In the antediluvian days of Translation As We Knew and Loved It, companies would translate, edit, then proofread (TEP). TEP is based on Gutenberg’s printing requirements, where the author submitted the manuscript, someone typeset it, and somebody else reviewed the galley proofs as many times as necessary to make sure that no typos made it to the final print run. Modern technologies make this sequential process redundant, and quality improvement methodologies like Six Sigma teach us that adding steps to a process only increases the probability of adding errors.

There is an imbalance of knowledge in traditional processes. Usually, people downstream in the production chain have less information than people upstream. If the editor knows less than the translator, he is likely to introduce errors, instead of correcting them, thus reducing the quality of the document.

Years ago some translation agencies began experimenting with plan, coordinate, translate, and publish (PCTP) to replace this Gutenberg-based Taylorism of TEP. They tried putting 20 translators on a project for 5 days rather than 5 translators for 20 days, relying on each to proof and case-harden the others’ word. They hired non-translator consultants with subject-matter expertise to answer terminology and conceptual questions up-front, instead of leaving it up to reviewers to catch errors. This self-correcting environment worked on simple Novell networks in the 1990s, but becomes supercharged on today’s broadband-distributed collaborative network.

Focusing on doing things right the first time, companies can eliminate the editing stage. Total quality is knowing what needs to be done, having the means to do it, then doing it right the first time, every time. This age-old TEP model, with each individual and task working in lockstep rotation according to time-motion studies, will be replaced by technology and process that allow a swarm of translators, editors, and supporting cast to concurrently work on a translation. Taking their lessons from the Agile development model of creating software in shorter periods, the localization scrum will emphasize functional, timely translation as its goal.

Looking ahead, collaboration across borders, communities of translators, updates of centralized translation memories and terminology bases, in-situ use of style and grammar guides, and translation more intimately tied to authoring will be hallmarks of this new style of translation process. Under this model, 2008’s decentralization of the TEP process will give way to broad virtualization into a much more collaborative, cross-supplier, planetary landscape. Postmodern localization will be more decentralized, benefiting smaller providers of language services. LSPs will be cross-border entities, with sales in the euro-pound-dollar region, project management in Argentina and China, and production distributed around the globe. The following table lays out the implications for TEP (”Conventional Wisdom”) versus the new wave of “How Translations Will Happen” across the axes of people, process, and technology.