Wouter Maagdenberg ( TXTOmedia ) became the 2020 “Localization process innovator of the year for Europe” at the 8th PIC event which took place 29th of July 2020 at LocWorldWide42.

His innovation “Watch instead of read”, explained how text content in a document (e.g. a user manual) can easily be converted to translated audio as a voiceover creating complete localized videos. TXTOmedia creates the whole video product from text. This can radically reduce the effort and cost of creating translated videos and significantly improve time to market. As Wouter says, “The market life of the video assets is now far longer, and they are so much easier to produce, which makes technical writers like Jenny, ( the character in his pitch) very happy “.

One of our process dragons, Yuka Nakasone (Intento) added that “Wouter’s innovation has once again proved that we have some great innovators in our industry who apply unconventional thinking to solve common challenges and pain points. Not only did he create a technology product which challenges how we approach the multilingual media creation process, but he has proven this with enterprise case studies and data. What he showed seamlessly combines video creation and localization technology. This innovation clearly shortens time to market drastically, and will help the production team stay on top of the process and save significant costs. The PIC platform is now a known entity inspiring innovators, we trust that backers and investors will see innovations like Wouter, and support them on their journey.”

The runner up this time was Andrzej Zydroń from XTM International. He debuted a technology which automatically extracted terminology from bilingual files (parellel source and target files). This makes the terminology creation process much easier as a lot of heavy lifting is done by AI, linguists can more easily create multilingual glossaries. This AI technology is based on a new framework developed by Andrzej and his team, called Inter-language Vector Space.

This year’s PIC final round had 7 innovators battle on a virtual stage in front of a panel of dragons and the LocWorldWide audience. As PIC chair and moderator Dave Ruane put it; “The level of innovation was the highest we have seen, and the virtual experiment was a success for the PIC platform. We saw the innovators really grow through the stages; from paper submission, through preliminary rounds and on to the final, thanks also in no small part to the mentoring provided by the PIC dragons. The next evolution in the platform will look at how we inspire more innovation conversations between like-minded innovators virtually, and connect the dots with backers and investors. Well done to all innovators who took part in PIC number 8, and congratulations to Wouter and Andrzej. ”

We want to thank the PIC dragons who took part; Alessandra Binazzi (Asics), Yuka Nakasone (Intento), Markus Meisl (SAP), the PIC advisors; Alex Bernet (LocWorld), Kris Wiegand (LocWorld) and PIC instigators; Ulrich Henes (LocWorld) and Dave Ruane (XTM International). We would also like to thank LocWorld, XTM International and Multilingual Magazine for supporting this version of the event, and providing prizeware.

Another PIC event is done, congratulations to all finalists and a big thank you to all those who sent in proposals (the highest number of submissions so far). We will endeavour to continually raise the bar for this event, the next event will be in January 2021; entries can be submitted until October 2020. (Call for paper details soon to be confirmed).

Do you have a localization process or technology innovation for the PIC “stage” ? Keep an eye out for the call for papers or contact Dave Ruane directly.

The innovators and innovations at the 8th PIC event were:

  • Yi-Qun(Luke) Ren & Le Peng, Micro Focus – “An innovative tool to auto-detect layout issues in webpages”
  • Adam Bittlingmayer, ModelFront – “Translation Risk Prediction”
  • Andrzej Zydroń, XTM International Ltd. – “AI enabled Bilingual Terminology Extraction”
  • Wouter Maagdenberg, TXTOmedia International BV – “Watch instead of read”
  • John Weisgerber, Transifex – “Bypassing the I18N problem by owning it in the development platform”
  • Martin Švestka, Memsource – “Business Intelligence-Powered Post-Editing”
  • Marc Mittag, MittagQI – “What You See Is What You Get” translation for all file formats – in a TMS