So said Rory Cowan (CEO of Lionbridge) in a recent interview.

In other U.S. commercial news, Goggle replaced Systran machine translation (MT) with its own version, which will affect all sorts of localization vendors. Jon Yunker (Byte Level Research) notes that Google, now in 42 languages, will start acting as a multilingual interface. "What does this mean for vendors?" he asks. "It means that the time is now to start thinking about how your company will thrive in a world where translation is not your core source of revenue."

Microsoft enabled its software into scores of languages, but did not replace vendors.

The Alcatel/Lucent merger is still sorting out what shape its combined localization approach will be, and who its vendors will be.

SDL (which bought into the content management business in 2007 and just recently purchased Idiom) published its 2007 World Language League Table, which lists the major languages it translated during the year. The list in order of words translated:

Canadian French
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Chinese
Japanese
Dutch
English
Russian

SDL noted that Russian made it into the top ten for the first time, and that they expect to process even more in 2008. Vladimir Putin was selected as Person of the Year by Time magazine for his role in stabilizing Russia. The country is now enjoying stability and a boom in oil prices. Putin has stated that he wants to make his hometown of St. Petersburg the center of the world auto industry. As a result, he has been successful in attracting a number of auto plants, and with those, come the need for manuals and shop guides in Russian.

And in a first in my lifetime, the Russian Government took out a four-page, four-color advertising supplement in the Washington Post to highlight Putin’s Plan of Economic Reform and Development. On of the writers in the supplement sponsored by the Rossiysaka Gazeta (www.rbth.rg.ru) noted, "Putin’s Plan is a phrase that has provided linguistic zeal to the just finished election."

The SDL 2007 World Language League Table also noted the percentage growth of certain languages. Since I was born in Latvia and represent the Latvian Investment and Trade Agency in the U.S., I am naturally proud that Latvian had the highest percentage growth during 2007 (81%), followed by Bulgarian (78%), Estonian (77%), Romanian (71%), Lithuanian (67%), Slovenian (49%), Traditional Chinese (44%), Russian (39%), Turkish (36%) and Japanese (28%).

In addition to Russian and the Eastern European languages that will pick up in 2008, we have Chinese. China.org recently noted, "Liu Xilang, President of the Translation Association of China (TAC), said that with the 29th Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and the 18th FIT (International Federation of Translation) World Congress in Shanghai both in 2008, China could expect soaring demand for translation services over the next few years, and the industry could expect something of a golden era."

A major task was translating 13,905 signposts, and this task went to the China Translating and Publishing Corporation, with help from Beijing's sister city, Pasadena, California. Two people from Pasadena convinced the Chinese that they had to do something about "chinglish," the combination of Chinese and English that is often ridiculed in the West. According to Zhang Jinjing of the China Translation and Publishing Corporation, "The problem with many of the existing translations is that they neglected to take into consideration how ideas would be expressed in a different language." But Oliver Lutz Radtke author of www.chinglish.de, a web site that lists the “best Chinglish translations,” thinks that correcting them is really taking away one of the joys of China.

In looking over the web site of some of the 3,000 registered translations firms in China – there might be as many as 10,000, considering all the "mom and pop" operations – a lot of Chinglish still abounds, particularly on the web site for the upcoming Olympics (www.en.beijing2008.cn). The mascot is a cow-like figure called Fu Niu Lele and described as "the design of derives from the farming cultivation culture."

On the search engine front in 2008, look for increased growth of Xandex, the leading Russian search engine and Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine. The latter recently bought out Google with a little help from the government.

Government Markets

In the U.S., there are three segments to the government market for translation and localization, which I have come to call battlefield, day-to-day and hi-tech.

As the U.S. is still engaged in a costly and non-productive war in Iraq, "trying to understand the fog of war" is now the largest market. And the "mainstream sounding" localization firm, Global Linguistic Solutions (GLS), which may garner US $4.6 Billion over five years, will be doing most of the work. They have a listing of four pages of job openings (www.gls-corp.com). It is a joint venture between DynCorp (which provides armed guards in Iraq and elsewhere) and McNeil Technologies, a long-standing hi-tech government contractor. GLS is now the largest translation firm in the world, even though it just has one client, the US Army.

GLS is headed by James "Spider" Marks, who was hired by McNeil specifically to pull this contract away from incumbent L3 Communications. With 33 years in the military, I don’t think he will be keynoting a LISA session anytime soon! He is also a global strategy advisor to (former) U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign. Romney is in favor of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (for normal people, this means torture) in dealing with people captured in Iraq. Marks made headlines by telling CNN during an interview, "I’d stick a knife in somebody’s thigh in a heartbeat to get information." But this is not really "torture," according to Marks, but rather "an enhanced interrogation technique." Maybe he’ll submit a paper to LISA called, "The role of translation quality in enhanced interrogation techniques." (Note: I requested an interview with Marks, but no one returned my many calls.)

You cannot get a contract for battlefield translations without a military guy heading your effort. And it is difficult to get a day-to-day translation assignment without someone from the Federal bureaucracy to pave the way. McNeil recently sold its day-to-day translation group McNeil Multilingual (www.mcneilml.com) to Translations International, which is headed by a former Project Manager for McNeil. Comprehensive Language Center is another firm that was split off from a government contactor (CACI) to pursue day-to-day government business. To get day-to-day business, you must be listed in GSA schedule 738 11.

And the U.S. government itself has been in business for awhile through the FBI and its National Virtual Translation Center (NVTC), which brokers translators throughout the Federal bureaucracy.

The U.S. government loves hi-tech and thus created an opening for firms like Systran, Language Weaver and Basis Technology, which supply a variety of machine translation and multilingual documentation solutions. Basis also acquired Translingual Technologies during 2007. In a discussion with Language Weaver, I was told that they have "a lot of money in the bank to puruse a number of initiatives." CACI is another firm that provides hi-tech services to the government, but is rarely if ever seen in the non-government market. It touts its programs by noting, "With CACI document exploitation, the Army can extract useful intelligence from multilingual sources faster than using traditional manual methods."

In the EU, the Directorate General for Translation (DGT) continues to expand with the addition of two more official languages, raising the total to 23. During 2007, it translated 1.5 million pages of text; 72% originated in English, 14% in French and 10.8% in other languages. It gave out 8,599 contracts to different linguists and contractors, while maintaining permanent staff of 1,750 linguists and 600 staff. In its most recent initiative, The DGT is now promoting a program called "Mother Language +2" throughout the EU in 2008. The goal is for every EU citizen to speak two languages plus his or her mother tongue.

Commercial Markets

Markets seem flat wherever you look, but more marketing money is being spent by European firms than elsewhere. This is anecdotal knowledge, but that is my impression in reviewing various web sites. And thebigword appeared to win in giving out the most press releases in 2007.

Lionbridge started out the year as the largest commercial provider of services to the private sector with US $440 million in sales. One recent financial blog caught my eye. It said, "The new CFO sounded pretty sharp. And has identified 4 areas that he wants to target including currency hedging and foreign taxes where LIOX really gets hit hard. These areas are operational and can be fixed. Demand for services still appears to be healthy and cash flow is improving. I expect that there are cost synergies still to be realized from the Bowne acquisition."

Two niche players, Language Line (telephone interpretation) and RWS (patent translations) are continuing to expand their localization offerings. Language Line and Translations.com bought Adams Globalization and seemed to be offering the most job offerings – close to 40. And the Italian firm, Logos, whose sales are near US $50 million opened an office in far-off Darwin, Australia.

Language Line also bought Coto (Lingo Systems et al). They did US $163 million last year (generating a loss of 2.3 million) and now join Lionbridge, SDL and Systran in the public game. Interesting, as they were also once part of AT&T (like Lucent Localization). Now they look like they want to be a full service localization firm.

But all the gossip centers on what will happen with Merrill Brink. Merrill Corporation, a commercial printer acquired PH Brink in March of 2005. In the last several months, it has lost its two top operations people, cut most of its advertising and industry memberships, and is going on a cost control program. 2008 will be a year of decision: will Merrill Corporation put more money in it, or sell all or part, recognizing that it can’t stand still in a competitive marketplace and survive.

Someone who knows something about printers buying localization firms is Rory Cowan, who has closely followed the Merrill Brink situation and commented:

"Three strikes and you’re out. Donnelly, Bowne and now Merrill have taken a swing at the McKinsey (BCG, Booz Allen Hamilton)-induced value chain expansion strategy by attempting to integrate translation as their core offering. In reality, accuracy and industry scale economics trumps one-stop shopping. Ours is an industry built upon the combination of global networks and individual contributions. This drives structure which cannot be integrated into command and control cultures of most Fortune 500 scale companies."

---

John Freivalds is Managing Director of JFA Marketing and publisher of The Periodic Tables (Languages, Money, First Class and Toasts). He can be reached at john@jfamarketing.com.