Change as opportunity – A look at the future of language services

As part of the GALA Localization Forum, Christian Schwendy and other industry representatives discussed “Engaging the Community – Empower Stakeholders and Improve ROI” on 12 November 2014 at the tekom annual conference in Stuttgart.

The panel discussion centred on current and coming changes in worldwide communications and the resulting opportunities and risks for language service providers as well as the question of what role language service providers will play in the future. Christian Schwendy, Managing Director and owner of Gemino GmbH, who is also the Vice President of Elia, shared the stage with Veronique Ozkaya (Xplanation) and Robert Etches (TextMinded). The panel discussion was moderated by Tea Dietterich (2M Language Services).

The participants were of a mind that what will be demanded of language service providers in coming years will change drastically, and that adding new services and technologies to their portfolios will be of great importance strategically. Of course, there were varying opinions on the speed at which these changes will occur. In the end, every company will have to decide for itself whether the shift will take place at the speed of evolution or revolution.

In the panellists’ opinions, the greatest changes can be expected in the type, format, and scope of the content to be translated, as well as in technical possibilities. In practice, with the availability of appropriate infrastructures, there are already models in play (such as translation crowdsourcing) which only a few years ago would have been unthinkable.

“For us, every change is a huge opportunity,” says Christian Schwendy. “Every customer is unique with regard to their products, foreign-language communication needs, corporate structure and budget. Our task is, and in the future will be all the more, to provide for each of our customers the right mix of services from amongst all available language services and technologies. Only in this way will it be possible to fulfil individual requirements through the efficient application of the respective budget.”

As exciting as developments may be in the future, language service providers will have to—and moreover, want to—adapt: only with flexibility, boldness, and vision will language service providers be able to stay a successful course for the future.