Global by Design

I’m going to be presenting a series of Webinars on Web globalization.
The Webinars are sponsored by Lionbridge.
Mark your calendar for May 7th at 1 pm (EST), when I will present the first Webinar — The Best Global Web Sites (and why) — which focuses on key findings from The 2008 Web Globalization Report Card.
The Webinars [...]

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Techcrunch reports that Facebook is a day away from launching a German-language interface, translated in part by 2,000 volunteers. Spanish was launched a few weeks ago. And French is also nearly here.
MySpace is also busy building localized Web sites.
I reviewed both Facebook and MySpace for the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, as part of the [...]

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So SDL is buying Idiom.
SDL has posted an FAQ page about the deal here — but the list is absent a question I recently posed:
Does this acquisition mark the beginning of the end of SDL being a translation services provider?
I think it does. Or, at least, I think it should.
I haven’t received an official answer [...]

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Lionbridge evaluated the Spanish-language Web sites of the presidential candidates and found that Hillary Clinton offered the highest percentage of translated content for Hispanic voters.

Lionbridge evaluated the sites of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards on the Democratic site and Romney on the Republican side. It appears that Huckabee and McCain have more or less given up [...]

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Language Weaver has added five more language pairs to its repertoire:

Arabic/Spanish
Arabic/French
French/Spanish
Danish/English
Greek/English

What’s interesting here is that Language Weaver is moving beyond language pairs that include English.
English is the “pivot language” of the translation industry, in which content either begins in English or is converted into English on its way to its target language. Taking English out [...]

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To follow up on my last post about the transformation of the translation industry, I was just sent a press release from a maker of statistical machine translation, Language Weaver, regarding a new product they and across Systems will be releasing in 2008.
The product is software designed specifically for German/English translation of content that falls [...]

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