Kurt Godden

Perhaps I can shed some light on your questions, "Why is it the automotive industry that defines translation metrics? Is this an example of a customer need that our industry could have met?" (see Tech Briefs in 2.3)

I was the person who principally authored the J2450 metric as the founding chairman of the J2450 committee when I was at GM. It originated from an idea by GM's Director of Service Engineering who heads up J2450's parent committee (and who happened to be my boss at the time.)

At the time, I was the translations manager for GM and a computational linguist by training/experience, so I had the qualifications. We studied many metrics used around the world in the translation industry, and borrowed concepts from a few of them. It is interesting, however, that (and this is my personal opinion now) that many of the industry's metrics are rather naive from a linguistic standpoint. They are typically ill-defined, relying on common (i.e. informal) understanding of the concepts. We tried to be very careful in providing very specific definitions of each of the J2450 categories. But the principal contribution by J2450 is in the use of the two meta-rules, which was simply a thought that came to me one day when I was thinking about how to reduce variability in human application of the metric.

J2450 is used routinely now by GM (via its translation supplier Omnilingua), and Rick Woyde's company Detroit Translation Bureau also uses it. Ford Motor may be using it by now too, though I don't know that for sure. They are highly active on the committee. We had trouble just getting Chrysler to participate. There is now also a J2450 group in Europe as well, thanks to Rick Woyde's initiative.

Anyway, that's a bit of the history behind J2450.

Rick Woyde, President & CEO, Detroit Translation Bureau

The development of J2450 by the automotive industry is both an example of the various "disconnected" activities going on in our industry and also represents a particular strength of the automotive industry. The automotive industry has a long track record of developing quality metrics and therefore has a substantial amount of experience doing so. While the objective of the J2450 committee is to develop a metric to meet the needs of the automotive industry there is no reason that other industries can't participate and benefit from these efforts.