And as Google noted in its blog, Poland’s Ministry of Economy is taking advantage of this translation engine to provide web users with real-time translated content. The Google Translate engine is built right into the header.

Here’s a screen grab from their site (translated from Polish into English):

However, you’ll notice that the main header is still in Polish.

Why is that?

Blame embedded text.

Embedding text within visuals is a great way to ensure that the text appears exactly how you wish it to appear. But it’s a lousy way to make that text translateable, indexable, etc.

So don’t do it.

You can achieve a similar effect using style sheets and background images. Fonts may vary based on operating system, but even this too can be managed via hosted fonts.

Making your web site “translation friendly” is a great way to make the most of the free translation tools already out there. Eventually you’ll want to get your site professionally translated, but until then, unlock the text so users can translate it for themselves.

Link: Polish Ministry of Economy

• Google Translate
• Bing (Microsoft) Translator
• Yahoo! Babelfish

Ethan Shen has wrapped up the project, soliciting input from more than 1,000 reviewers. He summed up his findings here.

Here are the findings that jumped out at me:

• Google wins, hands down, translating longer text passages. No big surprise here.
• Bing and Babelfish are competitive translating shorter texts (150 or fewer characters). Bing did quite well with Italian and German, while Babelfish did well with Chinese.
• Google’s brand trumps all. About halfway through his test, Ethan removed the brand names from the search engines, so the reviewers did not know which engine was doing which translation. The change in results was significant. Reviewers were 21% more likely to say Google was better than Microsoft when they knew the brand names. And reviewers were 136% more likely to say Google was better than Babelfish.

This last finding is what poses the greatest hurdle for Microsoft and Yahoo!

When it comes to machine translation — perception is (almost) everything. If people think you’re the best translation engine, then you are the best.

Integration is the other key element of success, and Google Translate is doing well here also — I absolutely love the Chrome browser integration.

Ethan is not done with his research. This is only stage one. To help him with stage two, click here.

It’s very early days, but it’s safe to say that localization vendors are drooling over the possibilities. Although many apps aren’t going to present much in the way of translation revenue, the localization engineering work can be quite substantial.

I’m currently aware of two vendors that have been doing a good job of specializing in this area:

• iPhoneLocalizer.com
• Glyph Language Services

Some app developers I’ve spoken with still question the degree to which they must localize their apps. After all, many report significant sales in markets around the word WITHOUT any localization investment on their part. So they naturally want to know what additional sales they’re going to get for their investment. There are many factors to consider. The ROI of a 99 cent app could be tough to achieve if you’ve got to completely internationalize your app. If your app is already internationalized, the ROI is much easier to achieve.

But China and Japan, as noted in the WSJ article, could be what pushes more and more developers into finally opening their checkbooks.

Here’s what one iPhone developer says:

“We definitely have plans to get all our games localized,” said Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development. “We may see more than half of our sales come from outside of the U.S.” PopCap’s $2.99 “Plants vs. Zombies” tower defense game is currently No. 1 in China, according to App Store rankings.

The article stresses that few apps are currently localized — and I will second that. In fact, the only apps that I’m aware of that support more than 20 languages are Apple’s own default apps. Outside of Apple, PayPal and Google apps appear to be the most global overall.

Here’s a rough tally of what I’ve seen so far:

• PayPal Mobile: 15 languages
• Google Mobile: 15 languages
• Facebook Mobile: 7 languages
• Monopoly: 6 languages

What am I missing here?

So not only is Google automatically transcribing the text of its videos, it’s also providing translations — via machine translation. Now I just need a “machine reader” so I can process all of this new content — as I’m running out of hours in a day.

Google’s blog post notes:

In the next few months we expect over 150,000 Youtube channels to implement auto-captioning with translation. This is just the beginning and we hope that all Youtube content will soon be enjoyed by all Youtube users, regardless of what language they speak.

One of the examples cited is a TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert, show here:

Here’s how you enable the auto-translation — hover your mouse over the Closed Caption icon and click the Translate Captions link.

I found the language-selection overlay (shown below) challenging to scroll through. But I suspect this feature will be automated eventually, similar to how Google’s Chrome browser has automated translation based on your language setting.

What I find interesting about the Gilbert talk is that TED has recruited its own army of translators — human translators — to do the same thing but in higher quality.

Here is the TED-translated version of the same talk:

I think it’s safe to assume that the volunteers are going to offer a much higher-quality translation of the video. But TED does not (yet) support the breadth of languages that Google supports. So while TED has the advantage in quality, Google has the advantage in languages.

But the larger is to what extent Google will make the TED-translated video as easy to find as its own YouTube version.

I did a Google search today and both videos emerged at the top of the results:

I believe this scenario raises a few interesting issues that will need to be addressed in the years ahead:

• How to easily differentiate between content that has been machine translated vs. human translated
• How to quickly discover which content is available in which languages
• Will the crowd continue to be as enthused about translating content by hand when Google  provides the same service, albeit in lower quality, for free?
  

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 beating Google on some languages pairs, as well as on shorter text strings. Although Google is emerging the overall winner — and receiving some much-deserved attention from the media — it’s nice to see some healthy competition.

That said, quality is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece — perhaps much more important — is usability. Now that Google has embedded its MT engine into Gmail and Reader — and now its Chrome client –I find I’m using Google exclusively as my MT engine.

Here are Ethan’s findings so far (emphasis mine):

At the highest level, it appears that survey participants prefer Google Translate’s results across the board.

In a few languages (Arabic, Polish, Dutch) the preference is overwhelming with votes for Google doubling its nearest competitor

However, once you remove voters that have self defined their fluency in the source or target language as “limited,” the contest becomes closer along some of the heavily trafficked languages. For example:

• Microsoft Bing Translator leads in German
• Yahoo! Babelfish leads in Chinese
• Google maintains its lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French

Observing only the self-defined “limited fluency” voter reveals a strong brand bias. If your fluency in the target translation language is limited, it would stand to reason your ability to assess the quality of the translation is very limited. And yet…

• Limited-fluency voters chose Google over Bing by 2 to 1
• They also chose Google over Yahoo! Babelfish by 5 to 1

As I had guessed, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s hybrid rules-based MT model performed better on shorter text passages

For phrases below 50 characters, Google’s lead in Spanish, Japanese, and French disappear. And Microsoft’s lead in German widens.

Beyond 50 characters, Google’s relative performance seems to improve across the board.

For passages that are only one sentence, the same effect is seen, though to a lesser extent than under 50 characters.

On March 4th, we made a few changes to our survey – hiding the brands and randomizing the positions of the text results before voting.  Since then, we have not yet collected enough data to draw conclusions, but Babelfish seems to be receiving the biggest boost, perhaps showing the effects of the recent neglect of that tool.

Clearly, Ethan needs more data to arrive at more concrete conclusions. If you’re a translator and you want to lend a hand, here is the voting site.

PS: Here’s an interview with Google’s MT guru Franz Josef Och.

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Cisco Systems
4. Philips
5. Samsung
6. Wikipedia
7. 3M
8. NIVEA
9. Symantec
10. Lenovo
11. Xbox
12. Autodesk
13. Gmail
14. Microsoft
15. Nokia
16. Intel
17. Caterpillar
18. Panasonic
19. HP
20. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
21. LG
22. Volvo Group
23. Hotels.com
24. SAP
25. Kodak

Google has emerged on top again, but just barely.
The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it edged out as the winner.

Moving down the list, there are a number of familiar faces — companies like Cisco and Philips, Panasonic, and NIVEA. But there are some new faces as well. Samsung jumped up in the rankings due to improvements to global navigation and localization. Kodak, Symantec, and Autodesk are also new to the top 25.

Although these sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 50 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 225 sites reviewed.

20+ languages is the new baseline
Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years — due in large part to the global recession — growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008.

It wasn’t that long ago that any web site that supported 10 languages would have qualified as “global.” The new baseline is 20 or more languages, and climbing.

I will be posting additional findings in the days and weeks ahead. If you want to learn more, we’ve posted a brochure here.

But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.

Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics.

Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.

Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Enter Ethan Shen and his start-up venture Gabble On.

Ethan has set out to recruit a few thousand volunteer translators to compare the three free translation engines. He asked me to help get out the word. He promises that he will publish the results for all to see. He’s also offering a free Apple iPad to one lucky volunteer. I have no financial interest in the project. I’m just curious to see what engine comes out on top.

Here are the details from Ethan:

We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take 5 minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the 6 week voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.

In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at: www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.

Which engine do you think is best?

Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com.

And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall.

Just change your browser’s language preference to Chinese and you’ll see it the next time you visit Google.

And had China not continually blocked this site from Chinese citizens years ago, perhaps Google would not have compromised so to enter the market.

But it did. Its services got blocked anyway. And Baidu is still number one.

Here’s a good article that posits that Google’s Korea strategy is what led to what is happening right now with China.

1. The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
2. Of Kosovo and .ks
3. Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
4. Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
5. Is this the next language icon?
6. Google Translate now in 41 languages
7. Three rules of global gateway design
8. Kindle goes international, but not multilingual
9. Bit.ly is leaving Libya for the islands
10. Countryless Country Codes

Perennial Favorites
Don’t ask me why these posts continue to rank highly, but they do:

• Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
• Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
• Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis
• Is Facebook “translation worthy” or just plain cheap?
• iTunes Going Global

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m really looking forward to 2010…

Google now has goo.gl.

And Facebook has FB.me.

But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country code”

That is, the ccTLD is not being used to signify location, but for something totally unrelated.

I’ve compiled a growing list of Countryless Country Codes.

As always, if you have any sites for me to add, post a comment below.

But I’m not the intended user.

Google Korea, as I mentioned in 2007, has big aspirations in Korea. So much so that it tried relaxing its austere design protocol. Here is what the site looked like (up until earlier today):

Apparently, Google still had some relaxing to do.

According to Ohmy News:

Google Korea announced last week that they will integrate “Blog, People and Hot issues links on the upper menu page, with Picasa, Gmail, Textcube and other Google services occupying the lower half,” thus effectively copying the style of Naver and Daum. At the end of the day, even the mighty Google could not fight against the tenacious local culture.

The list of global online brands that have failed to win over the local audience by insisting on their original site design optimized for the western users is long. MySpace heard their death knell last February and Linden Lab could not renew the contract for Second Life with the Korean partner, ending their two year experiment in Seoul.

So today Google launches Google.co.kr, Version 2.

So what do you think? It looks a bit more like the competition.

But the larger question is how far Google will go to localize itself for a market. This is a question every global company must answer. At what point does a company go too far?

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 here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

But hey, those slogans are cool to look at, right?

Here are two German examples:

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2006, when I predicted that companies would eventually do away with global slogans. It seems to me that the next generation of global brands won’t have them and won’t need them. I pointed out at the time that Google didn’t have a global slogan, but apparently I overlooked YouTube. Even Google has fallen for a lure of the global slogan.

Nike tried to translate “Just Do It” but gave up and just used the slogan globally. So perhaps the “global slogan” is here to stay.

But my advice to companies just getting started — avoid them if you can. The risks generally outweigh the rewards.

Until there is a “global consumer” there is no such thing as a “global slogan.”

Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below:

Google went from 13 languages to 51 languages in less than 16 months.

Not bad.

And, yes, I’m aware that we must not confuse quantity of translations with quality of translations. Your translation mileage will most certainly vary by language pair. Still, as language pairs go, Google is the only game in town across many.

Here are the 10 most recently added languages:

• Albanian
• Afrikaans
• Belarusian
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Swahili
• Welsh
• Yiddish

On a related noted, 41 of these languages are now incorporated into Google Docs.

Every month there seems to be more of them, which could mean that the quality of Google Translate is improving, or this site is doing better in the rankings, or some combination of the two. Or, it could be simply be that more people have discovered Google Translate.

Given my passion for country codes, it’s fair to say that I also enjoy language codes. And it is through language codes that you can figure out what languages users were translating your site “from” and “to.”

Here is one referral string from my site:

First, you can see that the person was using Google Korea, so it’s fair to say the person was translating from English into Korean. The “To” line is actually the blog title post translated into Korean.

That was an easy one.

This next one is a bit more challenging:

This person was using Google.com, so you have to focus on the language codes. There are two here — an “id” (which follows  “hl=”) and an “en” (which follows “sl=”). What this means is the person was translating from English into Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia).

Here is what the translated page looks like:

The quick and easy way to know the target language is to focus on the “hl=” string. In the screen shot below, the target language is German.

And here is a language code reference if you want to study your web logs.

What I want to know is what percentage of web traffic is taken up by Google Translate. Anyone care to share their Web log stats?

Based on my cursory analysis, I would estimate the figure to be between 5% and 10%, but that’s very rough.

I appears though that Google still has a thing or two to learn about scanning covers…

Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages.

Yes, 70 languages.

Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here is a rough list:

• Internet Explorer 8: 63 languages
• Chrome: 63 languages
• Opera 9.6: 36 languages
• Safari 4: 16 languages

I say “rough” because I didn’t verify every language and I might be off by one or two. I was surprised at how few languages Safari supports; 16 languages used to be a lot not that long ago. But not anymore.

And I think it’s safe to say that Firefox is the most global browser on the market today.

If you want to see how popular Firefox is around the world, check out the real-time download map here. The last I checked there were 23 million downloads with 5 million coming from the US, followed by Germany, Japan, and France. I particularly like how you can look up countries by ccTLD.

And on a separate note: If you enjoy watching real-time downloads, here’s another map that I found oddly hypnotizing — Zappos purchases as they happen: www.zappos.com/map/

Since Bing launched I’ve been thinking a lot about search engines and how I use them.

I’ve got two recent examples that illustrate why I think Bing might be onto something. Bing, for certain scenarios, cuts the clicks you must make to get the information you need — or at least the information I need.

Checking a sports score

I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan. When I want to get a Cardinals score, I often go to ESPN, but that site loads so slowly and is so busy that I have been going to Bing lately and just entering “Cardinals” in the search window. Here’s what I get:

Bing gives me a nice summary of the Cardinals schedule. If there’s a game going on at the moment, I get a real-time sports score, which is nifty. Google, as shown here, only gives me a link to the Cardinals’ site. Another click, instead of a score.

Checking on a flight

My wife flew to Oakland recently and I wanted to check on her flight. So I entered the flight number into Google and Bing. Here’s what I found:

I got the arrival time so I knew when I could call her.

Google gives me a link to another site that will give me the details that Bing already gave me.

Google got to where it is today by prioritizing speed. Austere web design and massive data centers gave its search engine a massive advantage over everything else out there.

But speed isn’t just about how quickly a search page loads, it’s about how quickly you find what you’re looking for. If a search engine knows you’re looking for a sports score and not a sports team web site, it can save you a click and, as a result, save you time.

Time is clicks. You save people time by saving them clicks.

Granted, I’m probably not the most objective observer of the Bing vs. Google debate. So what do you think?

Are these two Bing innovations going to stick?

For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing and Google (to save you time I created pre-loaded hyperlinks):

• Translate I love you: Bing vs. Google
• Translate I love you into Chinese: Bing vs. Google
• How do you say I love you in Italian: Bing vs. Google

Below are screen shots of the first text string in both Bing and Google. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Google, despite its massively powerful translation engine, doesn’t simply answer your translation question. Instead, it provides links.

I realize that this is a relatively minor feature and that it currently only supports a small number of very common text strings, but it’s still a very handy feature for a translation geek such as myself.

Now, I’m not saying Bing is perfect. When it comes to technical searches — or when I just need to look up a Wikipedia article quickly — Google still does better, sometimes far better.

But I’m glad to see Bing integrating translation in an intuitive way. It’s a feature that I’ll be using again.

PS: Here is the blog announcement of this feature from Microsoft Translate team.

I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000.

From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps searches are going down because more and more people already know what it is — at least that’s how I choose to see it.

And while I’m wasting an evening on Google, here’s one of its newest features, the Wonder Wheel:

It’s nifty, though I’m not sure I would use it more than once. And what the heck is Walmart doing there?

Walmart failed in Germany and Korea and is still bleeding cash in Japan — not exactly what I would call a web globalization success story. Walmart finished in the bottom 10 of The Web Globalization Report Card.

In other Google news, I added Friend Connect to this site — up on the upper right corner. Apparently Google now offers real-time translation of comments, so I’m hoping to give it a spin.

Let me know what you think…

UPDATE: I just removed it. It was really slow in loading. Instead I inserted my Twitter feed. I just noticed that the Chinese characters that were supported just fine in Twitter didn’t make it across into my feed as Unicode. This is interesting because I have WordPress setup for Unicode. I’ll have to do some digging.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Rise and Fall of WordPress Plugins.

According to the unofficial Google blog, Google has inserted its “translate” link into a number of localized Google sites — such as France and Spain. Google.com is not yet included.

This is just another sign that translation is becoming a core element of Google’s world domination strategy. If you’re curious about Google’s market share around the world — here’s an interesting “crowdsourced” document.

Here is the France home page:

I rarely ever use this pull-down menu and I wonder how many others do. I realize that Google strives to keep an austere home page and this is one solution — but I’m not sure it’s worth it. If users can’t find the translation link they may never use it.

Google Translate is no longer growing up, it’s growing out — integrating itself across all of its many properties.

As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.

Om Malik recently reported some key stats from Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.