Global by Design

Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around to doing it. But that’s a topic for a later post.
For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing [...]

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It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are two very important developments that every companies needs to be aware of — and possibly champion.
That said, I do wonder how this article is going [...]

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File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation.

This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial.
Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the MT engine wasn’t working all that well.
So instead of “restaurant” we have “translate server error.”
It’s certainly one [...]

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Only a few days after Microsoft announces a widget to bring machine translation into your Web site’s home page, Google takes a step towards integrating machine translation into its home page.
According to the unofficial Google blog, Google has inserted its “translate” link into a number of localized Google sites — such as France and Spain. [...]

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I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget.
I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love to hear from others who have tried it.
A demo site is here.
I really like how the widget creates a more seamless translation experience, which is a [...]

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