Global by Design

Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews.
Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are [...]

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I’m working on the Web Globalization Report Card, and this, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages.
Here it is in Spanish…

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, “pirate English”…

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years. (Personally, I think [...]

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For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds.
And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:
Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with [...]

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Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?
After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.
Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And [...]

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Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks.
It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, more than 1,500 volunteer translators have provided more than 1,000 translations in more than 50 languages. And another 1,000 translations are in the works.
September 18, 2009 [...]

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