure – L&H. Two males joined randomly in a dream (apparently not of avarice), but surely not a real technology brand. Would Microsoft have done so well as Gates & Allen?

Monday, May 09, 2005

Morse vs SMS

The London Times reports on a messaging competition pitching a 93 year old telegraph typist using Morse code against a 13 year old using mobile texting. The content was a randomly chosen phrase from an advert. The dot ‘n dash guy was faster, even though his message had to be transcribed by yet another veteran receiver.

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