LAN Airlines is trying to expand its US presence. I’ve flown the airline once — back when it was known as LAN Chile.
I received an email from them last week in which they promoted their new Twitter page:
What I found interesting is they use of “USA” in the Twitter address.
LAN had been using @LANAirlinesUS and gave it up in favor of @LANAirlinesUSA.
The naming of Twitter feeds is highly inconsistent across countries, due to a variety of reasons. For starters, you only have so many characters available to work with — which means, say, ”Australia” isn’t going to work in full for most companies. Then there are the squatters who beat you to your name of choice. Finally, it’s hard to change a name once it gets a fair number of followers. Since so many local offices have created Twitter feeds on their own, many corporate communications people are discovering that consistency in naming across countries in next to impossible.
If you’re interested in how companies have named their Twitter feeds across markets, check out Twittering in Tongues.
Tags: Twitter
The Translation Automation User Society has always been an organization that I’ve admired more in theory than in practice.
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.
Tags: Machine Translation · Translation
While trying (and failing) to buy an iPhone this morning, I’ve encountered three different error screens.
Here’s my favorite:
I seriously doubt that “Oops!” has been localized for different markets.
In fact, many companies overlook the localization of error messages.
For starters, doing so is no trivial task — as many of these error messages are generated by underlying pieces of software that in some cases cannot be easily localized.
And it’s no fun to focus on failure. We like to focus our energies on positive user experiences, not negative ones. Besides, these are edge cases, right?
But as I bounce from one Apple error message to another, it’s comforting to know that even Apple — a company that prides itself on user experience — still has some serious work left to do.
Tags: Apple
Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US.
Source: Twitter.com
Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States.
And half of all tweets are in a language other than English.
This is a remarkable trend, particularly since Twitter has only been localized into five languages so far.
A few months ago, I set out to better understand how large, multinational companies are using Twitter to reach users around the world.
I studied more than 225 companies across 21 industry verticals (representing 80% of the Interbrand 100). And I interviewed a number of people who manage Twitter feeds in different markets.
This work resulted in the report Twittering in Tongues. This report is a first stab at a phenomenon that is very much in its early days, so it’s hard to draw any sweeping conclusions. But there are some clearly emerging trends, which I discuss. I also highlight a number of Twitter’s inherent international limitations and provide some recommendations for companies considering localized Twitter feeds.
Here are a few findings/recommendations from the report:
- Most companies have yet to launch international Twitter feeds. Only one-third of the 225 companies studied support one or more Twitter feeds outside of their domestic markets. What makes this ratio interesting is that every one of 225 companies studied supports two or more localized web sites. So these are all companies that do business in three or more countries. A number of companies that support more than 20 local web sites still only use Twitter for their domestic markets.
- Sony leads the pack with support for 20 international Twitter feeds, mostly through its Sony Music division. Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and PricewaterhouseCoopers are also out in front with support for 10 or more country specific Twitter feeds. CAVEAT: Counting feeds is a tricky business. Not all corporate feeds are actively managed (which I did not count) and not all local feeds are easy to find.
- Brazil rules. Brazil is by far the most popular Twitter market outside of the US. Nearly half of the companies that support one or more international feeds have targeted Brazil. Not surprisingly, Brazilian Portuguese is the second most popular language used on Twitter.
- Local Twitter success depends on local web site promotion. It’s also no surprise that the local feeds with some of the highest numbers of followers also had high visibility on their local web sites. Companies such as Dell and Samsung lead in this respect. Below is a screen shot from Samsung’s Brazil home page; Twitter gets prime real estate.
- Twitter is local by design. Based on my interviews, most of the in-country Twitter feeds have been launched without any central approval process or even awareness. This also applies to local Facebook and YouTube pages. The evolution is local Twitter feeds is similar to the evolution of local web sites in the 1990s. Back then, local offices often created their own sites, with their own designs and platforms. Over the years, the central offices reined in these disparate sites — sometimes going too far and dampening local enthusiasm. The key challenge I see executies facing now is balancing local control with global consistency. While consistency is important, it should not come at the expense of local enthusiasm and innovation. In the end, the success of local Twitter feeds depends on the local offices.
For more information:
Tags: Brazil · Business globalization · Twitter · Web Globalization
As readers of this blog well know, I’ve been bullish on machine translation for quite some time. Way back in 2004, I wrote:
Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll be out of business anytime soon. But I am saying that machine translation (MT) is going to find its niche and this niche will grow exponentially. There is simply not enough translators in the world to handle the content necessary in this increasingly global economy.
Enter Lionbridge and IBM.
In March, the two companies inked a multi-year partnership in which Lionbridge would have exclusive rights to market IBM’s Real Time Translation Service (RTTS) technology.
I recently asked Lionbridge COO Satish Maripuri about the deal.
Here is the interview:
Q: It appears that Lionbridge is trying to replace the legacy term “machine translation” with Real-Time Translation. Why do you think this new term is better?
Real-Time Translation is a more accurate term for the solution. We see machine translation as a technology that enables the solution. Real time instantaneous translation is the solution. Also, within the localization industry, Machine Translation typically refers to using productivity tools to offset the cost and time associated with translation and usually ends with a heavy post edit (PE) to get the content to publication quality. That is different than instantaneous real time translation that delivers “good-enough” translation without post edit if a customer so desires.
Q: When you talk to companies about machine translation, what types of content are they most excited about leveraging through your MT engine?
The customer excitement is remarkable. This one announcement created more in-bound interest than any announcement in our history. Organizations are most excited about translating the enterprise content that they aren’t translating today due to cost and time associated with the traditional localization process. Examples include: user generated content, research reports, eSupport, social media, knowledge bases, website content and real time instantaneous chat/email communication.
Q: We still live in a “cost per word” translation ecosystem. Do you see real-time translation as the beginning of the end of the per-word pricing model?
Details around the new pricing model will be forthcoming, but it will follow a SaaS model subscription fee and/or seat license for certain applications. This will be different than the traditional per-word pricing model. Time will tell whether this will lead to a change in the way organizations view all translation pricing. But for real time translation technology, SaaS-based subscription pricing is clearly the right model.
Q: In my view, Google has done more than any language provider to demonstrate that machine translation has a valuable role to play in global communications. Is there any concern at Lionbridge, that Google might open up its MT engine to companies via its Apps platform?
Google’s automated translation tool is a highly visible application. And you are right in that it creates awareness of the opportunity for automated translation. There are applications for Google’s technology, specifically in its ability to enhance search. Our focus is on enterprise content – which is a different application for automated translation in that it requires higher levels of quality and utility within the enterprise.
For the last five years, Lionbridge has been using and continuously developing our translation management platform — Translation Workspace. This technology combined with IBM’s real-time translation technology will allow us to customize the engine to our customer-specific domains to provide levels of quality that far surpass any freeware translation technology. This customization combined with cloud availability through Translation Workspace differentiates our tool from freeware tools and creates a highly valuable application for the enterprise.
Q: TAUS has been critical of the Lionbridge/IBM alliance as an attempt to “lock in” users via ownership of the translation resources. TAUS has called on Lionbridge to open up your data. What is Lionbridge’s response?
Customers who use Lionbridge’s real time translation technology are not locked in to Lionbridge for any service — post edit or other traditional managed service translation. We are only providing our customers with a technology application to support real-time multilingual communication. As such, our customers would simply license the technology to support real time translation. If they choose to post edit the result, they can use any service provider they choose.
Q: What do you estimate will be the ratio of human translated content to machine translated content in a typical company — say from today to five years from now?
As machine translation improves over time we believe it will be used more frequently, especially on dynamic user-generated content. We also believe over the next ten years we are going to see a shift from “Just in Case Translation” — just in case someone happens to read to “Just in Time Translation” — translation after someone shows interest.
In addition, we believe that over the next five to ten years, there will be more acceptance in the market for “good-enough” translation. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to see a larger percentages of enterprise content translated using machine translation or Real-Time Translation technology.
For more information:
Tags: Machine Translation · Vendors
