GTS Blog

Google has added Yiddish to its free translation tool, allowing users to translate documents and website pages from and into Yiddish. The Google translation tool can be found on http://translate.google.com/.

Yiddish is a German-based dialect which is used by Jews around the world and is written in the Hebrew alphabet. The language originated in European Jewish communities some 1,000 years ago and was used predominantly by Orthodox Jews in Europe. Since Hebrew was considered to be a holy language, too sacred to be used for everyday speech, Yiddish became the official language of the Jews. Also commonly referred to as ‘mama lashon’ (mother tongue), Yiddish was the first language to millions of European Jews for hundreds of years. 

Yiddish was an important part of Jewish culture, with an abundance of Yiddish theater and Yiddish literature. Notable Yiddish authors included Shalom Aleichem and Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yiddish newspapers were common. The Forward daily newspaper, published in the USA for over 100 years, had over 250,000 readers in its heyday. Currently, the Yiddish edition of the Forward is only published once a week.

World War II and the holocaust, which decimated millions of Yiddish speakers, brought about a sharp decline in the use of Yiddish. Today, Yiddish is only used by ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic communities and is spoken regularly by fewer than 1 million people.

It was announced today that Worldlingo (www.worldlingo.com) is going to integrate the Language Weaver machine translation system on their Internet site and in their desktop translation products. See the full post on http://tinyurl.com/qf4atf

Worldlingo is the leader in a market niche that it itself created: Internet Translation. The Australian company came into prominence at the start of the 2000′s by offering free translation of websites. This solution was deployed by thousands of websites, with each website providing a text link to Worldlingo’s home page. As a result, Worldlingo came in at the top of virtually every keyword search involving translation. Worldlingo was the first translation company to rely exclusively on the Internet for marketing and sales.

In another brilliant move, Worldlingo paid Microsoft a sum of several hundred thousand Dollars (which MS gladly pocketed) to integrate Worldlingo’s translation services in MS Office products.

With the huge following that resulted, Worldlingo started to sell translation solutions for Website translation, translation of emails and other applications.

All of Worldlingo’s translation solutions were powered by Systran Enterprise Server 5.0.

Recently, Worldlingo has seen a steep drop in Internet traffic on their website — 25% in the last 3 months and over 50% in the last 2 years (see http://alexa.com/siteinfo/worldlingo.com). That has got to hurt as the Internet is their bread-and-butter. Worldlingo’s solutions have become outdated. The Systran 5.0 server they are running is a few years old. People are not really buying desktop translation products any more. And Google offers many of Worldlingo’s solutions for free, which makes it very tough for Worldlingo to make money from sales. The future of the partnership with Microsoft is unclear. Microsoft has its own machine translation technology which they are integrating into MS Office products.

By integrating one of the best machine translation systems available (Language Weavers Statistical MT system), Worldlingo hopes to regain some of its prominence by rejuvenating its product and service offering with new languages and enhanced translation quality.

Worldlingo is the brainchild of Australian entrepreneur Phil Scanlan, who is probably still the owner but no longer the CEO of Worldlingo. Mr. Scanlan is currently running RxWorks – Veterinary Practice Management Software.