I could go on, but I think I’ll stop right here. I believe I have presented enough evidence to be able to pass judgement. And what is my judgement?
Well, my judgment is that it actually looks like a pretty neat tool. They are providing trainable machine translation technology as a subscription service, in a system that integrates translation editing environment (CAT tool) and some basic quality checks like spell checking. Purchasing the (reasonably priced) paid subscription models also gets you access to their APIs so that you can integrate it directly into existing workflows. The platform looks fine. Nothing that is going to completely disrupt the language services industry, but fine. This is a new company so they maybe don’t have all the bells and whistles rolled out yet, but everybody has to start somewhere. I welcome newcomers to the area of language technology because this is a space that has been tragically devoid of any real innovation for a while now. Perhaps a little competition from new entrants like these guys is just what is needed to spur innovation.
What I don’t like though, is a trend that I’m seeing not just from this unnamed company, but from a lot of new startups in the language services industry. It’s this new idea that translation is automated and easy. It’s not. Translation is complex and sometimes messy, at least when it is done right. This is not a very popular opinion to have these days, though – especially working on the vendor (LSP) side of the fence. Language services buyers (LSBs) used to know that translation was complex. That is why they engaged with LSPs in the first place, taking advantage of their expertise and outsourcing the headache.
When working for LSPs, my sales pitch to clients used to be:
Localization is hard. Let us help you with that.
Now I’m not able to get past the word “hard” because they don’t want to hear how difficult anything is. And why would they? They’ve be preconditioned by aggressive marketing campaigns to believe that translation is easy. They are seeing the same Facebook ads and watching the same YouTube videos as am I. All those marketing materials are telling them the same thing: Translation is easy! The difference is that many of them don’t have the experience needed to be able to properly interpret that message.
This is not good news for LSPs. Clients onboard tools and platforms like this because they don’t know any better. They think it will be easy. Then they eventually realize that the tool is not living up to their expectations (ex., there may be some additional DTP work needed to clean up those “automatically formatted” files). By the time these LSBs reach out to an LSP, they are already incredibly frustrated and expect the LSP to fix everything for them. That is fine, actually. That is what good LSPs do for clients every day – fix things. What is not fine is that these LSPs are then told that they have to work within the same tool that is responsible for causing issues in the first place. Perhaps because of binding long-term contracts, or maybe because of a refusal to walk away from an already incurred sunk cost the client still wants to use this tool. This makes for a no-win situation.
Maybe I’m just an old man on my front porch rocking chair shaking my wrinkled fists at those pesky neighborhood kids. But I don’t think so. I welcome the newcomers to this industry. Lord knows we need some fresh blood to keep the rest of us on our toes. I wish the best for this new company and their overly-aggressive ad campaign. However, I would just ask one thing:
Please don’t sell us all snake oil.
You don’t need to. You have a lovely platform and you don’t need to make it seem better than it is. If you don’t want to take that advice, then I understand. You need to say these things because if you don’t, your competitors will. I get it. But then you should probably fix those formatting errors in your marketing videos. They kind of undermine your entire message.
