Global by Design

What began as just another “gisting” application — like Babel Fish — is gradually becoming an impressive translation tool. And I’m not referring to the quality of translation, though that is improving as well.
I’m referring to the breadth of languages and breadth of features that Google Translate supports.
Today, Google announced that Google Translate added support [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

As we come to the end of 2007, it is safe to say that Web globalization has evolved from an ancillary activity to a core piece of the marketing puzzle at many companies.
So now it’s time to take a deep breath and take a shot at predicting the future of Web globalization. The following predictions [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

The translation industry has undergone significant change over the past two years — and not just in terms of consolidation. The changes are structural. Offices are more decentralized, as is the technology used to support workflow, and machine translation (once widely derided by the translation industry) is now the star attraction.
What’s the reason for this [...]

[Read more →]