And, as always, using current technology as much as possible, the White House also tweeted the translation in Farsi and posted a subtitled version of his opening remarks.

Many questions, and different opinions there. Not much I can add except that a) I don’t think we can conflate all kind of community, volunteer, crowdsourced, user community and such like translation together so easily, a subject I will return to, b) we might consider that the Facebook crowdsourcing translation model should be considered as much, if not more, a part of a user engagement strategy as just a localization one, so the model may not apply depending on your content, market, and branding, and c) this whole episode is as good a case study about change management (or lack of) as any you’ll get in your MBA textbooks.

About all we can agree on now, I think, as I pointed out as a result of the San Mateo Localization UnConference last year and the thoughts of Sun Microsystems, is that this stuff ain’t free in either the short or long run. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this one…

Update: [29-June-2009] The story has also made the New York Times - Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

Here’s to the next one!

I was a little concerned in reading the help pages to see: “By default, we save your translations to a shared, publicly searchable [sic] translation memory.” The help goes on to describe how to avoid the default condition.

I just wonder, until we all decide that no one owns TMs (will we decide that? when?), this seems to be a bit risky. Translators will have to be on their toes to avoid sharing TMs that belong to their clients.

In the localization/internationalization space (I refuse to use the word “globalization"), I can see a number of possibilities for Twitter, some of which we’ve explored already in the past month’s exchanges (and some are being implemented as cloud or collaborative customer solutions by enterprises already, by the way):

* Cloud service and solutions - vendor feedback, terminology queries, internationalization issues ("my Tweetdeck don’t work with Japanese characters, what’ll fix?"), location of resources, tools support ("how do I do X or Y in Trados?"), and so on. Real time and searchable knowledge.

* Communications, marketing and promotion - announcements, headsups on events, soliciting submissions, calls for papers, making time-bound offers, spreading the word virally, and more. Although I certainly want more from Twitter than just reading Tweets about what conferences and reports are for sale, directing me to the standard press releases for more details. If you’re using it for that, don’t be surprised is somebody asks you for a discount. Or a hard question about the content. You’ll have to respond. Great way to build a network of contacts, gather market intelligence, too.

* Information filtering by peers - gathering information, links, opinions, survey responses, obtaining recommendations, and so on. Using the intelligence of your followers to mine raw data for you.

* Real time commentary and feedback on events, products, services - for example, using hashtags to track webinars, or conference presentations as the event occurs. Come to think of it, why even bother going to the conference at all to obtain the real time feedback? It’s all there on public view as it’s recorded (for example, the Twitter “hashtag” #DuLu.) Listening to customers, users, and so on.

There are all kinds of possibilities, admittedly low-level at present, and non-revenue generating. You can get a flavor by looking at these Twitter hashtags: #l10n, and #i18n.

I can see some limitations at present, namely the lack of any supporting metadata around Tweets which would allow analysis, but I am sure that can be dealt with over time.

Anyway, all I can do now is encourage you to come on over to Twitter and hook up with us @localization and @multilingualmag.  10 minutes a day is all you need to join in the fun.

I’ll get back with more Blogos stuff as soon as the beard grows a little more.

He forgot that neither of them wore a helmet. He woke up staring at his hands, wondered at the blood on them, and stepped out to get his face bandaged (and be lectured by two sisters to stop giving himself concussions). The other guy went to the hospital and got 20 stitches.

I’m really not sure if this kind of damage can occur with cross-cultural instincts elsewhere, but I’m willing to bet so. I’m also willing to bet that localizing your instincts might be one of the hardest things to do, short of learning the hard way.