Global by Design

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 [...]

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It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Google announced that they now have 30 products available in 30 languages. And many of these products, such as Gmail and Adwords, now support 40 languages. 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 [...]

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Techcrunch reports from Facebook’s developer conference today in which company announced that it would open its “crowdsourcing” translation platform to its legion of application developers. Here’s the press release excerpt: As a result of the worldwide success of Facebook’s translation system, the company has opened up the Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. [...]

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