Global by Design now in 25 languages

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I read about a startup (via Techcrunch) recently called mloovi. The service leverages Google Translate to provide real-time translations of your blog feed. I’ve installed the widget over on the right and would love to know what people think.

My biggest concern is slow-loading Web pages. And, yes, I know the quality of the translation will leave plenty to be desired, but what I really like about the widget are the little RSS feed buttons. Just click the button and you can have translated feeds delivered to whatever feed reader you use.

What I don’t understand is the significance of the name “mloovi.” Am I missing something?

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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5 thoughts on “Global by Design now in 25 languages”

  1. “Mloovi” looks like an anglicised spelling of a Slavonic root ‘to talk’ or ‘to speak’ – e.g. Czech mluvit “to talk”, mluví “talks” (mluvi might be a 2nd person singular imperative, I don’t know enough Czech to be sure!)

    Hope this helps

    Neij

  2. Hi Neij,

    You’re right about the name. I just emailed the founder of the service and he confirmed that the name comes from the Czech word “to talk.” I’ll have more from him later…

    JY

  3. Hi John, I’ve just checked Russian, German, and French, the languages I’m most fluent in, and I can confirm that mloovi’s translations are pathetic to say the least. Give or take the RSS feeds, I fail to see how their service is any better than those Google machine translation links many bloggers put on their pages.

    As to the Czech mluva, mluvit (“talk”, “to speak, talk, say”), it has cognates in every Slavic language, including молва, молвить in Russian (“talk, rumour”, “to talk, speak”), мова in Ukrainian and mowa in Polish (“language”), мълвя in Bulgarian (“to talk, argue”), etc. It is probably related to the Greek μέλος and μέλπω (“I praise”), Old Indic brávīti and Avestian mraoiti (“he talks”), and Avestian mrūitē (“to say, read”).

    Some tried to also tie it to the German melden (“to announce, report, notify”) and even to the Latin pro-mulgare (“to announce”), but at least the latter is quite a stretch and would make it related to the English word “milk” and its equivalents in pretty much every single Indo-European language out there.

  4. Hi Alex,

    I’m sure you’re spot on regarding the quality. But what interests me most about this widget is the ease at which people can add the language-specific RSS feeds. I haven’t come across a widget like this yet. Have you?

    Also, I’ll have a brief Q&A with the developer of Mloovi shortly.

    JY

  5. Hi Schwallex,

    I would just like to respond to your above comment.

    I am aware that the translations are far from perfect but as I clearly state the translations are done by Google Translate so I have no control over these, however I have found that in my testing, most posts (admittedly into English) are fairly easy to understand. I disagree that the service has no more value than the Google Translate links that bloggers use currently. The big difference is that readers can add the feed to their reader and the translations are done automatically from then on, this allows readers to quickly scan headlines and see if it is worth reading more. Using the Google translate links the reader has to visit the site every day and click on each link to get a translation without knowing if it is interesting to them. The added bonus for blog owners is that we generate a permanent url which can be indexed by search engines giving them a much wider potential audience.

    I called the service Mloovi because I live in the Czech Republic and am learning Czech at the moment, I know it is not a perfect translation but I like the name and my Czech friends got it straight away 🙂

    Anyway, thanks for you comments and I hope this answers some of your doubts.

    Mike
    http://mloovi.com

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