A short impression of the 7th TAUS QE Summit held October, 2015 at eBay (San Jose, California).

We live in a connected world. Data, profiles and preferences are shared to shape new goods  and services. Social media, histories, cookies, playlists and GPS location information dominate the cyber landscape. And data is king. It gives you all the answers. The challenge for business today is to ask the right questions. Business Intelligence is starting to catch on in the translation industry, and with good reason — transforming data into actionable information yields business benefits and helps stakeholders make informed decisions. How can you use your data efficiently? What stats do you want to see on your reports? What data points do you need to track to make sure the right quality is delivered by your vendor? How do you benchmark and how do you link quality evaluation data to KPIs in the long run?

Similar questions were addressed on the 14th of October at the 7th TAUS Translation Quality Evaluation Summit hosted by eBay in San Jose. The participants discussed various topics including the challenges of non-conventional content, business intelligence, quality assessment of vendors and MT benchmarking. The sixty participants had a busy day and six topics to tackle, but there was an awesome vibe in the room and the networking potential was unbeatable. We had fun but worked hard towards a common end: to define best practices and reach consensus on the different topics. The productive day came to an end with a climax during the six breakout sessions when we discussed, reasoned and shared our experience on the various topics and let our voices be heard in a more unorderly fashion.

After the welcoming words of Malcolm Ishida (eBay) and Jaap van der Meer (TAUS), Attila Görög shared the TAUS DQF roadmap and explained the benefits of a new TAUS service: the TAUS Quality Dashboard. The industry-shared platform enables users to measure and benchmark translation quality and productivity integrating with major CAT and TMS environments and offering live reporting. The introductory talks were followed by six panel sessions where session leaders and discussants shared their experiences on various approaches to QE.

The introductory talks were followed by the first session, which focused on translation quality in  agile workflows. The session was led by Sofia Pessanha from Unbabel. She wanted to discover how companies can tackle hyper-fast localization turnarounds and still offer the required quality to their user base. In the second session, Tom Shaw (Capita) and his discussants gave interesting insights on how they think data, which is omnipresent in the translation industry, can best be employed for the benefit of not only the company itself but its customers and users.

A very different topic, but still in the realms of translation quality, was proposed by Sonia Oliveira (Zynga) who interviewed her panelists on the methods they’ve been using to ensure the right level of quality for non-conventional content like games or movies. The question of business intelligence from topic one also came up in the context of machine translation engines in the fourth session just before the lunch break. In this session JP Barraza, together with his session members, introduced new ways machine translation engines can be evaluated and benchmarked to offer interested customers a clear view on MT quality. More specific data, for example, like quality evaluation results and scores as input for business intelligence was also discussed in the session after the break. In this session Sabine Rioufol (eBay) and her colleagues from the industry explained the different benefits of tracking and using evaluation data to monitor vendor performance and training vendors to provide the expected quality.

The objectives of the QE Summit are to lay out strategies, raise awareness of industry dynamics, and where possible, agree to share and take collaborative actions. Participants discuss relevant topics, recommend best practices and outline collaboration plans between industry and academia. The breakout sessions provide opportunity for networking and interaction. Make sure you join us at the TAUS QE Summits next year hosted by Microsoft (Dublin, June) and by Intel (Portland, October).