Earlier this month we participated in the Berkeley Globalization Conference [Localization Industry and Association (LISA) @ Berkeley). Donald Barabé ­ Vice President, Canadian Government Translation Bureau, talked about emerging standards that the Canadian Government uses to denote 'Premium' documents--those requiring professional translation.

He stated, medical records fall into one of the criteria:

1. Documents produced by professionals.

The reasoning being that to do the end user justice, a document produced by a professional needs to be professionally translated.

It strikes us as a very appropriate standard!

To talk more about our impressions of conference and what we learned, contact us at luis@avantpage.com.

Here are some of other other quick impressions. It was an informative two days!

• Only 10% of the world's languages have a written form
• No translation equals no trade.
• The value of translation doubles every 5 years.
• Translation Memory (TM) plus Machine Translation (MT) is the combination of the future
• Localization is now for specific English-speaking markets
• Diaspora is crucial in a globalized world
• Google Translation is adding hundreds of servers every week
• Many countries have multiple national languages
• Machine Translation (MT) is great providing access to terminology
• The world language is translation and localization.