TranslatorsTraining.com - RSS Language/Translation Blog Collection http://www.translatorstraining.com/ This week, Google’s philanthropic arm (Google.org) announced an initiative called Health Speaks, which seeks to make health-related information available to individuals throughout the world, regardless of language. Starting with Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili, the project will use community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation to address an important but often-overlooked disparity – access to health information. Here’s [...] http://www.globalwatchtower.com/2010/09/06/googlehealthspeaks/ Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:08:06 CEST Last week I said I’d love to see more profiles of global-minded business execs and, sure enough, the Journal delivers. Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee. According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/Atg0Bhrns4Y/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:47:19 CEST The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart. This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages. It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/lJcW-wRQThA/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:16:18 CEST Language technology supplier MultiCorpora today announced that it has acquired Beetext, another developer of translation management systems (TMS). The deal underscores the importance of offering a complete solution for companies managing large-scale projects. MultiCorpora CEO Pierre Blais pre-briefed us on the acquisition earlier this week. Because both companies are family-owned and privately funded, Blais wouldn’t [...] http://www.globalwatchtower.com/2010/08/31/multicorpora-acquires-beetext/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:34:32 CEST Language services help the world go ’round. We’ve written before about how interpreters and translators help thwart public health outbreaks, end bomb scares, communicate with populations affected by oil spills and earthquakes, enable fans to enjoy the World Cup, and assist diplomats with international relations snafus. We thought we’d seen it all, until some bright [...] http://www.globalwatchtower.com/2010/08/31/diamonds/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:35:48 CEST In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category. In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround. In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance. It’s nice to see [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/jafTEJwdqOQ/ Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:04:56 CEST It’s been awhile since I’ve posted findings from the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, but I did want to include a brief note on the retail sector. We define this industry segment to include those retailers (and a few food/beverage chains) that have a physical presence in the countries in which they do business. This excludes [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/FTZxrYGNUQo/ Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:44:11 CEST I’m happy to be not only attending but speaking at Localization World and Unicode Conference in October. Here are the details on my sessions: Localization World Seattle, WA October 6: International Search Summit October 7: The Next Ten Years of Web Globalization October 7: Making Your Website Truly Global — and No, We’re Not Talking About Language Unicode [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/W0y8805WzZw/ Sun, 15 Aug 2010 17:54:28 CEST The Kindle 3 was announced last evening. The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader. Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual. Last year, I asked where was Kindle’s support for non-Latin characters. I was happy to find [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/dDbeGmVOt6c/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:00:16 CEST Google Translate is a great tool for translating content on the fly — and on the cheap. And as Google noted in its blog, Poland’s Ministry of Economy is taking advantage of this translation engine to provide web users with real-time translated content. The Google Translate engine is built right into the header. Here’s a [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/nLIRK8dPP1o/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:59:00 CEST .AN is the ccTLD for the Netherlands Antilles which is about to fade into the sunset.  Its days as a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands will end in a few short months. Says this article: On the same date, 10-10-10, Curaçao and the Dutch half of St Maarten will become independent countries within [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/xgOFgC7q9UU/ Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:59:11 CEST Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/fOWYNqSFc-o/ Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:30:40 CEST Translation memory helps companies re-use previously translated text, improving consistency and potentially saving money. 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, [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/rpwt4_KcZaw/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:17:27 CEST The iPhone is a global success story. And one of the reasons for this success can be attributed to the device’s support for more than 30 languages. But with the iPhone 4 update, Apple continues to push ahead on the global front. Multilingual Mac has documented these improvements, which include fonts that now display some Indic [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/1ey-4F-IOaE/ Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:48:43 CEST Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world’s largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks, recently launched a redesigned (and more global) web site. Auction web sites are much like ecommerce web sites — that is, quite complex. You’ve got currencies and time zones and legal issues to navigate. And, in the case of Ritchie Bros, you’ve also got real-time [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/AEyS9EA5tbE/ Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:09:28 CEST ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN to support IDNs. To give you an idea of how these new IDNs are poised to change the Internet as we know it, I’ve overlayed [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/Z1SPgk40Ikg/ Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:58:01 CEST Awhile back, Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder. emailed me to ask if I knew of any other religion web site that supported more languages than the site of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I didn’t. As shown in the screen grab below, the Jehovah’s Witnesses site supports nearly 400 languages! In comparison, Wikipedia supports only 272 languages. [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/HKrKwWqDos4/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:05:02 CEST A great quote from an interview with Tarun Khanna and Krishna G. Palepu, authors of the new book Winning in Emerging Markets: Multinationals based in developed countries as well as emerging market -based companies face a tension between ambition and humility. Multinationals want to exploit the tremendous opportunities in emerging markets, but they need to [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/bOoITfoYo30/ Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:30:38 CEST 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 [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/Uh_q1phWtwA/ Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:29:41 CEST 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 [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/kg9KmE5zou0/ Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:13:12 CEST 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 [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/xHO7jnKV8F0/ Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:00:20 CEST Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US. 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, [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/duw92BW8Tbs/ Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:47:00 CEST 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 [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/DJCzG1p1LPc/ Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:55:42 CEST When it comes to web globalization and, in particular, global navigation, the general rule about flags is to avoid using them. By avoiding them, you avoid stepping into any number of politically sensitive issues. Nevertheless, companies love to use flags on their web sites. And sometimes the use of flags can result in some rather [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/YY56Ch6BMDM/ Mon, 31 May 2010 00:42:03 CEST From SharePoint to Documentum to Interwoven, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software provides the information infrastructure for  large enterprises, both internally and externally. And although most ECM developers will eagerly say their software is “global” — not all software is equal when it comes to supporting all languages and locales. As one point of reference, SharePoint [...] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GlobalByDesign/~3/C9vJuiMXFo0/ Tue, 25 May 2010 17:22:46 CEST