The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2022 - 32

GEEKSPEAK By Jost Zetzsche
Selling Data
In 2004, I started a company with Donna Parrish, one of the co-owners
and co-organizers of the LocWorld conferences (https://locworld.com),
called TM Marketplace. The idea behind the company was to facilitate the
leasing of translation memories (TMs) between parties. These TMs could
either be used for traditional TM lookup services or as training material
for the then-blossoming statistical machine translation (MT) engines. The
company didn't survive very long, but I mention this here because I want
to tell you a story connected with it.
O
32 The ATA Chronicle | May/June 2022
ne of the underlying
ideas of allowing
partners and even
competitors to use TMs is
that it really is in everyone's
interest. Localizing a firstof-its-kind
product in a
given language market
involves a steep investment,
especially with terminology
that has to be researched
and coined. The leasing of
those materials to others
might allow the leasing
party to recoup some of
that investment, but, more
importantly, it might also
give them a certain amount
of power and prestige
because their terminology
would likely be used without
highly company-specific or
trademarked terms. Plus,
because product owners
believe their products
compare favorably with the
competition, it only makes
sense to have everyone use
similar terminology to create
a more even playing field.
At a LocWorld conference
in 2005, the heads of the
translation divisions of SAP
and Oracle were present.
SAP had just announced
they were about to release a
Vietnamese version of their
flagship product. While SAP
and Oracle are very different
companies, their core
products are rather similar.
(In fact, if you read through
their Wikipedia pages, the
description of their range of
products is almost word-forword
the same).
Of course, I saw this as
a great opportunity for TM
Marketplace. It seemed a
no-brainer to me that SAP
would be more than willing
to use our services so their
data could be leased to
Oracle and other partners
and competitors.
I was essentially laughed
out of the room by the
SAP representative-who
asked why in the world
they would ever do that.
The Oracle representative,
while acknowledging that
they were indeed gearing up
for their own Vietnamese
localization, also just shook
his head at my naivety. That
simply wasn't how things
were done!
This column has two goals: to inform the community about technological advances and encourage the use and appreciation of
technology among translation professionals.
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The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2022

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