GTS Blog

The referee has blown the whistle. The match is over. And the winner is: SDL. This company has transcended the localization and translation industry and is now a global information management conglomerate. Equipped with lots of cash, SDL CEO Mark Lancaster will be on the lookout to buy more companies in order to expand his kingdom. After establishing SDL as a premier LSP, conquering the CAT tool market, and dominating in web content management, Lancaster is setting his sights much higher. continue reading…

Although they have traditionally kept a low profile about it, IBM is not new to the translation software industry. IBM has been involved in computational linguistics and NLP (natural language processing) research for over 30 years and has a machine translation (MT) system called WebSphere Translation Server which has been around for about 10 years. You can try IBM’s machine translation online by clicking here.

IBM has not promoted this business aggressively and relatively little is known about this product. I searched the Internet for relevant customer case studies and found very few. Press releases about the product are also hard to find.

But IBM’s approach to language software will probably become more market-oriented and will result in new product offerings. continue reading…

Our hearts go out to the people of Haiti. The mass graves, the piles of rubble, the sights of the tattered and starving survivors are gut wrenching. And we all want to help, each in our own way. Our prayers and thoughts are with you my dear Haitians.

But what insults me, and maybe some of you as well, are the cynical attempts by some companies and bloggers to milk the Haiti disaster for the purpose of financial profit. continue reading…

I am not sure exactly when, but sometime in the early 1980s one-hour photo stores became the norm. Instead of sending your film to a central lab for development and printing, stores started to print your photos on premises and deliver them in one hour or even less.

A similar kind of service is now being offered for translations. Instead of calling a translation agency for a quote, paying for the work and then waiting a few days for the translation, you can do it all online and get the translation within hours. Some of the companies that offer this service are Tolingo, Mygengo and OneHourTranslation. Babylon, the vendor of translation dictionaries has launched a similar service. And there are other companies as well. Some of these companies have received funding from VCs, resulting in valuable media coverage and advertisement.

So should the old-fashioned translation agencies be worried? Will the one-hour shops take over the industry?  continue reading…

My last blog post of top 10 bloggers to watch in 2010 was a success. It was viewed like 150 times in its first day and was retweeted 16 times. So I’m going with another top 10 list: the tweeters in the translation and localization industry that have the most followers. Unfortunately, I can’t put myself in this time. I used www.wefollow.com to get the facts. Here is the list: continue reading…