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Friday, March 28, 2008

Der Mundo, New Easy to Use Multilingual Blogging Tool

As he mentioned at the SV Localization UnConference Brian McConnell of the Worldwide Lexicon (see previous Blogos posting), has announced Der Mundo, a new, easy to use multilingual blogging tool.

This is a free hosted blogging service, as easy to use as Twitter, with the WWL community translation tools built in. More information is available on how to sign up and use it at http://blog.dermundo.com.

Brian tells us:

With Der Mundo, it’s easy to sign up and start writing. The service auto-detects the reader’s language preferences and displays translations if present, or invites them to contribute. You can use it as a standalone service, or export RSS to your favorite publishing system.

I’ve signed us up for it - and will revisit as soon as this work stuff is out of the way...

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Community Translation Ain't FREE Translation

There was a great session at the recent Localization UnConference on the subject of Community-based localization/translation.

Janice Campbell, a Globalization Manager at Sun (Janice’s Blog is here) made it clear that it must not be seen as free translation. The community must be invested in, developed, nurtured, communicated with constantly, and supported with facilitators and tools (check out the NetBeans Localization Wiki). There is therefore a time, effort and resource cost to this. What kind of rewards are expected by such translators? Never give money. Instead, kudos, invites to dev conferences, t-shirts and other swag, advance beta previews, and so on…

I expressed the fear about switching to a Web 2.0 participative community model of translation based on the analogy of throwing a party and nobody turns up. Janice countered this by asking how we’d feel if we were invited to a party and there was no food, drink, or host present. A really great point.

Seems like the real question is how to create, foster yes, even manage community-based contributions to the translation effort so that it scales and is persistent over time. Could there be a relationship between the type of company and nature of its products and the long-term success of the model? Comments welcome.

Very often, senior - and not so senior - management see community translation as a free option, which is the wrong way to approach this. But then, we’ve also seen how the cost-savings aspect of the outsourcing model has come back to bite many an executive in the rear.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Google Model Volunteer Localization

Saw a fascinating presentation on Google Localization, presented by Google’s Dr. Thomas Arend at the Localisation Reseach Centre’s recent 12th Annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference in Ireland.

There is some great information there on global language coverage, localization issues, and social (volunteer) translation. Yes, that latter topic seems to be coming up more and more. Take a look at the presentation and how Google’s approach might be a model in this regard.

More on the Localisation Research Centre.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Ubuntu: The Gutsy Gibbon and Web 2.0 Localization

I received a very positive reaction from my Multilingual Takeway piece: “Web 2.0: The End of Organized Localization As We Know It?” It also sparked discussion in some other places too. It’s a subject I’ll be returning to...

Collaboration and participation are fundamental tenets of Web 2.0. This presents process and tool challenges, but the enthusiasm, creativity, and innovativeness of contributors wins through.

There are already many successful collaborative development and localization efforts in existence. Ubuntu, the freely downloadable Linux-based desktop, laptop, and server operating system is a great example, with doc and software localization in full swing worldwide using the Rosetta Launchpad. Take a look at the international effort; witnessed by the LoCo (Local Community) teams on the Ubuntu web site.

Ubuntu have recently released The Gutsy Gibbon version of their operating system - version 7.10.

Everyone’s talking about Ubuntu - even the Financial Times.

Move over Leopard and Windows....

More on Ubuntu.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

The Babelfish Tartuffe

Here’s something your won’t hear at the Translation Automation User Society: Molière’s classic French comedy “Tartuffe“ as translated into English by the Alta Vista’s Babelfish internet language translator and the result performed by French actors in Dublin.

I attended “The Babelfish Tartuffe” today as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival ‘07, and it was truly wonderful - if more than slightly weird. However, just like the tiresome Chinglish examples we so often hear about, I had no problem figuring out the plot.

The use of Babelfish, according to the director, Jaimie Carswell, brings a new perspective on Walter Benjamin’s observation about the emergence of a new global language where “all information, all sense, and all intention are extinguished.”

In the technology infused world of “The Babelfish Tartuffe”, everyone was speaking the same language, but making no sense. Language itself, like Tartuffe, is an imposter as jargon and technical terms take over from any concrete reality. Worth thinking about as you try to catch up with the latest Web 2.0 phrase du jour.

If the play comes to your town, then I recommend you see it.  This is one instance when controlled authoring really would have detracted from the resulting machine translation!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Worldwide Lexicon

I’m back in the Bay Area and I was talking with Brian McConnell of the Worldwide Lexicon (WWL) project in San Francisco today. For fans and researchers of the promise offered by social translation, the WWL is a must to check out.

The Worldwide Lexicon is an open-source project that combines technology and human translation expertise to allow users to translate any web page from any language to another language, and to share those translations within the web community.

I’ll be looking at the issue of social translation in more detail in a forthcoming issue of Multilingual, but for now, go to: http://www.worldwidelexicon.org/ for more information.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Social Translation and the Wisdom of Crowds

Could social translation represent a serious threat to Language Service Providers (LSPs) and other localization groups? I think it could, and will, and other globalization analysts have earmarked social translation as an industry development to watch. 

Of course, the immediate criticism that will be leveled at social translation will be one of quality. However, if publishers make their terminology glossaries freely available, then the quality issue could be addressed. Even if they didn’t, anyone who has read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki will realize that bad translations would be driven out by good ones as “the crowd” establishes its own common user dialogue…

Well worth a read…
And for those more, er, “obscure” languages, why the Long Tail will take care of those...

It’s going to be interesting times ahead ....

Monday, March 13, 2006

Language Technology in the News

A recent article in Newsweek gives us a overview of new language technology coming out. Each of the products listed is quite interesting—exciting, actually.

One that caught my eye deals more with audio technology, but is reminiscent of the old Maxwell Smart “cone of silence.” DaimlerChrysler has created audio-beam speakers to shoot a cone of sound (not silence!) to areas as small as a seat. So, goodbye to the big headphones worn in places like the United Nations!

Other items listed were: the sign translator, Siemens’s Lecture Translator System, Nokia’s cell-phone translation/transcription software, and NASA’s software that analyzes words that are mouthed, not spoken.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Whose memory is it?

The ownership of Translation Memory (TM) content has been an ongoing debate for the past 10 or so years.  A new web page has been created to provide various forum threads and articles that discuss and debate this issue.

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Memory or machine?

In my Google alert for ‘machine translation’ the other day I received this:

Lionbridge & Bowne: Waiting For the Other Shoe To Drop
Corante – USA
“... buying BGS would be and he answered “volume.” Now that Lionbridge has production centers up and running in India and a brand-new machine translation tool (sic), it is ready to scale.”

If I click on the URL, which links to John Yunker’s Corante blog I get:

“... buying BGS would be and he answered “volume.” Now that Lionbridge has production centers up and running in India and a brand-new translation memory tool, it is ready to scale.”

Either John has changed his wording entretemps, or Google has taxonomized ‘translation memory’ as ’machine translation’. If the latter, it would fit perfectly with its own efforts at envisioning parts of the web as a massive translation database. My taxonomy is (sort of) my world.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Google's translation agenda

Haven’t had time to do the proper checking, but Google invited journalists to discover what’s cooking in their development kitchen last week, in the wake of the underwhelming Personalization launch. Apparently translation automation was on the menu, according to this report:

Officials from Google also announced that the company is working on a translation program. “Historically, the approach to building machine translation systems is to have expert machine linguists write down dictionaries and rules on how to translate, say, from Chinese to English” said researcher Franz Och. “Trying to write down all the rules on how to translate from Chinese to English is very hard.”

Instead, Google is fine-tuning a translation program that can automatically translate back and forth between documents in different languages. All the languages of the United Nations will be supported.

If true, this language spread means English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. Pity that Franz Och can’t work on his native German.

A similar story put it slightly differently:

Instead, Google is fine-tuning a translation program that can automatically translate back and forth between documents in different languages — a sort of virtual Rosetta Stone.

That strange instead again. Going back and forth between languages is surely what translation automation programs do anyway, however they are crafted. The over-used Rosetta Stone meme is the wrong metaphor for translation as process (a carved stone only displays the results of an act of translating), and misleading in a world in which translation will appear as effortlessly instantaneous - you won’t ever need to see the original language alongside your translated version.

Although it’s still early days, Google’s translation program is good news. We need more and more such real-world translation efforts among the big web players. They enable us to test public acceptability thresholds fairly rapidly, explore more quickly than in the past rival technologies (statistics vs. rules vs. hybrids of both, etc) in an age of near infinite computing power, and steadily position translation as a ‘natural’ practice at the beating heart of information finding (or searching, as they still call it).

Monday, May 02, 2005

Open source MT workshop

OS enthusiasts should note the workshop on Open Source translation technologies at the MT summit to be held this summer in Phuket, Thailand:

Open-source software is associated to a change in the business model. In the case of machine translation, it would result in a shift from license-based or charge-per-word models to a service model in which enterprises would offer users a variety of services: consulting, customization, linguistic data development, integration in multilingual document management systems, etc.

Machine translation is only one of the available language technologies which can be applied to translation; the effect of the existence of open-source software for other translation applications such as translation memory, etc., or even other natural language processing applications not related to translation, would therefore be worth examining as well.

Posted by Andrew on 05/02 at 07:04 PM

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