Google Translator Toolkit: A New Player in Translation Technology

This week, Google launched its new platform for translation projects, the Google Translator Toolkit. The tool is designed for translators and is similar to translation memory (TM) tools available in the market -- such as Across, Déjà Vu, Trados, and Wordfast -- and integrates Google Translate's statistical machine translation.



As we have been discussing in Common Sense Advisory's research, and in recent industry gatherings, this is the long-needed revolution in an industry that has been trying to "out-Trados" Trados, or trying to increase the productivity of processes and pump up technology that is old and cumbersome. Google Translator Toolkit incorporates all the collaboration features of current technology in an elegant way and enables translators to regain control of the process.
Even though it is still a bare bones solution, it will attract early adopters. Hardcore TM users, on the other hand, will likely shun the new technology.

It is still early to predict the impact of this launch, but we expect that the following will happen:

• TM tools will develop interfaces that will read/write Google TMs and Google MT if they want to stay in the market.


• Pre-translation and post-editing will become standard practices, even for the most recalcitrant translators.


• Discussions about intellectual property of translation memories will become irrelevant, with negative impact for efforts like TM Market Place and the TAUS TDA initiative.
  

From the Google Translator Toolkit website, we also learn that:

• It supports 47 languages.
• Translations and glossaries each have a maximum size of 1MB.
• Documents can be uploaded in most common file formats.
• Translation memories have a maximum size of 50MB per upload.
• Google Translator Toolkit is free, but in the future, Google plans to charge users whose translations exceed high-volume thresholds.

Google Translator Toolkit is not perfect. There are valid concerns about using it, along with the predictable resistance to change by those tied to the existing model. However, Google has already changed our behavior in the way we look for information. Now, it is launching a platform that has the potential to revolutionize the translation process, especially if combined with Google Wave, which is expected to be launched soon.

The role of the language services industry is to evolve from this stage. Alea jacta est!

You can't make these things up

The story making the rounds of the translation industry today is yet another indication of the power of bad translations. I've already received 12 e-mails with links to the BBC story of the bilingual road sign in Wales that reads "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" in English, but "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." In Welsh. 

This story falls in the same category of the Chinese restaurant that used a free machine translation website to convert its name into English and printed a giant sign for its façade saying "Translate server error." 

In terms of viral capacity, this story will probably rank in the same category of the Berlitz video for its language schools in Germany, which clogged my mailbox with its 3MB everytime that it was sent to me (By the way, if you want to circulate a funny video, check first if it wasn't already published in YouTube... it's much easier to just send the link than add the video as an attachment to your message).

Now seriously, what do we learn from this?

• Translation is for professionals. I can hear the linguists around the world jumping to use this as proof that machine translation doesn't work. Well, the Welsh story is actually just an Out-of-Office reply that the client thought was the translation for the text he or she requested. The client actually sought a professional to do the job.
• Machine translation should be a productivity tool. If you follow my postings or presentations, you should know by now that I believe that translators should use MT to improve their productivity and it is only useful if you know the language into which the text is being translated. The second picture is a clear example of a person who did not have any command of English and trusted the internet to translate his sign.
• Signs continue to be a translator's best friend. Before the internet, stories about bad translations in hotel signs were a favorite past time. They circulated by letter, telex and later by fax.
• Only bad translations make the news. When was the last time you saw a story about a good translation? Did you ever?

5Qs with Me

Here's a story on the power of leaving comments on other people's blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, my best friend in the world - Google Alerts - picked up that Sarah Dillon, a translator and blogger in Australia had the keyword "Common Sense Advisory" included in one of her entries.

Without delay or hesitation I went there and read a quick interview that Sarah had with Christian Arno, from Lingo24, in which he mentioned that he liked to read The Global Watchtower. I left a quick comment and voilà... Sarah invited me to give her an interview for her 5Qs section.

If you want to read my insightful responses to her five questions, just go here. And while you are there, read the other posts, too. Mine is only the fourth interview in a series.

Help Preserve a Language

I just saw this very interesting video from Pop!Tech, and thought of sharing it with you. You have read about dotSUB here in my blog a few times, and now you have a chance to use it for something fun, instructive and social in nature.

This video is a presentation delivered at Pop!Tech 2008 titledd Scarcity and Abundance. In it, ethnolinguist K. David Harrison discussed how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. He also detailed efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide.

If you want to Help translate this video, this is what you need to do: 

1. Register for free at www.dotSUB.com.
2. Once you are a dotSUB user, click on the orange "translate this video" link located at the bottom of this video player.
3. Begin translating the video at dotSUB's site, and your translation will be immediately available on this site for anyone to see, add to, or edit.  

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

I have spent the last month travelling. Today, reading an airline magazine article ranking places and restaurants, I thought of a line of one of my favorite movies, Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer says it before dying: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears... in rain. Time to die. “

Except for the time to die part, I sometimes feel like that. So, taking advantage of my blog (yeah, I know, haven’t written anything forever), here are some of my Best of 2008 (so far).

Best event location. Vendor Management Seminar in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Best cocktail location. ELIA Networking Days in Lisbon (photo). The view of the Lisbon skyline from Hotel Chiado at dusk was amazing.

Best conference room. IV Financial Translation Conference organized by CLS at the Madrid Stock Exchange. It was surreal to see the big board with a straight line down in the middle of the worldwide financial crisis.

Best conference lunch. Our own Localization Vendor Management Colloquium at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. An unexpected surprise in the middle of the day with tasty salads and seafood.

Best translation company offices. This year I visited several offices around the world and I must say that I was impressed by two great locations. The C-Soft new headquarters in Beijing are very modern, functional and beautiful. I was honored to be invited to their grand opening.

LanguageWire’s offices in Copenhagen (picture) have that Scandinavian coolness in an historic building on a cobblestone alley. I was lucky that it was a sunny autumn day, so much so that it made me wish I worked there. However, no corner office beats Alejandro Aguirre’s from Omni Technologies in Guatemala!

Best skyline. The event organized by SunFlare at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo gave me the chance to see all of Tokyo from the 50^th floor of a building on a hill. Once again, I was lucky and it was a clear night. The rain only fell the next day!

Best post-event. This week I spoke at an event for Kommunicera in Västerås, Sweden, and I was treated to a great surprise after the event. A concert of the Soweto Gospel Choir. That was fun!

Best agenda. I like the attitude of both ELIA and IMTT who organize events with a Latin flair when it comes to the agenda. IMTT organizes their Vendor Management Seminars in great locations (the next one is in Egypt) and the agenda serves as a guideline for the event. Both ELIA and IMTT allow plenty of time for networking, lunches and dinners. Common Sense Advisory's research shows that these are the parts of events that people appreciate the most. Instead of trying to fit three tracks in a day, these events do the opposite and try to fit a one day event in two or three days. A much better pace!

Vendor Management Event in Mexico

As you are aware, I go to a lot of events all the time. One of the best events I go to is one organized by a couple of Argentinean entrepreneurs in Córdoba once every two years: the Cecis (photo on the side). I like it because they take good care of the program and the participants, making every event an experience.

They asked me to suggest a topic and a keynote speaker for their first event outside of Argentina. I believe that the big topic for 2008 is going to be Vendor Management, and I suggested that they organize an event for Vendor Managers from translation companies only (as there is none).

The event will be held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in February, a time when some of us will be ready to leave the snow and go to somewhere warm. The idea is to have an event that is affordable and where vendor managers can discuss their issues and challenges and even find some new resources. It's supposed to be half-conference half-training.

If you have any ideas of themes that you would like to have discussed, please let me know.

Quality Still Doesn't Matter - ATA San Francisco Presentation

As promised to the attendees of my presentation in San Francisco, here is a copy of my presentation.

The new directions of the translation industry is a ongoing topic for us at Common Sense Advisory. So stay tuned, read our blog at http://www.globalwatchtower.com/ and send us comments whenever you have them. We love to hear new ideas.

And while you are visiting the Global Watchtower, read my posts on The End of Localization Taylorism and Dispatch from Localization World: Old Age Affects Localization Industry.

Click here to download the presentation.

Sample Translations as a Sales Tool Presentation

Here is presentation that I made at the ATA Conference in San Francisco.

What I forgot to tell the participants is that now that you know the power of sample translations, start asking your prospects to give them to you, and dazzle them with your reports.

Click here to download the PDF file.

Google MT and dotSUB - an atomic combination

I wanted to do something cool for my presentation at the ATA this weekend -- Quality Still Doesn't Matter, which focuses on topics that should really matter to translators and LSPs, such as productivity, new technologies, sales, etc. -- and decided to start with a video subtitled in dotSUB.

dotSUB is a cool site that allows you to upload your video, transcribe and subtitle very fast. I actually wrote about it in the Global Watchtower almost one year ago.

So... this week I read the news about Google abandoning SYSTRAN and starting to use its own Statistical Machine Translation Engine instead. I played with it a little bit by writing some text in Portuguese and having it translated into English. I was very surprised with the quality of the translation into English. That's when I decided to really play with Google Translate and dotSUB.

Here is what I did:

1) Wrote a script in Portuguese.
2) Had it translated into English with Google Translate.
3) Read the script to my webcam.
4) Pasted the Portuguese text into dotSUB.
5) Pasted the English transaltion into dotSUB.

All of this took me no more than 10 minutes to do.

Then I decided to have some fun. I edited the English translation a little bit and used Google Translate to go from English into Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

I found that the quality of the translation was much better than I expected. I can judge Spanish, French, and Italian. I asked someone here in the office to check the Russian, but I have no idea of how the Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic came out. I don't even know if my visual pasting of the subtitles didn't break any words in the middle.

Check out for yourself. Try changing the languages using the small arrows in the bottom right corner of the video.




What I am going to say in my presentation is essentially that translators that are not using Google to pre-process their jobs, are doing too much work. MT is here to stay... as I had predicted a couple of years ago, this can be the disruptive player in the market.

Look out for mash-ups of Translation Memory technologies with Google from Elanex, XML-Intl, Proz.com, and other players. I can now see huge projects incorporating all these new technologies: a Ning portal for discussion and training, Google Translate for preprocessing translations, a shared translation memory repository from LingoTek, a wiki in wikidot.com for editing the translations in a collaborative way. These are all free technologies that would allow a company to manage a huge project in a much more efficient way than using the tools of today. All of this could be managed in ]Project Open[ and the sales process might have been tracked in FreeCRM or SugarCRM.

Globalization Partners International and LiveEarth

I don't know if you watched the LiveEarth Marathon this weekend. I saw a little bit of it on NBC, a little bit on Bravo, and some of it on the Brazilian TV. While US TV mostly showed the international attractions singing in English (like Lenny Kravitz running in the middle of the audience in Copacabana beach in Rio), I really enjoying watching some of my local favorites in the Brazilian broadcast.

I was pleased to see that my friends at Globalization Partners International were involved in sponsoring and providing services to such a global event (7 concerts in 7 continents on 07.07.07) for what is one of the biggest concerns for humanity these days. Martin Spethman, the owner of GPI, tells me that this event was just the beginning of what is going on with Live Earth.

GPI provided translation and website localization services in 19 languages ranging from Arabic to Zulu. Translations included a set of "Solutions" to educate over 2 billion people on how they can fight global warming and pledge their support the movement.

In that same conversation, I learned that GPI won 12 website awards in one year 2006 for its own site. Even though I like his site, I am not that I am that impressed with the 12 awards. What it tells the cynic in me is that he had the time to register to at least as many competitions.

But what matters from my perspective is that these accomplishments demonstrate the place smaller firms can have if they are successful and innovative in marketing their services, how smaller firms carve out a niches (environmental products and services translations in this case), and how they can compete very successfully without huge marketing budgets. After all, GPI is listed among LiveEarth partners among companies like Pepsi, eBay, and Philips.

Common Sense Advisory in Business Week

Our PR agent, Melissa Gillespie, is very happy today.

My partner Don DePalma was mentioned in BusinessWeek Special Report "Online, a Global Strategy Starts at Home." After scoring Time magazine earlier this year (Translation Nation, January 12, 2007), the stakes have gone up for Melissa. Next she will have to put me in the cover of some magazine.

Last week in Berlin, we ran a workshop for several European translation companies called "Unleash the Power of PR" in which discussed the value of being quoted in the mainstream media. The workshop was organized by ELIA and drew 22 participants.

New Product Coming to the Market

The word in the street is that Lionbridge will make a major announcement regarding its business model in April. I (officially) don't know what this is about, but I suspect that it has something to do with the technology that they bought from Logoport. After so many technology announcements from SDL/Trados in the past few months, I think it will be nice to hear something from the "Localization as a Service" people that is not only a press release to impress their shareholders. I don't know about you, but I love big announcements!

New merger talks in the industry

It's too early to confirm, but there is a rumor circulating that welocalize, the D.C.-area company is in conversations to merge with Connect Global Solutions, the nice guys from Ireland. More later.

Don and Renato will present together at Localization World

My partner Don DePalma and I will be presenting L10N in 2010 next Thursday at 10:30 am at Localization World in Seattle.

If you are there, don't miss it. 

Better Localization Blog

I just spent an hour reading through this excellent blog by Vic Dickson from China called BetterLocalization. Vic and I met a couple of years ago when he attended my Sales Management Workshop here in Carlsbad, CA. He is the CEO of Transco, one of the leading Chinese localization companies. I particularly enjoyed the entry about CMMI applied to localization, since I am writing a report on that topic.

His articles are well written and well thought. I strongly recommend it.

SimulTrans: Avoiding the $36 Comma and Other Ways to Reduce Translation and Localization Costs (Auburndale, MA)

Simultrans was one of the pioneers in client education. Back in the 90s, it ran a series workshops for IT companies that graduated many of the localization managers in the industry today. It is with pleasure that I see them back into this activity. For those of us who have been in the business for a while, it is easy to infer what the 36-dollar comma means. By multiplying small changes by a number of languages and a variety of publishing media (documentation, help, web, etc.) it is easy to see how inserting a comma late in the process can escalate the price of translations.

If you are in the Boston area, my recommendation is "go!" The event is free and the content is good. By doing this, Simultrans follows rule number one of sales: give something before you ask for something!

If you heard about the event here, and you go, please let me know how it was.

Trouble at Transware

We have learned that Tom Kelly, the CEO of Irish company Transware, and John McCormack, its CFO, both coming from BlueStar Solutions, Inc. (a provider of applications management outsourcing services) have left the company. Devin Lynch is the new CEO.

Before this, it was notorious that Transware had not been paying its vendors, leaving invoices unpaid for up to 180 days. The new team came on board, but their vendors were still having trouble collecting.

Our sources tell us that Transware is not making money and struggling with how to compete.

SourceWire | Press Releases - How to Choose A Translation Services Supplier

Although I am always skeptical of translation companies telling people how to buy translation services, this short article by Liz Athey from Roevin Translation Services gives some insight on differences between the U.K. and the U.S. translation markets. Namely, the charging of services by 1,000 words.

As I am always looking for hard independent data to justify doing translations, I liked the mention that "results of the British Chambers of Commerce 2004 Survey – The Impact of Foreign Languages on British Business — found that exporters who adapted and localised their products/services and sales literature for their export markets, and who placed value on having staff with foreign language skills, enjoyed average export sales growth of 7% — or £290,000 – over the previous year. "

Customer Centric Selling Workshop in Paris a big hit

Jim Lewis, the former CEO of Berlitz that hired me to work there in 1999, is giving the first Customer Centric Selling workshop customized for the translation industry in Paris, at the request of Common Sense Advisory. This first event has 18 participants from all over Europe and the response has been excellent. We are planning to have other two events in the U.S. (East Coast/West Coast). The beauty of Customer Centric Selling is that it is a development on Solution Selling and it is a great way to sell services. Berlitz, Bowne, SDL and Lionbridge use this sales approach.

Buy translation and toilet paper in the same place

For those of you who have seen Common Sense Advisory's presentations, the concept of the translation-to-toilet-paper ratio is not new. We have said it all along that some companies spend more money on toilet paper than they spend on translations (but nobody talks about cutting the consumption of toilet paper).

Mustang Cleaning Supplies from the U.K. is offering both. According to their press-release, they are going to offer machine translation for their janitorial clients who might hire a Portuguese employee who cannot read local manuals and regulations.

They are using Systran's machine translation and offer a disclaimer: "The translation services are provided by SD2001. The SYSTRAN Software used by SD2001 strives to achieve the highest possible accuracy, however no automated translation is perfect nor is it intended to replace human translators. Any discrepancies or differences created in translations are not binding and have no legal effect for compliance or enforcement purposes. If any questions arise in regard to the accuracy of information contained in any translated portion of text provided, please refer to the orginal version. Language structures in English are not easily translated into another language. Source text that includes jargon common to an industry, may not be translated accurately. Mustang Marketing & Services Ltd or SD2001 are not responsible for translation errors."

The fact is that this is the ultimate example of commoditization of language services. But don't be afraid. Although they will certainly attract some clients, these are not the client that you might want to have.