Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee.

According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s total sales. And it’s just getting started.

Some choice quotes from the interview:

The rush to emerging markets is there already for the last 10 years. What you have started to see is that, in many of these emerging markets, now you get growing local [Chinese] competitors who become either regional or aspiring global competitors.

It does not suffice to serve only the metropolitan areas. In India and in China you need to have good rural distribution.

For the emerging markets we have even more local responsibility. In general we try to push responsibility down in the organization and have everything necessary centralized. But for emerging markets we have done that even more than for the developed markets.

The Philips global web site finished in 4th place overall in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. Decentralization of control is a key ingredient of successful local web sites, particularly in emerging markets.

The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart.

This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages.

It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic.

In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category.

In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround.

In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance.

It’s nice to see the business press taking notice.

This Wall Street Journal profile of Johan Svanstrom, the head of Hotels.com’s Asia group, sheds light on why the company has done so well. The article begins:

Online travel giant Expedia Inc. had fewer than 20 employees in Hong Kong and no Chinese-language website when Johan Svanstrom took on his role as Asia-Pacific vice president of Expedia unit Hotels.com five years ago. Under 38-year-old Mr. Svanstrom, Hotels.com has added 13 new country-specific websites in the region and more than 160 staff.

Hotels.com is clearly betting big on Asia, and with good reason. Says Svanstrom:

According to the [International Air Transport Association], Asia Pacific overtook North America as the world’s largest air-travel market with 647 million passengers in 2009—a true milestone. When these people arrive at their destination, very many of them need a hotel to stay in. Add to that the fact that travel is one of the top three verticals of e-commerce and a natural pair with the Internet? All the stars are aligned.

I love to see profiles such as this; I hope to see more in the months ahead. Despite all the doom and gloom in the news these days, a lot of companies are booming abroad — and, in large part, thanks to smart bets on web globalization.

We define this industry segment to include those retailers (and a few food/beverage chains) that have a physical presence in the countries in which they do business. This excludes a company such as Amazon, and it greatly narrows the selection of global web sites, as most “bricks and mortar” retailers have been slow to expand into new markets. For bricks and mortar retailers, the world is not quite as flat as it is for their virtual competitors. To illustrate, the average number of languages supported by the retail web sites we studied was 13, well below the overall average of 22.

We included 11 retailers in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition.

Of the 11 retailers studied, IKEA emerged on top.

IKEA is no stranger to the top spot. It was an early leader in this space and has done an amazing job of balancing global consistency with local flexibility in every market it enters. IKEA was also one of the first multinationals to use a splash global gateway — which it still uses today (FYI: if you want to learn more about global gateways, check out the brand new edition of The Art of the Global Gateway).

Starbucks made significant improvements over the past two years, and adding eight new languages. Starbucks has also beenagressive in embracing social media around the world. For example, its German Facebook page — Starbucks Deutschland — has more than 175,000 followers (it gained more than 100,000 followers in the last seven months).

Best Buy has done an excellent job with its US Spanish web site, blogs, and community forums.

It will be an interesting site to watch over the next year as the company expands into Europe.

Here is the full list of retailers included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Best Buy
• Build a Bear
• Godiva
• H&M
• Home Depot
• IKEA
• McDonald’s
• Starbucks
• Subway
• Tiffany
• Wal-Mart

Here are the details on my sessions:

Localization World
Seattle, WA

• October 6: International Search Summit
• October 7: The Next Ten Years of Web Globalization
• October 7: Making Your Website Truly Global — and No, We’re Not Talking About Language

Unicode Conference
Santa Clara, CA

• October 19: Improving the Global Gateway: Established and Emerging Trends in Multilingual Navigation

If you’re planning to attend either event, please let me know. I’d love to meet.

The Kindle 3 was announced last evening.

The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader.

Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual.

Last year, I asked where was Kindle’s support for non-Latin characters.

I was happy to find this morning, buried in the product description for the Kindle 3, this product blurb:

Support for New Characters
Kindle can now display Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts.

This is great to see. I guess asking for bidi support (Arabic and Hebrew) would have been a bit too much.

PS: I’ve got a book on the Kindle now — though only in plain ol’ Latin script. Still, this is great news for when my book is translated into Russian, Japanese, etc. I can dream…

And as Google noted in its blog, Poland’s Ministry of Economy is taking advantage of this translation engine to provide web users with real-time translated content. The Google Translate engine is built right into the header.

Here’s a screen grab from their site (translated from Polish into English):

However, you’ll notice that the main header is still in Polish.

Why is that?

Blame embedded text.

Embedding text within visuals is a great way to ensure that the text appears exactly how you wish it to appear. But it’s a lousy way to make that text translateable, indexable, etc.

So don’t do it.

You can achieve a similar effect using style sheets and background images. Fonts may vary based on operating system, but even this too can be managed via hosted fonts.

Making your web site “translation friendly” is a great way to make the most of the free translation tools already out there. Eventually you’ll want to get your site professionally translated, but until then, unlock the text so users can translate it for themselves.

Link: Polish Ministry of Economy

On the same date, 10-10-10, Curaçao and the Dutch half of St Maarten will become independent countries within the Kingdom, on an equal footing with the Netherlands proper and with Aruba, which gained its “status aparte” in 1986.

When a country fades away so too, the thinking goes, should its country code.

Though this hasn’t exactly been the case with the Soviet Union; despite the best efforts of ICANN to remove it from the root, apparently you can still register .SU.

There is a silver lining to losing .AN — the possibility of adding two new ccTLDs.

Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life.

But translation memory requires using translation memory software, which has for years largely meant using SDL Trados software.

When a company hires a translation agency and requires that they use translation memory — not only must that agency have Trados software, but so too must the freelance translators — who are often located all around the world. This is a nice business model for SDL, but it has been a pain point for translators and agencies for years.

For agencies, the more acute pain point has been that SDL not only sells TM software but also sells translation services. Nearly every translation exec I have spoken to has openly asked for an open-source alternative to Trados.

Well, now we have one.

IBM has partnered with LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association), Welocalize, Cisco, and Linux Solution Group e.V. (LiSoG) to launch an open source project that provides a “full-featured, enterprise-level translation workbench environment for professional translators.”

It’s called Open TM2 — and it’s basically a scaled-down version of what IBM has developed and used internally for years. I haven’t used the product yet and there’s understandably quite a bit of work involved to get this software to a point where it’s easy for translators, agencies, etc. to consume.

I’m not prepared to say Open TM2 is going to put an end to Trados. After all, Linux didn’t exactly put Windows or OSX out of business. But I am excited to see it out there in the world. Open source keeps software vendors on their toes. I’ll be very curious to see if developers embrace the code,  and what they come up with.

To learn more, I interviewed one of the partners behind Open TM2, Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize.

Here is what he had to say:

Q: Why did IBM decide to open source its software in this fashion? What does it hope to gain?

Bill Sullivan can answer this question better than I, but as he stated, “Freelance translators are the backbone of the localization industry. These translators have longed for free and open translation tools to increase their productivity. There is a recognized and growing need for standards in the localization industry. Despite our best intentions, however, standards themselves can often be vague and open to multiple interpretations. What is needed are reference implementations and reference platforms that serve as concrete and unambiguous models in support of the standard.”

In my opinion, productivity and standardization go hand-in-hand. By releasing Open TM2 as an open source product with a standards-based, data-exchange goal, not only is there potential for increased productivity – flexibility and freedom of choice also increase.

Q: And what do you hope to gain from this effort?

I like to use the mobile phone analogy. I can travel just about anywhere in the world, turn my phone on, and it works. This is possible, because competing carriers and hardware manufacturers collaborated to be able to offer that seamless user experience across global networks and handset protocols. Consider the user experience in our industry. There is really no ability for a client to turn on a translation supply chain and have it work out of the box across various content types, tools and translation vendors. The clients I speak with are demanding that this change.

GlobalSight, Joomla and Open TM2 are being used to demonstrate an example of a seamless data exchange based upon a set of standards. LISA will play an important role in documenting and sharing these standards so that they can be applied uniformly to other integrations. To put it simply, we need a variety of tools to be able to talk to each other in an automated way. This is where I think we can improve time, cost and quality results and greatly improve the user experience. Ultimately, I expect Welocalize to gain an increase in productivity, interoperability and freedom of choice in configuring the best set of tools for each client’s unique translation supply chain needs. If we can get under the hood, we can tune the engine; otherwise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain time, cost and quality advantages from the old way of doing business.

Q: Who is going to use this software? And what software will it replace?

Many translators are already using TM2 in delivering work to IBM. I expect Open TM2, as its features grow, will appeal to more translators as a desktop workbench. This is only an initial release of the open source product, and there is much work to be done. But the potential is there to collaborate and improve. Ultimately, I think Open TM2 has the potential to replace the Trados desktop workbench.

Q: When you talk open source, stability and support are common pain points. Who will be actively supporting this effort?

The members of the Steering Committee are currently supporting the effort, and the goal is to build a community which can support itself. This open source initiative is not unlike others, what one puts into it will determine the benefits one can pull from it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company create a business model to offer Open TM2 support. Support, training and customization are typical services that bloom around open source initiatives.

Q: What would stop a technology company from taking the source code and creating a competitive ™ product?

It is an open source product, so there is potential for companies to build a business model around the product. However, I doubt that will be a proprietary fork of the code. The appeal is an open source product with growing standards compliance, not yet another proprietary product. What is more likely are support, training and integration services. Anyone investing in the product naturally expects a return, and the better the return, the more healthy and diverse will be the community. I think that is a good thing. Competition drives innovation. However, if we can’t get the standard data-exchange protocols right, productivity across the supply chain will continue to lag the increasing velocity of change in the marketplace. Rapidly evolving time, cost and quality demands already exceed what the traditional translation supply chain can deliver.

Q: The source code is available now but documentation is lacking. What is your timetable for launching a more translator and agency friendly product.

I think the first step for the Steering Committee is to take the feedback that is already coming in about the product, good and bad, and use that to set priorities, responsibilities and a timeline. The idea is sound, but it must be tested in practical use and refined according to what the market really needs. Translators have the answers to many challenges in our supply chain, they are just not asked very often.

Q: How will this software be integrated? Is there is a goal of integrating it with the open source GlobalSight CMS?

Content creation, translation, workflow and performance metrics reporting – there are many systems and tools for accomplishing each of these requirements. However, very few of them can pass necessary data in an automated way. A lot can be accomplished with web services and open APIs, but widespread integration possibilities can only be realized with a critical mass actively using an industry-supported data-exchange standard.

In order to demonstrate this possibility in a live use case scenario, Joomla, GlobalSight and Open TM2 will be integrated with the resultant standards published by LISA. I think additional standards organizations will also need to participate to gain wider understanding, agreement and adoption. If enough of the industry’s thought leaders and leading practitioners get behind this standard data-exchange and tools integration challenge, I think all boats will rise. Without it, the industry will never be able to approach the growing volume of content which current production and cost models can’t support.

Link: Open TM2

But with the iPhone 4 update, Apple continues to push ahead on the global front. Multilingual Mac has documented these improvements, which include fonts that now display some Indic languages finally (though input methods are missing).

Two other features worth notice are:

• Voice control in 24 languages
• The emoji keyboard is now readily accessible. It had been hidden to non-JP users (and it’s quite entertaining to play with)

But one improvement that I just picked up on — and it could have been added prior to iOS 4 — is the localization of “shortcut” top-level domain feature.

I’ll demonstrate below.

First note my keyboard list (if only I were fluent in all of these languages!):

Now I open the Mail app.

Note  below how when I press and hold the “.com” key that I get a nice range of ccTLDs and other top-level domains to select from.

These domains vary based on my activated keyboards.

The more keyboards you activate, the more domains you have to select from.

This is a very nice touch — and I imagine that the Apple devs are right now working on adding IDNs to the mix…

What other international improvements have you noticed with the new iPhone?

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world’s largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks, recently launched a redesigned (and more global) web site.

Auction web sites are much like ecommerce web sites — that is, quite complex. You’ve got currencies and time zones and legal issues to navigate. And, in the case of Ritchie Bros, you’ve also got real-time global bidding.

To learn more, I interviewed Brad Cumiskey, Manager of Digital Marketing at Ritchie Bros. about the redesign.

Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your company and what drove you to expand your global presence

Established in 1958, Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers sells more equipment to on-site and online bidders than any other company in the world. The Company has over 110 locations in more than 25 countries and customers in more than 200 countries. Expanding our global presence has been an integral part of the company’s strategy for decades and the web site launch was a natural progression.

Q: How many languages do you now support? And when did these go live?
As of April 2010:

• Current inventory equipment search is available in 21 languages
• “My Account” services including past auction results are available in 14 languages
• Full service online bidding is available in 7 languages

Prior to the April launch, rbauction.com offered varying degrees of current inventory equipment content in 16 languages. Although full service online bidding and account services were only available in English.

Q: How long did the localization process take?

The bulk of the localization process spanned a six-month period; however localization activities continue on a daily basis. The localization function operates within the Ritchie Bros. marketing department and processes content for all customer-facing materials

Q: Did you rely on a vendor or do it in-house? And can you share a ballpark figure what you budgeted?

We supplemented our in-house translation expertise with external translation agencies. Internal subject matter experts are charged as ‘language owners’ and are ultimately responsible for the final delivered translations.

Q: What lessons did you learn that you can share with other companies planning to go global?

Engagement from fluent, in-house localization champions is crucial. In our case, our ‘language owners’ helped resolve translation conflicts and advocated for the customer experience in their native language.

Q: Any post-launch usage stats you can share? Any surprises?

Last week alone, rbauction.com received visits from 204 countries, with 22% of all web site traffic represented as non-English speaking. At this point in our history, the non-English market continues to grow, and is no longer considered a surprise. Notably, we see steady increases in web usage from non-English customers when we simulcast with live auctions being conducted in non-English markets.

As an example, last week Ritchie Bros. conducted 18 live auctions worldwide, including in Krakow, POL, Hyderabad, IND and Meppen, DEU. The locale sites for the surrounding markets saw pronounced spikes

Q: What was the most challenging language to add — and why?

Arabic proved to be the toughest locale to implement. The rare right-to-left orientation of a script created design challenges; also we had some problems moving content (think: cutting-n-pasting) between document types. Just to make things extra fun, we worked with an inconvenient 12-hour time zone difference between the head-office development team and the regional language owner

Q: Your local sites include a great deal of time/date/location data. How did you manage the internationalization and localization of this functionality?

Date, time, and location information are maintained within the web site’s content management administration system. Wherever possible, the development team made strict use of the content management framework’s internal localization functions. Excellent multilingual support was a ‘must-have’ in selecting a content management system. In the software selection process we took pains to ensure the solution would meet our requirements and prevent us from having to ‘fight the framework’.

Q: Not all web site features are currently available to all users. For instance, online bidding is available only in a third of the languages/markets. Are these limitations due to legal issues or simply a matter of rolling out in milestones?

No legal roadblocks, only the effort to develop and ultimately support the language. Ritchie Bros. has plans to increase language support to an ever growing list of locales, including expanding online bidding access beyond locales currently supported. We currently classify language support into one of three escalating groups:

• Read-only content support
• Interactive content support
• Full transactional content support

As we expand into new markets and extend our services to an ever increasing number of non-English speaking customers, we will undoubtedly increase the overall number of languages used for marketing and other customer-facing materials and services.

Link: Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers

This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN to support IDNs.

To give you an idea of how these new IDNs are poised to change the Internet as we know it, I’ve overlayed the approved IDNs onto my Country Codes of the World map.

You’ll notice both simplified and traditional script IDNs for both China and Taiwan.

Here’s my running list of all IDNs that have passed string evaluation stage.

I didn’t.

As shown in the screen grab below, the Jehovah’s Witnesses site supports nearly 400 languages!

In comparison, Wikipedia supports only 272 languages.

Google.com supports only 125 languages.

(It feels strange say use “only” and “125 languages” in the same sentence)

I should be clear that I’m using a liberal definition of “supporting a language.” Most of the languages supported by the Jehovah’s site contains very little content — about a dozen or so pages. This is also static content — the stuff that doesn’t require monthly or even annual updates. In fact, some of the content is so dated that much of the text is embedded within visuals — a very common practice back in the old days. Today, thanks to Unicode and Unicode-friendly fonts, modern OSs can display most of these languages — Windows far better than Mac.

Here’s a sample page in Oriya:

So given the wide range of languages, how does the site manage navigation?

It uses a “gateway” page (screen grab above) in just 20 languages. You have to click the cosmic globe icon to get the full list of languages.

Wisely, the site makes no attempt at a pull-down menu.

But what’s most interesting about the Jehovah’s Witnesses site is that it’s still adding languages.

That’s right.

Two months ago, when I first looked at the site, there were 292 languages. Now there are 299. Seven languages were added in two months — that’s more languages than most companies add in a year. Granted, we’re not talking about a lot of content, but you have to admire the initiative.

So how does this site compare with other religious web sites?

The Holy See supports just eight languages.

I also visited the Christian Scientist web site, as well as the two major Lutheran web sites and found only English.

Any other web sites I should mention? I doubt anyone is going to come close to challenging Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I’d love to see a little more competition.

Multinationals based in developed countries as well as emerging market -based companies face a tension between ambition and humility. Multinationals want to exploit the tremendous opportunities in emerging markets, but they need to carefully evaluate the extent to which they have the local knowledge and capacity to fully exploit those opportunities. Segmenting these markets and carefully aligning ambitions and capabilities can help multinationals avoid costly mistakes. Multinationals need the humility not only to gauge their own capabilities in relation to the institutional context of emerging markets but also in terms of their position in emerging markets. As one multinational executive explained, “Most emerging markets are highly sensitive. They’re emerging because for years they’ve been colonized. That has left its own suspicions, distrust, et cetera of foreigners. It’s certainly true in China. It’s certainly true in India. It’s probably true in many other places. So people want the benefits of globalization and development, but they want to know that they’re not being exploited.”

Link

I received an email from them last week in which they promoted their new Twitter page:

What I found interesting is they use of “USA” in the Twitter address.

LAN had been using @LANAirlinesUS and gave it up in favor of  @LANAirlinesUSA.

The naming of Twitter feeds is highly inconsistent across countries, due to a variety of reasons. For starters, you only have so many characters available to work with — which means, say,  ”Australia” isn’t going to work in full for most companies. Then there are the squatters who beat you to your name of choice. Finally, it’s hard to change a name once it gets a fair number of followers. Since so many local offices have created Twitter feeds on their own, many corporate communications people are discovering that consistency in naming across countries in next to impossible.

If you’re interested in how companies have named their Twitter feeds across markets, check out Twittering in Tongues.

That is, I admire the organization’s goal of broadly sharing translation memories (TM).

But I’ve been less than enthusiastic about how this organization operates.

TAUS always felt a bit like a country club — in which only a few large players could afford to join and its inner workings kept top-secret. TAUS caught some flack awhile back from trying to prevent its attendees from tweeting its conference sessions. It’s this culture of secrecy that has always bothered me. For translation memory sharing to go mainstream, you need to raise awareness significantly. You need lots of evangelists embedded in companies large and small.

So I’m happy to see TAUS lowering admission fees for its Data Association. TAUS writes:

The annual associate level fee has come down from €625 to €250. Professional membership has been reduced from €75 to €50 and allows individuals to download 10 times the amount of data that is uploaded.

Many executives that I speak with still do not see the value of sharing previously translated text strings (if this is on their radar to begin with). And if you don’t see the value in sharing TM, you sure as heck aren’t going to throw money at it.

More important, you’re not going to throw money at membership fees for something you don’t understand.

By lowering the fees, not only do you expand your organization to smaller players, you lower the barrier for larger organization that may not yet see the value of participating.

It will be interesting to see how membership evolves based on this change. The last I checked, current membership stands at roughly 70 corporate members.

Here’s my favorite:

I seriously doubt that “Oops!” has been localized for different markets.

In fact, many companies overlook the localization of error messages.

For starters, doing so is no trivial task — as many of these error messages are generated by underlying pieces of software that in some cases cannot be easily localized.

And it’s no fun to focus on failure. We like to focus our energies on positive user experiences, not negative ones. Besides, these are edge cases, right?

But as I bounce from one Apple error message to another, it’s comforting to know that even Apple — a company that prides itself on user experience — still has some serious work left to do.

Source: Twitter.com

Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States.

And half of all tweets are in a language other than English.

This is a remarkable trend, particularly since Twitter has only been localized into five languages so far.

A few months ago, I set out to better understand how large, multinational companies are using Twitter to reach users around the world.

I studied more than 225 companies across 21 industry verticals (representing 80% of the Interbrand 100). And I interviewed a number of people who manage Twitter feeds in different markets.

This work resulted in the report Twittering in Tongues. This report is a first stab at a phenomenon that is very much in its early days, so it’s hard to draw any sweeping conclusions. But there are some clearly emerging trends, which I discuss. I also highlight a number of Twitter’s inherent international limitations and provide some recommendations for companies considering localized Twitter feeds.

Here are a few findings/recommendations from the report:

• Most companies have yet to launch international Twitter feeds. Only one-third of the 225 companies studied support one or more Twitter feeds outside of their domestic markets. What makes this ratio interesting is that every one of 225 companies studied supports two or more localized web sites. So these are all companies that do business in three or more countries. A number of companies that support more than 20 local web sites still only use Twitter for their domestic markets.
• Sony leads the pack with support for 20 international Twitter feeds, mostly through its Sony Music division. Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and PricewaterhouseCoopers are also out in front with support for 10 or more country specific Twitter feeds. CAVEAT: Counting feeds is a tricky business. Not all corporate feeds are actively managed (which I did not count) and not all local feeds are easy to find.
  
• Brazil rules. Brazil is by far the most popular Twitter market outside of the US. Nearly half of the companies that support one or more international feeds have targeted Brazil. Not surprisingly, Brazilian Portuguese is the second most popular language used on Twitter.
• Local Twitter success depends on local web site promotion. It’s also no surprise that the local feeds with some of the highest numbers of followers also had high visibility on their local web sites. Companies such as Dell and Samsung lead in this respect. Below is a screen shot from Samsung’s Brazil home page; Twitter gets prime real estate.
• Twitter is local by design. Based on my interviews, most of the in-country Twitter feeds have been launched without any central approval process or even awareness. This also applies to local Facebook and YouTube pages. The evolution is local Twitter feeds is similar to the evolution of local web sites in the 1990s. Back then, local offices often created their own sites, with their own designs and platforms. Over the years, the central offices reined in these disparate sites — sometimes going too far and dampening local enthusiasm. The key challenge I see executies facing now is balancing local control with global consistency. While consistency is important, it should not come at the expense of local enthusiasm and innovation. In the end, the success of local Twitter feeds depends on the local offices.

For more information:

• Report: Twittering in Tongues
• Twitter blog post on global growth

Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll be out of business anytime soon. But I am saying that machine translation (MT) is going to find its niche and this niche will grow exponentially. There is simply not enough translators in the world to handle the content necessary in this increasingly global economy.

Enter Lionbridge and IBM.

In March, the two companies inked a multi-year partnership in which Lionbridge would have exclusive rights to market IBM’s Real Time Translation Service (RTTS) technology.

I recently asked Lionbridge COO Satish Maripuri about the deal.

Here is the interview:

Q: It appears that Lionbridge is trying to replace the legacy term “machine translation” with Real-Time Translation. Why do you think this new term is better?

Real-Time Translation is a more accurate term for the solution. We see machine translation as a technology that enables the solution.  Real time instantaneous translation is the solution. Also, within the localization industry, Machine Translation typically refers to using productivity tools to offset the cost and time associated with translation and usually ends with a heavy post edit (PE) to get the content to publication quality. That is different than instantaneous real time translation that delivers “good-enough” translation without post edit if a customer so desires.

Q: When you talk to companies about machine translation, what types of content are they most excited about leveraging through your MT engine?

The customer excitement is remarkable. This one announcement created more in-bound interest than any announcement in our history. Organizations are most excited about translating the enterprise content that they aren’t translating today due to cost and time associated with the traditional localization process. Examples include: user generated content, research  reports, eSupport, social media, knowledge bases, website content and real time instantaneous chat/email communication.

Q: We still live in a “cost per word” translation ecosystem. Do you see real-time translation as the beginning of the end of the per-word pricing model?

Details around the new pricing model will be forthcoming, but it will follow a SaaS model subscription fee and/or seat license for certain applications. This will be different than the traditional per-word pricing model.  Time will tell whether this will lead to a change in the way organizations view all translation pricing. But for real time translation technology, SaaS-based subscription pricing is clearly the right model.

Q: In my view, Google has done more than any language provider to demonstrate that machine translation has a valuable role to play in global communications. Is there any concern at Lionbridge, that Google might open up its MT engine to companies via its Apps platform?

Google’s automated translation tool is a highly visible application.  And you are right in that it creates awareness of the opportunity for automated translation. There are applications for Google’s technology, specifically in its ability to enhance search.  Our focus is on enterprise content – which is a different application for automated translation in that it requires higher levels of quality and utility within the enterprise.

For the last five years, Lionbridge has been using and continuously developing our translation management platform — Translation Workspace. This technology combined with IBM’s real-time translation technology will allow us to customize the engine to our customer-specific domains to provide levels of quality that far surpass any freeware translation technology. This customization combined with cloud availability through Translation Workspace differentiates our tool from freeware tools and creates a  highly valuable application for the enterprise.

Q: TAUS has been critical of the Lionbridge/IBM alliance as an attempt to “lock in” users via ownership of the translation resources. TAUS has called on Lionbridge to open up your data. What is Lionbridge’s response?

Customers who use Lionbridge’s real time translation technology are not locked in to Lionbridge for any service — post edit or other traditional managed service translation. We are only providing our customers with a technology application to support real-time multilingual communication.  As such, our customers would simply license the technology to support real time translation. If they choose to post edit the result, they can use any service provider they choose.

Q: What do you estimate will be the ratio of human translated content to machine translated content in a typical company — say from today to five years from now?

As machine translation improves over time we believe it will be used more frequently, especially on dynamic user-generated content. We also believe over the next ten years we are going to see a shift from “Just in Case Translation” — just in case someone happens to read to “Just in Time Translation” — translation after someone shows interest.

In addition, we believe that over the next five to ten years, there will be more acceptance in the market for “good-enough” translation. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to see a larger percentages of enterprise content translated using machine translation or Real-Time Translation technology.

For more information:

• Lionbridge announcement
• TAUS comments on the deal
• SDL comments on the deal
• Lionbridge response to SDL

By avoiding them, you avoid stepping into any number of politically sensitive issues.

Nevertheless, companies love to use flags on their web sites.

And sometimes the use of flags can result in some rather curious implementations.

Case in point: I recently came across the global gateway for Swiss Air and saw something that can best be conveyed via video:

Did you see the “flashing” flag?

I’d be curious to know if residents of the UK and Ireland would be bothered by this hybrid flag. Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but the flashing alone made this flag stand apart from all others. Frankly, it looks silly.

The flashing flag is also included in the pull-down menu, as demonstrated below:

Had Swiss Air simply avoided flags in the first place, it would have avoided this issue altogether.

Flags can be troublesome. When it doubt, leave them out.

And although most ECM developers will eagerly say their software is “global” — not all software is equal when it comes to supporting all languages and locales. As one point of reference, SharePoint 2010 will be available in 40 languages by year end.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst and Director of The Real Story Group, has been covering the ECM industry for years and I recently asked him a few questions specific to the globalization of ECM software.

Here is the interview:

Q: You mentioned in your 2010 ECM Market Analysis that international vendors continued to thrive. Can you provide an example or two of vendors who have been innovating in this area?

The best known vendors, the market leaders in Gartner or Forrester research papers tend to be American.  However the actual market is huge with a multitude of vendors that get no coverage at all from major analyst firms.  Most of these vendors are “local” to some degree, be that predominantly active in a country such as Germany (Fabasoft) or Australia (Objective) — or even within a local market such as Chicago.

Q: Your report also referenced the consolidation at the top end of the market. Is this a good thing, or bad thing, with respect to international support?

That’s a tricky question — in that though there is a great deal of consolidation at the high end of the market (and likely more to come), there is new entrants coming into the market every week so it sort of balances out.  Support in your time zone, in your language is one the most important thing we stress to buyers, and even though the high end of the market claims to offer 24/7 support globally, that typically only works for their major products (storage infrastructure/databases) rather than their content management products, which are considered niche.

Q: To what extent are international requirements playing a role in product selection?

Ever more so.  This past year we have seen a very notable pick up with larger enterprises really starting to address international requirements either for their customers or their employees.  Its a tough nut to crack, but some of the largest (tens of millions of dollar) projects in the ECM market today are focused on multi-language, multi-location issues.

Q: Supporting social networking across locales and languages is becoming a pain point for many companies. Do what degree are ECM vendors addressing this pain. What platforms are leading in this regard?

ECM vendors are struggling to know what to do with social networking.  On the one hand the press and analyst community are talking of nothing else, on the other hand there is virtually no demand from end users and buyers of this technology for ECM to address the pain.  In as much as the pain is no more than the the normal consumer world leaking into the enterprise world, usually restricted to a handful of people or teams.  If there is a compliancy problem (the usual concern) then best to ignore its happening than to start out on a major project that has little chance of success.

Q: Given the pace of change in technologies, social networks, etc. what advice do you have for companies planning to buy or upgrade their ECM platforms?

Open standards — always open standards — never ever proprietary.  Your ECM platform should be just that, a platform. Capable of chatting and interacting will all parts of your business and IT infrastructure, many fall short of that expectation. The other thing to say is be realistic, you can’t now and never will be able to manage all your organizations information/content – focus in on priorities, content that is genuinely mission critical and do that well.

For more information, visit www.realstorygroup.com