Prospectives: Arturo Quintero, Moravia Worldwide

As we celebrate this MultiLingual centenary, I am reminded of two things: how much I personally love our translation and localization industry and how much - or how little, depending on your perspective - it has changed over the past 20 years.

When we founded Moravia almost 20 years ago, roughly at the time of the first MultiLingual issue, we were passionate about languages and passionate about technologies. We wanted to apply our knowledge to help companies succeed in their international expansion and to "make this world a better place" by providing access to technologies and information to people in their own languages. Since at that time we all came from non-English speaking countries, we understood and felt this need even more acutely. This has been our mission ever since.

What do we see ahead? We will continue to focus on excelling in the core service areas. At the same time, I personally see a continuing increase in demand for the following:

• Process optimization services. We will continue with our technology-agnostic approach. We understand our customers want to have a variety of options and look for a flexible and portable technology. We will keep working to understand the many technologies that exist today, and to provide our clients with an unbiased perspective and assistance with utilizing the technology that best meets their needs. We will continue to help optimize clients' processes and implement best practices related to the complete multilingual process.
• Machine translation services. We will continue being at the forefront of utilizing the recent and future advances of machine translation (MT). We believe MT has a potential, and we want to explore it fully. With MT as a managed service, we see a growing demand for providing MT customization, maintenance of system and language assets, as well as standalone MT post-editing services.
• Moravia Language Quality Services (MLQS). We see a rapidly growing interest in outsourced language QA services because companies look for efficiencies in streamlining the translation process and providing a standardized quality control. We are building MLQS solutions for some of the newest emerging languages (for example, Valencian, a regional language in Spain, spoken by only about two million speakers).
• Outsourced testing and engineering. Our production centers in Central Europe, China and Argentina give us a major advantage here. Our outsourced testing customers get the best of both worlds: optimum outsourcing locations with same time-zone support and the choice of an off-shore or near-shore location as suits them best.

As an entrepreneur, risk-taking is something I'm not afraid of. I see the challenges we observe globally as opportunities for us to define Moravia's role for the future and to understand how to move forward. In this sense, our clients, our suppliers, our competitors - really, the whole community - are a big inspiration for me.

On a personal note, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the whole MultiLingual team for all the great service they have provided to the industry over the past 20 years - promoting and reporting on our industry professionally, objectively and passionately. I wish MultiLingual many happy returns on this 100th publication anniversary.

Arturo Quintero
Chief Corporate Strategist
Moravia Worldwide