I’m so pleased to be newly part of the Gengo sales team! For my current and future globalization friends and partners, I wanted to say a word about why I made the move from long-time translation services buyer to representing Gengo.

I’ve been on the customer side of localization for 15+ years, with Documentum, EMC, Yahoo! and most recently Glassdoor, where I was responsible for launching their first international sites, which have a great deal of user-generated content.

As a past Gengo customer, several trends caught my attention.  (I beg indulgence from G11N friends reading this who have heard me continually obsessing on these points over the past year):

“Translation everywhere”

Gengo is just one example in a trend where we see the globalization space being entered by brilliant technology entrepreneurs who do not have an artisanal linguistics background – they are driven by the ideal of creating hugely scalable, very affordable globalization technology and services, that will eventually make “translation everywhere” a true reality.

We’re going to see these entrepreneurs partnering with linguistics people, but with a technology and platform-enablement perspective.

Scalable human translation

The combination of crowd-sourced “translation with a human voice” plus technology that enables massive scale, speed and predictable quality, is a powerful way to fill the current gap between high-quality traditional localization and the ultimate promise of MT. Most industry experts I talk with see MT perfection as at least 15 or so years out, with serious post-editing still required for some time.

Crowd-sourced human translation bridges that gap, in an SEO-friendly way, and again helps us collectively toward the “translation everywhere” vision.

Affordable globalization

The affordability of Gengo floored me when I first became aware of it as a potential customer. I admit I was skeptical at first, and I understand that Gengo is somewhat disruptive in the industry. But it is a valuable and inevitable disruption. In order for translation to be everywhere, with the vast amount of content that still remains to be translated (think social, UGC, video, audio, big data…), there has to be a way to do the mass translation inexpensively. MT is a huge part of the solution, and so is mass-crowdsourcing, for the reasons mentioned above.

Facilitating translator growth

The translation pie is very big. So much content is out there waiting to be translated. The number of crowd-sourcing resources has to be huge for this all to work. There are not enough professional translators for all the potential content that should be translated. So we need to make the translation tools and process simple enough to draw in lay bilinguals to help increase the pool, and scalably teach and grow them toward the pro-level.

The simplicity of Gengo achieves this. It also makes it very easy for professional translators to drop in whenever they have free time from their more complex jobs, even from their phones, so that they can supplement their current incomes, which is a good thing.

These are the reasons I felt inspired by Gengo as a customer, and why I am so glad to be here today as part of the team. And as part of an industry that is really making something extraordinary happen. Translation is finally really part of mainstream business thinking, and we are all – whether customers, technology makers, LSPs, freelancers, crowdsourcers or whatever other new participants come along – together really changing the world.

Go global with Gengo’s people-powered translation platform.

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