Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Baidu.com, the largest Chinese Internet search service provider in China and even the world, officially rolled out on July 10 its online translation service to compete head-to-head with the well-received similar service that was launched by Google.

From Internet search to online advertising, now the two search giants once again are in direct competition in the online translation service sector.

The online translation service of the Chinese search service provider offers Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation and English dictionary. The service supports translation of 1,000 Chinese characters at most.

Read more >> Baidu 

Common issues plague the search space within the global search market. The most common of these issues occurs when a U.S.-based company expands globally. While this company may have an extreme advantage in the U.S. with both brand and search engine presence, these companies typically spend little or no time with their expansion plans overseas.

For example, adding a link to bring a user to a different database. Let’s look at the UK. A cookie may be set up when a user clicks on the link, which will then bring the user to a localized session. This session may be optimal for their needs, but search engines won’t accept the cookie and won’t travel down such a path.

The only way a search engine can determine if a particular page or “site” should be listed within a specific country is seen by one of two options:

1. The domain name or top-level domain. Most countries require address verification during the registration process in order to deliver a local domain.
2. Location of the hosting environment. Each country has been assigned IP ranges. These pools of ranges are then passed down to hosting companies and providers of Internet access. Search engines are able to determine which data centers they belong to based on a check to see if they are within a given range.

Google has provided a service within the Google Webmaster Tools that helps Webmasters tag their site(s) to a specific country. This can be especially helpful if a Webmaster or company is using sub-domains that may or may not be hosted in a single country.

Read more >> Aaron Shear 

Today, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, ThoughtFarmer announced the third generation of its wiki-inspired intranet platform: ThoughtFarmer Intranet 3.0 Multilingual.

ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information. Wiki-inspired, but without the chaos, ThoughtFarmer combines the collaborative and empowering benefits of social software with a secure and centralized intranet platform demanded by the modern enterprise.

Previous versions of ThoughtFarmer addressed the need for organizations to be able to better leverage the intellectual capital that exists at all levels of the organization. ThoughtFarmer helped companies like Intrawest Placemaking break through regional and departmental barriers, bringing together geographically dispersed colleagues with similar job functions. Idea sharing on ThoughtFarmer produced real ROI.

In version 3.0, ThoughtFarmer sets its sights on breaking through the organizational language barrier.

“Our multinational customers want to collaborate regardless of language,” said ThoughtFarmer President, Darren Gibbons. “ThoughtFarmer 3.0’s features allow them to cross those language boundaries.”

Read more > Press Release 

The International Search Summit in the British Library looks set to catch the attention of the search engine marketing (SEM) world.

Heralded as a “top quality event” by its organisers, the summit will cover topics from online marketing to link building.

However, attendees will no doubt be enthralled by the in-depth consideration of multilingual search engine marketing issues, spurred on by the multilingual web marketing hosts, WebCertain.

The summit could also leave marketers pondering the importance of introducing multilingual elements into their web design.

According to WebCertain’s managing director, Andy Atkins-Kruger, it is “something that every company must consider”.

He added: “Multilingual and international search is something that every company must consider and implement if it wants to maximise its global online potential.”

Read more > SEM 

Google adds 10 different languages to its online translation arsenal this week

Snuck out via a Google blog post, Jeff Chin a product manager over at the search engine company announced to all and sundry a whole bank of new tongues to Google Translate.

“Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible,” he burbled

From the machine translation team within Google Research, they’re happy to report they’ve been hard at work to overcome this challenge. Google now has brought the grand total of translation abilities to the princely sum of 23 languages. The bog post goes on to list Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish as the latest additions.

Read more > Google

The Canadian Tourism Commission knew exactly how to optimize its website to foreign markets. It knew that Germans prefer canoe trips, while the Japanese are fond of organized bus tours. The multilingual version of its website reflects these preferences.

“It all comes down to understanding your clients,” said Huiping Iler, chief executive of WINTranslation.com, a Web translation service in Ottawa.

But there are few examples like this one, she says. Most companies don’t bother to understand their audiences when they translate websites. Sloppily made multilingual sites either turn off international clients with bad translations or don’t show up at all in Web searches.

Take the concept of an open house for a home for sale. This is a practice unknown in many countries, yet companies nonetheless push the service on their foreign language sites, even translating the words “open house” literally.

This is not only a linguistic and cultural blunder, but it also keeps search engines from pointing to a website.

“There’s a real lack of understanding,” Iler said. “People who do marketing are often uniling

Read more > Websites 

The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.

Its users around the world are translating Facebook’s visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — aiding the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.

The company says it’s using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.

“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the idea, other social networks aren’t “crowdsourcing” translation. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.

Read more > Facebook 

Although companies today generally understand the importance of search engine optimization on their home language Websites, they don’t take the same care when translating their Websites into other languages. Therefore, many companies have multilingual Websites that no one can find. These companies are unaware about what it takes to get their foreign sites well positioned by search engines. As a result, they are missing out on potentially huge opportunities.

Here are ten common mistakes these companies make when creating multilingual Websites:

1. Companies often don’t realize the enormous power of search engines. Did you know that nearly 90 percent of Website traffic is generated by search engines? However, it’s not enough to simply have your multilingual Website included in search engine indices. You need to get ranked in the first three pages. Research has shown that more than 80 percent of searchers do not look beyond the third page.

2. Worldwide corporations sometimes don’t spend the money to hire a good translator. Maybe you know someone who can speak the language into which you want to translate your Website, or perhaps you’ve thought about hiring a student at a local university who knows the language. Think again. You need to hire a professional. Your Web copy needs to be well written in English and the language in which you are translating it. If not, your company could look uneducated or unprofessional to your non-native English speaking audience. Not only most the translator be fluent in the target language as well as in the originating language, but he or she must be very familiar with the industry under discussion. Also, make sure your translator is familiar with search engine marketing. Translators not only need to know the language, they need to know how to get eyes on your page.

Read more: Multilingual SEO 

One of the ways to do this easily and inexpensively (even free!) is to go online and find a translation tool for your Web site, such as AltaVista’s Babel Fish (www.altavista.com/help/free/free_searchbox_transl). This tool will translate to/from up to nine languages. Adding the tool to your site enables users to translate your Web pages into their language of choice with just one click. Simply ask your Web site developer to put the translation tool onto your site – and off you go! It’s a simple thing to do, and it’s just a small logo-like button added to your Web site.

There are other benefits to adding a translation tool to your site. For starters, it is a positive reflection on your business. It makes you look tech savvy and, believe me, there are very few kitchen and bath dealers out there who have added this option to their Web sites. It will put you ahead of the pack! Even if someone doesn’t need the tool, they will see it and subconsciously be aware that you stay on top of the latest technology.

Read more: Website additions 

Facebook isn’t just messing around with a few European language translations any more. They’re using their new user-powered translation engine to get Facebook into 22 more languages, on top of English, French, German and Spanish.

It will take some time for users to translate the sites, and Facebook likes to stagger launches to maximize PR. If you want to help out with the project, the application is here.