GTS Blog

With 2011 nearly gone, most of you are already deep in the holiday spirit and probably thinking of things other than work. So what better time than now to summarize the biggest events in our industry in 2011? In my opinion, 2011 was not a very exciting in the translation industry. A “Top 10″ list would have been better, but I found it hard to stretch it beyond 5. Ready? Here’s my list:

1. Google becomes a translation vendor. This was a tidal wave in the relatively calm waters of the translation industry: Google got millions of people hooked by providing unlimited, free machine translation for several years. In May, 2011 they announced that the free lunch is over. This caused shock among many people both in and out of the industry. It upset many people, especially developers who created products around the free translations. Google then added more fuel to the fire by announcing a few weeks later that it was making the API a paid option.
2. Microsoft strengthens its position in MT. 2011 will have proven to be a watershed year for the Bing Translator team at Microsoft Research. When Google made its dramatic announcement, Bing Translator chief Chris Wendt swiftly announced that Microsoft will continue to provide free API services. This won over a lot customers, who came to distrust Google. And when Bing made the terms of their commercial license known, it was done in an understated way that did not cause any of the histrionics associated with Google’s announcement.
3. Translation startups get serious. In 2011 several startup companies like Smartling, MyGengo and Cloudwords raised Millions of dollars from VCs to deploy online translation services. With that kind of money being invested these companies will surely make their presence felt in the years to come and will compete with veteran companies in the translation services market. These companies will also help propagate some of the new work-flows that people are talking about recently like crowdsourcing and post-edited machine translation.
4. Facebook machine translation integration. In 2011 Facebook integrated Microsoft Translation to enable its users to read messages that are in different languages. This should be an industry driver and will help advance machine translation technology, due the size and influence that Facebook carries in the world. Will Facebook stay with Microsoft? Will they develop their own tools? Will Microsoft develop new tools for Facebook? I don’t have the answers but I am positive that Facebook will work at making cross-language communication different and better than what it is today.
5. Transperfect acquisition of Worldlingo. Transperfect is one of the biggest translation companies and it will be interesting to see if they can grow Worldlingo as an online translation business; and if selling translations online will become a significant part of their business.

What didn’t we see in 2011? We did not see any significant advances in speech-to-speech translation. In recent years IBM, Microsoft and Google made a lot of announcements about speech-to-speech translation R&D. But these announcements did not turn into any new commercial products or services in 2011. We also did not see any revolutionary new translation products for mobile smartphones. I hope we see some exciting new translation products in 2012.

Merry Christmas to everyone! Happy Holidays, Dave

My all-time favorite rock band growing up was Boston. I liked them so much that I went to see them in concert twice in one week in Alpine Valley Wisconsin in 1987.

The only problem with Boston is that they took forever to come out with a new album. More than a Feeling came out in 1976. Their next album Don’t Look Back came out in 1978. It took them another 8 years to come out with their third album Third Stage. They released their fourth and last album Corporate America in 2002 but by then I had lost interest in the group.

Why did it take this group so long to release an album? Most people say that it is because Tom Scholtz, Boston’s creator and leader, was a perfectionist and did not want to release an album until it was perfect.

What does this have to do with Word Lens? In today’s high-tech world, time-to-market is a key factor. A year is an eternity when you’re talking about mobile phone apps. Yet since Quest Visual first released Word Lens one year ago with only Spanish language support, it took them a whole year to release the second language, French.

But is it just a matter of perfectionism? Or was this product release timed for the holiday season to capitalize on indiscriminate Christmas shopping (just like the first product which was also released days before Christmas). Since I wanted to check out the product myself, I bought the French-to-English language pack on my iPhone.

Well the product is NOT perfect, but works well nonetheless. It renders comprehensible translations of simple signs that one would find in public areas. However, it does not do as well with more extensive texts. Some people may complain about the $10 price tag per language pair, but once you get over that and install the product, it is definitely nice to have. I will surely use it on future travels to French-speaking countries.

But why did it take so long to release another language? One of the reasons may be just lack of time. It seems that the creator of Word Lens Otavio Good was busy working on other things, including a project for DARPA which yielded a prize of $50,000 (read more here). Another reason may have been to release the new product in time for the holiday season. Will we need to wait for next Christmas for Italian or German? Let’s wait and see.

To all my Canadian buddies,

It’s hockey season, eh? So let’s crack open a couple of cold Molsons and go into deep hibernation until the temperature gets back into positive territory. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about our favorite Canadian translation product: Ortsbo.

Ortsbo issued a press release a few days ago that they are going to sue for libel people who bad-mouthed the company. Well, here I am. I am not hiding behind a fake name and in every one of my posts I asked the folks at Ortsbo to refute my remarks with some hard facts. I never received any information from them and instead received comments from people who called me a crook and a paid basher. I even received some comments that had to do with my Mother but I decided to trash those in the interest of good taste. In the USA we have something called “free press” and I can write whatever I please. After all it is my blog. Everything I wrote is based in fact and clearly is not in violation of any laws. But heck, if they want to sue me than so be it. I have been to court before and know the way there.

Now let’s get back to facts:

• Ortsbo is now using the Microsoft Translator API in its real-time translator. They were previously using the Google Translate API V1 which was terminated on December 1, 2011. The problem is, Microsoft only supports about 35 languages which is about 20 less than Google. So if you select a language (like Yiddish) which is not supported by Microsoft, Ortsbo does not translate it. I know this because I myself installed the Ortsbo app on my iPhone and tested it.
• Ortsbo ranks #3 in in the US iTunes store. Does it now? According to XYologic, a company that specializes in mobile analysis and metrics, the Ortsbo iPhone app has been downloaded a total of about 50,000 times worldwide-83% of those in Canada. Click here to see it yourself. It has a total of 111 user ratings to date. Does that sound like a high ranking app? Not to me.
• Intertainment purchased a share in Israeli company Lexifone. This company has solid technology and patents. Which is good. But what is the synergy with real-time, multilingual text messaging? And will Ortsbo be able to compete with such small companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google who are spending Millions on speech-to-speech translation? This looks like a Hail Mary pass in a lost Football game.
• The Ortsbo WordPress plugin. They announced its release two months ago. Where is it? I can’t find it.
• INT.V stock price is tanking. It is worth much less than it was when I started writing about the company. Is it my fault? Can suing people for libel bring the stock price up?

The people at Ortsbo excel in a lot of things: in raising money from the public; in promoting products with gimmicks and shtick; in selling a dream. But in technology? I give them an F, a failing grade. And you can sue me for saying it.

On December 1, 2011 Google shut down the free version of its Translate API (v1) and informed that all users would have to switch over to the paid Translate API version (V2). As many of us have anticipated, this ended the party for many companies that enjoyed free translation services. Here is a partial list of websites/products that have discontinued free translation services to at least some extent.

• Ackuna, the Cloud Translator. The website is still there but the free translation has not been working in the last 24 hours. (Ackuna is owned by Translation Services USA, see next on the list).
• Translation Services USA. This company switched over to the Microsoft Translator API so some of the languages work. But some of the languages (like Welsh and Yiddish) which Microsoft does not support are not working.
• Ortsbo. This company also switched over to the Microsoft Translator API and some languages work. But some of the languages don’t work even though they remain as menu selection options.
• Lingo24. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• AsiaTranslate.net. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• ToLingo. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• Transperfect Transimage. This is an iPhone app developed by Transperfect which ran on the Google Translate API. It no longer works. I am betting that there are more free translation apps for smartphones that no longer work.

There are also a lot of websites that used free widgets that were powered by Google Translate V1 or that used scripts that called the deprecated API. You will be able to see some of them by doing a search on “Unable to perform Translation: Please use Translate v2.” Google terms this as a Terms of Service Abuse, click here for more details.