Global by Design

Facebook has demonstrated that you can crowdsource translations with high quality and rapid turnaround, leading many other companies to ask how they too can leverage the crowd to translate their content. Enter Adobe and Lingotek. Adobe has recently begun leveraging Lingotek’s software platform to enable the crowdsourcing of translations within China. As of now, there [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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