Trends in Localisation

Editor's Notes

1. 11:15 Presentation - trends in localisation - Reinhard Schaler Clay Shirky: 1 trillion hours up for grabs; US-based NGOs: $1.9 trillion revenues; more jobs in Nonprofit sector
2. Not very pc flash animation http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/politicalsciencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lrKYCsE48Lchttp://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/37160/#Rrri37jcMeGOEghY.99
3. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, brings it to the point: "This isn't just about Arab Spring. This is about corporate spring." We add: This is about the localisation spring. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM (FastCompany, 11 Sep 2011) believes that “social media will be dwarfed by social business”. We add: mainstream translation will be dwarfed by social localisation. Communities will take control of localisation and introduce radical change to the industry. What is our role in this scenario?The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Gary Hamel as the world's most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him "the world's leading expert on business strategy." For the last three years, Hamel has also topped Executive Excellence magazine's annual ranking of the most sought after management speakers.
4. Daniel Pink, Al Gore’s ex-speech writer, who, in his now famous book Drive, tells the story about the person with a crystal ball who sits down with an economist, an accomplished business school professor, in 1995:“I’ve got a crystal ball here that can peer fifteen years into the future. I’d like to test your forecasting powers.”
She’s skeptical, but she decides to humor you. “I’m going to describe two new encyclopedias—one just out, the other to be launched in a few years. You have to predict which will be more successful in 2010.”
“Bring it,” she says.“The first encyclopedia comes from Microsoft. As you know, Microsoft is already a large and profitable company. Microsoft will fund this encyclopedia. It will pay professional writers and editors to craft articles on thousands of topics. Well-compensated managers will oversee the project to ensure it’s completed on budget and on time. Then Microsoft will sell the encyclopedia on CD-ROMs and later online.
“The second encyclopedia won’t come from a company. It will be created by tens of thousands of people who write and edit articles for fun. These hobbyists won’t need any special qualifications to participate. And nobody will be paid a dollar or a euro or a yen to write or edit articles. Participants will have to contribute their labor - sometimes twenty and thirty hours per week - for free. The encyclopedia itself, which will exist online, will also be free - no charge for anyone who wants to use it.“Now,” you say to the economist, “think forward fifteen years. According to my crystal ball, in 2010, one of these encyclopedias will be the largest and most popular in the world and the other will be defunct. Which is which?”
Pink correctly suggests that in 1995, you would not have found an economist who would not have picked the first model as the successful one. “That ragtag band of volunteers might produce something. But there was no way its product could compete with an offering from a powerful profit-driven company. The incentives were all wrong.” Of course, Microsoft would gain from the commercial success of its product while everyone involved in the other project would have known from the outset that success would earn them nothing – so why would they bother? Microsoft’s writers, editors, and managers were paid while the other project’s contributors were not. Pink says that the question was such a no-brainer that the economist wouldn’t even have considered putting it on an exam for her MBA class because it was too easy. However, we all know how things turned out…On October 31, 2009, Microsoft closed down MSN Encarta while the other project, Wikipedia, today has more than 13 million articles in some 260 languages, including 3 million in English alone. Pink is right when he says that the conventional view of human motivation has a very hard time explaining this result.
5. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, brings it to the point: "This isn't just about Arab Spring. This is about corporate spring." We add: This is about the localisation spring. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM (FastCompany, 11 Sep 2011) believes that “social media will be dwarfed by social business”. We add: mainstream translation will be dwarfed by social localisation. Communities will take control of localisation and introduce radical change to the industry. What is our role in this scenario?
6. A trillion hours a year of participatory value are up for grabs. (Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus)The nonprofit sector in the US had revenues of US$1.9 trillionThe nonprofit sector generates 20% more employment (against revenue) than the for-profit sector
7. What is the problem?Trying to use current technology is like trying to plug the holes in the Titanic.Irrelevant whether not-/for-profit
8. Outside our research area: Content discovery and retrieval
9. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/06/18/google-government-takedown-requests-up-103-in-us-49-in-india-4-new-countries-on-transparency-report/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/How can that be achieved? – Only few years ago, people would have said that this is not possible. – EC DG Translation: Study and interest500,000 volunteer translators with TwitterExplain acronyms: TWB, TRF
10. Picture of the Ark
11. CSA:Q:Do your estimates include non-profit work?A:Many LSPs receive a significant percentage of work from the non-profit sector, and this is captured in the revenues they report to us.