'Net Features : translation

The Language of the Web

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:15:00 GMT

What’s the most common language in use on the Web and which carries the most significant economic opportunity?

Data released from Common Sense Advisory (in its “ROI Lifts the Long Tail of Languages in 2012” report) aims to answer these important questions, revealing very interesting insights into the state of the multi-cultural Web, as well as the potential reach and the Web-based economic opportunity of different languages in the process.

To reach 80 percent of the world’s total online population, you need at least 12 languages – Chinese, English, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Russian, French, Indonesian, Korean and Italian – in that order. In 2009, it only took 37 languages to reach 98 percent of people on the web, but in 2012 it takes 48 languages to reach the same percentage.

To address 90% of global online economic opportunity (spending money) according to CSA, at least 13 languages are needed and it changes somewhat dramatically as compared to reaching the largest segment of the total online population. In order, those languages are English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Arabic, Russian and Swedish.

CSA also indicated that the “English” slice of the language pie is getting smaller each year. Since 2009, English is down from 48 to 36 percent while other languages grew from 52 to 64 percent.

The Importance of Translating in E-Commerce

Michael Garrity — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Thanks to a recent study by TransPerfect, the important role that language translations play in e-commerce finally has some measurable data to be analyzed.

While the positive effects for e-commerce stemming from rampant globalization through the Internet are obvious, such as having a larger, worldwide assortment of potential customers, there are some issues that undeniably need to be addressed before the market can reach its fullest potential.

One of those problems is a widespread language barrier that moves from country to country, and sometimes within them, that makes it hard for some e-commerce retailers to market to and reach groups outside of their local region. The survey in question aims to address this problem, with TransPerfect, the world's largest privately held provider of language services and translation-related technologies, comparing the views of both e-tailers and consumers as it relates to their different expectations concerning online translation.

What the results show is a noteworthy disparity between the way that executives and e-tailers, from companies of varying sizes, consider translations, and the way that global consumers weigh them. Just 19 percent of executives surveyed said that translating information online was a high priority. Does that sound like someone in the e-commerce game you might know? Because, if so, you may want to let them know that 63 percent of consumer respondents said that they are more likely to buy from a website available in their native language.

That number is underscored by the fact that 73 percent of surveyed consumers said they encounter e-commerce websites that aren't available in their native languages. What's more, over half of those same consumers said that, when left to their own devices, they will either attempt to translate material on their own, rely on a browser-based translation application to do it for them, or, far worse for e-tailers, will simply end their shopping sessions and move on. This could potentially mean substantial revenue losses for many e-commerce companies because of a lack of translations on their websites.

Also important to note is the fact that almost 68 percent of respondents said that they "sometimes" or "always" encounter website translations that aren't correct or are confusing because the translations lacked an understanding of their culture. This seems to show that it is important to invest in online translations in more than just a superficial way, because it can not only turn off customers, but straight up confuse them if you don't take the time to make sure your translations are done right.

That being said, here's a list of things e-commerce businesses can do that will translate to success (get it?):

- Take notice of local sites
Really understand the different markets that you're trying to reach. It helps to have a design that can appeal to various cultural backgrounds and is accessible to (almost) everyone to visits your site, so follow the lead of Facebook or Amazon when it comes to creating an all-encompassing approach to your website.

- Become local
One thing you can easily do to appeal to a specific overseas market is to create a localized Top Level Domain (TLD) for each country or language.

- Ponder your keyword selection
You need to be sure that your SEO and PPC keywords that you use in copy and tags are properly researched for each target market. Also, it would help you to know what the successful keywords of their local competition are, as well as maybe using some specific, local terms along with your more generic words. And, please, make sure you test and analyze your selected keywords. You won't be sorry.

- Start small
To see both how well your translating skills are working and how your e-commerce business is going over in a new market, start by just offering a limited (and targeted) range of products when first launching your site overseas.

- Human translators work best
We've all seen the hours of mindless fun that can be had copy and pasting between various online translators, but I think you may want a bit more security when translating for your business. Poor grammar and awkward phrasing are off-putting for anyone, so make sure that you're content is translated, or at the very least checked, by a professional, HUMAN translator before your site goes live.

Translate Content Inside Drupal with Lingotek

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 05 May 2011 01:45:00 GMT

If you're a Drupal user looking to enter new markets abroad, you'll need to address translation if you hope to increase engagement internationally.

Collaborative translation solution Lingotek just announced a partnership with Acquia which provides commercial products and services to users of the open source Drupal publishing platform.

Lingotek and Acquia will offer Lingotek's Collaborative Translation Software to the Drupal community. Lingotek can now be embedded directly in Drupal through a set of APIs, providing its community members access to unlimited language translations through Lingotek's professional, community or machine translators.

"Internationalization and localization have long been priorities for the Drupal community," said Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder and CTO, Drupal project founder and lead. "Lingotek's translation technology helps Drupal site owners deliver multi-lingual site experiences and engage members of a Drupal community site to participate in the translation effort."

Is Your CMS Global Ready?

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:30:00 GMT

Content management software vendor Day Software and Translations.com, a provider of translation-related technologies, today announced a joint solution that allows online businesses to create new marketing content, campaign sites or promotions and quickly adjust them to meet regional and linguistic needs. Content is automatically routed by CQ5 (Day Software's content infrastructure solution) to Translations.com’s GlobalLink for immediate translation and a localized experience.

“Driving online brand awareness and demand in new geographies requires tailoring your site and campaigns to the local market,” said Kevin Cochrane, chief marketing officer of Day Software. “Marketers need to not only ensure their global web presences and campaigns are offered in appropriate languages, but also that the entire online experience is tailored to the unique requirements of any local market. With both CQ5 and Translations.com GlobalLink, online marketers now have a best-in-class solution for efficiently managing the globalization process.”

Partnerships of this nature are what differentiate commercial content management system from their open-source counterparts. Sure, you can use WordPress or Joomla as a CMS, but are you going to be global ready with those platforms out-of-the-box?

Create a Multi-Language Weblog with Mojofiti

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:51:00 GMT

Several months ago WM featured the some of the best translation plugins for WordPress and it generated a lot of interest among our readership. Continuing along that line about the importance of translation, take a moment now to check out MojoFiti, a blogging community like few others I’ve come across.

Mojofiti is using real-time language translation (powered by a combination of humans and machines) to develop solutions that enable bloggers to share their content in 28 languages.

There are two ways in which bloggers can have their content seamlessly translated. First, for people wanting to maintain their existing blog, users can opt to host a copy of their blog at Mojofiti.com, which will then be translated into 28 languages every time a new post is created. Second, users can choose to migrate their blog to Mojofiti.com permanently where they can enjoy a familiar WordPress authoring environment, have their posts translated into multiple languages and take full advantage of the social networking features built into the Mojofiti.com site.

Pretty impressive all the way around. Within minutes of discovering Mojofiti, I had a weblog up for Website Magazine and posted one article from yesterday. That can be seen at www.Mojofiti.com/websitemagazine.

“We believe there is an enormous opportunity for bloggers to easily multiply the number of people reading their content and that the way to achieve this is to remove the language barrier,” said Alan Simon, founder, Mojofiti.

Media Monitoring With CyberAlert

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:29:00 GMT

Media monitoring service CyberAlert released three new features and services today worthy of note. CyberAlert’s daily email alerts to users now include language identification and an automated translation service for non-English language clips. Translating only the headline and body text of the article, sidebar text and ads that appear on the source page are excluded.

The next feature is “News on Your Site”. Users of the CyberAlert 4.0 news monitoring services can select, edit and republish headlines and excerpts of news clips on their website (or intranet).

CyberAlert users will need to order the service, but doing so enables them to specify the design (size, color, position, header) of the daily news featured.

Finally, Twitter is the latest addition to CyberAlert’s consumer discussion monitoring service. Those clients using BlogSquirrel (blog monitoring service), Netpinions (consumer buzz tracking), and CyberAlert VDO (video monitoring and clipping) can now receive Twitter tweets containing their key words.

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Translate Your Tweets?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:31:00 GMT

Not that many English-speaking Twitizens will need to have their tweets translated, but a new service in twinslator.com makes it possible.

The Twitter translation tool is powered by Google Translator and Twitter of course. Worth a look for sure should you be interested in tearing down language barriers and spreading your marketing message to Twitterers in other countries.

All you will need to do is type your tweet, select a language and press update to get the translation. Users have the option to “twin their tweet” (able to post both tweets on a twitter profile directly from the site, or post only the translated tweet to the profile.

Best Translation Plugins for WordPress

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:25:00 GMT

The last few WordPress posts we’ve done here at Website Magazine were met with great attention. Apparently, Wordpress bloggers love their plugins so who are we to keep them from knowing about the best. Today’s post focuses on the top translation plugins for WordPress. While each is different in some of the primary features, each plugin has been thoroughly tested and worked well for us in the latest version of WordPress.

If you’re aware of a translation plugin for WordPress that we missed, let us and other Website Magazine readers know by sharing your comment below.

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Global Translator: Automatically translates your blog into 41 different languages. The number of available translations depends on your blog languages and the translation engine (features four – Google translation engine, Babel Fish, Promt, and Free Translations) you choose to use. Features include its SEO friendliness (by adding permalink language code, (e.g. en for English) at the beginning of you URL), fast caching system, configurable layout and not database modifications. The Global Translator plugin has been downloaded over 180,000 times. There is a great list of FAQ’s on the plugins addressing speed, layout and translation engine problems. Similar translation plugins are the ConveyThis Blog Translator (nearly 3,000 downloads)

ICanLocalize Translator: Unlike the free machine translation provided by the other plugins highlighted here, the ICanLocalize Translator plugin (from ICanLocalize.com) actually sends posts and pages to be translated by real people – users select from a pool of professional translators or assign the work to a preferred translator at the cost of seven cents per word. If you’re serious about creating multi-lingual WordPress websites look no further than this plugin. Downloaded less than 1000 times, this one’s not for the casual blogger but great for serious companies looking to make an international footprint with their WP blog.

Google Translator: The handy little plugin enables blogger to feature a Google translation widget on their sidebar. Readers are easily to change your website’s language to their native language by just selecting it from a pull down menu. Base language selectable, multi language supported. The Google Translator plugin works with version 2.5 or higher and has been downloaded over 3,600 times. A similar plugin is the free translation widget offered by Applied Language Solutions (downloaded just over 1,000 times).

Translate This: Andrea Olivato’s Translate This plugin enables users to translate their posts and pages directly from the input form – see a preview of how it works in this screencast on YouTube. Inside the translation menu of the plugin, users choose one of the 42 languages they want to translate to (the system automatically determines what language you are writing in) and the text will be updated automatically. The plugin however has only been downloaded 1,000 times. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/translate-this/

Google AJAX Translation: One of the more popular and accessible plugins on this list, the Google AJAX translation widget adds a “Translate” button to the bottom of posts, pages and/or comments. The plugin detects the browser's preferred language and shows the "Translate" button in that language if available. That language is listed first in the popup. The plugin uses the Google AJAX Language API and the jQuery-translate plugin. Recently updated, the plugin has been downloaded over 14,000 times.

Tweet Multi-Language with SpeakLike Twitter Translation

Mike Phillips — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Look through your Twitter followers and you're bound to have some from foreign countries. And they are bound to have hundreds of other connections in those countries that might not speak English. SpeakLike can help, by translating your tweets to become "tweaks." Tweaks can be translated into any two of the currently 10 supported languages. And it's done through a crowdsourcing model, by a group of human translators around the world.

"Machine translation just won't do," says SpeakLike Founder and CEO Sanford Cohen. "The only way to ensure you are communicating the message you want is to have a human involved. SpeakLike makes this possible for all Twitter users.

To get involved, you must sign up on the SpeakLike website, where you can find a free trial. After that, you buy "credits," where one credit is worth $.01 of translation services. According to their website, translating from English to most major languages runs 5 credits per word. English to Japanese is 8 credits. For Twitter, they offer a flat rate of 25 credits, or $0.25 per tweet. Which, compared to their regular rate, is a pretty good deal.

This would appear to be a good way to get some International brand exposure on the cheap. Instead of translating an entire blog post to another language, you can get your point across for $0.25 and hopefully, if your content is strong, the receiver will take on the translation task on their own.

Translate Skype Chats with MokaChat

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Moka today unveiled Moka Chat, a mobile language tranlsation service for Skype.

The tool gives users the ability to chat in English, Spanish or Chinese with other Skype users. Clearly there is a lot of value in a solution like Moka. Both businesses and consumers can essentially carry on dialogues/conversations and actually learn a little while they are doing it. This is clearly important in an increasingly borderless world.

Moka Chat for Skype is available free during the beta period. After downloading and installing the application and selecting a language pair, users enable real-time language translation for any text messaging conversation with anyone on their Skype buddy list.

"Skype is one of the most popular and effective services in the world today for global communications, and we are excited to be adding a high-value multilingual communication capability for Skype users. Moka Chat for Skype is the ideal translation solution for a community with such a vast multilingual user base," said Diego Winegardner, President and Co-founder of Moka.

Lost (and Found) In Web Translation

Administrator — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:47:00 GMT

Applied Language Solutions made available a machine translation service for websites this month. The translation tool can be added to a website pretty quickly and can give visitors the option of translating the page they are viewing. What's most interesting is that the toolbar will allow users to search through an entire website in ten languages including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russ and simplified Chinese. Users can even switch languages while on the site, e.g. from English to French.

Try out the translation toolbar from Applied Language Solutions
and let us know what you think.