Andovar Globalization: Andovar Blog

Localization is the Name of the Game

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:40:00 +1300

PC and console best-seller Modern Warfare 3, released in November 2011, earned $750m USD in its first five days. By way of comparison, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the current record-holder for the fastest-selling film, clocked up just $169m of ticket sales on its first weekend (Source). The gaming industry is big and it’s growing. Fast.

As a comprehensive localization solutions provider, Andovar has also seen tremendous growth in demand for gaming globalization services, and we have made a special effort to stay at the cutting edge of the business by building out a specialized game localization division and testing lab, as well as investing in relevant gaming conferences and development organizations. It’s a labor of love and it requires an investment in terms of time and relationships to ensure that we keep ahead of best localization practices for our gaming clients.

Games Connection Paris 2011

Early in December 2011, we attended Game Connection in Paris, one of the world’s largest events for computer gaming professionals. We met with many European game developers, publishers, and distributors and we saw some emerging (or expanding) lines of thought in regard to game localization.

There were a few areas where we found most interest fuelled by recent trends:

Ever heard of Angry Birds? Actually, the game was a failure in English-speaking markets at first and only thanks to focusing on smaller countries did it reach the critical mass that made it the success that it is. The moral of the story: it is much easier to be a big fish in a small pond and localization into minor languages can bring your game to new markets with a splash.
Latin American and Asian game industries are growing rapidly and poised for accelerated growth in coming years both as markets and as developers of games. From a localization perspective, we anticipate that use of English as a pivot language will shift as demand for other source languages - and for specialized resources – continues to grow.
Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) continue to rise in popularity and publishers often reach to developers from emerging markets to acquire new titles at good values. The sheer volume of content for such games, combined with the use of origination languages other than English, poses a special challenge for global distribution when time-to-market is a critical element of a game’s competitiveness.

What Does This All Mean to Andovar and Our Clients?

At Andovar, we’ve always kept a global perspective on our business – both from perspectives of global resources and global client markets – as well as a holistic approach to the way our services are rendered and integrated. The goal is to simplify localization for our clientele, which we seek to achieve in the following ways:

Removing the stress of localization process management by integrating value-added services that match client needs. In the particular case of gaming, this usually means handling large volumes of translation and file engineering for in-game content and UI, as well as voice acting and testing.
Offering the best possible fit and value to our customers by having production centers in different but complementary regions. Specifically, we do the bulk of our work from Southeast Asia (Bangkok, Thailand) and Latin America (Medellín, Colombia), both of which plug into global resources that match the development pattern seen in game localization.
Keeping game localization specialists in-house, and investing in their further development. This is crucial to delivering on the industry’s needs with competitiveness and time-efficiency – all without giving up the artistic element of successful game adaptation into multiple languages.

On Continuing Participation in Game Conferences

We see that relevant knowledge is critical to building suitable processes and resources. Events such as Game Connection help us build our knowledge and reputation in the exciting and fast-growing gaming industry. We look forward to meeting more of our customers and peers at game conferences in the future, and we will continue to develop our team in a way that will support accelerating growth in this specialized market.

To learn about Andovar and our experience, and to see how those might plug and play with your needs, please contact us for a free initial consultation.

Source: Localization is the Name of the Game

Bangkok Flood Update - Andovar Thailand is Fully Operational

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:33:00 +1300

Dear Friends and Clients of Andovar:

As many of you have no doubt heard and seen in the news, Bangkok has been beset by serious flooding that has indeed impacted many parts of the city. As friends and customers, you also know that we have a major production facility in Bangkok and so we want to take this moment to give you an update on where things stand with particular focus on our offices and business continuity.

The answer to your first question is: YES, we are dry and fully operational.

Please feel free to read below for greater detail.

The Flooding Situation in General

To summarize, the floods coming across Bangkok are largely the result of massive amounts of water coming down from Northern Thailand, which reposits most of the country’s water for the dry season throughout the course of the year through a national reservoir system. The reservoirs were overfilled to the point that there is no choice but to allow the water to roll through the country – including Bangkok, which is situated in Central Thailand. Thailand’s natural slope has always sent water through this path, but not usually in such great volumes as to flood the nation’s capitol.

The core challenges come on many fronts:

Control the flow of water to minimize damage and maximize safety as best possible;
Protect critical areas to ensure business continuity;
Provide assistance to the affected population in terms of supplies and potable water; and
Manage collateral damage as best possible, including the emergence of different types of wild life or diseases we might not normally be exposed to.

We sympathize deeply with affected families and businesses. This situation has indeed caused different types of disruptions for business and for day-to-day life for many residents of the Kingdom of Thailand. At the same time, we have seen a resilience that, we believe, is a resounding and inspiring characteristic of the Thai people and we’re proud to be here.

Having said all of this, we believe that some international reporting fails to report the whole situation and is focuses solely on the elements of disaster. To watch CNN, one would be led to believe that the entire city is under 6 feet of water. The situation is very serious, but the fact is that many parts of the city are still operational and reasonably expect to remain in operation.

Where Andovar Stands

At Andovar Bangkok, we are still dry and operational with all studios, project management, localization engineering and graphic integration personnel operating at full capacity. We believe this will continue to be the case for the following reasons:

We are located in a part of the city near a major canal, Khlong Saen Saep, which is being carefully managed to prevent overflow into parts of the city that are critical to business continuity.
Water will have to flow ACROSS Khlong Saen Saep before reaching our district, or it must overflow in our specific area. Water levels as of now are surprisingly low in Khlong Saen Saep, and we are reasonably certain that it can be managed to prevent overflow in this particular district.
We are many districts away from Bangkok’s main river, the Chao Phraya. We are reasonably certain that overflow will not make it quite this far.

Unfortunately, some of our staff have been affected in their residence and have had to relocate their families to higher ground. However, staff absenteeism is at a minimum and Andovar is exploring ways to lend support.

Ensuring Business Continuity: Global Business Structure + The Cloud

Although we are reasonably certain that Andovar Bangkok will remain safe and dry, we must of course ensure business continuity for the sake of our clients, and for the sake of our own bottom line. The following are steps we have in place to prevent work stoppages from affecting our project deliveries and client support work:

Andovar has multiple offices around the globe with systems and data management protocols configured to ensure that we can immediately hand-off functions from on-site to another. This structure was originally established to support a round-the-clock service model, but the infrastructure nonetheless supports global handoffs.
We primarily run our business functions and project management systems in the “Cloud”. Our global network (wholly owned by Andovar Global) include our offices in Asia, Australia and the Americas. Many functions can also be executed from home offices through VPN or secure web access where appropriate.
Our staff is cross-trained to ensure that we can provide mutual support in multiple disciplines where needed

Although this is indeed a critical time for Thailand, we want to assure each and all of our customers – both current and prospective- that Andovar is committed to providing stable and professional support. No matter which of our services you use (Localization, Multimedia, Content Writing, Global SEO or Language Tech Advisory), we are thinking many moves ahead to ensure that you will continue to enjoy the good standard of service and quality to which you are accustomed.

Thanks all for your ongoing support and patronage. Please feel free to like us on Facebook or subscribe to our Twitter feed if you’d like to be apprised of our periodic updates.

Sincerely,

Andovar Global

Source: Bangkok Flood Update - Andovar Thailand is Fully Operational

Machine Translation: Where is it now, and where is it headed?

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:31:00 +1200

The rise of Google Translate has been a double-edged sword for purveyors of Machine Translation systems. On the one hand, it’s brought mass awareness that MT can offer acceptable quality for certain purposes, and that MT quality for gisting is significantly better than in the past. At the same time, it’s fed expectations that MT is both free of charge and improving every year.

Two announcements from Google over the past year are set to change the game. Firstly, Andreas Zollman of Google Translate admitted that its brute force method of indexing the world’s content was unlikely to yield much better translations. Having already captured as much as 10% of the available bilingual data in some languages, their results showed that doubling the volume of training data typically yielded a quality improvement of just 0.5% -- so Google could not significantly increase quality just through data volume. Secondly came the announcement that the Google Translate API would be shut down due to “abuse of terms” – shortly followed by their decision to make it a paid service.

Industry blogs such as Common Sense Advisory’s Global Watchtower initially asserted that Google’s goal was to enter the paid MT space, but Andovar’s MT partner, AsiaOnline, makes a more convincing case that it is a strategic move to avoid polluting the internet with uncontrolled and unidentified MT. You can read the analysis of AsiaOnline’s CEO, Dion Wiggins here.

What does this mean for the advancement of MT going forward?

Further improvements in quality will come down to customization and domain specialization rather than Google’s brute force methodology.

The perception of “MT is free” will fade as it is understood that the extra quality of customized, domain specialized MT is worth paying for.

MT companies will receive additional investment as the specter of competing with Google’s free translation services fades

At Andovar we expect that, over the coming decade, MT with human post editing will become increasingly important as a cheaper alternative to professional human translation plus editing in those subject domains which are less quality sensitive or more intrinsically suited to MT.

Key Unknowns and Trends to Watch

How will users accept Machine Translation solutions?

It has always been hard to judge the acceptability and utility of lower-than-professional quality translations, whether it is raw MT or human post edited work. In the context of searching for information, such as legal discovery or engineers looking for technical solutions, practice has shown that there is wide tolerance. But it is unknown whether consumers of mass market applications will show similar tolerance. Will online gamers accept in-game chat that works most of the time? Will tourists seeking facts on a destination gravitate to a site that is comprehensive and up to date, but translated with MT over a local site with perfect language but far less data? It’s likely that much will depend on the language and market size. MT quality is certainly higher in some languages, but competition from and availability of native language applications may be a stronger indicator. When the choice for users is between reading usable MT and reading English that has been forgotten since schooldays, MT looks more attractive.

Which applications and subjects are best suited to MT?

At this point in time, MT companies are universally bad in identifying up front which applications are not likely to be suited to MT, preferring to couch any reservations in disclaimers and vague advice about greater volumes of training data providing better results.

For MT usage to penetrate further into the everyday world, MT companies need to be more adept at identifying what is less likely to be a successful deployment. Successful MT is based on a complex blend of factors such as terminology, available training data, tolerance/acceptance of errors by end users, complexity and length of typical grammatical constructions, and feedback/improvement cycles. A traditional caveat toward MT is that its success is inversely proportional to the hype that promotes it; but clearer methods of appraising suitability are sorely needed.

How will the improvement curve change?

Statistical MT has breathed new life into MT. Decades of frustration with rules-based systems were replaced by a new optimism as SMT yielded a higher quality of more natural-sounding general purpose translation that could be seen by every internet user.

Now that MT is evolving into a more complex and hybrid mixture of techniques and domain specializations, will we see the same dramatic improvements as in recent years or will we revert to the "not in my lifetime" expectations of the recent past?

Conclusion

Despite all the improvements, machine translation solutions are still a long way off being a viable replacement for human translators in most mainstream usages, but they have proved their worth in enough real world situations that every Language Service Provider should be able to assess MT viability rather than rejecting it out of hand.

If you want to learn more about MT and the various workflow permutations that might make it viable for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.

Source: Machine Translation: Where is it now, and where is it headed?

Andovar Makes the Hot 100 for eLearning

Tue, 31 May 2011 17:31:00 +1200

Andovar is proud to announce that we have made the global list of Top 100 Highest Ranking Websites in eLearning, Training and Development.

Why are we so proud?

First of all, Andovar has long worked to position itself as a leading provider of eLearning localization solutions. We offer fully integrated services that include:

Translation for a wide range of subject area specialties in over 80 languages
Desktop Publishing in every major eLearning application
Comprehensive studio services, including lip-synch voiceover, dubbing subtitling and much more in over 60 languages
Multimedia Integration to bring every element of compelling eLearning modules to your multilingual marketplace

Packaging these services together into a comprehensive solution is just one part of Andovar's value proposition. And getting the word out in a highly competitive marketplace is a serious challenge.

In addition to providing these services in accordance with international quality standards, Andovar employs an offshore production system that ensures highly competitive rates while maintaining service centers in cities that support our client markets. It's the best of both worlds in terms of service and value.

Another reason we're proud to make this list is that it reflects well on our Globalized e-Marketing Advisory and Content Creation service lines. Identifying relevant keywords and writing quality content that helps to earn such rankings is another service Andovar offers; if it works for us, it's good evidence that it will work for our clientele. In any language.

For more information about Andovar's eLearning localization solutions or e-Marketing advisory services, please don't hesitate to contact us. Whether to chat over ideas or to provide you with added punch in your globalization efforts, we'd love to help.

Source: Andovar Makes the Hot 100 for eLearning

Andovar Relocates Americas Offices from Argentina to Colombia

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 06:42:00 +1200

Andovar is pleased to announce the expansion of its global operation into Medellin, Colombia.

This geographic expansion has been put in place strategically to enable Andovar to improve its services for the Americas. Our Colombian facilities will enable Andovar to continue offering highly competitive services through a combination of offshore production and intelligent project management paired with professional translators with subject area expertise that work wherever in the world they are best found.

The Andovar model ensures the competitive pricing, flexible solutions and consistently high levels of quality that Andovar has come to be known for, with working hours that better mirror our largest client market, the U.S. Additionally, this will enable key members of Andovar’s project management team to meet with U.S. clients on a more regular basis.

The Region & The Reason

Andovar has had a presence in South America since 2008 with offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina from which we were able to build strong regional resources for content creation, localization and project management. However, high rates of inflation (projected to be 30% in US Dollar terms for 2011) and other barriers to foreign investment made Argentina an increasingly less hospitable environment from which to run a competitive business. Simultaneously, Andovar’s emphasis on leveraging cloud-based technologies enables us to make geographic decisions with relative ease.

Considering the above, and with an outlook on long-term growth and competitiveness, Andovar started vetting alternative cities for our regional HQ early in 2010. Here’s what we were able to learn about Colombia through our own research and with the excellent assistance of ProExport, Colombia’s agency in charge of promoting Colombian trade, tourism and foreign investment:

The people of Medellin have long been known for their entrepreneurial spirit, diligence and famous hospitality and, as a Top 100 metropolitan area with over 30 universities and a strong emphasis on English education, Medellin offers breadth and depth in terms of viable staffing resources for both technical and non-technical roles.
Colombia has traditionally maintained an inflation rate under 5%; combined with a significant drop in crime (especially in and around Medellin), it has become a safe and desirable place in which to do business.
Barriers to entry are minimal; requirements for work permits (for international staffing and a globally mobile workforce) are clear and reasonable.
The international community of Medellin is growing rapidly, with expatriates having a high level of education and strong backgrounds in multiple languages. This is most especially true of major European languages, which represent the greater part of the services required by Andovar clientele.
The growing international community also reflects greater breadth of resources for multimedia and studio services such as voiceover, subtitling and localized Flash integration.
Recent investment by global bellwethers such as HP and others contributed to Andovar’s confidence in Medellin as a Latin American business center.
Members of Andovar’s leadership have ties to Colombian business and government, thus enabling a rapid uptake on the establishment of our offices here.
With a very favorable climate, Medellin is known as “The City of the Eternal Spring”. We believe the impact of a good climate in a great city on long-term employee retention will be favorable.
Medellin’s home state, Antioquia, is simply a beautiful part of the world.

The Team

Andovar has an experienced team moving to launch our Colombian operation, including Aoife Cregan, Managing Director of Andovar Americas and Mat Berland, Senior Project Manager at Andovar.

A founding member of the Andovar team, Aoife Cregan brings a tremendous depth of experience in running high level strategy in Andovar’s core service areas of localization and content creation, with additional experience in operations management. Throughout her career, she has been responsible for running global project management teams for major global clients including Yahoo!, Netsuite, Travelocity and many more. As Managing Director of Andovar Americas, Aoife will take charge of the region’s operational considerations while working directly with high profile clients to set strategic inter-organizational workflows that optimize the client experience for Andovar’s customers.

A true polyglot and highly experienced project manager, Mat Berland will take charge as Senior Project Manager tasked with high level management of the regional team of project managers and localization engineers. Mat’s experience on specialized localization engagements for such firms as HP, Disney, HolidayCheck and ProMetric ensure the ability to customize services that meet the specific needs and budgets of our clientele. Mat’s expertise in language technologies, solutions scalability and breadth of experience will ensure smooth workflow and smart capacity planning that will enable Andovar to provide a continuously high level of service as Andovar’s portfolio continues to grow.

Andovar’s Outlook

All in all, we believe that the combination of technically-oriented human resources, favorable geography toward our key markets, and organizational development in a country on the upswing should all contribute to Andovar’s strategies for sustainable growth. Combined with the experienced team we’re putting on the ground as of April 25, 2011 we believe we have all of the ingredient needed in a recipe for success.

If you are interested in learning more about Andovar’s expansion plans, or in becoming a part of our global team, please contact us for more information.

Source: Andovar Relocates Americas Offices from Argentina to Colombia

LISA is Dead... Long Live the Standards!

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:28:00 +1300

The Localization Industry Standards Association (www.lisa.org) recently announced its insolvency and is expected to close down. Andovar has always been a keen proponent of Industry Standards over proprietary tools, but we think this is probably a positive development.

The standards will continue and the subcommittees on their development will move elsewhere. Why the indifference then, to the impending departure of one the oldest associations in the industry?

LISA's main activities in the past decade has been to hold conferences on localization around the world. Most industry veterans agree that there are too many such conferences with GALA, ClientSide News, Localization World and LISA chasing the same attendees. The most recent LISA conference was still pushing the same workshops they advertised ten years ago and the Localization Client list of attendees had barely changed either.

Apart from the endless recycling of workshops among the the closed shop of lecturers and clients, it has always seemed to us that it was a conflict of interest for a standards organization to host for-profit conferences, with said profits going not to LISA but to a related private organization. At the same time the annual subscription fees of over USD $4,000 for “basic corporate memberships” seem extraordinarily high compared to the fees of other industry associations.

With the Localization industry experienced sustained strong growth, we see this as an opportunity for consolidation and restructuring of industry associations. The LISA conferences will go, but the standards will go on.

Source: LISA is Dead... Long Live the Standards!

The Lion, The Weaver and The Weird Valuations

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +1300

How do you create a Language Technology company worth USD $20 million in eight years? Ans: Invest $80 million. Such was the fate of Idiom Technologies, the apparent market leader in Translation Management Systems which sold out to SDL for $21.4 million after receiving combined investment rounds of nearly four times that amount.

More recently SDL acquired Machine Translation vendor Language Weaver for $42.5 million. The Weaver's $12.2M of revenue for the calendar year ending 2009 included a loss of $1.0 million.

Why the massive gulf in valuations? Both companies sold language technology and both companies made losses. The difference lies in perception. And dreams.

TMS is a technology that is hard to define and understand. Even its name has changed over the years, being the technology formerly known as “GMS” or “GCMS”. Whatever the acronym, the TMS promise of automating Translation Management is not easy to grasp and remains difficult in practice to fully realize. The potential valuation of MT, if it can deliver quality, is far higher than the total annual value of the localization industry (more than USD $20 billion). Never mind that MT is a long way from delivering on its promise, just the chance of being part of the dream technology draws valuations that far exceed those of lowly automation software.

Which brings us to the Languages Services Providers. Lionbridge is by some margin the largest LSP with over USD $400 million in annual revenues, growing higher every year. What stratospheric valuation would be placed on the market leader in a fast growing industry?

Since it is listed on the NASDAQ we know the answer: six months of revenues.

This miserable valuation affects the market worth of every LSP that has tried to raise funds. If the market leader is only worth 0.5 times revenues, why would any similar company be worth more? It's not as if Lionbridge always makes losses, it often strings back to back quarters of profit, before the familiar report of losses due to “one time charges” “currency movements” and “restructuring”. Why is our industry leader in such bad shape?

My guess:

The company was built by round after round of mergers. Despite all the restructuring their revenue per employee numbers suggests that there is still more to cut

Lionbridge's approach to technology changes every year. They spend less than 1% of revenues on R&D and did not follow SDL in making many acquisitions of technologies (of course they did not have the cash to do this). They used technology partners then developed their own, then opened that technology to everyone with Geoworkz.com. Seems that they have not settled on a strategy.

Large production operations in China and India have not really cut costs or won new clients. Labor costs in both countries are rising at over 15% per annum and the cultural and practical barriers to efficiency are significant. We don't see that much revenues are being generated in those countries either

Lionbridge has a greater range of services with ambition throughout the content creation cycle. This vision is much harder to implement than rival SDL which tends to offer lower rates and uses its size and ownership of technology as crude but effective weapons

Can Lionbridge solve its problems and be consistently profitable? We hope so, but for now we see the fastest growth in mid sized companies like Andovar who can offer lower rates than Lionbridge while enjoying comfortable profits.

Source: The Lion, The Weaver and The Weird Valuations