McElroy Operations Manager Kim Vitray was pleased to organize and host the 8th Annual Conference of the Translation Company Division of the American Translators Association in San Antonio, TX, on July 26-29, in her role as Administrator of the Division. The event drew 89 attendees from around the world, including visitors from Guatemala, Canada, Argentina, Singapore, Mexico, Peru, Germany, Netherlands Antilles, and New Zealand. We were especially pleased to have ATA President Marian Greenfield with us for the conference.

Our Thursday evening banquet was a thoroughly Texas affair, with barbecue and all the trimmings. Guests were invited to wear their boots and 10-gallon hats for the occasion, and you can see from the accompanying photo that our friends from Gold Sponsor Beetext entered fully into the spirit of things!

Conference sessions this year focused on workflow tools and project management. Presenters and topics included:

• Ann Macfarlane, former president of ATA, “Leadership in Translation and in Life”
• Ben Sargent, Common Sense Advisory, “The TMS Explosion: 15 Translation Management System Scorecards”
• Lauren Peters, PetersGroup Public Relations, “Communicating about Your Business”
• Michael Airaudi, PM Mentors, “Project Management—The Basics”
• Charles Campbell, spanishbackoffice SA, “Using PMI to Advance PM Training and Enhance Company Profits”
• André Hudon, MultiCorpora, “The Next Step in Translation Project Management Automation”
• Tomasz Mróz and Andrzej Nedoma, XTRF Management System, “XTRF—Global Management System for Translation Agencies”
• Ellen Miller, TEAM Performance, “Going the Extra Mile—Customer Service That Delights”

• Marian Greenfield, ATA President, and Rina Ne’eman, Hebrew Language Services, “Public Relations and Your Bottom Line: A Review of the ATA PR Initiative”
• Tim Mora, American Society for Quality, “Applying Six Sigma/ ISO 9000 in Small Business Today”
• Kim Vitray, McElroy Translation, and Beatriz Bonnet, Syntes Language Group, “The ASTM Translation Standard: Why Should You Care?”
• Bryan Montpetit, Beetext, “Beetext FLOW—Project Efficiency Solution”
• Elham Attarpour, The Language Technology Center, “ LTC Worx—The Next Generation Workflow Tool for the Language Industry”

On Friday evening, a group of attendees participated in an optional activity: Tex-Mex at Rio Rio Cantina. Everyone enjoyed traditional tex-mex food and ice-cold margaritas down on San Antonio’s festive Riverwalk.

Our Saturday morning keynote event was a panel discussion of workflow tool vendors moderated by Ben Sargent of Common Sense Advisory. Participants were representatives from across Systems, Beetext, Idiom Technologies, The Language Technology Centre, MultiCorpora, SDL International, and XTRF Management System (see photo). Having recently published detailed research on translation management systems, and the day before having presented that research to conference attendees, Ben probed the vendors with both specific questions prepared in advance and spontaneous questions from the audience. A quite lively session ensued! To give you a feel for the information discussed, following are the prepared questions:

• We see four types of buyers in the market: (1) medium-large LSPs (over $5M); (2) small LSPs (under $5M); department-level buyers (enterprise and government); and (4) IT organizations (enterprise and government). How do you see the market, and which buyer types are you targeting with your product features? How do your support packages reflect different buyer types?
• Many LSPs view TMS solutions as “ERP for translation agencies.” Yet many of these systems handle limited file types, or calculate cost and effort for limited task types. For instance, word counts are calculated but not DTP and PM costs. Furthermore, many or most LSPs are true “translation agencies” with some portion of their workload falling outside the boundaries of “localization” per se, work where there may be no ability to control the format or authoring process for the source documents. How much of a company’s work process is encompassed by your system, and how do you plan to support “ERP for translation agencies” (not just “localization agencies”) in the future?
• There is a lot of talk on both the client and localization vendor sides about “integration,” both at the technical level and the conceptual level. What kinds of partnerships do you see emerging in the language services space, and how do your products enable new and evolving approaches to integration at the conceptual level? How do you avoid the common technology vendor’s trap of automating your vision instead of enabling multiple competing visions of how the marketplace should evolve?

This year’s conference closed with a free night out on Saturday and a leisurely breakfast Sunday morning, before everyone returned home. We are still collecting feedback about the event, but preliminary comments were “The choice of speakers and exhibitors brought new dimensions to management and translation,” and “It was a great conference…. The different technology companies in the same room were amazing.”

The TCD is extremely grateful to its conference sponsors, exhibitors, and advertisers:

• 1-Stop Translation USA
• across Systems
• Beetext
• GALA
• Idiom Technologies
• Journyx
• The Language Technology Centre
• LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell
• Lido-Lang Technical Translations/XTRF Management System
• Lighthouse Translations
• MultiCorpora
• MultiLingual Computing
• ProZ.com
• Rina Ne’eman Hebrew Language Services, Inc.
• SDL International
• spanishbackoffice SA
• Taylor & Francis
• Washington Management Group

We also appreciate the support of:

• Assistant Administrator Ellen Boyar, of Thomson Scientific
• ATA Chapter and Division Relations Manager Jamie Padula and Webmaster Roshan Pokharel
• Our speakers, for their generous contributions of time, effort, and expertise
• Our set-up volunteers, including translator Antoinette Sixt-Ruth and her husband, translator John Vazquez, Charles Campbell of spanishbackoffice SA, and Alice Doosey and Yasuko Sato of Thomson Scientific
• Susan Andrus of McElroy Translation, for design and layout of flyers, signs, and the conference program