Recently in Machine Translation Category

Last year as we pursued our research for the Multilingual Product Content study we saw an opportunity for further study of the role of machine translation (MT) as an element in the global content value chain (GCVC).  To this end, Gilbane Group is now conducting an online survey on MT adoption and buyer / user expectations.  The survey covers domains using MT, target applications, integration, benefits and business drivers, as well as obstacles to adoption.

Adoption of MT in some form or another is gaining acceptance and use (we anticipate) will soon be prevalent, especially as a strategy for managing user-generated content in multiple languages.  We are seeking input from IT, content, and language professionals within global enterprises as well as service providers.  Current adoption of MT is not a requirement for taking the survey.

The survey is online and will take less than 10 minutes to complete.  In exchange for participation, respondents will receive aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Take the survey now.  Contact us if you have any questions about the research.

Providing education on the business value of global information through our research is an important part of our content globalization practice. As we know however, the value of research is only as good as the results organizations achieve when they apply it! What really gets us jazzed is when knowledge sharing validates our thinking about what we call “universal truths” – the factors that define success for those who champion, implement and sustain organizational investment in multilingual communications.

Participants in our 2009 study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains told us that eliminating the language afterthought syndrome in their companies-- a pattern of treating language requirements as secondary considerations within content strategies and solutions -- would be a “defining moment” in realizing the impact of their efforts. Of course, we wanted more specifics. What would those defining moments look like? What would be the themes that characterized them? What would make up the “universal truths” about the remedies? Aggregating the answers to these questions led us to develop some key and common ingredients for success:

• Promotion of “global thinking” within their own departments, across product content domains, and between headquartered and regional resources.
• Strategies that balance inward-facing operational efficiency and cost reduction goals with outward-facing customer impacts.
• Business cases and objectives carefully aligned with corporate objectives, creating more value in product content deliverables and more influence for product content teams.
• Commitment to quality at the source, language requirements as part of status-quo information design, and global customer experience as the “end goal.”
• Focused and steady progress on removing collaboration barriers within their own departments and across product content domains, effectively creating a product content ecosystem that will grow over time.
• Technology implementations that enable standardization, automation, and interoperability.

Defining the ingredients naturally turned into sharing the recipes, a.k.a. a series of best practices profiles based on the experiences of individual technical documentation, training, localization/translation, or customer support professionals. Sincere appreciation goes to companies including Adobe, BMW Motorrad, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Mercury Marine, Microsoft, and the New York City Department of Education, for enabling their product content champions to share their stories. Applause goes to the champions themselves, who continue to achieve ongoing and impressive results.

Want the details?
Download the Multilingual Product Content report
(updated with additional profiles!)

Attending Localization World, Silicon Valley?
Don’t miss Mary’s presentation on
Overcoming the Language Afterthought Syndrome
in the Global Business Best Practices track.

Readers of this content globalization blog will be interested in hearing about Frank's adventures in Finland this week at the Kites Symposium. Check out the entry on our main blog. About Kites:

Kites Association develops and promotes multilingual communication, multi-cultural interaction and their technical content management to improve the competitive edge of the Finnish economic life and the public administration.

In our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report, we noted the fact that machine translation (MT) has long been the target of "don't let this happen to you" jokes throughout the globalization industry. Unpredictable results and poor quality allowed humor to become the focus of MT discussions, making widespread adoption risky at best.

On the other hand, we also noted that scientists, researchers, and technologists have been determined to unlock MT potential since the 1950's to solve the same core challenges the industry struggles with today: cost savings, speed, and linguist augmentation. Although the infamous report on Languages and Machines from the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) published in 1966 discussed these challenges in some depth (albeit from a U.S. perspective), it sent a resounding message that "there is no emergency in the field of translation." Research funding suffered; researcher Margaret King described the impact as effectively "killing machine translation research in the States."

Borrowing from S.E. Hinton, that was then, this is now. Technology advancements and pure computing power have made machine translation not only viable, but also potentially game-changing. A global economy, the volume and velocity of content required to run a global business, and customer expectations is steadily shifting enterprise postures from "not an option" to "help me understand where MT fits." Case in point -- participants in our study identified MT as one of the top three valuable technologies for the future.

There's lots of game-changing news for our readers to digest.

• An excellent place to start is with our colleagues at Multilingual Magazine, who dedicated the April-May issue to this very subject. Don Osborn over at the Multidisciplinary Perspectives blog provides an excellent summary, posing the question: "Is there a paradigm shift on machine translation?"
• Language Weaver predicts a potential $67.5 billion market for digital translation, fueled by MT. CEO Mark Tapling explains why.
• SYSTRAN, one of the earliest MT software developers provides research and education here.
• And finally (for today), there's no way to deny the Google impact -- here's their FAQ about the beta version of Google Translate. TAUS weighs in on the subject here.

Mary and I will be at Localization World Madison to provide practical advice and best practices for making the enterprise business case for multilingual communications investments as part of a Global Content Value Chain. But we're also looking forward to the session focused on MT potential, issues, and vendor approaches. The full grid is here. Join us!

Well, our blogging hiatus is over. No, we haven't fallen off the face of the earth, as some loyal readers might have thought. Quite the contrary. We've been criss-crossing countries and continents since April, speaking at industry events, user group meetings, and our own conference in San Francisco.

What's really keeping us busy, though, is new original research and analysis on content globalization within multinational organizations. Gilbane Group'sMultilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain will be published this summer. The report provides an in-depth look at the current state of content globalization initiatives and emerging best practices. Highlights include profiles of companies with worldwide brands who are bringing together people, process, and technology to align multilingual content initiatives with strategic global business goals.

You may have gotten a sneak peek at preliminary results if you attended Gilbane San Francisco, Localization World in Berlin or the STC annual meeting in Philadelphia, or Sajan or SDL customer events in May. In the weeks ahead, the research will be featured in several webinar events, such as the July 24 event with study sponsor RedDot, and in our blog entries (so check back often).

In addition to RedDot, sponsors are Jonckers, Sajan, Sitecore, SDL Tridion, Systran, and Jahia.

We're very excited about the insights we uncovered in the research, and we look forward to sharing them with our readers. Stay tuned.

I keep being fascinated about the role of language in social media. I read a very interesting article on multilingual social bookmarking in the Just Landed web site. English is extremely dominant in social bookmarking, although a lot of the English sites also contain bookmarks to non-English sites. Among the non-English sites, German dominates. I also noticed that there are multilingual Indian social bookmarking sites which include several Indian languages.

Is social media actually compartmentalized by languages? Christian Kreutz has an excellent entry in his blog about the multilingual social web. As he says: "So it is a dilemma. On one way English allows us to communicate worldwide, but at the same time it narrows down the potential for collaboration by simply contradicting cultural diversity."

I would guess that more social and customer-generated media will eventually mean more machine translation, because it would be nice to share thoughts over the language barrier. Or I might be quite wrong, and most of the discussions and social sites will actually be quite local, shared by people who already share a language. Language is, after all, more than words: it is also culture and connotations and nuances, some of which are impossible to translate.

It would be interesting to hear from the MT community: do you see increased demand from social media sites?

More than likely. One of her more famous quotes was:

"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it."

If Fuller was still alive, would social networking have forged a connection somehow with Jaap van der Meer, Director of the Translation Automation User Society, otherwise known as TAUS? I'd bet money on it.

Long known as a language industry pioneer and visionary, van der Meer directs the TAUS-driven call for knowledge sharing as the driver of change for the translation industry. Efforts such as:

• spearheading a language data sharing initiative, including a planned platform for cross-industry sharing


• providing executive forums to discuss and design new translation business models, and


• mapping the roadmap to share translation memories

are just a few examples of the innovation within this proactive organization.

Since November 2004, TAUS has managed to bring together more than sixty companies that exchange user cases, best practices and technology roadmaps specific to the language industry. The resulting membership is far from a "weighted" crowd; rather, it is a well-rounded collection of end users, service providers and technology vendors with a shared interest for change.

Shared vision. Common goals. Concrete results. No more secret languages.

This mission statement for 2008 defines how TAUS plans driving an "agenda of change" that stimulates innovation, automation and collaboration for the industry. Impressive goals, to say the least. Find out more by requesting a copy of the TAUS Annual Plan 2008. It is an excellent read.

Although it is already mid-January, I would still like to wish everyone a very good 2008! It definitely looks to be an interesting year.

Back to blogging, after a very long pause. The reason was my major geographical transition: after 8 very nice years in Boston, we returned to the bi-lingual Finland and the very multi-lingual European union last autumn. The time required for a trans-Atlantic move is not to be underestimated!

Leonor's interview with Director General Lonnroth about the languages in the EU is an excellent description of the world on this side of the Atlantic. On a very personal note, I love tuning to YLE Mondo radio every time I am driving; a local station broadcasting news from several different countries. I even get the NPR! I listen to German, French, Spanish, and Italian news, and at the same time notice the differences there are not just in the language, but also in the content. Even more fun is to listen to news from Australia and South Africa, which really change the world perspective. A good reminder that from Africa or Australia, many things do look different than from the US or from Europe. How lovely it would be to understand what they say in Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, to name just a few languages!

Anyways, things are finally starting to find their places in their new home, so I am back to blogging. We had a wonderful Gilbane conference in Boston at the end of November; it got so many ideas going in my head, especially about the social aspects of content, search, collaboration - and of course language. The question "Where are languages in social media" was asked in the conference, and the first answer was on the lines of: gee, that is a tough thing to solve. True - and yet I am convinced that we will begin to see very new types of tools and solutions. It was interesting to note that several examples were given on how in corporations social media enabled people find a language speaker inside the organization. "Through our collaboration tool, we found someone who speaks Japanes and can check our translations." "We realized someone in our German office could translate the materials we needed." Language skills become yet another skill to be shared in communities.

Another interesting point was that MT and its usefulness came up. With the amount of user-generated information exploding, there is no chance to human-translate everything. Could this be the real coming of age of MT?

I spoke with one multilingual service provider who said that they have started receiving requests for checking user-generated content in corporate community sites. Interesting. I would guess that need for automated checking of "bad words" increases as more content on corporate sites comes not from employees but from anyone in the web. Enterprise searches have to be multilingual, but there is always room to improve.

As Leonor pointed out: collaboration yields knowledge. That knowledge is multilingual.

As we close our first year of the Gilbane Globalization blog, we looked back at our initial goals to help readers meet the challenges of multilingual business communications. Three conversations stood out as emerging themes that we felt were critical then -- and now:

• Understanding the impact of globalization on customer experience and brand management


• Viewing the global content lifecycle as a strategic business practice


• Closing the gap between content and translation management processes

Communicating the importance of each drove our 2007 blog entries, our conversations with corporate users and technology vendors, our globalization-specific case studies and whitepapers, and the design of the Globalization Track at Gilbane Boston 2007. As we did so, our favorite mantra continued to bubble up as the ultimate success criteria:

A holistic focus on the People, Processes, and Technology that create, translate, manage, distribute, and consume global content.

Our conversation wish list for 2008 is very "PPT"-driven. In fact, we can't think of any theme that does not require a collaboration of people, an interoperability between processes, and an integration of technologies:

• The power of single-sourcing to redefine "multi-channel" as more than device-driven outputs.


• The impact that human + machine translation combinations can have on the availability and quality of multilingual content.


• The value of terminology management in combating the proliferation of insulting translations.


• The potential of multilingual social networking.

And last but not least, the availability of "the wisdom of the crowds," or from our take, global access to shared best practices that enable organizations to learn from each other in attaining quality multilingual communications. We'll aim to make sure that goal is ongoing.

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.