GTS Blog

Crowdsourcing is one of the hottest trends on the Internet and in the translation industry. As anyone in the translation business knows, there are lots of underemployed translators and people with good language skills out there that have time on their hands. So why not harness this huge workforce to translate masses of text?

Many people are speaking out against crowdsourcing translations for various reasons. But I can think of five reasons why it will catch on in a big way. The reasons are: IBM, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wordpress. Big companies become successful by making the right decisions. And they set the trends that other companies follow. Now even a successful company can be wrong once in a while. But can five of the biggest and most influential companies all be wrong? It is unlikely. 
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January 27, 2010

At a panel on social networking that took place in Davos, Switzerland George Colony of Forrester Research (@gcolony) said that Twitter usage has peaked at about 75 million users and that traffic has been flat for the last six months.

Another panelist, Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) said a few minutes later that a new Twitter feature called Geotagging will promote growth of Twitter and make it a more valuable social and business tool. continue reading…

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ZOO Digital has developed software that automates the localization of multi language delivery of digital content across multiple media (DVD / print / digital / web). Once a company has translated their material, ZOO can take any designed base file and input that translation to create multiple language files in seconds which is where the large cost and time savings come in.

ZOO has production facilities in the UK and US and license the software to clients and/or their suppliers. They have just completed the 2nd phase of worldwide implementation within the Disney Corporation saving them 50% of their costs approx $8 million. By utilising ZOO software they also cut their production time by 50% creating a more flexible critical path. ZOO is ideal for any organisation that produces marketing, print, DVD or digital media in multiple languages and wishes to cut production costs and time.

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Google has so many amazing products, it is hard to keep track of all of them. One of these products is called Google Insights for Search and it provides powerful tools for targeting your website/blog content to an international audience. It can also help you decide which content you should localize and into which languages; and it can help you localize your content, keywords and meta tags so your content ranks high on foreign language keyword searches.

As an example, let’s say your blog or website ranks high in searches for ‘business card design.’   Now you want to target your content for an international market, say the German-speaking population. If we enter ‘Visitenkarte’ (German for ‘business cards’) we can see the main countries that are searching for related data (in this case Germany, Austria and Switzerland). We can also see which keywords get searched the most (Top Searches), how people are searching for related information and the keywords that are rising in popularity (Rising Searches). 

This and other information from Google Insights for Search allows you to get a feel for what kind of content your audience is looking for, segmented by country and by language. This can help you choose the best meta tag and keyword translations. It can help you optimize your Adwords campaigns. And if you are a blogger, you can target your content to pique the interest of your audience in foreign countries.

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Microsoft recently made their language portal, previously only for internal use at Microsoft, available online for public use. Click here to see it.

The language portal allows you to search Microsoft localization glossaries and terminology database in over 70 languages, download style guides, provide feedback on terminology used in Microsoft products and get links to other additional Microsoft language resources. You can also participate in terminology forms and collaborate with language professionals.

Terminology search in MS Language portal

The term search function is easy to use, you just enter a term and select a language. Response time is slow: the query for translation of window into German took more than 10 seconds. But the wait is worthwhile. The results window displays dictionary definitions for all related terms. It provides the translation individually for each of the the Microsoft products (e.g. .NET, MS Excel). The window also provides advanced search options, and allows you to search for terminology translations per Microsoft product and for translations from ‘any’ to ‘any’ language.

The Style Guide download function proved to be buggy but I managed a workaround. It is easy to download each of the more than 70 Style Guides per language, but opening them can be problematic due to security issues (which is weird since MS Windows XP does not allow you to open a CHM file that MS itself created). The workarounds mentioned on the Language portal did not work, but I solved the problem by opening the CHM file using Internet Explorer and THEN using the workaround suggested by MS.

Microsoft Localization Style Guides per Language

The style guides are provided in MS HTML Help (CHM) format. The information is provided clearly and in abundance.

The release of the Language portal is great news to translators and localization professionals/companies. The wealth of resources here is incredible.

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