Marie and Burckhardt at GALA New York
Premise
Once a year, Industry professionals get together for the Globalization and Localization Association Conference (GALA), one of the largest conferences in the industry with over 400 attendees. This year, the conference took place in New York. On the second evening, as the conference reached its peak, GALA hosted its much anticipated Film Fest in the Academy Awards tradition. This event has become a fun conference ritual and is attended by many translation and localization enthusiasts. And we are proud to announce that our team won an award...
Rules
Companies from around the world have the opportunity to present who they are in a creative 1 minute video. No exceptions! Better be fast, witty and funny. And avoid anything too "commercial"...
Concept
This year's video is a complete departure from the deep "state of the matter" video we shot last year, in pure Wes Anderson style and with some interesting puns on machine translation. This year was all about fun and, as it turns out, not only do we have one of the most diverse teams in the industry, we also have a musically talented one! The BeatBabel team leaves their daily task behind and everyone picks up an instrument to sing their troubles away. All instruments and vocals were performed and recorded by BeatBabel team members on one winter afternoon! Mixing took a bit longer... This year's challenge: Sting's original song uses quite a long intro and a slow tempo so we had to up the beat to fit it all in 1 minute!
Lyrics, in case you want to sing along ;-)
Woke up to a Studio service pack,
Silent treatment from Support.
It seems the vendor did not send the package back,
Now my PC doesn't want to work...
Word counts, CAT tools are our daily grind,
Cheaper, faster is the trend.
Don't mind the struggle but sometimes we need a change...
Book a business trip to New York!
French, Italian, Dutch and Argentinean,
We are LSPs in New York.
Russian, Japanese, German and Brazilian,
We are GALA members in New York!
Slang used in the video...
A few crazy acronyms that are used daily in our industry:
- LSP: Language Service Provider. Basically, how we call ourselves in the industry.
- GALA: The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) is the world's leading trade association for the language industry.
- CAT Tools: Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools software such as Studio, MemoQ, XTM... Those tools help translators and linguists increase translation productivity.
- Studio: The #1 CAT tool or translation software in the industry. SDL Studio has the biggest market share but is well known for its constant service packs and the lack of a support team from the SDL customer service team. Its biggest competitor is currently MemoQ.
- Package: Translators cannot directly work in complex source format, so files are prepared in translation software such as Studio or MemoQ before being sent out to them. The files translators work with are referred to as translation "packages", which include bilingual file format, glossaries, translation memories, all compressed in one ZIP.
A few more that are not mentioned in the video but always get us weird, puzzled looks:
- L10n: we like lions and cats in our industry but this acronym is the short way of saying localization. From the starting L to the ending N, you will find 10 letters in the word hence L10n.
- GILT: Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation.
- MLV – Multi-Language Vendor meaning a translation agency which supports many language combinations. SLV - Single Language Vendor: smaller agency or freelance translator who focuses on one language pair.
- FIGS - nothing to do with the fruit. Short for French, Italian, German and Spanish.
CCJK - Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, Korean.