Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are …
Translation
The Rise and Fall of Web Globalization
According to my search on “web globalization” in Google Timeline: I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000. From my humble …
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though …
The TAUS take on Google Translation Center
The post I wrote on the Google Translation Center has been the most-visited page on this blog over the past month. Clearly, Google has struck a nerve in the translation …
Global by Design now in 25 languages
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 …
Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
Within the translation industry, ProZ is widely known as the leading public network of freelance translators and buyers of translation services. But here comes Google… According to Blogoscoped, Google is …
Will Facebook become the world’s largest translation platform?
Techcrunch reports from Facebook’s developer conference today in which company announced that it would open its “crowdsourcing” translation platform to its legion of application developers. Here’s the press release excerpt: …
The iPhone App localization opportunity
So after a slow start upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 OS on Friday, I’ve since had a chance to review a number of the apps and have been very impressed …
Google perpetuates the American .com myth
Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today. This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent …
Two thoughts on Euro 2008 and Web globalization
Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany …
Translating numbers in China
As John wrote awhile back: All lucky numbers are local. And this is particularly true in China, where people pay thousands of dollars to obtain license plates with lucky numbers. …
Google Translate is growing up
What began as just another “gisting” application — like Babel Fish — is gradually becoming an impressive translation tool. And I’m not referring to the quality of translation, though that …
Facebook and MySpace going multilingual: But XING is well ahead
Techcrunch reports that Facebook is a day away from launching a German-language interface, translated in part by 2,000 volunteers. Spanish was launched a few weeks ago. And French is also …
SDL buys Idiom and begs the question: Will it exit the translation services game?
So SDL is buying Idiom. SDL has posted an FAQ page about the deal here — but the list is absent a question I recently posed: Does this acquisition mark …