TAUS Annual Plan 2011 by TAUS

Enabling better translation

Annual Plan 2011 Translation Innovation Think Tank Interoperability Watchdog

Shared Vision â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Common Goals â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Concrete Results

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TAUS - Enabling better translation

Prologue A new vision is emerging of translation as a standard feature, a ubiquitous service, free or paid for in a different manner. Internet, electricity, water, and … translation – they are all basic needs of human civilization. We envision a world where

translation of any information in any language is always instantly available. In this

dynamic environment it is unthinkable that any single publisher can carry the total

cost of translation alone. Shared practices, shared services and shared resources make perfect sense.

As we progress along this path we realize that language and translation need

to move up the corporate and political agenda. Translation is a key to economic

growth and a better world. It is time to stress the strategic importance of translation for business and society globally.

TAUS is a strategic think tank for its members, representing their common goals,

and providing fact-based insight to enable better business decisions. We continue

to be the leading organization for detailing best practices, use cases, and providing technology briefings to guide translation industry strategies and processes. Our

non-sponsored Executive Forums and the annual User Conference set the trend

for others to follow. Our thematic Roundtables and Workshops provide insight and training for large and small stakeholders globally.

TAUS now also works for the industry as an interoperability watchdog to facilitate

translation automation and business innovation. In this annual plan we make a call to action and present a program for improving the current, woefully inadequate state of interoperability. Our intention is as always to pave the way for greater

translation automation and innovation. The return-on-investment will be huge. The TAUS Data Association (TDA) repository of shared language data is growing continuously, and extending into an exchange of open-source technologies. This TAUS ‘supercloud’ exemplifies and accelerates the industry’s move towards greater interoperability. Services are free and open to the public.

“Fast, reliable translation for every citizen in the world. This is a mission that – for the first time in history – is ambitious, but no longer impossible.”

TAUS - Enabling better translation

INDUSTRY CALL TO ACTION

The timing is right for translation service and software companies, translators and customers to get together and agree on a plan to straighten out the costly friction and overcome the barriers for growth. TAUS calls on you to:

99Join us by contributing to our standards related consultations and advancing the interoperability agenda

99Educate your peers, clients and providers on the benefits of interoperability

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Embracing translation interoperability TAUS was founded in November 2004 to promote translation automation and business innovation. There have been

significant improvements in six short years. But the lack of interoperability still stops us from realizing the full benefits

of efficiency and quality improvement initiatives. Since 2008 TAUS has been pushing for Open Translation Platforms. Members have now asked TAUS to prioritize interoperability as a primary focus to facilitate their ongoing translation and business innovation programs.

Standards and interoperability in context Interoperability

Translation automation

Business innovation

According to a recent TAUS survey, 40% of respondents waste more than 10% of their budget due to non-compliance to open industry standards. The ROI for the TAUS action plan is huge.

The content explosion, rapid growth of the multilingual web and multimedia content all call for easier access to better translation automation solutions. Lack of interoperability between systems throughout the content value chain is a major hurdle to making this happen. There is a huge potential to better serve business and society. TAUS has successfully spearheaded the translation automation agenda for the last six years.

Market domination by a few firms strangles innovation. True interoperability will arrest lock in practices and unleash a wave of innovation. This is essential to translate new dynamic and social media content. TAUS has successfully spearheaded the innovation agenda for the last five years.

Return on investment Global markets are opening, business language coverage is spreading and the volume of information is growing

exponentially. Unlike for instance the finance, telecommunications, travel and transportation sectors the translation industry has not reached a common ground of efficiency. This is already costing the industry a fortune.

In this annual plan we present the first steps of an action

program aimed at improving interoperability and paving the

Interoperability

Automation

Innovation

way for advanced translation automation and innovation. We ask buyers and providers of translation services and

technologies as well as translators, government institutions and universities to support this program. The result will be greater efficiency, making translation a more interesting

profession and a financially significant industry within a few short years.

Efficiency

Volume

User Satisfaction

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Contents Representation, outreach and partnerships

Events

Guidelines, articles, and reports

Tracker

Consultancy

Industry initiative: Quality evaluation metrics

Industry initiative: Interoperability watchdog

Industry initiative: TAUS Data Association

TAUS members

TAUS Data Association members

Industry Services

TAUS Membership Program

TAUS Data Association Membership Program

Team, boards and advisors

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Representation, outreach and partnerships TAUS serves an important representational role for its community of members. As invited speakers at institutional,

association, academic and general industry conferences, TAUS provides high profile representation to support the interests of our members. We strive to underline the strategic importance of translation for political and business agendas. Our members call on us for references and introductions.

Open standards, interoperability, translation automation and innovation are the cornerstones of our representation

activity. In addition to our own world tour, in 2011 our outreach activity includes invited talks at European Commission sponsored events, JIAMCATT (the forum for international public bodies), the European Union of Associations of Translation Companies, International Federation of Translators, and Localization World events, among others. We work in partnership with standards bodies, such as the W3C, and segment experts, such as Center for

Information-Development Management and the Consortium for Service Innovation, to deliver valuable insights and affect positive change. We collaborate with leading research institutes such as DFKI (Germany), the University of Edinburgh (UK), and CNGL (Ireland) to ensure long-term strategic research roadmaps, whether covering interoperability or translation automation, are useful to industry.

INTEROPERABILITY ACTION PROGRAM

Advocating solutions to the lack of interoperability, communicating the ROI and benefits of the TAUS plan, and rallying support are now a primary focus for all TAUS representational, outreach and partnership activity.

TAUS will have delegates representing the interest of its members on the technical committees of standards organizations. Our task is to ensure that industry requirements are understood and that deliverables are in accordance to specifications.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Events TAUS events stand out for their executive level of participation, purposeful forward looking agendas, and balanced representation from buy and supply sides of the industry. TAUS events are non-sponsored to ensure there is no dilution of content quality.

TAUS Executive Forums – agenda setting TAUS Executive Forums are intimate executive meetings (usually not more than 40 attendees, often invitation-

only), focused on strategic topics and concrete deliverables in the form of recommendations and action calendars. Executive Forums are two-day meetings held in a congenial setting and provide high-value networking.

TAUS Roundtable meetings – focused themes TAUS Roundtable meetings are low cost meetings (one or two days), often hosted by one of the TAUS members.

Roundtable meetings are focused on particular themes, such as developing industry collaboration networks, defining an enterprise language strategy, and translation automation use cases.

TAUS User Conference – taking the pulse The TAUS User Conference is the once-a-year event focused on translation automation, localization business

innovation and industry collaboration. Language business decision makers come to this event to learn about the latest in translation strategies and automation. The User Conference is usually combined with the TAUS Data Association Annual General Meeting.

Events calendar Please visit www.translationautomation.com/events

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Guidelines, articles, and reports The TAUS website hosts over one-hundred and fifty articles and a catalogue of reports providing strategic and

operational guidance on all areas of translation automation and business innovation as well as pointed coverage of

standards and interoperability related issues. The knowledge catalogue includes over 30 leading edge and uniquely insightful reports, which have consistently helped members to stay ahead of the competition.

White papers – vision and strategy Since its foundation TAUS has been recognized for its forward-looking analysis of the globalization and translation industry. The TAUS White Paper on Language Business Innovation (2008) and subsequent market studies have

helped build consensus. TAUS members are a community in support of a common innovation agenda. Under the current reporting theme of “Translation in the 21st Century”, we are envisioning and documenting future scenario

states of the translation industry. Our analysis has been extended to include speech technologies and strategies, as well as enterprise search.

Best practice guides As the adoption of new translation automation technologies is spreading, day-to-day working practices are changing. As we learn to adapt new processes are gradually taking shape. TAUS provides a series of best practice guides and workshops, among others:

1. Machine translation postediting guidelines (publicly available in many languages) 2. How to increase your leveraging (available to non-members) 3. Manager’s guide to implementing open source MT (members only) 4. How to implement open source MT systems (available to non-members) 5. How to evaluate the quality of MT output (available to non-members)

Technology briefings – fact-based and practical The 5 to 10 page technology briefings provide an overview of specific translation automation technologies. They follow a more or less standard template to help TAUS members quickly find out the different approaches and methodologies applied in the solutions that are on offer in the market.

Use cases – deep analyses Use cases are deeper analyses of the use environment of a particular technology or solution from the real

user’s perspective in both buyer and provider organizations. These reports typically describe the selection and implementation process as well as the production scenarios and economic and business values. INTEROPERABILITY ACTION PROGRAM

Migration guides

Companies switching from one translation workflow system to another risk losing efficiencies built up over many

years in their translation memory databases. In 2011 and 2012 TAUS will provide a series of migration guides to

support members transitioning to open translation platforms with a minimal loss of value. The focus will be on specific workflow to workflow and MT and TM integration.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Tracker The TAUS Tracker is an online directory of technologies and resources for users and developers of translation

services and technologies. The TAUS Tracker is divided in three different directories for MT engines, CAT (computeraided translation) software and for LT (language technology) components. Members and non-members can add and edit their own engines and tools in the Tracker. Entries in the Tracker report on use of open standards, APIs, and other interoperability related information.

MT Tracker The MT Tracker (beta) launched in January 2011.

CAT Tracker In the course of 2011 we will release the CAT Tracker listing many translation editors and translation software tools.

LT Tracker Also to be released later this year is the LT Tracker, especially interesting for developers looking for parsers, stemmers, term extractors and many other specific language technology tools.

Consultancy We offer a strategic consultancy service exclusively to global category members, who are challenged to design highly complex strategies for effective global language coverage and customer communications. Consultancy engagements have a two-stage approach: ideation sessions followed by a strategic analysis and planning.

Ideation Ideation sessions cover a discovery of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the current translation organization set-up. In dialogue with the management team we identify the pain points and the opportunities for

migration to a standardized and interoperable translation environment and opportunities for better automation and innovation.

Strategic analysis and planning During the strategic analysis and planning phase we help enterprise users formulate a global communications

vision and we translate this vision into an enterprise-wide language strategy combined with an actionable innovation roadmap with a two to three year scope for the management team.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Industry initiative: Quality evaluation metrics Existing translation QA models are usually static and normative. These models were developed a long time ago and fit very well the static types of content predominantly translated in the 1980s and 1990s. TAUS enterprise

members report delays and unproductive disputes in their QA processes. The translation industry is changing and is

increasingly getting involved with dynamic content of all natures. Translation QA models need to change in response. Together with some of our enterprise members we have started along the TAUS Quality Evaluation Benchmarking Metrics project. The TAUS QE Metrics are dynamic and adaptable to four different vectors: 1. Type and use of content; 2. Evaluator’s perspective; 3. Tool and process; 4. Actual industry practices.

INDUSTRY ACTION PROGRAM

Benchmarking

The TAUS QE metrics will be developed in close cooperation with the TAUS member organizations. We plan to draft

and release a first version with input from a small group of members. The second version will be benchmarked with a larger group of members before the metrics will be made available in the second half of 2011.

Industry initiative: Interoperability watchdog The lack of interoperability costs the translation industry a fortune (see report on the recent TAUS survey). The lack of interoperability limits flexibility. As respondents to the survey commented: “we are not able to switch translators, tools and vendors so easily and that hurts our business and limits our possibilities to improve efficiency and innovate our processes.”

The translation industry had standards to operate on since the 1990s. Some work needs to be done to improve for

instance data interchange formats and some new standards are required. The main challenge however is to ‘rally the

troops’ and get all stakeholders to support and embrace the standards. The TAUS interoperability program consists of the following action lines for 2011 and subsequent years.

CALL FOR ACTION The timing is right for translation service and software companies and their translators and customers to get together and agree on a plan to straighten out the costly friction and overcome the barriers for growth.

99 Join us by contributing to our related consultations and advancing the interoperability agenda 99 Educate your peers, clients and providers on the benefits of interoperability

TAUS - Enabling better translation

INTEROPERABILITY ACTION PROGRAM

Coordinate and drive standards for interoperability While standards are governed and administered by the appropriate standards bodies such as OASIS and Unicode, TAUS will act as the coordinating platform for all stakeholders in the translation industry to drive the discussions

and ensure the deliverables. A TAUS delegate will actively participate in the technical and standards committees representing the interests of all members. The respondents to TAUS interoperability survey list interchange standards, content management integration and translation container standards as priorities.

Translation interchange formats TMX and XLIFF are flagged as the most important interchange standards in the TAUS interoperability survey. TAUS will get actively involved in the technical committees and help resolve outstanding issues and ensure a timely and purposeful release of future releases.

Content management and social media integration A pressing issue among primarily enterprise users and content owners is the need to integrate translation related

attributes in content and social media platforms at the time of creation or storage of this content. TAUS has joined the Language Technology (LT) on the Web consortium that consists of organizations such as DFKI, W3C, and CNGL, amongst others. The goal of the LT Web project is to develop a translation standard for web content. TAUS will represent its membership base in this project. INTEROPERABILITY ACTION PROGRAM

Interoperability dashboard

TAUS will set up a service on the TAUS website where members can upload output files from translation tools and obtain an immediate compliance validation report. The scores will be stored and displayed in the Interoperability Dashboard, visible for all members on the TAUS website.

INTEROPERABILITY ACTION PROGRAM

Certification TAUS is reviewing the potential to provide a certification service to providers of translation and content management technologies who would like to obtain validation of compliance to agreed standards.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Industry initiative: TAUS Data Association The TAUS Data Association (TDA) is a separately legal entity to TAUS. It is a global not-for-profit organization providing a neutral and secure platform for sharing language data for better terminology, improved translation

automation, and enabling innovation. It is the execution of members’ vision for shared services and investments, for

the use of open standards and interoperability. Participation ensures an end to the industry’s service lock-in practices. Translation memory was invented in the 1980s as a productivity tool for translators. In the 1990s buyers of translation – corporate customers as well as large translation companies – started to aggregate translation memories on

server-based GMS and TMS systems. We now see the shift towards cloud-based sharing of translation memories. This shift to massive sharing opens tremendous new opportunities for efficiency increases, quality improvements

and innovative new services. To illustrate this break with the past we prefer to use the term ‘language data’ instead

of translation memories. Realizing that 80% of the world’s information is already published on the internet, more and

more TDA members and non-members are overcoming their reservations against sharing. The TDA repository is the only not-for-profit member-governed repository of translation memory data.

The repository currently (March 2011) hosts 3.4 billion words in 320 language pairs. Services including terminology search, TM upload and download and APIs are free and open to the public. Members benefit from significantly

advantageous access to TM data. There is technical cleaning of TM data and user feedback to manage and monitor data quality.

TDA provides a safe harbor where IP and copyright are explicitly dealt with through contracts. The website provides TM sharing guidance and reports on use cases. The Association is governed in accordance with statutes and

member regulations. Members vote on changes. The Supervisory Board oversees the Management Team. The

Technical Advisory Committee helps to ensure implementation of the best approaches. Member fees support day-today operations.

TDA development roadmap TAUS Search roadmap The roadmap for 2011 and 2012 includes automatic search for synonyms and related terms as well as the addition of a cross-lingual search. Academic research has proven that the accuracy of automatic search for synonyms

and related terms increases with the volume of data in the repository. As more and more users start sharing their translation memories we expect that the TAUS Search including the automatic synonym look-up will become an

indispensable industry service. In the current set-up TAUS already provides a user-feedback loop for reporting errors. Adding the cross-lingual search feature or matrix search will increase the number or searchable language pairs from currently 320 to over 100,000.

Corpora for MT The most common use of the TAUS Data repository is the corpora for MT service. Members select their language pairs, industry, domain and possibly even data owner and download the data to start training and customizing a

machine translation engine. For detailed instructions on how to train MT engines with language data we refer to the TAUS best practices guides.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

TM Cleaning Translations in the TAUS Data repository all come from trusted sources. Nevertheless translation memories may

not always be of the same high quality. We are already filtering out corrupt characters and tags. We reject duplicate

translations, non-compliant TMX files, and empty translation segments. On our roadmap for 2011 we have scheduled the release of a much more advanced TM Cleaning service. See specifications on the TAUS Data website.

Matching scores In the past year we have researched together with the University of Leeds the new feature of Matching Scores. Matching Scores is a semantic clustering technology that allows users of the TAUS Data repository to zoom in on data that are most proximate to their own domain. We plan to release this new feature early 2012. For full specifications we refer to the TAUS Data website.

Matrix TM Our roadmap for 2012 includes the addition of a Matrix TM feature that increase the number of language pairs in the repository to over 100,000.

Open-source technology exchange TAUS is promoting an open-source technology exchange. All of the components used to build the TAUS Data

repository are open-source software components, such as MySQL, Apache, Joomla, Giza++, Corpus Workbench,

TreeTagger, GlobalSight. We publish open APIs on the TAUS Data web site and we encourage integration and use of the software we develop. The new features TM Cleaning and Matching Scores will also be made publicly available.

In 2012 we plan to release all program documentation for all components for developers and make all software code available under an open-source licensing program. We encourage members and non-members to exchange their enhancements and new features via this open-source technology exchange program.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

TAUS members Global members Adobe

Lionbridge

Alcatel-Lucent

Medtronic

Autodesk

Microsoft

CA Technologies

Molina Healthcare

Cisco

Oracle

DELL

Philips

eBay

PTC

EMC

Raytheon BBN Technologies

Google

SAS Institute

Hewlett-Packard

SDL

hiSoft

Siemens

IBM

Symantec

Intel

Large corporate members AAC Global

Moravia Worldwide

ABBYY Software

MultiCorpora

Amesto

Omnilingua

Bowne

ProMT

CLS Communication

SYSTRAN

CNGL

WCS Group

European Patent Office

Welocalize

Jonckers

Yamagata Europe

Logrus

Small corporate members Applied Language Solutions

Language Intelligence

AVB Vertalingen

Lexcelera

DutchComm

Lingotek

Global Textware

Lucy Software

iDisc Information Technologies

Pangeanic

Janus

Tembua

Jensen Localization

Urban Translation Services

KCSL Inc.

Wordhouse

Kilgray Translation Technologies

TAUS - Enabling better translation

TAUS Data Association members AAMT

Lingotek

ABBYY

Linguistic Systems Inc.

Able Translations

Lingva-by

Adobe

LionBridge

AILIA

Logrus International

Alpha CRC

McAfee

Amesto

Microsoft

Applications Technology, Inc. (AppTek)

Moravia

Applied Language Solutions

Morphologic

Aquarius

MultiCorpora

ATA (Association of Translation Agencies)

Oracle

Autodesk

Pangeanic

Biro 2000

Paris University

Bothof

PROMT

BYU Center for Language Studies

PTC

CA Technologies

PTSGI

Carmazzi Global Solutions

Safaba Translation Solutions

Celer Soluciones

SDL

Cisco Systems

Skrivanek

CLS Communication

SMART SOFT SERV SRL

Cross Language

SWIFT

DELL

Sybase

DIADEIS

Symantec

eBay Inc.

Tekom

Eleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa

Tilde

EMC

Translavic BV

Gemino

University of Copenhagen

Global textware bv

University of Leeds

GTS

University of Western Sydney

HiSoft

Uppsala University

Intel

Via Language

Jensen Localization BV

Welocalize

Jonckers

World Trade Organization

KCSL Inc.

Xerox

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Industry Services Non member resources Interoperability watchdog

a a a a a a

Articles Best practice guidelines Access to select reports QE Metrics TAUS Data Association

Global

Corporate Big

Corporate Small

Agency

Professional

Academic

TAUS Membership Program

> 100M

> 10M

< 10M

< 1M

7,500

3,500

1,500

500

200

Listing in Member Directory

Use TAUS member logo

Representation

Interoperability Dashboard

Events discounts

Access full reports catalogue

Host roundtable meetings

Access innovation consulting service

Annual revenues (USD/EUR) Annual fee (in EUR)

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Associate

Professional

Academic

Special (Gold)

Regular (Silver & Bronze)

TAUS Data Association Membership Program

Annual revenues (USD/EUR)

> 100M

> 10M

< 2M

Employees

> 1,000

> 100

< 100

< 10

Admission fee (in EUR)

15,000

5,000

Annual fee (in EUR)

5,000

1,500

250

375

Votes

Special rights*

yes

10x upload

5m words

Unlimited

Download** Registered users

* Right to nominate candidates for the Supervisory Board and to give affirmative votes on amendments to the Member Regulations and the Articles of Association.

** Non-members are also able to download data at a ratio of 1:1 / Upload:Download.

TAUS - Enabling better translation

Team, boards and advisors TAUS Team Jaap van der Meer, Director; Rahzeb Choudhury, Operations Director; René Savelsbergh, Member Services; Maxim Khalilov, Research & Development; Karl Vassallo, Webmaster & Social Media; Andrew Joscelyne, Consultant &

Reporter; Joanna Gough, Researcher & Reporter; Jan Freijser, Researcher & Product Specialist; Anne-Maj van der Meer, Administrator.

TDA Team Jaap van der Meer, Director; Yan Yu, Director of Development; Donna Parrish, Technology and Advisor to the Board; Andrew Pimlott, Lead Software Engineer.

TAUS Advisory Board Aiman Copty, Oracle; Francis Tsang, Adobe; Diane Wagner, Microsoft; Karen Combe, PTC; Fred Hollowood, Symantec; Jessica Roland, EMC.

TAUS Data Association Supervisory Board Will Burgett, Intel (Chairman), Melissa Biggs, Oracle (Treasurer); Chris Wendt, Microsoft; Jessica Roland, EMC; Paula Shannon, Lionbridge; Francis Tsang, Adobe.

Technology Advisory Committee Professor Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh; Laurie Gerber, AMTA; Ilia Kaufman, KCSL; Fred Hollowood, Symantec; Dr. Jörg Schütz, Bioloom Group; Professor Tony Hartley, University of Leeds.

Standards Advisory Board Prof. Dr. Klemens Waldhör, FOM Hochschule für Oekonomie & Management, Hochschulstudienzentrum Nürnberg; Professor Alan Melby, Brigham Young University; Helena Shih Chapman, IBM; Dr. David Filip, LRC |CNGL; Dr. Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University.

TAUS is an innovation think tank and interoperability watchdog for the translation industry. We envision translation as a standard feature, a ubiquitous service. Like the internet, electricity, and water, translation is one of the basic needs of human civilization. Our mission is to increase the size and significance of the translation industry to help the world communicate better. TAUS supports entrepreneurs and principals in the translation industry to share and define new strategies through a comprehensive range of events, publications and knowledge tools.