Shattering the language barrier

CXO quizzes Eric Silberstein, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Idiom Inc, on the realities of corporate globalisation and how effective management systems can make the process easier.

CXO: How important is globalization to the wider business world? What challenges does it present? How have your solutions helped to overcome these challenges?
ES: The new global economy has resulted in more companies doing business in more languages than ever before. The resulting exponential growth in content translation has become an inefficient management nightmare for many global enterprises. Idiom globalisation management systems provide our customers with a SaaS or on-premise software solution that makes it possible to automate many of the steps in the historically labor intensive translation management process. At the same time, it maximizes the organization’s ability to easily identify and reuse previously translated content.

CXO: Where have you recently experienced growth and where do you expect future growth to come from?
ES: The answer to both those questions is in our On-Demand (SaaS) product line. Translation is normally outsourced to external translation agencies. An outsourced software solution more naturally aligns with the norms in this service-oriented supply chain.

CXO: Have you made any major technological developments recently? Do you have any new developments in the pipeline?
ES: Yes and yes. We've made major advances in global terminology management. This is the ability to identify and reuse industry or company -specific terms that must be translated the same way all of the time. Historically, editors and reviewers had to get involved to ensure consistent translation of these terms. Now, our software can help our customers to identify the correct translation for these terms and phrases and enforce their correct use. In the future, we’re going to we’re going to focusing very heavily on collaboration throughout the translation supply chain.

CXO: What do you consider to be the most important features of a successful GMS system? What are the main difficulties involved in their development?
ES: The key really is having the right mix of linguistic technologies, business process management and automation. Being particularly strong in any one area while being weak in another will inevitably lead to problems. Our success has largely resulted from our ability to strike the right balance between these areas. It’s also been a major benefit that our solutions are scalable on both price and performance. It allows them to be utilized by corporations of all sizes.

CXO: Will solutions such as yours always require human input or do you envisage a time when the entire process can be automated?
ES: The human touch will always be required. Language is simply too complex and nuanced to ever be 100 percent automated. Our vision is to free people them from any and all steps in the translation and localisation process that do not require human thought or art. We’ll make our software do the rest.