Cloudwords : Translation Supply Chain & Process Management

Posted on July 18, 2013 by bsmcconnell

I recently met with Michael Meinhardt, co-founder of Cloudwords, to get an update on their cloud based translation platform. Founded by Salesforce.com veterans, CloudWords enables clients to manage their translation supply chain and process much more efficiently (most companies use a hodge podge of spreadsheets, email and FTP servers to do this).

The Cloudwords system is not a translation workbench, other companies such as SDL, Smartling and Transifex do this, but rather provides web based tools for managing business processes, sourcing vendors, and other tasks that are typically done manually. This eliminates a lot of the inefficiency and potential for mistakes associated with the time honored Excel spreadsheet.

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LinqApp Social Translation App

Posted on June 28, 2013 by bsmcconnell

LingApp, a social translation app for mobiles, was created by a Taiwan based startup. The app pairs people in need with language help with native speakers, and is based on a freemium model. Basic inquires are free, but users buy credits to upload pictures and audio files (for example a mobile photo of a menu they need help translating). This bridges a gap between apps that use image recognition and machine translation (not very accurate) and conventional human translation. It’ll be interesting to see if they can attract a critical mass of users. If so, this could be a great solution for casual translation for travelers and language learners.

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Global First : How To Build For A Global Audience From Day One

Posted on May 30, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Published on Medium, Global First, an article about how to build an app or service that’s globally accessible from day one.

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Review : Using Gengo & Transifex To Localize A Web App In 20 Languages

Posted on April 13, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Last month, we re-launched Der Mundo as a multilingual link sharing and cross-language search engine. Since the site’s purpose is to enable people to curate and share news and commentary across languages, the service had to be localized into many languages. This would have been a formidable and expensive project until recently, but using Gengo and Transifex, the whole project took two days and cost just a few hundred dollars.

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Tutorial – How To Combine Google Translate And Human Translators

Posted on March 27, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Google Translate is the web’s most popular machine translation service. With support for over 60 languages, Google Translate enables web users to translate almost any web page. However, these translations are often less than perfect, and sometimes riddled with errors. Fortunately, Google offers a little known but very useful feature that enables you to have human translators replace and correct these machine translations.

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Gengo Partners With 3PlayMedia To Offer Seamless Captioning

Posted on March 22, 2013 by bsmcconnell

(Via Gengo) Ever wondered how to make your videos globally accessible, searchable, and SEO friendly? It’s traditionally been hard to do: you’d have to work with a number of different vendors to get transcriptions, at quite a high cost, and the process used to be pretty clumsy. But now, Cambridge-based 3Play Media offers a world-class solution for video captions and transcriptions. (read more)

 

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Reaching A Global Audience On A Startup Budget

Posted on March 21, 2013 by bsmcconnell

This article outlines some inexpensive and straightforward things you can do to make your company and products accessible to a multilingual audience. This used to be a difficult and expensive undertaking, but thanks to a plethora of new translation services and technologies, that’s no longer the case. It’s important to be prepared to go multilingual, because when the time is right, doing so will expand your reach several fold.

Most companies I talk to, especially startups operating on a budget, defer decisions about translating their website and applications until a future release. By the time they are ready to support multiple languages, they have often baked bad habits into their code base, picked a content management system that doesn’t support translation, and made other common mistakes. A few simple steps will help you avoid these pitfalls.

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Smartling Adds Office Document Support To Its TMS

Posted on February 27, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Smartling, the leading provider of agile localization tools, has upgraded its TMS to support popular office and design document formats, enabling the system to support a full range of localization projects.

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Der Mundo : Share Any Web Page In Any Language

Posted on February 18, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Der Mundo (www.dermundo.com) is a new multilingual link sharing service. Simply provide a URL to share. The service generates a short code (URL) to share on social media. The service detects each visitor’s preferred language, and if needed, automatically translates the page using the best available machine translation service.

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New Scientist : Duolingo gives language learning a jump start

Posted on January 25, 2013 by bsmcconnell

Luis von Ahn is an ambitious guy. He’s best known for putting a twist on CAPTCHAs – the squiggly fragments of text that websites deploy to beat spammers’ automated software – that he called reCAPTCHA. Von Ahn realised that when we solve a CAPTCHA we could be helping to decipher text that book-digitisation software has tried and failed to transcribe. Google liked the idea so much that it bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and now uses the technique to help power its book-scanning project.

Von Ahn‘s current project may be his most ambitious yet. Duolingo is a website where people can learn a language for free and help to translate web content at the same time. Not everyone thinks it will work, but von Ahn now has evidence that one part of the challenge – the learning bit – is performing as hoped.

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www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/01/duolingo-language-learning.html

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