Newsletter - Events
The “Atomic” Localization World in Barcelona, June 2006
Magda García-Masana, LocTeam
Well, finally a big localization event came to my home town, Barcelona. This event, organized by MultiLingual Computing and the Localization Institute (in cooperation of GALA), was a big success: over 500 attendees and more than 50 exhibitors took part. One of the aspects that was broadly discussed during this event was “atomization” – truly the buzz word of the event.
Atomic Localization
The keynote speaker was Roger Camrass, Fujitsu’s Director of Business Transformation. According to Camrass, the localization industry will go through what he calls the atomization process. Technology innovation and unlimited connectivity will encourage the emergence of new players performing new roles. Although the localization industry is highly fragmented right now, Camrass believes that new organizing principles could lead to new atomic combinations.
Camrass talked about four major technology drivers in our industry: low cost language translation, new training techniques, information storage retrieval and web based search and retrieve technologies.
Bottom line, scale is important but that does not mean that providers have to be big.
An interesting point of view was offered by Serge Gladkoff of Logrus International. According to Serge, the new economy is atomic. Large corporations are created because “the sum is greater than its parts.” But actually, smaller companies can be more efficient. In the new economy the parts are about to become greater standing by themselves as small companies provide more stability than large corporations. The “new” corporation consists of smart “atoms” achieving better quality and greater productivity.
Other Forms of Atomic Localization
Besides these ”stable” forms of atomic corporations, I believe a more pragmatic approach is possible in our industry. After all, every customer and even every project is different. Circumstances are not always the same, so one of the beauties of this atomic system is to enable “perfect” associations, allowing clients to get the specialization they need for every project (for example in subject matter specialty or platform specialty). Atoms can actually come together on a project-by-project basis.
Maybe proof of that at Localization World in Barcelona was the large number of companies and individuals that had never attended previous industry events. Many seemed to anticipate that this industry is no longer reserved for only the big players. Themselves university professors, freelance translators, pure translation companies and tools developers are all part of this atomic industry.
These atomic configurations may also allow us – the localization industry – to serve new markets. This event also welcomed a large number of companies new to localization (such as advertising firms) looking for new ways to serve their customers by adding localization to specific projects.
In addition to all of this thinking and talking about the future of the industry, people also seemed to enjoy the social aspects of the conference, including dinners and drinks until late in the night. The theme of Barcelona’s Localization World was “Working – Together”. We did both work and enjoy ourselves – together.
Magda García-Masana is owner of LocTeam, a company specializing in Mac localization. Since 1990, LocTeam has served as the leading localization resource for the Mac community. LocTeam began as an Apple localization partner for Spanish and has evolved over the years to complete more than 5000 software translation and localization projects spanning five of the world’s major languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, among others. LocTeam was bronze sponsor of Localization World Barcelona.