This was 2012 - the Kilgray retrospective

While we released two new versions in 2012, I think I should give some priority to talking about LanguageTerminal.com, as it is a new venture for Kilgray, and we have a very detailed roadmap for this service. Two years ago when we were doing our walk in the woods (i.e. version planning) with Gábor and Balázs, we came to the conclusion that no matter how good our technology is, SDL will be able to follow us, and no matter what they do, we are able to follow them. This does not make it easy for us to change the market situation and become the market leader, which we'd like to be, even if we don't want a total market domination (we do believe there's enough room for multiple vendors, and we don't believe that there really is a translation technology market). This is when we had the divine spark, to come up with something that others cannot mimic, and which builds on the most valuable asset Kilgray has, the trust of our users. As we are not competing with anyone for any translation job, we are well-positioned to provide cloud-based services to the users. We have resisted the concept of the cloud for years and years, but we have to admit that in order to provide powerful technology at low cost, we need to move there as well - as an option, rather than as a policy though.  LanguageTerminal.com is a place where we are offering services that are not possible to offer in a desktop-based tool. We plan to turn this into a platform where translators, language service providers and enterprise customers all get added-value services for free or for a very reasonable fee. Two of the three initial functions - the sophisticated InDesign management and the online backup solution - were very well received by translators, and we see the number of users growing significantly each day. We hope that the possibility to share resources online will also be adopted by tech-savvy translators, extending the functionality of memoQ also to those who are not good at techie things like regular expressions. Keep an eye out for this system.

We also released two new versions, and one of them was very controversial. memoQ 6 was released in July, and it was the first ever version that wasn't acclaimed by everyone. memoQ 6's main theme was refactoring, which basically means that we made memoQ ready for the future. We have rewritten about two thirds of the code from scratch, and we survived! Companies like Netscape went down the drain when they embarked on rewriting the software, so we had butterflies in the stomach when we started working on this in 2011. memoQ 6 was developed for an entire year, whereas earlier we usually released three new versions every single year. It was a gigantic task. As a result, the performance of memoQ has improved significantly, especially as regards large projects or projects with many small files, and the potential for error has also decreased. It's natural that such a large release comes with a large amount of issues, but actually memoQ 6 wasn't very buggy after a few weeks' time anymore.

We have to admit that we made some bad design decisions that affected users. The biggest controversy was spurred by the change in the behaviour of the bilingual DOC format. It was already just a coincidence that the bilingual DOCs exported by memoQ 5 were good enough for Trados Translator's Workbench even without pre-segmenting, and it was never planned to be like this, but in memoQ 6 we actually required this pre-segmentation for compatibility reasons. This was a very bad decision, and as it was quite a fundamental difference in our new file filter framework, we needed to work for more than a month to rectify this. There were also some other design decisions that needed to be ironed out later. Whilst all this was made in good faith, unfortunately it damaged the reputation of Kilgray - but it was proven once again that admitting mistakes and fixing them is the best strategy to follow.

On November 30, we released memoQ 6.2, with a lot of small usability enhancements, and we ironed out a lot of the shortcomings of memoQ 6. memoQ 6.2.4 is a rock-stable build, and I believe that we are over this PR crisis. It's good to know that by the end of the year we have gained back the trust of our users.

During this year we released qTerm 2, and added a lot of significant functionality to it, so now companies who want to manage their terminology according to professional standards can use qTerm to do so. webTrans also received extra functionality, among others the preview - I believe we are offering the industry's only browser-based solution with a translation preview. And finally after 6.0 we decided to take content connectors very seriously, so the complete automation of recurring translation is not a dream anymore. And did I tell you that we are actually using all these technologies to localize our software and website?

We are looking forward to the next year with a much more robust development team than before. This year we added some new people to the staff: Mónika Antunovics is joining us, effectively helping out Gábor in writing specifications for functionality. Mónika is a computer programmer who was Microsoft's Hungarian and Slovenian terminologist for many years. She is the one who came up with terms that I refuse to use, as the language of computing is English, period :)) Mónika has already designed significant functionality for memoQ 6.5. Ágnes Varga, another female addition to the team, taught programming at the University of Győr, Hungary, and decided to come on board. I have known her for a long while, as we attended the same PhD course in translation studies - the only difference is that she actually earned her PhD degree. Márton Szalay is now responsible for Kilgray's computer and cloud infrastructure. Seeing how many books he published on IT, and what kind of technical background he has, you wouldn't guess that he's only 27. Márton is a man of many talents, but the biggest problem is that when he starts talking about technologies that we should be using, I often can't follow. And you already know probably that Gergely Vándor is responsible for the product lifecycle management, but this year he implemented many mechanisms to make sure that the software quality cannot be compromised.

This year - due to the increased amount of customers and the complexity of migration to memoQ 6 - there was a lot of pressure on support, and I would like to thank the team: Márton Horváth, Tamás Ritter, Péter Szögi, János Szabó, and new addition Yo Miura for their persistence. While sometimes support quality could have been better, generally their helpfulness was appreciated by our customers. Support is very central to Kilgray's strategy, and we believe that without good support it is not possible to sell software. Therefore we are continuously working on new methods to improve support. We introduced a new support system this year where you are able to rate the supporters, and we encourage you to do so, as we are able to escalate issues if the rating is not good enough. We have also launched the Knowledge Base which is available at http://kb.kilgray.com -- I definitely recommend you that you browse this for information. We also decided to localize everything into German, so now even our help is available in German language. And there's more knowledge out there than ever before: we are releasing the e-learning material developed with Angelika Zerfass in January - and translators will be able to get a certificate that they completed the course with success -, and users and partners also contribute. Kevin Lossner released a book on memoQ 6, while Loctimize offer their training material for purchase, and as I hear, there is another book coming soon!

While I cannot mention everyone in the company, I think it's important to note that there are many others working for Kilgray, who are making sure that the business is running well, and customers are kept happy. This year we held roadshows in Dublin, London, Munich and Hamburg, and next year we'll organize a roadshow in Paris - please help us fill the seats! We have organized memoQfest and memoQfest.hu, both of them were very well received - and in just a month we'll host memoQfest USA, our first American user conference, in San Antonio, Texas. We attended over 30 conferences, and we decided that we are ready to have another customer segment focus after translators and language service providers, and started working with games companies. Respected companies like Sega, Innogames or Popcap Games are now using memoQ GamesLoc to localize their products. GamesLoc uses the content connectors to automate the flow of content and the management of ever-updating projects. We truly believe that memoQ is a tailor-made solution for games developers - and we truly appreciate their creativity, so we're a good fit!

What will the future bring? In 2013 we are going to lower the bar for collaboration, and introduce exciting new functionality. In September we have revised our roadmap and I am proud to say that even after 7 years in the business and aggressive growth, we still have a 5-year development roadmap maintained for memoQ, and a 3-year development roadmap maintained for the other systems. So we did not run out of ideas, that's for sure.I hope that you will have plenty of rest during the Christmas holidays - of course listening to the Zen -, and I wish you a merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year!

I find that it is really something that I did not mention the end of the world in a blog post that was written on 21 Dec 2012... oh shame, now I did. I really did not want that and wanted readers to notice that there was no reference to the end of the world... d'oh... again.)