Monday, July 25, 2005

How many countries have you visited?

I had known about this site for a while, but I went back there to update some new countries that I visited in the last couple of years, like Guatemala and Finland. World66 lets you check all the countries that you have visited (and in which you have lived). It also lets you track the States of the United States and the Provices of Canada that you have visited. It was great to find that the site has improved a lot, although Macau and Hong Kong aren't listed anymore :-(

Here's my map as of today. I have visited 38 countries or 17% of all of them. Now I want to visit Mongolia!



create your own visited country map

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Two interesting sites and Google Translations


This week I had a chance to play around with two very good sites developed by Dr. Qilian Cui from Beijing, China.

The sites are globalization.com.cn and GILTWorld.com. They contain a wealth of information on the Chinese translation and localization market and very interesting articles about the industry and issues related to Chinese localization.

If you clicked on the links above, you will have noticed that the sites are written in Chinese (which is not one the five languages I speak). In order to read it, I engaged the help of Google Translations. I can report that in addition to being impressed with the speed of the translation, I felt like I could understand and read with some ease the texts that were presented.

I strongly recommend a little tour of these sites.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Fusion Society in Silicon Valley was a blast

The main idea behind the Localization Fusion Society is that people go to conferences to network and talk to their industry peers. After meeting people from my town all over the world and never seeing them when we were at home, Don and I figured: who cares about the conference... let's just do the networking part. It is cheaper and it is a lot less work.

We have had Fusion Society meetings everywhere. There are five rules, though. And they must be respected. The two most important ones: NO SELLING and SEND PICTURES.

Check out the Fusion Society site for pictures of past events in places like Pittsburgh, Amsterdam, New York, Silicon Valley, San Diego... Why don't you organize one in your city!

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Hold the presses! We don't have the Last Word anymore

In my last posting I mentioned that we would have the last page OpEd article in the next issue of Multilingual Computing... Sorry. It's not going to happen. Unfortunately our analysis of the mergers ran a little too long, so the editors decided to make it an article, instead of the Last Word.

Too bad! I really like that last page :-) It probably means that I will have to write another article for the next one.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Last Word in Multilingual Computing is Ours




In the next issue of Multilingual Computing, the only magazine that focuses on the localization industry, the last page article - a sort of OpEd page - will be signed by Don DePalma and I. We will be analyzing how the market is now divided in two camps:

- Managed services: the Lionbridge approach
- Technology driven services: the SDL approach

Don't miss this article.

Monday, July 04, 2005

LSP: An new industry standard term

It feels good to see that an acronym that you coined has caught on. In the early days of Common Sense Advisory, when Don and I were writing Beggars at the Globalization Banquet, we didn't want to use the common practice of separating the world in buyers and vendors, especially because very often vendors act as buyers, too (in the case of MLV buying from SLVs).

We didn't like the other acronym (GILT) that was coming up at that time and which we avoid to use. We believed that GILT (pronounced "guilt", for globalization, internationalization, localization, translation) had a negative connotation, especially when associated with other words like GILT Provider, GILT Vendor (weird, isn't it?)

So we looked at what all companies had in common and came up with Language Service Providers (LSP), which is the term that we use in our research. And now we are proud to see that the industry has adopted our terminology and incorporated it into products, like SDL, with its LSP Solutions, and Idiom, with its WorldServer LSP Advantage Program™.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

List of Top 20 companies released by Common Sense Advisory

After missing a few significant players that do not compete in the traditional markets, like RWS that specializes in patents and Euroscript that does a lot of work for the European Institutions, Common Sense Advisory published an update to its well publicized Top 15 Translation Companies list. The new list is expanded to Top 20, so that nobody that was in the list was left out (these guys at Common Sense Advisory are soooo nice!)

The full list of can be seen here.

After the acquisition of Bowne by Lionbridge, the Top 5 companies are:

1. Lionbridge (US)
2. Titan (US)
3. SDL (UK)
4. STAR (DE)
5. RWS (UK)