CEO Teddy Bengtsson periodically sends out “state of the business” updates which I always find interesting. I asked him if I could pass along his note and he said yes.

Here is what he had to say…

So – now that we are a couple of months into 2010 – can it be said we are past the worst in terms of the global financial crisis?  Too early to tell I think, but there are some signs suggesting there may be cause for modest optimism.  Up until the end of 2008, the effect of the crisis on IFL’s financial performance had primarily been that revenue growth was slowing down or come to a standstill.  The situation got worse during the first half of 2009, with year on year revenues down by 10-20% over the two quarters.  This pattern continued in the third and fourth, but for the latter it was only marginally down when comparing year on year and we saw a 12% growth compared to the third quarter (despite a seasonally slow December month).  I expect the first quarter of 2010 to be a turning point and we will see positive year on year revenue growth for the first time since 2008.  Naturally, this is partly due to the easier comparisons as the crisis was starting to bite for real early in 2009, but nevertheless significant in terms of direction.  Looking beyond pure financials, we are also seeing increased recruitment activity, growth in some existing client business and new customer acquisitions, adding to the reasons for a cautiously positive sentiment.

Several general and market specific factors continue to be very challenging however.  Price pressure remains as intense as it has been, but I get the impression that the industry is starting to realize it is being pushed too far.  We are seeing instances of returning accounts, i.e. business lost to cheaper suppliers is coming back to IFL as clients realize that a lower price does not mean lower total cost.  In fact, almost without exception the opposite is true as increased management overheads and post-processing costs quickly accumulate to eat up the superficial advantage of a word rate that is a cent or two lower.  Not to mention the truly high cost caused by late and/or sub-standard quality deliveries!  IFL neither can nor want to compete on price alone with the many agencies in our region operating with minimal infrastructures, but I remain confident that service quality and reliability will ultimately generate the true value that makes a partnership sustainable and mutually rewarding.

Market factors in our local production environments tend to be in stark contrast with most parts of the world.  In these times when deflation, salary reductions and declining property markets seem to be the norm, Argentina continues to run its own very different race.  Private consultants estimate that Argentina’s inflation in 2009 was the third highest in the world – only behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela – strongly contesting the cosmetically enhanced official number below 8% and stating the real figure as somewhere between 15-18%.  As you can imagine, this puts local companies servicing global clients looking for price reductions in a near impossible situation.  Especially larger companies like IFL with a high number of permanent employees, as we cannot simply pass the resulting problems further down the supply chain.  A saving grace has been the easing of the local currency by around 10% against the USD.

Inflation is less of an issue in Brazil, IFL’s other production location.  Although not inexistent – it was close to 5% in 2009 – the bigger challenge here has been the strengthening of the local currency.  When we saw the Brazilian Real going in the opposite direction in 2008, predictably we came under pressure to reduce pricing accordingly.  Unsurprisingly, few are equally eager to suggest that we now increase rates to compensate…!  Seriously though, a pricing correction of 20-25% from January 2009 levels would be perfectly logical from strictly an economic data perspective.  Furthermore, Brazil’s growing stature as a global power is making it an even more attractive target for international companies seeking alternatives to their existing, often troubled, markets.  This is becoming evident in increased competition for the relatively scarce competent translation/localization resources, so my recommendation is to expect to pay reasonable rates and make sure to find a partner you can trust.

And global reach doesn’t always mean expanding beyond borders, it could also mean expanding within borders — consider Spanish for the US (a trend that continues to tick upward).

That said, any executive with global aspirations is sure to wonder at one point or another: How many languages is  enough?

It must seem that every year, the definition of “enough” inches upward.

The Web Globalization Report Card proves this to be true.

In 2003, when we began the Report Card, 10 languages was widely considered  enough for a global web site.

Today, that baseline is 20+ languages.

As you can see below, the number of languages that companies support has steadily grown over the years. In the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card — in which we tabulated the languages of 225 global web sites across 21 industries — the average was 22 languages.

I’m not suggesting that companies add languages for the sake of adding languages.

But I do suggest that companies conduct regular “audits” of their own language mix, the languages supported by the competition, and the languages supported by the ecosystem as a whole.

I’d prefer to be the first company within a given industry to support a new language than the last. Only by keeping a close eye on languages and the competition can you achieve this goal.

Consider Russian. Five years ago, fewer than 40% of the major global web sites supported this language. At that point in time, a company might not have felt any pressure to localize for Russia simply because few other companies did so. Today, seven out of 10 companies now support Russian, which means that companies that hope to do business in Russia and do not support Russian are now in the minority.

Now let’s look at three companies in more detail: NIVEA, Starbucks, and Genzyme.

Each of these companies occupies a different industry sector and yet all three continue to add languages, each at its own pace.

For more information on language trends and much more, check out the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

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.

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.

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 Update: TED has reached 2,000 translations.

Now, putting aside my concerns about a company getting services for free that it could very well afford, I want to focus on what TED has done well with its web site to facilitate the crowdsourcing of translations:

• All translators have their own profile page (see below)
• Translators get little buttons they can use to promote themselves (see above)
• The translators who have done the most work are highlighted
• The most-translated talks are highlight (see below)

One of the most active translators is Yasser Bahjatt. I like how you can click on the talks that he has translated.

A picky comment: Why is Arabic in Latin script? Wouldn’t it make more sense to use Arabic script? Details, I know, but these details count when you’re trying to create content for people who may not understand any English.

Next, here is a screen shot of the most popular talks — at least among translators:

As TED adds more and more translated content, it’s going to need to devote resources to providing a fully localized user interface (UI).

Right now, TED offers this:

But for the most part, the TED site expects users to know a fair amount of English if they’re going to navigate to their translated content.

Ultimately, TED will have to localize its Web site — or just the Ted Talks section — so that people can more easily find their translated content. And this I suspect won’t come free.

Nevertheless, TED has proven that its content is translation-worthy and it has done a great job of creating a community of translators who are bound to keep the effort alive and growing.

But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are.

Fortunately, there is TypeIt, an online editor that gives you the ability to input non-ASCII characters used by languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian. Here’s a screen shot:

Operating systems like OSX and Windows also give you the ability to change your keyboard virtually — but that can be a real pain if you only need to input an á.

Tomasz Szynalski launched TypeIt in 2004, and the site gets about 35,000 visits a month. Some people use the editor like I do — to crank out a few characters — while others use it to write entire letters. Russian is the latest keyboard added — and I hope to see more to come.

The site is www.typeit.org.

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/

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.

That said, I do wonder how this article is going to be received by the translators of the world who actually expect to be paid for their services.

For example the for-profit, invite-only conference company TED saved about $500,000 using volunteer translators. Clearly TED could have coughed up the money.

I can see this article spurring on CEOs across the land to think that they too can get free translations.

One thing I mentioned awhile back is that you need to be translation-worthy to get away with pro-bono services, particularly if you’re a for-profit company.

Facebook, Google and, now, TED appear to be translation-worthy. But I wouldn’t expect to see, say, General Motors succeeding in this area (though they could certainly use the help).

But the larger issue here is to the extent that volunteer translation for companies that can afford to pay for translation undermines the translation industry. I don’t believe machine translation undermines human translation because companies generally use it to translation text they would never have hired people to do (or they use it as a first pass before bringing on the human translators).

But volunteer translation is different.

Are  volunteer translators taking money away from their colleagues? After all, TED and Google and Facebook certainly can afford to pay. Or are volunteer translators raising awareness for the value of their work, thereby benefiting the translation industry as a whole?

Personally, I think we’re entering a dangerous area where companies that don’t know better are going to think they don’t have to pay for translation. This all reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Costanza’s aversion to parking garages: Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

Does this icon say “language” to you?

It doesn’t to me.

But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.

I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that this one should be it. I find that this looks like a floppy disk (and, yes, I’m aware that there is an entire generation of computer users out there who don’t even know what a floppy disk looks like).

If I were to vote for an international icon, I would vote for a generic globe icon. Companies such as Panasonic, Dow Corning, and Microsoft have used a globe icon to denote either language or country/region (or both).

Other companies use tiny maps, such as John Deere and Caterpillar.

I prefer the globe, but either will do the trick.

What do you think?

PS: I just discovered that I wrote about the need for a standard icon way back in 2004. I preferred the globe icon even back then.

This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad.

But I particularly like the minor tweaks made to the site’s interface. As shown below, you can now click on your language to make it one half of a language pair — a welcome alternative to the pull-down menu, which continues to grow.

What I would like to see — and I suspect is less than a year away — is the ability to simply enter a URL and have Google auto-translate that Web site into your language without you having to specify your language. Google should already know this based on your locale setting — or at least let you set that preference ahead of time.

Google Translate can auto-detect the language for you right now — but you have to ask it to do that. Perhaps the processing overhead is such that Google doesn’t want to turn on this feature by default.

So, will Google support 70 or so languages a year from now? I doubt it, given the current economic climate. As Google notes on its blog, these 41 languages already address 98% of all Internet users. I assume that Google will focus less on language expansion and more on integrating Google Translate into its products as well as improving the UI.

This was not the first Web site I’ve encountered to offer an international English option — and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Now what does international English actually look like?

In most cases, it’s American English.

For those who prefer British English, this is not the greatest of trends. But it is a trend. And while Boingo makes it obvious through its language picker, there are many more companies who simply use American English as the default English across all English-speaking markets.

Siemens comes to mind. Not only does this German-based company use American English on its .com page, it also uses American English on its .co.uk page.

I can count on one hand the number of companies that pay to have English translated from American to British or vice versa. And in this financial climate, I may not even need that many fingers.

No.

In the years ahead there will be only one flavor of English on most corporate Web sites — just as there will be only one flavor of Spanish (and maybe even one flavor of French).

One day the media will pick up on this as another sign of the decline of the diversity of languages on this planet.

All I know is that companies are trying to communicate with as much of the world as possible while spending as little as money as possible. And even language is facing cutbacks these days.

The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation industry — and its service is not even live yet.

The Translation Automation User Society does not appear to be as welcoming as I am of the Google Translation Center. A new essay on its site says:

Private companies will always seek world domination and customer lock-in. As a professional in the translation industry, the Google Translation Centre may help you on the short-term, but you only help Google long-term and you don’t help the world at all. Ultimately we pay the price for putting all translated words and sentences in the possession of a single company.

There is a distinct “evil empire” tone to this essay, which is understandable to a point. Google appears to be entering that evil empire stage of its development. Though I still use the search engine.

And the last I checked, Google’s “terms and services” page for the Translation Center had been taken down. So I can’t really say what Google’s policy will be regarding the translation memory (TM) that it may or may not leverage from this Center.

But it is no coincidence that TAUS is planning to develop a massive database of TMs of its own. I’m sure it wants readers to come away thinking that TAUS is going to be far more open with its TMs than Google will be.

TAUS says that its TM database will be free to the world for the looking up of translations of terms and phrases. But you’ll have to be a member to actually have access to the database (on a reciprocal basis) and membership is not free. I’m confident that this database will be of the highest quality as TAUS has some impressive corporate members, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle (Google does not appear to be a member).

Personally, I’m glad to see both services emerging — as well as services from Asia Online and Language Weaver (which is now offering a Web-based SaaS translation service). We are entering uncharted waters and it’s important to have a mix of large and small players, as well as a nonprofit, to keep everyone on their toes.

Is there a risk to the world if Google owns the world’s largest TM (which it might have already accomplished)?

Perhaps.

TAUS raises important questions. The answers have yet to emerge.

Here is a graph they published of the rate of growth of their language support. It’s a very impressive visual, but I found it potentially misleading.

What is being displayed is not the total number of “unique” languages Google supports, just the total number of product/language combinations. And that’s an important detail.

Google is nowhere near supporting 1,400 different languages. Their search engine interface, which supports roughly 120 languages, represents the maximum number of languages the company supports. And this number has only increased by about 10 languages over the past two years.

The other Google applications appear to have peaked (for now) at between 40 and 43 languages.

To support 40 languages is remarkable. Based on my survey of 225 global Web sites in the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, fewer than 10 companies support 40 or more languages (English excluded).

Still, it looks as if Google is now focused on getting its increasingly wide selection of software up to the 40-language mark rather than aggressively pushing into brand new languages. Gmail, for instance, now appears to be adding a language or two per year — rather than 10 to 20, which is the pace we’ve been seeing with YouTube and Blogger.

Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.

This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.

I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such a picky thing. I work with numerous multinationals that now host their American Web sites at the .us domain — and their global Web sites at the .com domain. This makes perfect sense.

And yet Google, in applying the American visual to the .com site, perpetuates this idea that .com is a uniquely American URL.

Granted, Google doesn’t show residents of France and Germany and other countries this visual even if they input Google.com; Google uses geolocation to serve up localized Web pages based on the Web user’s location.

I understand Google has a dilemma on its hands. Because most Americans believe .com to be an American domain, Google might appear unpatriotic if it didn’t continue this .com/4th of July tradition.

But what I would like to see happen is Google launching a .us search engine. Not only would Google benefit from having another country country code to monetize, but those multinationals that currently host .us Web sites would be rewarded for their efforts.