Global by Design

In April, after publishing a Web localization report for Brazil, we soon began receiving requests for a similar report on Russia.
So I’m pleased to announce our Russia Localization Report.

The report is designed to be a quick read for both marketing and Web executives. Here are some of the questions we answer:
 

What American and European companies [...]

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I visited the Live Earth Web site today and was pleased to see that the site supports eight languages, including Chinese, Turkish, and Zulu. It appears that the languages were selected to be relevant to the locations of the concerts.
There’s not much depth to the languages — and some of the links take you right [...]

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MarketingSherpa has posted a must-read case study on one company’s adventures in developing a multilingual email campaign to promote an executive conference.
In a nutshell, the campaign was a big success.
Here are the response rates by language:
English — 21.6% purchased
Spanish — 24.5% purchased
French — 187.5% purchased
German — 22% purchased
Italian — 33% purchased
And here’s a great tip [...]

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Google’s new “cross language” search tool that I mentioned last week is now live and ready for testing at translate.google.com.

I gave the tool a brief run-through today and it is definitely rough around the edges. To get the best results you really need to put some thought into the search queries you enter — the [...]

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Google held its Searchology event today and formally launched its “universal” search interface.
And, according to Wired, Google will be launching its Cross Language Information Retreival “soon.”
Cross language search allows you to translate your search query into another language and have the search results translated back into your language in real time. So if you want [...]

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Here are some thoughts from the past two days of the Idiom User Summit, in no particular order:
- There was a lot of buzz around machine translation (MT). Both Systran and Language Weaver are here and there were (at least) four sessions devoted to integrating Idiom WorldServer with MT. More important, the translation agencies and [...]

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Byte Level Research and MarketingSherpa recently polled 2,000 executives on their Web globalization activities and plans.
We asked what executives are spending on Web globalization, what languages their Web sites support — what languages they planned to add. We asked about Spanish localization for the US market. We measured executive awareness of Web localization vendors.
We [...]

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The members of the Translation Automation User Society met recently and agreed to develop a business plan for hosting and sharing translation memories (TMs).
TMs have historically been something that companies developed for their own internal use — to cut translation costs and improve consistency and quality. But last year TM Marketplace, profiled in the [...]

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Lionbridge issued a press release today that says the company’s new translation management platform, Freeway/Logoport, was the fastest-growing translation management tool in 2006. Freeway is the Web-based front-end of the application and Logoport is the translation memory engine (I’m still not quite sure why there are two names used). For the reason behind the two [...]

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Statistical machine translation is an innovative way of automatically translating text from one language into another. It’s being used by Google, it’s being used in Iraq, and it’s being commercialized by a company called Language Weaver.
I profiled this company for the December issue of Global by Design and now we’re making the full article available [...]

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