Global by Design

Google Translate now handles PDF files — says the unofficial Google blog.
I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to them to trigger the translation engine — not exactly what I’d call user friendly. But it’s a start..

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Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician.
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 [...]

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Google Translate recently added 11 languages to its impressive portfolio of supported languages.
To give you an idea of just how aggressive Google has been in this area, here is a screen grab of Google Translate from 2006:

And here is one from today:

That’s roughly twice the number of languages in two years.
Microsoft has also been busy [...]

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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 [...]

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I read about a startup (via Techcrunch) recently called mloovi. The service leverages Google Translate to provide real-time translations of your blog feed. I’ve installed the widget over on the right and would love to know what people think.
My biggest concern is slow-loading Web pages. And, yes, I know the quality of the translation will [...]

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Within the translation industry, ProZ is widely known as the leading public network of freelance translators and buyers of translation services.
But here comes Google…
According to Blogoscoped, Google is about to launch the Google Translation Center.
This is an exciting development, though I don’t expect everyone to suddenly ditch ProZ for Google. Why? Because much of the [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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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 [...]

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