Photo: Tiago and Edu competing in a beauty pageant.
Someone compared the evolution of the cycling industry with the localization industry, and no one from the audience or the panel of speakers got the question – maybe the gentlemen was speaking about the translation process cycle?
All-In Translations’ Operations Manager Tiago Aprigio and Terminology Manager Edu Ferrer do their best to transcreate what happened when they travelled to LocWorld34 in Barcelona – “the leading conference for international business, translation, localization and global website management”.

Photo: Tiago and Edu displaying LOCWorld badges
There was a Facebook guy in the house, and he addressed the panel with queries regarding the evolution and disruption of the localization industry over the last decade. Pretty hard to answer such a question coming from one of the most disruptive companies in the world over the same period that actually disrupted the localization industry itself by allowing users to actively participate in the translation of their website. This took place during one of the more crowded sessions, Where Do I Go to Keep Up with the Ever-changing Localization Industry?, where keynote speakers presented an overview of some of the main channels and showed the audience how they work, how they report, what’s in store and how the industry at large can help.
We’ve specifically written this introductory note to highlight that the 34^th LocWorld aimed to impact a wider audience. Thus we had the rewarding opportunity to meet LSP’s, end clients and localization software providers.
As one would expect, the conference was packed with interesting talks and open discussions about various topics, mainly trying to answer questions about software, the evolution of machine translation, quality assessment best practices, key processes and the importance of C-level localization professionals in companies worldwide. We just heard a GO PRO representative sharing their thoughts! Will we be seeing someone from Google?
Yep, the kickoff day of the conference was amazing in terms of getting a grasp of what’s really happening in the localization world. We dropped by some booths, put some faces to the names, met a lot of cool new people, and even took some silly photos with Translators without Borders. We were just trying to get hold of their “best photo” prize…, and we were told to get properly dressed as to become the most handsome “sevilanas” in the room. No prize landed over our heads though. We cannot help wondering why.

Photo: Enjoying la vida loca at LOCWorld in Barcelona
There was an interesting “contest” going on. Some sort of a Shark Tank for disruptive/process innovation ideas in the industry. The contesters were Mr. Zhang, Mr. Zhao and four Europeans. Does it come as a surprise that #AsianLevel was shortlisted for the final?
By the way, Mr. Zhang works for Microsoft, and during his presentation he used an iPhone to demo his (brilliant) piece of disruptive localization software, #WhereisLumia?
He presented us with a bot that can be plugged in Skype/FB Messenger and other APPs and translate whatever we write in a split of a second.
This bot can automatically translate whatever you type in any desired language. You can send your message in real time to the user on the other side and he’ll be able to see it in their language of choice. No we’re not kidding! This proves awesome for Tinder users that are not fluent in the same language but want to spread love worldwide. #boom
Buzzwords are all over the place. #change #innovation #disruption #improvement #experience.
Andreas Ekström is a name to look out for. What a smart, engaging and interesting speaker. To our taste, he delivered the best #LocWorld34 session – The big 5 and the digital revolution. To get a grasp of his session, just watch the below video:

We take our technology for granted these days, and we live in an interconnected world where visitors become customers and customers become followers, brand enthusiasts, ambassadors and fans. But, is there a latent danger in this technophile landscape? According to Andreas, our humanity gets more or less twisted when we start buying a power adapter that costs €79, or getting a sleeping bag outside of a shop to be one of the first buyers to acquire an overpriced device.

Photo: Andreas Ekström doing his magic act 
EBay, Linkedin, Intuit and GetYourGuide were also well represented. As an LSP, it is of great value to understand client needs and tweak our operations according to market demand. “Quality at the Speed on Now” was an open debate about how these companies approach localization in the digital era, presenting us with their processes, internal adaptations and how to design a competent quality model in a continuous delivery environment. Definitely some food for thought.
Electronic Arts delivered, alongside Booking.com, Moravia and Legacy Starwoods Resorts and Hotels a great session about data driven globalization. The gaming side of things is interesting for All-In Translations since the processes and customer experience are highly related to the ones of our clients. Strategic decisions are taken according to market demands but also according to language and world events. EA Sports gave us an example of a game that was not launched in Japan due to the fact that the game story was closely matching the recent (back then) Hiroshima nuclear accident. Tapped out is the Simpsons game where Homer caused a meltdown in the local nuclear power plant and our mission is to rebuild the city. The localization of the game into Japanese had thus to be cancelled.

Photo: EA Sports discussing the continuous delivery environment 

Photo: The Simpsons game that proved too similar to local realities in Japan
To wrap it up, some thoughts about BiCrawler.
One of the contestants in the Process Innovation Challenge was Jose Juan, a guy that presented us with this piece of freeware that is able to crawl any website and create a translation memory out of it. That’s quite remarkable and also pretty scary. We’ve asked Jose about the legality of this practice, and were assured that, exactly like Google is crawling all web pages, this software does the same — an activity that is 100% legal. (But wait, it just kind of copies all the content and uses it from translation memories not caring about copyrights??) We are still puzzled with the practice but can’t deny the usefulness… if it’s really legal.
That’s all folks from this LocWorld34 in Barcelona. Hope you enjoyed our brief glimpse into how things were there, and we promise to follow this huge event next year as well.
¡Adiós!