Last week I posted a question about Translator tool kit and does this type of thing spell the end for professional tools given a bot of time to consider the responses and let the dust settle (on the event and the July 4th break 
I wanted to post my follow up.
First off in a rare turn of events SDL and Lionbridge actually agree on the subject for a change In SDL’s blog Localization Best Practices inked by my old friend Mr Ashton, they give a brief summarized response which can be even further summarized up to “No”.
Of course as two professional loc tools providers we are bound to say that – but we are both beyond such obvious responses.
As I see the Loc demand curve there are two fundamentally different models – the masses and the enterprises. With the masses it is about volume of content, live interaction and speed – this is supported by self correcting mechanisms like voting, or status related seniority in the crowd. It is about allowing millions of people to speak to millions more and the ebb and flow of understanding and questions are a natural part of an interactive dialogue. helping the world to speak with google translator or any other toolkit will along with other post 2.0 concepts change our world for ever.
The Enterprise demand can not be so informal, it can not be so pray to the ebbs and flows of understanding and consistency. The tools that support these environments have to allow for domain specific attributes, for careful term and key phrase integration. They have to drive efficiency and speed in a way you can not control community volume output.
Google or Microsoft could easily decide to focus on the Enterprise demands and could catch up pretty quickly if they wanted to – but a 50m? product line is off no interest to them at all as far as I can tell – not when thier ultimate aim is the multi billion dollar commercial opportunity of letting the entire world speak to each other. Selling targeted content globally to the right audience is what drives the decisions on these tool kits.
Until the world gives up the idea that customers expect timely and high quality support or that selling those products requires timely and specific term messaging professional translation and the increasingly large number of competitive tools that support these demands will have to exist. A potential interesting side effect of the free toolkits is that more of these community translators might ultimately enter the professional tools market (aka Photoshop Elements – to Photoshop CS4) – choosing to pursue it as a professional career.
Either way Google and Microsoft will continue to speed up the ability of the masses to speak globally – while this may or may not be to sell targeted content – it will change the world in a way never before possible and so no matter the motive, no matter the effect on professional translation, I still say Viva La Revolución!
