MotionPoint announced today that it was now hosting a Spanish-language pandemic flu Web site for the US Dept. of Health & Human Services.
The site is located at http://espanol.pandemicflu.gov.
I first profiled MotionPoint in December of 2005. The company is part translation agency, part content management tools provider. MotionPoint effectively hosts the Spanish-language site on its servers and provides embedded pointers that manage any links between the English-language site and the Spanish-language site. MotionPoint also scans the English-language site for any changes to content. When a content change is detected, the MotionPoint people translate the content automatically. What this means is that the client has to do nothing — no files to handoff, not tools to purchase, nada. And this is resonating with companies and government agencies.
Of course, there are tradeoffs to this approach. For one, the client is locked in to the MotionPoint solution. This isn’t something that you can just take with you and give to some other vendor to manage — MotionPoint is the only company that I’m aware of that offers this solution. You also can’t bid out your translation pricing because MotionPoint is the exclusive vendor.
That said, there will always be those clients who want and need to outsource everything and, as a result, MotionPoint appears to be on a roll.