One of the biggest stories to hit the localization industry this year was the IBM-Lionbridge deal which granted Lionbridge exclusive rights to offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based, text-to-text language automation solutions to commercial clients based on IBM’s Real Time Translation Service (RTTS) technology. You can read my first blog post about it here.
Since that dramatic announcement was made, Lionbridge has not provided the general public with much information on how they are planning to use this new technology. And in other industry news, SDL’s purchase of Language Weaver has cast a shadow on the Lionbridge deal.
But I did manage to find a wealth of information on IBM RTTS from the IBM website. This blog post will tell you some of the details I found:
The n.Fluent Transwidget
IBM developerWorks is piloting a Real-Time Translation Solution (RTTS) in select areas of their web site (read about that here). To that end, IBM developerWorks has released a translation widget and is encouraging IBM employees to install it on their blogs. The objective is to make IBM blogs available in other languages and also to encourage more IBM’ers to improve the translation quality through crowdsourcing. You can read the announcement about the n.Fluent transwidget here.
Test RTTS translation yourself
A number of IBM blogs have already installed the n.Fluent transwidget. One example is Telco Talk. If you go into one of these blogs you can test the translation quality yourself. Previously, the public (outside of IBM) was unable to access IBM RTTS.
Crowdsourcing rating system and feedback
The n.Fluent transwidget has a built-in rating system that is used to improve the translation quality. It is unclear how IBM handles the backend, but it is probably similar to how it is handled at Google and Microsoft.
Supported Languages
IBM RTTS currently supports translation between English and 11 languages. It is interesting to note that language pairs that do not include English (such as French-German) are not supported. RTTS supports far fewer languages and language pairs than Google, Microsoft and Language Weaver.
What do the people at IBM think?
Not all of the IBM’ers are thrilled with the translation quality. The comments on this page make for an interesting read.
What do YOU think?
Do you have an opinion on IBM RTTS? Share it with us.
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