Like many people in our industry, we have read with interest the language used by IBM and Lionbridge as they promote their new collaboration – the development and commercial provision of real-time translations. We are concerned about the potentially negative implications for all our customers and our industry.

To assess the impact of this, we need to separate the “What” is being offered from the “Who”.

The “What” is Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) software from IBM which, combined with the proprietary Lionbridge Software-as-a-Service and its billions of translated words, enables the real-time translation of material such as blogs, IMs and emails, to a standard that is “good enough”.  

The “Who” are two companies that, due to their size and influence, can dominate how the real-time translation marketplace will develop over the next 3 years of their partnership.  During this time, IBM will also introduce Lionbridge to its customers as its preferred delivery partner.

These two companies can chase revenues and margins by ring-fencing their relationship, with the result that they could create a competitive landscape, which has the potential to undermine both business communities and existing relationships between customers and their language provider.

Ring-fencing could mean, for example, keeping developments to themselves; locking in customers by selling a service from a single supplier; creating a dependency on their service within selected business communities; and inviting customers and translation providers to pay a fee to be involved.  

Could another language technology company save the day?  Unlikely... If you ask a diagnostician to assess the health of a patient, he or she will focus on his or her area of expertise.  So, an oncologist will look for signs of cancer.  Similarly, asking another technology company to provide a solution for Machine Translation (MT) will result in an analysis and design around their framework, their future revenues and their market control.

Ring-fencing and technology-led solutions feel reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s when Value Added Networking companies offered to act as intermediaries between business partners. Unfortunately, some tried to enhance this role, attempting to control the supply chain.

The intellectual property of translations belongs to customers and not necessarily to their translation provider(s).  Each business community has the opportunity to make decisions about shared intellectual property and to drive forward its own vision for MT.  If it does not, IBM and Lionbridge could take the initiative and establish guidelines to ‘assist’ companies towards their own thinking.

So, how should the language provider community respond?  We can propose an open and collaborative approach for the translation supply chain for business communities, companies, language providers, linguists, workflows and technology.  This is far more than data access.

 Possible, but improbable.

In the meantime, IBM and Lionbridge could deliver thought leadership rather than trying to govern.

Possible, but improbable. 

'eTeams - translations you can trust'