Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Microsoft has announced the addition of new translation technology to its search and instant messaging services.

Users can now access Microsoft’s translation offerings through the Live Search, Internet Explorer 8, the Windows Live Toolbar and Windows Live Messenger applications, the company said in a post on the Live Search blog.

Read more > Microsoft

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the company’s efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.

“Google Translation Center is the fast and easy way to get translations for your content. Simply upload your document, choose your translation language, and choose from our registry of professional and volunteer translators. If a translator accepts, you should receive your translated content back as soon as it’s ready,” the site said.

Google prefers to rely on computer algorithms rather than humans, so at first glance the Google Translation Center looks somewhat anomalous, even though Google is only playing a middleman role. But it’s possible that the human translators might be gradually improving Google’s machine translation technology as they work, in effect helping to put themselves out of a job.

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One of Google’s goals is to give people the information they want, wherever they are, in whatever language they speak, and through whatever device they’re using. A huge part of that goal is making their services available in as many languages as possible.

The efforts to make Google products available in as many languages as possible dates to 2001, when they started “Google in Your Language”, which lets volunteers translate and edit translations of Google products in their native languages.

As more and more users, advertisers, and partners interact with Google across the world, the need for local products has become even more obvious. In 2007, they undertook a company-wide initiative to increase the availability of their products in multiple languages. They picked the 40 languages read by over 98% of Internet users and got going, relying heavily on open source libraries such as ICU and other internationalization technologies to design products. Do you need web search in Chinese or AdWords online support in Spanish? Perhaps Google News in Hindi or Google Scholar in Korean? Not a problem.

Here’s a taste of how far they’ve come:

* 30 in 30: Today Google has more than 30 products in more than 30 languages, up from 5 products in 30 languages just a year ago.
* In 2004, they had 150 local-language versions of various products (e.g. a product local to the UK, not just the English-speaking world); today they’re at more than 1500.
* From January to March of 2008, they launched 256 local-language versions of various products, compared to 55 in the same period of 2007.
* They’ve upgraded to Unicode 5.1 to make sure that they can handle any characters people read or write in.

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