According to the article the game has very little text but what little text that is contained in the user interface is translated by the user community. This is a huge risk of crowd sourcing. I have written about the risks of crowdsourcing translation in a previous post.

I understand why some nonprofit organizations would pursue a crowdsourcing strategy but companies that earn revenue off of the asset being translated are simply foolish for pursuing the strategy.  It diminishes the importance of the users in other countries and compromises the quality of their product. Would you allow the user base to write your marketing content? How about the legal aspects like the warranty, EULA or privacy policy? Would you allow your users to write the interface for the application?

If it is important enough to show your users then it is important enough to have translated by professional linguists. I just can’t believe the risks that companies take with their content.

I also thought it was very interesting that the company is enjoying incredible success with Minecraft. The article says that over four million copies of the game have been sold and 14 million users are registered.  I would imagine they could have budgeted a few dollars for translation and saved themselves the aggravation and embarrassment caused by this incident.

We get a lot of requests for quotations for website translations. Typically the conversation starts with, “can you give me a quote for the translation of our site? Here is the address {www. mycompany.com}”. This is a mistake.

The problem is that if you contact three different providers you will probably get three different scopes. When translation providers are faced with a quotation request like this they will either build a site script by manually cutting and pasting the content into a text editor or by using an web site capture tool like Blue Squirrel’s Grab-A-Site or InSpyder’s Web2Disk. These processes will lead to a variable source for your quotations. You won’t really know if you are comparing the vendors properly.

The best approach is to have the ability to ask your webmaster or developer for a proper export of your site in some form of XML or HTML. If that isn’t possible then you should create your own text based script of the content or even a subset of your content so that you can fairly measure the cost of each vendor against the same source document.

Here is a simple sample of what your script might look like:

Most popular firewall programs allow you to add websites to the Exception List or list of sites that can be trusted. This is very important since crossWeb requires an uninhibited connection for optimal performance.

The important point to make is how your program references websites. Adding sites to an exception list can be done in one of two ways.

1. Just add the root address and the program will unblock the entire site.

http://crrossweb.argotrans.com/crossweb

2. Add the root along with a “/*” at the end of the address to unblock all pages.

http://crrossweb.argotrans.com/crossweb/*

You may need to try both methods.

You can find a reference to how to add a website URL to TrendMicro’s firewall here.

The single most important question is, “how will I get the text exported out of my site for translation and how will I get the content back in via import?”.

It is incredibly important to think about the potential translation of your site early in the design. If you feel that there is any chance that you will translate your site, please share this with your developer or webmaster as early as possible in the process. If you decide on this too late in the process you run the risk of having a site that is very rigid in terms of  implementing new languages.

The goal is to have an easy way to export the site into XLIFF, XML or HTML format. If the site is data driven or hooked to a content management system like Umbraco you will be able to use a plugin or workflow to achieve this goal.

You should also get a clear understanding of how much embedded text you have in your site. Embedded text would be text that is placed in images or in animations or video and even in downloaded PDF documents. A decision needs to be made whether that content will be translated and if so, how will that be accomplished. If you decide to translate this material just consider that highly complex animation and art with a text layer will have to be modified in each language. So your costs will increase by the same factor as your number of languages.

Next, your translation provider should be able to translate the contents of the site without corrupting any of the tags that are important to the structure of your site. After translation there should be a way for you to import the translated content back into the site/database.

Having a clear understanding on how translated content will flow in and out of your website is the most important thing to consider before even beginning the search for your translation supplier.

Yes, Mitt Romney and John Huntsman are the apparent offenders. Mitt Romney speaks French and John Huntsman speaks Chinese. Romney spent time in France during his college years as a Mormon missionary while Huntsman lived abroad four different times and also served as the US Ambassador to China.

The ads seem to mock the candidates for aligning themselves against US interests. In fact Huntsman has been categorized as the “Manchurian Candidate”. Seriously? It was hard to find any definitive resources but I found a listing of quite a few past presidents that spoke foreign languages.  Thomas Jefferson was reported to have the ability to read four additional languages.

I think the ability to speak a foreign language should be applauded.  No differently than what we think about someone who is good at math or science.  We wouldn’t criticize someone for being good at math would we?

Like the Chevy Nova product release in Mexico which was a terrible mistake since “No va” means “doesn’t go”. But my favorite miscue from this article was this sign:

The author goes on to explain that even if the translation is distributed for free the ability to sell in that market would certainly be impaired by a free translation being circulated. It seems that the principal question is one of distribution. I would imagine that if  a book is translated for own personal use and never shared it would not violate copyright law. Now, what if a machine translation tool in the public domain is used to create that translation? I wrote about Google translate as a form of plagiarism in a blog post in 2011. Seth Godin recently posted on the idea of fair use which is a central principle in determining violation of copyright laws.

As the quality of machine translation improves it will be interesting to see how seriously MT output will be taken in the marketplace. As of now literary MT is really not an option. The quality simply is not acceptable yet.

The media and others would have us believe that President Kennedy declared “I am a jelly donut”.  It is incorrect to say that the inclusion of the indefinite article “ein” turned Kennedy into a popular jelly filled pastry also referred to as a Berliner in everyday German. But for many years you have heard the media and historians push this funny misconception. It just isn’t true.

A recent article in the Vancouver Courier titled “Incorrect quotations can have scary repercussions” detail other famous issues with quotations attributed to famous people. In the second half of the article you will find some issues related to quotations and translation by Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Historians tried to pin the blame for Kennedy’s “donut” quotation on his interpreter but the linguist provided Kennedy with a perfectly acceptable way to declare his solidarity with West Berliners. Perhaps those people just had an odd fixation with donuts?

On a recent trip to Florida I saw this sign in the airport talking about the Orange County Schools. The logistics on managing that number of languages in a district must be incredible. Most districts only have to deal with a few languages.

For the last six years we have been assisting local school districts with parent and student communication in Spanish, Korean, Russian and Polish. The districts require assistance with projects like lunch menus, registration forms, web content, curriculum information and other forms of parent communication. ELL (English language learners) programs do a great job in working with the students during the school day but communication with parents is very important and poses logistical and budgetary challenges for administrators.

Proper communication with the parents is essential in getting the students to progress in our education system. Here are a few strategies that we have seen our clients use to save time and money.

-Reduce content for multilingual communications to only the key information
Our districts use automated phone messages to announce weather closings. Typically the English message talks about the amount of snowfall, the reason for closure, etc. The translated version typically just announces the closure. This allows that part of the message to be used over and over again.

-Utilize in-house resources for as many projects as possible, especially for low-risk projects
Since most districts with non-English speakers have ELL programs it would follow that some bilingual teachers are in the program. It makes sense to use their abilities as much as possible to save money.

-Use language service providers that utilize translation memory technology
TM technology will save you money on future updates. This is extremely important for documents like school policy, registration forms and school menus that tend to only require small updates.

-Negotiate a lower rate or ask for some pro-bono service
Hopefully you can appeal to the language service providers good nature to provide a discount or even some pro-bono projects.

Argo Translation, Inc. is proud to announce a new machine translation service called ArgoMT. The service was created to help customers who need an inexpensive translation option with a fast turnaround on low-risk documents.  ArgoMT is a simple service.  All the client needs to do is upload a document, select the languages, approve the cost, and within minutes the final files are delivered.

Argo Translation Managing Director, Peter Argondizzo, says, “The great thing about ArgoMT is that this is the first service of its kind. The benefits of using ArgoMT as opposed to a free service such as Google Translate, are that ArgoMT provides secure document storage and account management. Documents are uploaded in their original file format (.doc, .ppt, . xls etc.) and maintain their formatting throughout the process. Tedious copying and pasting are not required.” Argondizzo continues, “ArgoMT is low-risk, because if the client isn’t satisfied with the machine translation, they can request a completely new human translation using the cost of ArgoMT as a discount.”

Argondizzo added, “An ArgoMT client recently told me that the service was extremely beneficial while responding to an RFP from a Brazilian company. The RFP was in Portuguese and they didn’t know if they qualified to respond. The price for human translation would have been much more than using ArgoMT.”  He continues, “As he expected, the translation wasn’t perfect, but they were able to get an idea of the qualifications in the document without bursting their budget.”

To view the ArgoMT solution, please visit the website www.argomt.com