To the Editor,

In discussing the “price war in Europe,” a point that I made during the keynote at the recent LISA Forum USA in Washington, D.C was misquoted. My comment that “just enough is good enough” was not made in reference to quality. We listen very carefully to our customers, feed what we hear back to them, and come to an agreement on quality. Quality is the number one issue for buyers of localization services, so there can be no compromise here, except when the customer makes a deliberate choice to do so. And that almost never happens with customer-facing product or content.

Quality is the number one issue for buyers of localization services.

“Just enough is good enough” is a comment about “how much” to translate, not “how well” to translate. For a brief period in the late ’90s, companies decided they could gain market share by translating everything — administration guides, reference materials, everything. Today, companies are more circumspect. Saving money does not mean paying half a penny less for translation. It means translating fewer components of the product; i.e. translating only the help system, not the documentation; or, leaving the user interface in English for administration modules. You get my point.

“Just enough is good enough” is a comment about “how much” to translate, not “how well” to translate.

“Just enough is good enough” is about maximizing the ROI (return on investment) of product localization, by saving the customer money while still delivering a salable product to market.

A market needs multiple solutions since not everyone is trying to solve the same problem.

It is ironic that SLV (single-language vendor) advocates claim they can deliver higher quality translation than an MLV, and in the next sentence, point out that they perform most of the translation work for MLVs anyway. It’s mystifying to me that this is even a topic of discussion. Clients come to MLVs precisely because we can manage quality and cost issues for them — across multiple SLVs. If that is not important to them, of course they will go directly to SLVs. This is the “horses for courses” truism — a market needs multiple solutions since not everyone is trying to solve the same problem.

We don’t compete with SLVs. We partner with them. We compete against in-sourcing of translation management.

Buyers who select MLVs ask us to manage the process of quality. They come to us because we are experts in global resource management and long-term program management. If those are tasks they wish to keep inside, then they will contract with SLVs instead. It’s that simple. We propose to them that we can deliver the services faster, better, cheaper than an internal group within their own organization.

The industry is in a dynamic phase, and this in itself is a healthy — if painful — state of affairs.

We don’t compete with SLVs. We partner with them. We compete against in-sourcing. And I don’t mean in-sourcing of translation tasks. We compete against in-sourcing of translation management. The SLVs who work with us are in effect outsourcing a big chunk of their sales activities to us. The ones who do this deliberately, and structure their business around this decision, do very well. Others, who do it reluctantly and still maintain highly paid sales staff to sell into our customer base, appear to be less happy. They are riding two horses in separate directions, so that is uncomfortable, no doubt.

I don’t believe there should be any remaining confusion about what business models are available in the industry. But if there are, this is a good venue for discussing them. The industry is in a dynamic phase, and this in itself is a healthy — if painful — state of affairs.

Rory Cowan is Chairman, President and CEO of Lionbridge and can be reached at Rory_Cowan@Lionbridge.com.