GTS Blog

One of the biggest events in the translation industry in 2010 transpired last week with the launch of Word Lens: the augmented reality iPhone app from Quest Visual. At least 2 million people watched the flash card video and thousands of people downloaded the app. Word Lens was a worldwide trending topic on Twitter for hours. Now that the dust has partially settled, it is interesting to take a look at how the market received this amazing piece of technology. So how did the market react?

The reception was rather cool. In the screenshot at the right, you can see that the overall review is 2.5 out of 5 stars, which is 50%. When one of my children brings home a 50% grade on a test they know they’re going to get their ass chewed out by my wife (when it comes to school work the woman is scary, believe me).

Looking at the reviews a bit more closely reveals three main user categories:

The cheapskates: Many of the disappointed users are complaining about having to pay up to $10 for the app. They also contend, rightfully so, that the advertisement of Word Lens as a ‘free’ app is deceiving. The ‘free’ version does not translate at all, and you are forced to spend at least $5 to start translating.

The perfectionists: Some of the users were disappointed with the performance of the app. Poor translations were cited; technical issues such as text jumping around, getting the camera to focus and other bugs were also cited.

The mesmerized: Some of the people were just blown away with the magic and futuristic nature of this app. I am one of those people. I think that these users, which accounted for all of the 5 star reviews, were not too concerned with how efficient the app is.

So what is the midterm report on the Word Lens iPhone app? I think that if the people at Quest Visual would have advertised Word Lens as a paid app (and not as a free one), they would have eliminated many of the negative reviews. Bad reviews at such an early stage will not help Quest Visual going forward. Technical issues are also a concern with many people reporting bugs in the app. The technology is still magical, however, and I am sure that people will continue to buy the app as Quest Visual continues to roll out more language packs.

Click here for another review.

Hype is a big part of marketing and some companies do it better than others. SDL is a good example of a company that engages in aggressive marketing (see related blog post here). Everyone knows about their flagship products, such as SDL Trados, which have become the industry standard. Google Translate is another example of efficient hype: hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new feature, service or product enhancement. As a result, Google Translate and the Translation Toolkit are the rage of the Internet and are used by millions of people.

Systran, one of the pioneers of machine translation, uses a much more understated marketing approach with little hype. But they let their products speak for themselves. In a recent annual survey on machine translation software by advisory firm Global Equations, Systran came out on top (read more about that here). continue reading…

The Top 10 blogging genre has become very popular in 2010. So I am going to go with the top 10 list of Internet directories of translators/translation agencies. These directories have searchable databases with thousands of translators and translation agencies. They are very helpful when you need to find a translator or translation company. Some of these portals offer an online marketplace that allows you to post translation jobs.

If you know of any other good translation directories, please write about them in the Comments area. 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…

In Answers.com Q3 2009 earnings call on 11/4/09, Answers.com CEO stated that  ”We’ve been informed by Google that we will no longer be receiving their definition link traffic starting sometime in Q4.” The definition link (shown below) appears when someone searches Google searches for terms and phrases that have a dictionary or encyclopedia definition.

For the last five years, clicking the definition link has led the user to the Answers.com website which offers a wide range of information on the requested topic. That link accounts for about 5% of Answers.com $20Million a year revenues, or about $1Million a year.

So who is Google going to give the definition link to next? The answer may be to Google itself. Google Dictionary is a very powerful tool that can be used to look up millions of words, terms, information on famous people, geography, landmarks and just about anything. If the term appears in Google’s own dictionary, it will display that information. For other terms, Google will offer a variety of Internet sources and images that provide information. See example below:

Google Dictionary already provides multilingual support and will tell you if the searched term has relevance in other languages. So although the definition link feature is  not available on the non-English versions of Google, it is logical to predict that the feature will be available in the future.