Were you born before 1977? If you suffer the dreaded diseases of AGE or ABD (Ancient Birth Date), you might be the root cause of malaise in the localization industry. The latest iteration of Localization World began this week in Seattle with an inspiring keynote on crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine. As a good keynote should do, it set the tone and made collaboration and community the fulcrum of many of the discussions in the conference rooms and hallways. The point of The End of Localization Taylorism, a blog entry we published earlier this week, was that technologies are available to improve productivity in translation and localization through collaboration and community. However, LSPs and translation buyers still live by dogmas related to quality and security processes that, in fact, do not improve either.

There are exceptions. In the session Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Community Engagement in Localization, Britta Simon (Microsoft) and Janice Campbell (Sun) talked about their use of wikis and blogs to address terminology and complete localization projects — with the help of the community of users in a collaborative environment. Richard Kaplan, Vice President of Supportability and Customer and Partner Experience at Microsoft, mentioned projects in which automated translations could be fed into wikis for volunteer post-editing by user communities.

So that’s big news to the geriatric set of the localization community. How did the raw youth just entering the fold react to these new concepts in localization? We heard a resounding “Duh!” from students — all born after 1977 — from the Chico State University Localization Program in response to all the talk about crowdsourcing and collaboration. Conversely, in a session moderated by Welocalize’s André Pellet, all but one of the participants — people responsible for terminology or localization processes in their organizations — were born before 1977. This group of pre-1977 managers was skeptical of new collaborative technologies and processes, and the most common objection was the fact that they do not use these technologies themselves (for lack of time, lack of initiative, or lack of interest.) Another objection was the fear of adding the task of managing a community to their already saturated workload.

Crowdsourcing, wikis, blogging, communities are the reality of today and should be incorporated in everybody’s production processes. The technology is cheap or free and implementation is easy. But we see three real challenges:

• Accepting that collaboration can replace sequential processes; that is, that translation and quality control can happen almost simultaneously;
• Recruiting and enabling professionals to work in the communities;
• Understanding that collaboration is supposed to reduce the workload, not increase it.