But translation memory requires using translation memory software, which has for years largely meant using SDL Trados software.

When a company hires a translation agency and requires that they use translation memory — not only must that agency have Trados software, but so too must the freelance translators — who are often located all around the world. This is a nice business model for SDL, but it has been a pain point for translators and agencies for years.

For agencies, the more acute pain point has been that SDL not only sells TM software but also sells translation services. Nearly every translation exec I have spoken to has openly asked for an open-source alternative to Trados.

Well, now we have one.

IBM has partnered with LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association), Welocalize, Cisco, and Linux Solution Group e.V. (LiSoG) to launch an open source project that provides a “full-featured, enterprise-level translation workbench environment for professional translators.”

It’s called Open TM2 — and it’s basically a scaled-down version of what IBM has developed and used internally for years. I haven’t used the product yet and there’s understandably quite a bit of work involved to get this software to a point where it’s easy for translators, agencies, etc. to consume.

I’m not prepared to say Open TM2 is going to put an end to Trados. After all, Linux didn’t exactly put Windows or OSX out of business. But I am excited to see it out there in the world. Open source keeps software vendors on their toes. I’ll be very curious to see if developers embrace the code,  and what they come up with.

To learn more, I interviewed one of the partners behind Open TM2, Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize.

Here is what he had to say:

Q: Why did IBM decide to open source its software in this fashion? What does it hope to gain?

Bill Sullivan can answer this question better than I, but as he stated, “Freelance translators are the backbone of the localization industry. These translators have longed for free and open translation tools to increase their productivity. There is a recognized and growing need for standards in the localization industry. Despite our best intentions, however, standards themselves can often be vague and open to multiple interpretations. What is needed are reference implementations and reference platforms that serve as concrete and unambiguous models in support of the standard.”

In my opinion, productivity and standardization go hand-in-hand. By releasing Open TM2 as an open source product with a standards-based, data-exchange goal, not only is there potential for increased productivity – flexibility and freedom of choice also increase.

Q: And what do you hope to gain from this effort?

I like to use the mobile phone analogy. I can travel just about anywhere in the world, turn my phone on, and it works. This is possible, because competing carriers and hardware manufacturers collaborated to be able to offer that seamless user experience across global networks and handset protocols. Consider the user experience in our industry. There is really no ability for a client to turn on a translation supply chain and have it work out of the box across various content types, tools and translation vendors. The clients I speak with are demanding that this change.

GlobalSight, Joomla and Open TM2 are being used to demonstrate an example of a seamless data exchange based upon a set of standards. LISA will play an important role in documenting and sharing these standards so that they can be applied uniformly to other integrations. To put it simply, we need a variety of tools to be able to talk to each other in an automated way. This is where I think we can improve time, cost and quality results and greatly improve the user experience. Ultimately, I expect Welocalize to gain an increase in productivity, interoperability and freedom of choice in configuring the best set of tools for each client’s unique translation supply chain needs. If we can get under the hood, we can tune the engine; otherwise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain time, cost and quality advantages from the old way of doing business.

Q: Who is going to use this software? And what software will it replace?

Many translators are already using TM2 in delivering work to IBM. I expect Open TM2, as its features grow, will appeal to more translators as a desktop workbench. This is only an initial release of the open source product, and there is much work to be done. But the potential is there to collaborate and improve. Ultimately, I think Open TM2 has the potential to replace the Trados desktop workbench.

Q: When you talk open source, stability and support are common pain points. Who will be actively supporting this effort?

The members of the Steering Committee are currently supporting the effort, and the goal is to build a community which can support itself. This open source initiative is not unlike others, what one puts into it will determine the benefits one can pull from it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company create a business model to offer Open TM2 support. Support, training and customization are typical services that bloom around open source initiatives.

Q: What would stop a technology company from taking the source code and creating a competitive ™ product?

It is an open source product, so there is potential for companies to build a business model around the product. However, I doubt that will be a proprietary fork of the code. The appeal is an open source product with growing standards compliance, not yet another proprietary product. What is more likely are support, training and integration services. Anyone investing in the product naturally expects a return, and the better the return, the more healthy and diverse will be the community. I think that is a good thing. Competition drives innovation. However, if we can’t get the standard data-exchange protocols right, productivity across the supply chain will continue to lag the increasing velocity of change in the marketplace. Rapidly evolving time, cost and quality demands already exceed what the traditional translation supply chain can deliver.

Q: The source code is available now but documentation is lacking. What is your timetable for launching a more translator and agency friendly product.

I think the first step for the Steering Committee is to take the feedback that is already coming in about the product, good and bad, and use that to set priorities, responsibilities and a timeline. The idea is sound, but it must be tested in practical use and refined according to what the market really needs. Translators have the answers to many challenges in our supply chain, they are just not asked very often.

Q: How will this software be integrated? Is there is a goal of integrating it with the open source GlobalSight CMS?

Content creation, translation, workflow and performance metrics reporting – there are many systems and tools for accomplishing each of these requirements. However, very few of them can pass necessary data in an automated way. A lot can be accomplished with web services and open APIs, but widespread integration possibilities can only be realized with a critical mass actively using an industry-supported data-exchange standard.

In order to demonstrate this possibility in a live use case scenario, Joomla, GlobalSight and Open TM2 will be integrated with the resultant standards published by LISA. I think additional standards organizations will also need to participate to gain wider understanding, agreement and adoption. If enough of the industry’s thought leaders and leading practitioners get behind this standard data-exchange and tools integration challenge, I think all boats will rise. Without it, the industry will never be able to approach the growing volume of content which current production and cost models can’t support.

Link: Open TM2

That is, I admire the organization’s goal of broadly sharing translation memories (TM).

But I’ve been less than enthusiastic about how this organization operates.

TAUS always felt a bit like a country club — in which only a few large players could afford to join and its inner workings kept top-secret. TAUS caught some flack awhile back from trying to prevent its attendees from tweeting its conference sessions. It’s this culture of secrecy that has always bothered me. For translation memory sharing to go mainstream, you need to raise awareness significantly. You need lots of evangelists embedded in companies large and small.

So I’m happy to see TAUS lowering admission fees for its Data Association. TAUS writes:

The annual associate level fee has come down from €625 to €250. Professional membership has been reduced from €75 to €50 and allows individuals to download 10 times the amount of data that is uploaded.

Many executives that I speak with still do not see the value of sharing previously translated text strings (if this is on their radar to begin with). And if you don’t see the value in sharing TM, you sure as heck aren’t going to throw money at it.

More important, you’re not going to throw money at membership fees for something you don’t understand.

By lowering the fees, not only do you expand your organization to smaller players, you lower the barrier for larger organization that may not yet see the value of participating.

It will be interesting to see how membership evolves based on this change. The last I checked, current membership stands at roughly 70 corporate members.

As Shanghai cleans up its more humorous Chinese to English mistranslations, some folks are feeling wistful.

Check out the NYT slideshow.

Also, I was just told that the Telegraph has quite a trove of mistranslated signage here.

So not only is Google automatically transcribing the text of its videos, it’s also providing translations — via machine translation. Now I just need a “machine reader” so I can process all of this new content — as I’m running out of hours in a day.

Google’s blog post notes:

In the next few months we expect over 150,000 Youtube channels to implement auto-captioning with translation. This is just the beginning and we hope that all Youtube content will soon be enjoyed by all Youtube users, regardless of what language they speak.

One of the examples cited is a TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert, show here:

Here’s how you enable the auto-translation — hover your mouse over the Closed Caption icon and click the Translate Captions link.

I found the language-selection overlay (shown below) challenging to scroll through. But I suspect this feature will be automated eventually, similar to how Google’s Chrome browser has automated translation based on your language setting.

What I find interesting about the Gilbert talk is that TED has recruited its own army of translators — human translators — to do the same thing but in higher quality.

Here is the TED-translated version of the same talk:

I think it’s safe to assume that the volunteers are going to offer a much higher-quality translation of the video. But TED does not (yet) support the breadth of languages that Google supports. So while TED has the advantage in quality, Google has the advantage in languages.

But the larger is to what extent Google will make the TED-translated video as easy to find as its own YouTube version.

I did a Google search today and both videos emerged at the top of the results:

I believe this scenario raises a few interesting issues that will need to be addressed in the years ahead:

• How to easily differentiate between content that has been machine translated vs. human translated
• How to quickly discover which content is available in which languages
• Will the crowd continue to be as enthused about translating content by hand when Google  provides the same service, albeit in lower quality, for free?
  

CEO Teddy Bengtsson periodically sends out “state of the business” updates which I always find interesting. I asked him if I could pass along his note and he said yes.

Here is what he had to say…

So – now that we are a couple of months into 2010 – can it be said we are past the worst in terms of the global financial crisis?  Too early to tell I think, but there are some signs suggesting there may be cause for modest optimism.  Up until the end of 2008, the effect of the crisis on IFL’s financial performance had primarily been that revenue growth was slowing down or come to a standstill.  The situation got worse during the first half of 2009, with year on year revenues down by 10-20% over the two quarters.  This pattern continued in the third and fourth, but for the latter it was only marginally down when comparing year on year and we saw a 12% growth compared to the third quarter (despite a seasonally slow December month).  I expect the first quarter of 2010 to be a turning point and we will see positive year on year revenue growth for the first time since 2008.  Naturally, this is partly due to the easier comparisons as the crisis was starting to bite for real early in 2009, but nevertheless significant in terms of direction.  Looking beyond pure financials, we are also seeing increased recruitment activity, growth in some existing client business and new customer acquisitions, adding to the reasons for a cautiously positive sentiment.

Several general and market specific factors continue to be very challenging however.  Price pressure remains as intense as it has been, but I get the impression that the industry is starting to realize it is being pushed too far.  We are seeing instances of returning accounts, i.e. business lost to cheaper suppliers is coming back to IFL as clients realize that a lower price does not mean lower total cost.  In fact, almost without exception the opposite is true as increased management overheads and post-processing costs quickly accumulate to eat up the superficial advantage of a word rate that is a cent or two lower.  Not to mention the truly high cost caused by late and/or sub-standard quality deliveries!  IFL neither can nor want to compete on price alone with the many agencies in our region operating with minimal infrastructures, but I remain confident that service quality and reliability will ultimately generate the true value that makes a partnership sustainable and mutually rewarding.

Market factors in our local production environments tend to be in stark contrast with most parts of the world.  In these times when deflation, salary reductions and declining property markets seem to be the norm, Argentina continues to run its own very different race.  Private consultants estimate that Argentina’s inflation in 2009 was the third highest in the world – only behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela – strongly contesting the cosmetically enhanced official number below 8% and stating the real figure as somewhere between 15-18%.  As you can imagine, this puts local companies servicing global clients looking for price reductions in a near impossible situation.  Especially larger companies like IFL with a high number of permanent employees, as we cannot simply pass the resulting problems further down the supply chain.  A saving grace has been the easing of the local currency by around 10% against the USD.

Inflation is less of an issue in Brazil, IFL’s other production location.  Although not inexistent – it was close to 5% in 2009 – the bigger challenge here has been the strengthening of the local currency.  When we saw the Brazilian Real going in the opposite direction in 2008, predictably we came under pressure to reduce pricing accordingly.  Unsurprisingly, few are equally eager to suggest that we now increase rates to compensate…!  Seriously though, a pricing correction of 20-25% from January 2009 levels would be perfectly logical from strictly an economic data perspective.  Furthermore, Brazil’s growing stature as a global power is making it an even more attractive target for international companies seeking alternatives to their existing, often troubled, markets.  This is becoming evident in increased competition for the relatively scarce competent translation/localization resources, so my recommendation is to expect to pay reasonable rates and make sure to find a partner you can trust.

But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.

Years ago, IBM developed an algorithmic method of measuring MT quality known as the BLEU score. Google scored well here, but the BLEU score is not without its critics.

Translation, like writing itself, is as much an art as it is a science.

Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Enter Ethan Shen and his start-up venture Gabble On.

Ethan has set out to recruit a few thousand volunteer translators to compare the three free translation engines. He asked me to help get out the word. He promises that he will publish the results for all to see. He’s also offering a free Apple iPad to one lucky volunteer. I have no financial interest in the project. I’m just curious to see what engine comes out on top.

Here are the details from Ethan:

We are seeking functional to fluent speakers of any two languages to take 5 minutes to judge and submit their opinion in our dynamic comparison engine (until March 29, 2010). At the end of the 6 week voting period, we will be publishing our results publicly in hopes that our research can to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge in this field.

In gratitude for your participation, we are awarding one new Apple iPad to a lucky participant. The survey can be found at: www.gabble-on.com/SurveySelector.aspx.

Which engine do you think is best?

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 the easiest blog to install or maintain in the early years. ISPs weren’t exactly offering it as a one-click install back then. And don’t get me started on the challenges of updating plug-ins.

But WordPress has certainly come a long way.

I was surprised to learn that, thanks to volunteer contributions, WordPress is now available in more languages than Blogger or TypePad.

• TypePad is available in nine languages.
• Blogger/Blogspot (owned by Google) is available in 49 languages.

WordPress is available in more than 60 languages.

Not bad.

And now WordPress is now launching a software translation platform: GlotPress.

Makes sense. Offer to others the very platform you used to localize your software.

I’ll be interested to see how this new platform develops.

1. The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
2. Of Kosovo and .ks
3. Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
4. Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
5. Is this the next language icon?
6. Google Translate now in 41 languages
7. Three rules of global gateway design
8. Kindle goes international, but not multilingual
9. Bit.ly is leaving Libya for the islands
10. Countryless Country Codes

Perennial Favorites
Don’t ask me why these posts continue to rank highly, but they do:

• Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
• Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
• Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis
• Is Facebook “translation worthy” or just plain cheap?
• iTunes Going Global

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m really looking forward to 2010…

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 we need more of the goofy ones — I’d so much rather “Adjust me riggins” than “Change settings” or change the “Settins o’ me piracy” than my “Privacy Settings.” I’m thinking of volunteering to do “Snarky English” myself.)

If you’re a translator, there’s a link on Facebook (on the language setting page) where you can find out more. And if you’re interested in more where this came from, check out our new report, coming in 2010.

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 “pickpocket” in Japanese?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

According to the agency’s web site:

Name changes later in life can be embarrassing, expensive and riddled with hassle. That’s why we offer a Name Translation Audit designed to help you consider the multilingual implications of giving your baby an unusual name.

For just £1,000, our brilliant team of 2600 linguists will check the meaning of baby names in 100 languages. Better safe than Suri.

Isn’t your baby worth it?

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 subtitles in as many languages as possible. Still, many of the world’s languages aren’t yet represented in the project, and we want to fill those gaps. Today, we’re putting out a call to translators worldwide to help us translate the languages that the project hasn’t yet covered.

We’re looking for translators who speak these languages, in particular:

• Akan
• Assamese
• Filipino
• Galician
• Gujarati
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Panjabi
• Sinhala
• Tagalog
• Tibetan
• Tswana
• Yoruba
• Zulu

In some cases, translations in the languages above have already been completed, but remain unpublished because they still need to be reviewed. (Some of the languages only have one translator.)

These languages aren’t exactly what the translation industry would call Tier 1. That is, there simply isn’t as deep pool of translators to draw from. Which is why any crowdsourcing strategy must take into account the size of the potential crowd.

So how is TED doing so far with its crowdsourcing project?

This menu should give you an idea of what languages are covered and to what extent. Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese are doing best by far.

For roughly six months of work, TED appears to be doing quite well.

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 here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

But hey, those slogans are cool to look at, right?

Here are two German examples:

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2006, when I predicted that companies would eventually do away with global slogans. It seems to me that the next generation of global brands won’t have them and won’t need them. I pointed out at the time that Google didn’t have a global slogan, but apparently I overlooked YouTube. Even Google has fallen for a lure of the global slogan.

Nike tried to translate “Just Do It” but gave up and just used the slogan globally. So perhaps the “global slogan” is here to stay.

But my advice to companies just getting started — avoid them if you can. The risks generally outweigh the rewards.

Until there is a “global consumer” there is no such thing as a “global slogan.”

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 and Content Management and lead the daily operations of the Global Information Management System. This includes working with the technology team to support workflows and issue escalation as well as liaising with affiliate counterparts via global meetings and phone calls. Also includes defining TM strategies and recommending future direction.  Priorities include localization project execution, resource assignments, and user administration as well as issue management. This role helps in developing ongoing strategies for future implementations and integrations.

The successful individual will leverage their proficiency to…

• Deep knowledge of the SDL WorldServer system
• Sound understanding of linguistic requirements, Translation Memory, Terminology Database and glossary management
• Strong background in Production management
• Technical understanding of functionality and capabilities of the WorldServer system.
• Development of strong partnerships with regional and affiliate localization teams

If you meet the qualifications and are interested, send your resume to me at jyunker (at) bytelevel (dotcom) and I’ll forward it along to the HR manager.

NOTE: That this is not a paid posting and I get no finder’s fee.

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 most certainly vary by language pair. Still, as language pairs go, Google is the only game in town across many.

Here are the 10 most recently added languages:

• Albanian
• Afrikaans
• Belarusian
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Swahili
• Welsh
• Yiddish

On a related noted, 41 of these languages are now incorporated into Google Docs.

Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks.

It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, more than 1,500 volunteer translators have provided more than 1,000 translations in more than 50 languages. And another 1,000 translations are in the works.

September 18, 2009 Update: TED has reached 2,000 translations.

Now, putting aside my concerns about a company getting services for free that it could very well afford, I want to focus on what TED has done well with its web site to facilitate the crowdsourcing of translations:

• All translators have their own profile page (see below)
• Translators get little buttons they can use to promote themselves (see above)
• The translators who have done the most work are highlighted
• The most-translated talks are highlight (see below)

One of the most active translators is Yasser Bahjatt. I like how you can click on the talks that he has translated.

A picky comment: Why is Arabic in Latin script? Wouldn’t it make more sense to use Arabic script? Details, I know, but these details count when you’re trying to create content for people who may not understand any English.

Next, here is a screen shot of the most popular talks — at least among translators:

As TED adds more and more translated content, it’s going to need to devote resources to providing a fully localized user interface (UI).

Right now, TED offers this:

But for the most part, the TED site expects users to know a fair amount of English if they’re going to navigate to their translated content.

Ultimately, TED will have to localize its Web site — or just the Ted Talks section — so that people can more easily find their translated content. And this I suspect won’t come free.

Nevertheless, TED has proven that its content is translation-worthy and it has done a great job of creating a community of translators who are bound to keep the effort alive and growing.

Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages.

Yes, 70 languages.

Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here is a rough list:

• Internet Explorer 8: 63 languages
• Chrome: 63 languages
• Opera 9.6: 36 languages
• Safari 4: 16 languages

I say “rough” because I didn’t verify every language and I might be off by one or two. I was surprised at how few languages Safari supports; 16 languages used to be a lot not that long ago. But not anymore.

And I think it’s safe to say that Firefox is the most global browser on the market today.

If you want to see how popular Firefox is around the world, check out the real-time download map here. The last I checked there were 23 million downloads with 5 million coming from the US, followed by Germany, Japan, and France. I particularly like how you can look up countries by ccTLD.

And on a separate note: If you enjoy watching real-time downloads, here’s another map that I found oddly hypnotizing — Zappos purchases as they happen: www.zappos.com/map/

For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing and Google (to save you time I created pre-loaded hyperlinks):

• Translate I love you: Bing vs. Google
• Translate I love you into Chinese: Bing vs. Google
• How do you say I love you in Italian: Bing vs. Google

Below are screen shots of the first text string in both Bing and Google. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Google, despite its massively powerful translation engine, doesn’t simply answer your translation question. Instead, it provides links.

I realize that this is a relatively minor feature and that it currently only supports a small number of very common text strings, but it’s still a very handy feature for a translation geek such as myself.

Now, I’m not saying Bing is perfect. When it comes to technical searches — or when I just need to look up a Wikipedia article quickly — Google still does better, sometimes far better.

But I’m glad to see Bing integrating translation in an intuitive way. It’s a feature that I’ll be using again.

PS: Here is the blog announcement of this feature from Microsoft Translate team.

That said, I do wonder how this article is going to be received by the translators of the world who actually expect to be paid for their services.

For example the for-profit, invite-only conference company TED saved about $500,000 using volunteer translators. Clearly TED could have coughed up the money.

I can see this article spurring on CEOs across the land to think that they too can get free translations.

One thing I mentioned awhile back is that you need to be translation-worthy to get away with pro-bono services, particularly if you’re a for-profit company.

Facebook, Google and, now, TED appear to be translation-worthy. But I wouldn’t expect to see, say, General Motors succeeding in this area (though they could certainly use the help).

But the larger issue here is to the extent that volunteer translation for companies that can afford to pay for translation undermines the translation industry. I don’t believe machine translation undermines human translation because companies generally use it to translation text they would never have hired people to do (or they use it as a first pass before bringing on the human translators).

But volunteer translation is different.

Are  volunteer translators taking money away from their colleagues? After all, TED and Google and Facebook certainly can afford to pay. Or are volunteer translators raising awareness for the value of their work, thereby benefiting the translation industry as a whole?

Personally, I think we’re entering a dangerous area where companies that don’t know better are going to think they don’t have to pay for translation. This all reminds me of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza’s aversion to parking garages: Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000.

From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps searches are going down because more and more people already know what it is — at least that’s how I choose to see it.

And while I’m wasting an evening on Google, here’s one of its newest features, the Wonder Wheel:

It’s nifty, though I’m not sure I would use it more than once. And what the heck is Walmart doing there?

Walmart failed in Germany and Korea and is still bleeding cash in Japan — not exactly what I would call a web globalization success story. Walmart finished in the bottom 10 of The Web Globalization Report Card.

In other Google news, I added Friend Connect to this site — up on the upper right corner. Apparently Google now offers real-time translation of comments, so I’m hoping to give it a spin.

Let me know what you think…

UPDATE: I just removed it. It was really slow in loading. Instead I inserted my Twitter feed. I just noticed that the Chinese characters that were supported just fine in Twitter didn’t make it across into my feed as Unicode. This is interesting because I have WordPress setup for Unicode. I’ll have to do some digging.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Rise and Fall of WordPress Plugins.

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 stats from Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.