For the love of Chinglish
As Shanghai cleans up its more humorous Chinese to English mistranslations, some folks are feeling wistful. Check out the NYT slideshow. Also, I was just told that the Telegraph has …
Translation
When machine translation and volunteer translators collide: A YouTube/TED case study
Google recently announced a rather nifty feature in YouTube: Auto-translation of auto-generated video captions. So not only is Google automatically transcribing the text of its videos, it’s also providing translations …
Signs of a translation rebound in Latin America
Idea Factory Languages, with 85 full-time employees and production centers in Brazil and Argentina, specializes in translation and localization for the Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese language markets. CEO Teddy Bengtsson …
What’s the best free machine translation engine?
Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but …
What’s the world’s most global blogging platform?
I’ve been writing this blog since 2002. Back when I started out, I wasn’t sure how long I would stick with this “blogging” thing and I didn’t really want to …
The most popular posts of 2009
With a few hours to spare, here are the most popular blog posts of 2009, based on number of visitors: The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American …
Forgetting English (literally)
I’m working on the Web Globalization Report Card, and this, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages. Here it …
How well does your baby’s name translate?
I’ve long maintained that translation agencies need to get creative if they are to succeed in the age of machine translation. London-based Today Translations is doing just that — offering …
TED is looking for a few good translators
For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds. And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. …
Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that
Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations? After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two …
There is no such thing as a global slogan
Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak …
Job posting: Marketing Manager – Localization
I was contacted recently about a rather interesting and specialized job opening in the globalization space. So I thought I’d throw it open to the readers of this blog. The …
Google Translate: Now in 51 languages
In February of this year, Google Translate surpassed 40 languages. Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below: Google went from 13 languages to …
TED is translation-worthy
Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks. It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, …
Just how global is your browser?
Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages. Yes, 70 languages. Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here …