GTS Blog

The startup company Whitesmoke announced a new translation product called Whitesmoke Translator. The free download now offers translation of single words in 45 languages. More languages as well as machine translation of texts will be released at a later stage.  This product will probably stir up some competition with Babylon’s  translation product, which provides some of the same functions. Babylon’s product is not free and requires purchase of a license.

Disclaimer-downloading Whitesmoke’s free translation tool requires you to enter an email address. Whitesmoke is known for its aggressive sales tactics of its Whitesmoke Writer, which is not a free product. People that download the Translator can expect a barrage of emails that tout their non-free products.

With great fanfare, Google announced on September 30, 2009 that “Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.” See the original announcement in Google’s own blog.

Did you click the link? Now look closely at the Official Google Blog again. Did you notice anything strange? Where is that fantastic translation gadget? If the widget is so great, why doesn’t Google use it on their own blog? If it’s good for me, shouldn’t it be good for them too?

Now go through all of Google’s blogs which you can access from Google’s blog directory. Guess how many have the translation gadget. I’ll give you a hint: it’s a round number (zero). And there are several regional blogs written in non-English languages. Why not serve these blogs in English via the Google translation gadget when an English speaker reads them?

If this is an oversight on the part of Google, then we should expect to see the translation gadget soon on all of Google’s blogs. But if the translation gadgets are not ready for prime time, maybe other bloggers and website publishers should take note of this.

If you need a good multilingual translation glossary of technical terms and equipment in Portuguese, Dutch and English look no further. technical-portuguese.blogspot.com has a solid terminology reference with informative pictures with each object. Includes a lifting, hoisting and rigging glossary. Safety equipment translations are also included. The authors of the dictionary are experts on the European Machinery Directive (98/37/CE), European Norms (EN).

A new program launched this week provides the first national certification for medical interpreters in the United States. This national interpreting standard provides professionals working in the medical field with the opportunity to be tested and credentialed as “Certified Medical Interpreter” (CMI). The CMI certification will be available to Spanish language interpreters, with other languages planned to be included in 2010.

“Hospitals across the country should provide their patients with qualified interpreters that can prevent the miscommunications and subsequent medical errors that still occur far too often in some of today’s hospitals,” said Mursal Khaliif, Senior Director of Multilingual Services, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, Massachusetts. “A national certification for medical interpreters has been desperately needed to ensure the safety of LEP (limited English proficiency) patients and I am extremely delighted that we now have a national standard in place.”

See more information here.

One of the more overlooked search services on the Internet is image search, which is one of the fastest growing services on the Internet. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have image search engines, with many other specialized image search engines available as well.  Image search allows users to search for pictures and images according to keywords or search phrases.

Having great artwork, whether it be photos or graphics, can really drive people to your website or blog. On a site or blog with nice graphics, traffic from image search engines can account for 15% or more of the total traffic.

If your website or blog is being published in several languages, use plenty of images to get your message across. As opposed to text, images do not need to be translated into another language. And good graphics will drive traffic to your foreign language blog or website as well, if not better, than text search.