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March 2013
Off the Map: The challenge of map apps
Kate Edwards
On September 19, 2012, Apple Inc. released a new app for its iOS 6 operating system that was meant to unleash the company from the shackles of an increasingly competitive relationship with Google.
The app in question was Apple Maps, an entirely new mobile mapping resource that displaced Google’s long-revered Google Maps app that had gained ubiquity across the iOS and Android platforms. With all the requisite pomp and circumstance, Apple hailed its new mapping capabilities as the most advanced to date, and promised to deliver a whole new way of viewing the world. And yet within a mere few hours, media outlets, users and businesses quickly discovered that Apple’s maps were fraught with spatial data errors, such as misplaced streets and points of interest, incorrect labels and abysmal driving directions. What could have gone wrong?. . .
March 2013
World Savvy: What we can learn from invented languages
John Freivalds
. . .This means “how empty is fullness (wealth), and how full (wealthy) is emptiness.” But that’s a pretty clunky translation. To overcome the chunkiness from one language to the next, many linguists over the years have sought to invent a new language. And remarkably, in the current world, a fellow by the name of John Quijada, instead of having hobbies like electric trains or classic cars like I have, decided to invent a whole new language, Ithkuil, over a span of three decades. . .
March 2013
Macro/Micro: Are you a craft LSP?
Terena Bell
. . .It’s not just translation for the food and drink industry (believe me, exports and imports in this market flow like distilling water) that we in localization can learn from beer today. It’s the existence of the craft brew itself — that ever-developing, hipster-enthralling, growing-market phenomenon. Microbrewing is all about quality, and the yellow stuff, more affectionately known as “good old fashioned American piss water,” has become a mere commodity. . .
March 2013
Perspectives: Three reasons to consider an SLV
Marek Makosiej
“We prefer to work with freelancers” is what vendor managers, procurement managers, project managers or production managers usually answer to single language vendor (SLV) representatives offering them language services. But is it a good approach?
The pros and cons of working with freelancers are well known to language service provider (LSP) executives and employees. SLVs are often perceived as a type of freelancer, just bigger and more costly, with no additional value. Is this a correct view of SLVs? Using freelancers for projects has become a habit in the localization industry and is a true driving force behind this business. 500,000 translators in 6,000 languages work hard each day in order to bridge the gap between manufacturers and their clients globally with the help of LSP companies that secure the peace of mind of executives in global markets. But is it really an efficient approach? Are the risks behind sourcing and managing multiple freelancers during complex projects really worth it? Can you afford to ignore the benefits of collaboration with an SLV?. . .
March 2013
Enterprise Innovators: Expanding reach through crowdsourcing
Lori Thicke
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest, behind China and India. The social networking site, which announced its one billionth user in October, leads the social media movement.
Ghassan Haddad, director of internationalization for five years at Facebook, was himself at the forefront of another great movement, translation crowdsourcing through engaging user communities. Prior to joining Facebook, Ghassan was director of software engineering and localization at PayPal. With a PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Ghassan has over 20 years of experience in language research and technology, management and software development. He was interviewed from his office in Palo Alto, California, during his last week at Facebook. . .
March 2013
CEE economics and the language industry
Jerzy Nedoma
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) should include all countries of Central Europe, plus these belonging to Eastern Europe. Several definitions of both regions exist today, but they often lack precision or are extremely general. These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts, even political scientists, recently becoming more and more imprecise.
The Central Europe region should not be confused with the area of the Central European Time Zone, stretching from Spain up to Poland. In the most limited sense, the CEE region is reduced to the four member states of the Visegrád Group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). In our opinion, for both political and economic reasons, the Balkan states should be treated as a part of the CEE region. The term Central Europe resurfaced by the end of the Cold War, which had divided the Old Continent politically into East and West, splitting Central Europe in half. . .
March 2013
Locale and culture in Slavic localization
Elena Rudeshko, Maryna Babich, Lyuba Lazarenko & Katia Kosovan
. . .Noteworthy from a linguistic point of view is the similarity among the languages within the Slavic language group, which includes Belarusian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Polish and, further south, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian. Ukrainians in the western part of Ukraine have no difficulties understanding Polish. Russian tourists in Bulgaria point to the fact that they do not encounter any major difficulties understanding Bulgarians. Czechs and Poles will most likely understand each other, too. This will in no way mean, of course, that native Ukrainians will be as good in translation into Polish as a native Polish translator. However, this could mean that the average Ukrainian would rather read the instructions for a domestic appliance in Russian or Polish than in English. Most Slavic languages are highly inflected, meaning the words are mostly modified depending upon the tense, number, person and other grammatical categories. Localization project managers should be aware that the implementation of global changes in such languages will not be as straightforward as it could be for English, for example.A lack of proper terminology is another difficulty that translators and localization professionals often encounter. For fast-paced technology industries, terminology has become an issue for Slavic languages. . .
March 2013
Bringing a new tone to CEE product localization
Alfred Hellstern, Katerina Gasova & Libor Safar
The language — terminology, style and tone — used in software products is constantly evolving; some of the changes are gradual and some are more radical with major new releases. It is probably fair to say that the language used in localized products always lags a little bit behind. There are multiple reasons, but two are probably the most significant.
First, localization introduces new terminology, concepts and often communication style to the target language. Some may be right on target and some may turn out to be not the right choice, but it will take some time before the common parlance in the given language passes a final verdict. Local languages adapt to the influx of new terminology coming from English, in their own way, style and speed. Second, product localization tends to conserve the language, pretty much like translations of religious or philosophical texts used to in the past. There is a natural tendency to leverage and recycle translations between releases, and changes to codified terms or stylistic guidelines require special effort and, of course, extra cost to implement. . .
March 2013
CEE and the tip of the global language industry
Serge Gladkoff
. . .
The media is currently full of bad news about every region of the world, without exception. With everything going that badly, exactly why (and where) is the translation industry able to sustain compound annual growth of 12.17%, according to Common Sense Advisory’s 2012 report on top language service providers (LSPs)? Where is this growth coming from if the developed world is in a crisis, and emerging markets are faring little better, with “key uncertainties”?
In June 2000, two years after the major economic crash in Russia of 1998, few expected the economy to even come back within a decade. However, in my article “The Software Market in Russia,” published in the June 2000 issue of MultiLingual magazine, I predicted annual growth in Russia to be at a level of at least 4.5% in the following five years. According to an FBK Company press release, “GDP [gross domestic product] growth in Russia over the first decade [of the twenty-first century] was 159.2%,” and within this release from one of the first private auditing firms in Russia, we can see that the actual GDP growth numbers were up to the promise, proving it to be a conservative estimate, since the actuality for the years 2001-2005 was 5.1%, 4.7%, 7.3%, 7.2% and 6.4%, respectively. . .
March 2013
Improving UX through context of use
Ultan Ó Broin
“Tell me more about that” is a standard phrase used by usability professionals to elicit information from users when gathering requirements before designing a solution. The question’s probing, open-ended nature is the very essence of an iterative, user-centered exploration that makes for building a great user experience (UX).
For enterprise applications (used for enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management functions), understanding how workers accomplish tasks distinguishes UX from usability’s traditional emphasis on user interface (UI) layout, look and feel. At Oracle, we say that applications UX is about how you work, not about how you click. Using a range of disciplines, a UX team delivers thoughtfully designed solutions that reflect anything of importance used to complete a task. This broad consideration we can usefully refer to as context of use: the core of successful user requirements gathering.
Context of use varies by enterprise location, country, region, culture and so on, nuanced by worldwide trends. . .
March 2013
Revolutionizing customer support through MT
Lori Thicke
. . .Customer support has not caught up to the globalization of customers. According to Greg Oxton, executive director of the Consortium for Service Innovation, a nonprofit industry alliance of high-tech customer support organizations, “Growth markets for most companies today are not in their home country. Their markets are global.” The implications of this for the translation and localization industry are clear: “The majority of customer support interactions are with content, not people, and that is driving demand for fast, economical localization capabilities.”
Today, however, relatively few companies offer online technical support in the languages of their customers. Even when global customers account for more sales than domestic customers, support content is often available only in the domestic language, or in a limited panel of mainstream languages. This leaves out a great, and growing, number of users who also purchased products or services but who, unlike their domestic counterparts, are not fully supported. . .
March 2013
Translation quality expectations
Sonia Monahan
The idea of translation quality is, shall we say, a bit elusive. To one translation buyer, the definition of a quality delivery is a translation that is orthographically perfect and grammatically correct. To another, a quality delivery is one that arrives on schedule; if the project is delivered late, then by that definition, it is not a quality delivery.
Not only is there no exact definition of quality, but that ill-defined designation is also a moving target. The same translation buyer will, for separate assignments and at different points in time, have varying quality expectations. All translation service providers understand this. . .
January/February 2013
Post Editing: Proving technology
Katie Botkin
I imagine some of this sounds familiar. Very few people are willing to initially embrace the idea that a machine of some kind is going to be changing their job. It’s only when they see that it truly is going to make their job easier, or better, that they’ll accept it. It might take a little proving first. . .
January/February 2013
Richard Sikes
Lingoport Resource Manager version 1.0, which was released early in November, is a software solution that monitors the software build environment for localization-relevant changes, flags and extracts changed resource files on behalf of localization project managers, automates the testing of both outbound and inbound localized resource files, and automatically replaces build-ready files back into the build environment in the proper location. . .
January/February 2013
Enterprise Innovators: Building low cost MT
Lori Thicke
Valarie Gilbert joined EMC nearly two years ago as a senior director in EMC’s Services and Support team, building tools and systems for online self-service problem resolution. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, holding BS and MS degrees in metallurgical and materials engineering. Valarie also earned a certificate in capability maturity model integration from Carnegie Mellon.
Thicke: At 16, you were one of the youngest women ever accepted at Carnegie Mellon. What does this say about you and how did that prepare you for your career? . . .
Gilbert: It prepared me to confront scary things face on. At the end of the day, I don’t like a problem to be ahead of me. I want to face it, figure it out, solve it, move forward. This sometimes means not doing the popular project or taking the easy road. It’s not recognition that motivates me, but the pleasure of getting things done and getting them behind me.
January/February 2013
Off the Map: The impact of territory disputes
Kate Edwards
Over the years, we’ve seen this form of retail retaliation take place in various markets, and it’s understandable. Ordinary citizens in a specific locale who disagree with another country’s actions really don’t have a lot of leverage to make a difference, except when it comes to their spending habits. On more local levels we see this kind of business boycotting taking place on a regular basis, as it’s a common part of citizen uprising to disagree with the actions of a specific business and then try to choke the flow of income to that business. What makes the phenomenon to which I’m referring more unique is that this happens on a national level. It’s not just a few citizens boycotting over one company or one issue; it’s an entire nation wanting to economically damage another nation in lieu of overt military action. . .
January/February 2013
Macro/Micro: The polarizing business of opinion
Terena Bell
For those of you who have forgotten the scandal or never heard of it to begin with, please allow me to fill you in. Chick-fil-A is an American fast food chain serving the tastiest chicken sandwich known to man. Seriously, I think they must slather the things in crack or something because they’re that addictive. Anyway, while the actual Chick-fil-A restaurants are locally owned franchises, the brand itself is owned and licensed by a man named Dan Cathy. July 16, 2012, Cathy was quoted by The Baptist Press as being personally against gay marriage for religious reasons. Enter the long tail. Media organizations that do not share Cathy’s beliefs of course got wind of them. And they printed them. And aired them. And broadcasted them until the whole of the United States was fully aware that the owner of Chick-fil-A is anti-gay.
Personally, I don’t care if his religious beliefs are the worship of Zuul, Gatekeeper of Gozer, the demigod from Ghostbusters. His company makes a darn good chicken sandwich. But I’m pretty much alone in that opinion. The Twitterverse, Facebook — the entire US media world, really — erupted. . .
January/February 2013
World Savvy: The ugly American
John Freivalds
The novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer first appeared in 1958 and was later made into a movie in 1963 starring Marlon (The Godfather) Brando. The book takes place in a fictional Southeast Asian country and deals with the yucky behavior of Americans, particularly government employees. Quoting U Maung Swe, a character who appears in the book: “No one who has ever visited America and come to know the country could fail to trust and respect her people. For some reason, however, the Americans I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious.” . . .
January/February 2013
Jeff Beatty & Staś Małolepszy
The open source movement is about open development and design of software applications. Open source software is not developed behind closed doors by a small team of developers, but in the open, and by everyone willing to enhance the application through their own time commitment and expertise. This philosophy automatically lends itself to the recently popular crowdsourcing methodology — organizing a volunteer community to perform a given task for your organization. For open source, that task is generally software engineering. For us at Mozilla, it means a lot more. . .
January/February 2013
Touchscreen devices in the localization industry
Shailendra Musale
I decided to curb the kids’ overuse of these devices. So I did a little trick. Since I know Japanese and the kids don’t, I changed the user interface (UI) language to Japanese so the kids would stop using the devices.
But, to my surprise, I failed. The kids were still using the devices, and the overuse didn’t stop, because they didn’t need any language help. They can easily get what they want on these devices by sliding and flicking through icons and images. It was not the UI language, but icons and images that were navigating them through using the device. My five-year-old son cannot read the UI text and screen messages, but based only on the icons and images, he can interpret what’s on the screen and just like a pro user, he can do things such as change the wallpaper to a picture of his choice, view animation clips, check scores and levels for his favorite Angry Bird game, and a lot more. . .
January/February 2013
Cost scaling through technology management
Wayne Bourland
There are many pieces to translation cost, with vendor rates, computer-aided translation tools, TM leverage and machine translation (MT) being the primary ones. Each had to be addressed. We gained some initial cost benefit by reducing our vendor pool from five to two. It’s a prominent trend in large enterprises across the outside services spend ecosystem. On the client side, we gain lower vendor management overhead, volume discounts and the ability to invest more time in partner relations — and honestly, this one doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The vendor gains increased revenue. It’s a win-win for those involved, but does have implications for the broader market. Once we had resized our vendor pool, we turned to rate analysis. We reviewed industry reports from Common Sense Advisory, spoke with other large enterprise clients — in aggregate, of course; no specific rates were discussed — and had an opportunity to hire in someone from the vendor side with the added benefit of strong vendor-side pricing knowledge. We negotiated roughly a 10% reduction in cost, while still leaving our partners with healthy enough margins to continue the great service they were providing. . .
January/February 2013
Translation technology's big data revolution
Rahzeb Choudhury
Translation technology can certainly be better exploited to capitalize on massive demand to translate content across all industries throughout the many touch points in the consumer decision journey. They may be particularly important in the burgeoning consumer classes in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China or the CIVETS markets of Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.
But translation technology providers will need to maintain openness in order to continue the change they have exhibited in the last few years if they and we are to enjoy rich rewards. After a generation of stagnation, where there were only rare examples of firms improving on tired old TM technology, often built with Windows-based editors, we suddenly find ourselves primed for a generation of dynamism. . .
January/February 2013
Lori Thicke
Progress has been made in a number of areas, particularly with the hybrid engines that combine the best of rule-based machine translation (RBMT) with statistical machine translation (SMT) techniques. But these changes have been incremental rather than groundbreaking. MT alone is still not capable of delivering fully automatic human quality translations.
So why, then, is MT on the roadmap of almost every savvy translation buyer today? If MT's quality hasn't improved as much as we had hoped it would, there has been at least one significant change in the MT landscape: our expectations. We have stopped expecting MT to be perfect. Instead, we have realized that there is a place for imperfect MT, and when it needs to be perfect, a strong business case can be made for human rework. . .
January/February 2013
Integrating language technology
David Filip
However, all the items that need to be right pose a multilingualism challenge, as the vast majority of the online population regularly interacts only in one language. The challenge is to make information shareable and comparable across language silos. This means the NLP areas of MT, cross-lingual retrieval and (automated) language learning amplify the usability of the other areas: search engines, question-answering, text mining; adaptive filtering and personalization; task modeling, behavioral predictions based on anticipatory analysis; speech recognition and synthesis; summarization and drill-down techniques. . .
January/February 2013
System functionality in language technology
Andrzej Zydroń
The last ten years have seen some real practical advances in translation technology: statistical machine translation (SMT) and effective collaboration using server and cloud-based translation management systems.
Both increase productivity and reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a given localization project. This same period has also seen great advances in IT, namely the universal adoption of XML as a vocabulary for all aspects of interchange and data definition, as well as big data, the ability to store and process vast quantities of information, and to mine it in order to benefit from this immense resource. Hand in hand with these advances, we have seen a constant and almost remorseless rise in internet connection speeds and geographical penetration. . .
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