Global by Design

Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. I haven’t used Babel Fish in years.
But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, [...]

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I’ve been writing this blog since 2002.
Back when I started out, I wasn’t sure how long I would stick with this “blogging” thing and I didn’t really want to make any investment in software (besides time).
I tried a few different platforms before settling on WordPress.
It was free — certainly a selling point. But it’s wasn’t [...]

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With a few hours to spare, here are the most popular blog posts of 2009, based on number of visitors:

The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
Of Kosovo and .ks
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
Is this the next language icon?
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Three [...]

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I’m working on the Web Globalization Report Card, and this, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages.
Here it is in Spanish…

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, “pirate English”…

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years. (Personally, I think [...]

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I’ve long maintained that translation agencies need to get creative if they are to succeed in the age of machine translation.
London-based Today Translations is doing just that — offering a Name Audit Service for soon-to-be parents.
Do you think Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would have chosen Suri for their daughter had they known it meant [...]

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For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds.
And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:
Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with [...]

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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 [...]

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Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak English. In this article, the German publication Spiegel actually asked people what a number of these English slogans meant and only 25% answered correctly.
But hey, [...]

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I was contacted recently about a rather interesting and specialized job opening in the globalization space. So I thought I’d throw it open to the readers of this blog.
The position is with a very large global company based outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Here is the job description:
The Marketing Manager-Localizations position will report to the Mgr-Localization [...]

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In February of this year, Google Translate surpassed 40 languages.
Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below:

Google went from 13 languages to 51 languages in less than 16 months.
Not bad.
And, yes, I’m aware that we must not confuse quantity of translations with quality of translations. Your translation mileage will [...]

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