GALA Blog

I’ve just returned from a three-day conference in St. Louis for leaders of trade associations, foundations and professional societies.  The show brought together 5000+ industry association executives from every sector ranging from medical specialty associations to athletic interest associations to obscure professional societies representing trades I’d never considered, like the International Sleep Products Association Society, the National Auctioneers Association, and the National Dive Products and Marketing Association.

The conference offered the occasion for me to reflect on GALA, our membership, the opportunity (and challenges) ahead for our industry, and the lessons we can learn from other industry bodies.  No matter the sector, the trends affecting trade associations at large are consistent: fragmentation within the industry; special interest group needs leading to the emergence of specialized professional associations; member exoduses to free online communities, which have in some ways supplanted the need for a traditional membership model; consolidation among member companies; and aging memberships that neither attract nor embrace the brightest new minds and companies that are shaping the future.

These trends present an opportunity for the association community to re-examine its true purpose.  What is the function of an industry body and the profession that it serves?  It is imperative that we keep a laser focus on the needs of our member companies as they face their own challenges in keeping up with market changes (faster, cheaper, smarter!).   And we must be forward-looking beyond our current trends.  Where will our own industry be 10, 20, 30 years from now?  And who will be our leading players?  Who will be the agents of paradigm change?  How can we support them in driving progress and sustainability?

As GALA’s managing director, I use these association conferences for honest, face-to-face exchanges with my peers who are serving other industries and who are striving to progress alongside the needs of their members.  The conference provided a number of different formats for learning, from lengthy presentations to speed-learning sessions.  But I found that I walked away with the most insight from the small-group discussions – the simplest format of all.

Meanwhile, to build on GALA’s outreach to other industries, we took the opportunity to share some expertise about our own industry at ASAE’s first-ever international track.  Hans Fenstermacher, GALA Board Chair, presented a session entitled, “Communicate locally. Succeed globally,” a primer on localization and multilingual concepts and strategies.  We found that while many associations are now expanding globally, they are sometimes slower to accept the need for translation because of limited resources.

As GALA demonstrates its relevance to our own industry, we in turn help our members evolve alongside their competitors and within the business world as a whole.  I encourage you to look to GALA for the same member experience that I benefited from this week in St. Louis: a place to connect with your own peers, to learn from the trends that will affect your own companies, to welcome bold new ideas, and to help craft your strategy for success within the larger industry community.

If you have ideas on how we can improve GALA’s service to the translation and localization industry, please contact me at lbrandon@gala-global.org.

Laura Brandon
GALA Managing Director

One of the consistent challenges we face as an industry is in reducing the manual overhead associated with translation tasks. Currently we deal with multiple ways of sending and receiving files and communication: email, FTP, DropBox or other cloud services, phone calls, etc. A significant portion of the effort incurred by LSPs is spent in file handling, format conversions, clarification of intent and instructions with clients, checking for project completeness, etc. All of these things add up to significant cost (some estimates put these tasks at almost 50% of the cost of translation to the end buyer).

One area where the GALA Standards Initiative is already active is in a new project intended to address these issues. The Language Interoperability Portfolio (Linport) project is a new proposal to define a standard format for representing and packaging translation projects and transmitting them through the entire production chain with full project metadata. The Linport project represents a merger of the Container Project and a European Commission project called Multilingual Electronic Dossier (MED). Both of these projects had very similar goals and the decision was made to merge our efforts.

Our hope is that the Linport project will result in a unified format for sending and receiving translation and localization jobs that will simplify the process for all involved. We anticipate that as the specification develops we will also see the creation of model business resources (e.g., RFPs) that match the requirements of a Linport portfolio so that the business and technical processes of the industry will be in greater alignment. By doing so we will see reductions in the manual overhead associated with both business and technical processes in our industry, delivering benefits for all involved.

An initial public draft of Linport is now under preparation by GALA, representatives of the European Union Directorate General for Translation, the Brigham Young University Translation Research Group (BYU TRG), and LTAC Global. This draft will unify the structure of the two projects into a unified format. As soon as this internal discussion is complete, the project will be opened to the public for feedback and discussion on an open mailing list. This working method will allow anyone to get involved with the project and contribute to it at no fee. When the project delivers a stable specification in this open forum it will then submit this specification for further development and ratification in a recognized standards-development body.

In addition, we have scheduled two face-to-face meetings to work on this project. The first Linport Symposium will be held in Luxembourg on September 27. This one-day meeting, hosted by the European Commission, will be open to all interested parties and will focus on technical discussion about the project. The second meeting, a half-day working session on October 10 held in conjunction with Localization World, will also be open to interested parties and will build upon the results of the September meeting to develop the Linport specification further. More details about the venues and logistics will be available soon.

To sign up as part of the Linport working group, we invite you to visit http://box456.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/linportmail_linport.org. By signing up for the Linport list you will be kept advised of all discussion and will be able to participate in the development of this important new format. More information about the project will be posted at linport.org as the project progresses, as well as on the GALA Standards Initiative website (http://www.gala-global.org/standards).