May 2007 Archives

As the Internet continues to redefine ubiquitous, the issue of cross-language search becomes more critical. It's a pervasive challenge with extreme scalability requirements. Hard to imagine, but the Internet will be full by about 2010 according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN's recommendation for IPv6 demonstrates the potential breadth of information overload.

Organizations such as the European-based Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) have moved beyond discussion and into in-depth testing on cross-language search for many years. With its "Leaping over Language Barriers" announcement, Google has moved beyond experimentation and toward productization of its cross-language search feature.

• The Wall Street Journal's Jessica Vascellaro weighs in here, and includes commentary on rival strategies from Yahoo and Microsoft.


• Google Blogoscoped weighs in here.


• Clay Tablet's Ryan Coleman weighs in here.


• Global by Design's John Yunker has a review here.


• And from Google themselves, here's the beta UI, the FAQ, and the "unveiling" at the company's Searchology event held earlier this month.

IMO, any discussion of what the interconnected world "looks like" in the future, whether focused on fill in your label here 2.0, social networking, customer experience, global elearning, etc., (should) eventually drill-down to translation and localization issues. Once we're at that level of conversation, there's more challenges to discuss -- the ongoing evolution of automated translation, the balance between human and machine translation, the conundrum of rich media and image translation, and as Kaija will always remind us, the quality and context of search results as opposed to merely the quantity.

As a researcher, I've used Google's "translate this" functionality and Yahoo's Babel Fish (originally AltaVista's) numerous times to "get the gist" of a non-English article. But my reliance on the results has been more for sanity-checking trends than for factual data gathering. Inconsistencies skew the truth. I just can't trust it. Can we trust this? Time will tell. Is it a step in the right direction for the masses? No doubt.

To continue my previous entry on quality: what, after all, is the cost of quality? When I was a localization service vendor, customers always emphasized the great importance of good translation quality - and yet most sales negotiations always boiled down to "What is your lowest price per word?"

Finally, a few customers actually measured ALL their translation-related costs, including the hours they themselves spent on checking and re-checking the translations they received. That, of course, should be the real cost to be used when comparing vendors, not just the price per word or per hour.

Getting the translation right the first time improves quality and reduces cost through less iterations needed for checking and re-checking. But getting it right the first time also requires good translators who know the subject matter and the required style, good background materials, terminology lists, style guides etc. - also called preparation, a step often overlooked due to great urgency of having the translation done asap. "There is never enough time to do the thing right, but there is always enough time to do it again." Ah well.

Getting it right the first time naturally also requires my favorite, favorite topic: a well-defined PROCESS. Something I will keep returning to in this blog...

Quality is such a fun topic to discuss. Good quality - and bad - is instantly recognizable, but difficult to define. I bet that everybody who has been involved in a translation project, either as a customer or as a vendor, has had discussions about translation quality: how many mistakes there were, what was a mistake and what was just a difference of opinion, what related materials and terminology lists were given beforehand, and so on.

Quality issues can be very frustrating to both customers and vendors, and they definitely affect the profit margins of both. It would be great to have a clear-cut definition of a good translation, a "six-sigma of language". The problem is that quality is very much about perception. Yes, there are the typos and grammatical errors, which are easy to define and to spot. But then there is style, and the question of whether the intended message was conveyed or "lost in translation", like Bill Murray in Tokyo. And that is where the slippery slope begins.

Eventually good quality means that the target audience received the message its provider intended it to receive. In the translation industry, this also includes that the correct message was received in time and within the translation budget.

LISA has done a major effort to establish a QA model which is described on http://www.lisa.org/products/qamodel/. The LISA QA model helps to quantify some of the quality issues, and gives a tool which customers and vendors can share in their discussions. Most importantly, it has been developed in co-operation by end users, software and hardware developers, and localization vendors, so it accumulates their joint experience.

One can, however, quantify only so many qualitative issues. The rest - the more elusive "perceived issues" - tend to fall under customer relationship management.

Bill has a nice summary of SDL's research into the use of XML in delivering global content across multiple channels. Seven golden rules is right on target -- given the age-old premise from cognitive psychologist George A. Miller.

Check it out.

One of the unique aspects of the translation and localization industries is the breadth of contributors and skill sets that actually get the work done. I remember standing in line last summer for the ferry to Ellis Island and marveling at the number of languages being spoken simultaneously and the number of cultures represented in one huge line. But for that moment, (2 hours actually) that line was a community with a single purpose. Despite language barriers, everyone shared the excitement of the historical adventure to come.

No, the San Diego-based WorldSummit organized by Idiom Technologies didn't offer a cross-country trek to the Status of Liberty. It did however, offer an opportunity for an impressive group of professionals with multiple skill sets and cultural backgrounds to come together and share the excitement of where the industry is heading and what it can achieve along the way.

Blending technical writers, brand managers, and marketers from varied organizations with translators from multiple countries, LSPs, university professors, industry researchers, and analysts is no small feat. But for that moment, (3 days actually) WorldSummit fostered community and conversation amongst those who research, those who groom the next generation of translators, those determined to author source content with globalization in mind, those faced with the nuances of dialect and locale, and those who provide the services and technologies so necessary for this complex work.

With Mary and I both attending, we got to compare notes and reactions as we moved through various user sessions, informal conversations, and social events. One clear pattern we both noticed is the power of human connection; IOW, the power of face-to-face, passionate conversations. Without belittling the impact of Web communities, I am standing firm on the notion that there's nothing like eye contact, body language and the sight of folks waving their hands to speak to fuel the adrenaline of a community conversation. It's positively contagious. Here's some examples of the adrenaline I'm talking about:

• Mary's user panel, "Evaluating and Selecting a Globalization Management System – Best Practices," included real-world advice from Brian Shorey - Cisco Systems, Alma Siller - Continental Airlines, and Mimi Hills - Sun Microsystems. This was not a panel of "nirvana" stories told through predefined slides; this was an honest and thoughtful discussion of the approaches each participant used to pave the way for success (including some colored commentary on the challenges to expect along the way!)


• Keynotes on translation quality and the future of technologies were passionately delivered by well-known researchers such as Jaap van der Meer and Alan Melby. The wealth of history these two brought to the table resulted in many a cramped finger as the audience scribbled furiously.


• Machine translation's potential to resolve time to market challenges and its intersection with human expertise was absolutely hot, as John Yunker notes over at Global by Design. Whether more acronyms are useful or confusing, it is quite clear that the pool of worldwide translation talent may not be able to keep up with demand.


• And I'll not soon forget the students from Kent State University and California State University Chico, who cheered their professors with more enthusiasm than I've seen at a technical conference for some time.

Whea. Documenting the varied participants and choosing my highlights was tough enough. Pulling off the event was surely another story. Kudos to the Idiom team for achieving a well-rounded and extremely organized event.