Last year Lionbridge introduced its Freeway offering as an example of "Localization 2.0," hoping to benefit from the massive pool of Web 2.0 energy in the marketplace. Shortly thereafter, LISA themed its next conference with the sobriquet "China 2.0" (would that be the Shang Dynasty or Taiwan?). And just this month an article in MultiLingual magazine introduced the concept of "Translation 2.0."

We’re sure that we missed some other 2.0 coinages, so if we missed yours, sorry! But we think these few are enough to justify identifying a trend in the language industry. Localization marketers must be thinking that "if 2.0 works for somebody else, it should work for me, too."

The problem with this follow-the-leader approach to marketing new ideas is that many people are unclear on just what Web 2.0 is, so we’ve heard clients describe it as everything from the Second Coming to "Web to dot … what?"

Tim O’Reilly coined the term in 2004 to describe the looming second generation of internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and "folksonomies." The term was a play on software product version numbering — everyone knows enough to stay away from first-version products. But we can rewind it even further back to Esther Dyson’s 1997 book "Release 2.0," which in turn was a play on her Release 1.0 newsletter from the 1980s.

When the 2.0 concept is applied to translation and localization, it becomes meaningless to most people outside the language industry cabal (and even some inside) who don’t know what "Translation 1.0" or "Localization 1.0" is (or was). Adding a "2.0" does little more than beg the question of what was there before, thus attempting some differentiation with an obscure practice. Over the last few months we have been talking with clients about our own idea of what is happening in the world of adapting products for global markets and translating the documents and websites that describe them. We’ll share that in our next posting to the soon-to-be-renamed "Global Watchtower 2.0."