TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society, recently conducted a survey on what it costs the translation industry to work with systems that don’t talk to each other easily:
Report on a TAUS research about translation interoperability
Thirty-seven percent of the 111 respondents to our survey think that the lack of interoperability costs their business more than 10% of their total translation budget (or revenue in case of the service providers). Twenty-five percent say it costs them more than 20%. Only nine percent think it costs them less than 5% of their translation budgets. Forty-three percent of the respondents don’t know exactly how much it costs them. It is clear though that the lack of interoperability costs the industry a fortune. We are talking about the industry’s failure to exchange translation memories and terminology in a standard format, and to integrate translation software with content and document management systems.
