Year 2020

In 2020…

A normal day will have rain, sun, snow, wind, and clouds all together, sudden mega storms will be our daily bread so we will have to be fully prepared with AI clothing.

The translators will be wearing virtual reality goggles, smart gloves, and their houses will be fully controlled by CAT-MAI, a computer assisted translation multitasking artificial intelligence represented holographically, that will care about dressing them up, preparing their morning coffee, checking their emails, setting reminders for deadlines, preparing flat tea, rates negotiations and much more.

Thank you to the Translation and Localization Conference 2019 (a.k.a the TLC), that took place during March 29-30 in Warsaw, Poland. We had the possibility to see these future developments with our own eyes. Amazing indeed!

Challenging and adventurous times are ahead. Embrace the challenge and adapt to success!

Many speakers enlightened the TLC this year, please find below some of them:

Robert Etches, CEO of Exfluency talked about combining blockchain and language technology to create a linguistic ledger capable of generating new opportunities for freelancers, LSPs, corporations, NGOs and intergovernmental institutions alike. He recognized that the industry will change, and new positions will be created. The way we do pricing currently will change from price per word to price per hour or per project.

Kester Thompson, Team Lead at Wix talked about Wix’s challenges related to translation and localization and their potential solutions and plans. The company employs over 100 writers covering a range of disciplines. UX text, marketing content, help articles, ADI content – all of these need to be localized into 20 languages.

Beata Strzałka, Learning and Development Director at Sodexo talked about Gallup, she mentioned that AI is already taking jobs from humans and that we will need to adapt. All industries are changing. However, productivity is decreasing as there are much fewer people happier nowadays than in the past. Around 15% of the workforce is happy. She mentioned several interesting things that are worth to check: Cognitive flexibility, Carol Dweck, CliftonStrengths, Simon Sinek and The Golden Circle, etc.

Agenor Hofmann-Delbor, founder of Localize.pl and the Translation and Localization Conference gave us a tour inside the matrix of the localization files. From packages and archives, how formatting and tags are embedded in files, fingerprints we tend to leave in our files, and hardcoded vs. externalized resources.

Aaron Schliem, Chief Marketing Officer for Bureau Works and Ellen Singer, founder of AzTech Solutions gave a very constructive unconference where everyone was welcome to talk, and all the attendees were able to discuss subjects as popular as Neural Machine Translation, Freelance vs In-house translators, pricing and much more.

Infinitus Physiotherapy showed all attendees how to ease back issues generated by long hours sitting. It is important to get moving and do desk-bound exercises!

This year, Jensen Localization participated as speaker for the first time in the history of the TLC. We are very grateful to Anna Lewoc and the rest of the TLC team for this opportunity and for her help.

I shared information about the franchising business model, from its history to current day and I explained how this system can be implemented in the translation industry. If you want to know more feel free to write an email to franchise@jensen-localization.com

For a full list of speakers and subjects they talked about visit the TLC 2019 web.

From Jensen Localization, we want to recommend this conference to all our readers. Contact us to know how we can help you to cope with the challenges that the translation industry is facing.