The answer lies in the problems we have created, and they all revolve around demonstrating our value:

1. We don't sell what buyers need. Localization had a big surge in awareness a few years back when people first began to realize that the Internet was a worldwide phenomenon. Suddenly, companies found potentially global constituencies that needed to be marketed to. Marketing, sales, and customer service executives at these firms began to worry about how to increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction all over the world, not just at home. But it's hard to think of any company in our space that can deliver on such a rich, simple value proposition as "we help you market effectively to your international or ethnic prospects." Instead, we sell whatever buyers want at the time (and most don't know what they want). Worse still, we often sell whatever they will pay for in the hopes that somehow our mere presence in the corporate accounting system will transform us into essential building blocks of corporate strategy. It won't, any more than it would, say, for print services. Why? Because by and large buyers will take advantage of any opportunity they can to avoid localization.

2. We keep getting dragged to the basement. In the most visible and obvious part of our business, translation, we allow ourselves to get booted from a seat at the table to a cost control manager downstairs whose goal is to whittle us down from $0.18 to $0.17 per word. We continue to inflict this lowest-bidder commoditization on ourselves by letting customers view us as glorified data processors (remember: it was only a few short years ago that the U.S. Government reclassified translation from a "function" to a "profession") instead of demonstrating how we add genuine value to their communications. We engage in price wars rather than trumpeting a value proposition that's strategic to marketing and sales. And we keep knocking on that basement door, almost by reflex. To wit, consider this statement of one of the more ambitious technology players: "Central to [our] solution is the philosophy that experienced people—including translators, project managers, and in-country reviewers—are the key to successful, high-quality globalization efforts." They may be experienced and they may make a difference, but they don't have the budget, clout, or strategic visibility where it matters most—revenue and customer satisfaction. Why haven't we learned to make a compelling case to marketing VPs and their peers who want to dramatically increase the effectiveness of their selling messages and who are willing to pay for it?

3. We act like small businesses. While that's good for a neighborhood deli, it's not the way to build an industry. Our small-mindedness takes many forms. We talk about tools virtually to the exclusion of all else as the core of our customers' needs. That's rather like the deli owner repeatedly directing his patrons' attention to the new meat slicer, which produces sandwich meats at an astonishing rate (yes, but how does the pastrami taste?). We can point to very few examples of "coopetition"—that is, your competitor is your partner—in localization, so customers are left to cobble together the partnerships they suppose they need, or not, as the case may be. We've also seen technology suppliers, having lost a sale, offering their products and services at no cost rather than see a competitor win the business. And on the association side, we have LISA, the nascent Professional Association for Localization (PAL), Globalisation Management Strategies Conferences (GMSC), and others simultaneously vying for attention. Each harbors a grudge from slights years ago and wants to put the other out of business.

4. We perpetuate confusion and ignorance. Most of our customers still misunderstand the fundamentals of localization. If you ask 10 people what the difference is between machine translation and translation memory, 9 will probably ask you to repeat the question. No two customer RFPs are alike in terms of how to qualify service providers, how the localization process works, or even how much input they need/want/expect from providers. But none of this should come as a surprise, because we promote and offer our services based on widely varying criteria, we make widely differing demands from customers, we sell similar products and services at bewilderingly different pricing schemes, and we have practically no agreed-upon standards for anything. We can't even all agree on what the terms globalization, internationalization, and localization mean. And so our customers keep asking for clarification, requesting primers, and repeating the last confusing thing they heard. If and when we recognize this problem, though, instead of coming up with a clear, unified message, we spend most of our time preaching to the same, intramural localization choir.

5. We ignore mainstream issues—or try to recreate them in miniature. It's surprising how few practitioners attend or speak at industry conferences and publications. Where are the strategists and practitioners with whom we should be speaking? Where are those responsible for building the Fortune 1,000's global commerce and marketing systems? They're attending a data warehousing symposium or at AIIM's Enterprise Content Management (ECM) conference along with Documentum, Oracle, and Vignette. Meanwhile, LISA gives conferences where we cognoscenti lament our inability to crash the mainstream party down the street. Even when we do get let into the mainstream gates from time to time, like the LISA "bonus track" at last year's SIIA Conference, we invariably end up talking to each other again.

6. We can't prove our value. Especially in the face of the turbulent economy of the past year, information and marketing groups have been developing metrics and tools to demonstrate the value of what they produce. Localization is harder to measure because a good rendering for another market typically shows up only after you've instrumented, measured, and analyzed the whole effort. Few localization companies, however, have the repertoire—or for that matter the political will—to analyze and conclusively demonstrate the value of improved communications in all markets and languages. That's because we take the value of localization for granted, and our customers simply don't.

It's time for us to start thinking seriously—and collectively—about how to get the localization industry on track. We need to do a few things:

• Agree on a compelling value proposition for the industry. People understand why they need to buy ERP systems, business intelligence, or advertising; they even tolerate the fact that, as J.R. Wrigley used to say, half of all advertising is wasted (we just don't know which half). Why should they add localization to their budgets? The simple answer is so they can communicate more effectively with their audiences, whether they're customers, employees, or partners. Together our industry must come up with compelling arguments for why localization must be part of every company's value chain. Then, we must see to it that those arguments make their way into our customers' ears, minds, and pocketbooks.
• Sell higher. We have to ratchet up our products, service offerings, and selling skills to capture the C-level for marketing, sales, product development, and supply chain. Those decision makers must become convinced that they won't reach global markets effectively without localization. Only thus persuaded will they be able to drive the need for localization deep down into their organizations, where it must take hold. Localizers and translators should stop focusing on simple adaptation and partner with, buy, or become allies in their customers' quest for effective communication. All of these things will raise the current discussion from lower cost per word to far higher-value differentiators like quality, service, and vertical market specializations.
• Open the kimonos. To date most localization companies have survived by selling tools or services that lock customers into inflexible, often proprietary processes and technologies. This has led to today's self-balkanization of the industry landscape. As content and document management systems evolve into enterprise systems with open application interfaces, we will have to change that landscape. We will have to be ready to work with savvy buyers who demand the interoperability they have come to expect from enterprise software, and we will have to extend this requirement to translation technologies and terminology management. This also means we will have to talk to each other more and more because it is in our obvious mutual self-interest to do so.

Don DePalma is an executive advisor to LISA. He is the president and founder of Common Sense Advisory, Inc., a business and marketing consultancy. He was formerly the vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom Technologies and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Hans Fenstermacher is president of ArchiText Inc., a localization and globalization services firm, and chairman of the board of the LISA Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise Network. He has 22 years' experience in virtually all aspects of the localization industry.