Following a period of relative calm, a new series of tweets, a blog article by Arle Lommel on 27 April, and a rather strange email from a French LSP recently appeared on the grapevine stating, in general, that: 1) it has been announced that the European Telecommunications Standards Initiative (ETSI) have been selected by LISA to take over their ‘open’ industry standards, 2) that the European Telecommunications Standards Initiative (ETSI) “has agreed to accept responsibility for the LISA open standards works”, and 3) that this is very good news.

If anybody was 'April Fooled' by our Breaking News Announcement (see below) published on 1 April then we've had our fun.

Now it's time to own up and reveal the full extent of our duplicity.

The press conference was not held in the Four Seasons Hotel (Istvan would never, ever pay for that - that was a significant clue).

Word has it that they actually want to make their conference 'a twitter-free zone' but don't want others to copy this great idea, so they are obviously trying to keep it secret.

The sophisticated "Dashboard" concept was slightly over the top - any old plain dusty dashboard will have to do for the 'watch dogging'.

I have often expressed the view that our industry is absolutely fascinating because of its relative immaturity and frequent lack of sync with the business world out there. Apart from the easily identifiable educational and perceptual gaps, there are a lot more correlations to be found with other immature industries.

Warsaw is really beautiful at the end of September.  I know you possibly have images of white winters in Poland but trust me, summer likes this city and usually tries to stay that bit longer and amazes us with spectacular Indian Summers. Hence, Warsaw is a great place to spend the last few days of September. You will be feeling very good after the brilliant presentation you have just delivered at TM-Europe 2011. A dozen or so attendees will have tweeted immediately about how insightful your presentation was and one will even tweet about how well you looked. You are finishing a beer with some new friends and notice from the business cards that these are the people your sales director told you to meet. What could be more pleasant?

Following a presentation by Jaap van der Meer at the LISA standards summit a number of people have been expressing the view that translation memory as we currently know it will not be around in five years. I think they are wrong and I would like to explain why.

Those that claim that translation memory is on the way out have come to this conclusion because they believe that statistical machine translation is becoming more and more important and as the corpus for large MT engines such as the Google one grow, translation memory will become increasingly irrelevant. There are even claims that while translation memory may be here in five years it will not have an economic value.

At the end of February 2011, LISA, the Localization Industry Standards Association, announced it was insolvent and was closing the organisation. LISA has been around since 1990 and it is interesting to note that all of the translation companies who were involved in founding LISA (Berlitz, Mendez, Softrans, Stream International and Bull International Localization Organization) no longer exist as separate companies.

Old proverbs say that: “Ignorance is bliss … and peace of life”. Therefore we should always remain grateful to our industry's seasoned professionals for keeping us in the dark about certain unpleasant facts of life, legal and financial issues, and dealings withinin our industry organizations, etc. If we are not aware of certain facts, we will not worry our little heads about them, and life will be good.