The 10 Commandments of Bilingual Blogging

Luistxo Fernandez at The English Cemetery blog offers the 10 Commandments for bilingual blogs. The truly coherent, consistent, bilingual blog simply doesn't exist, he says. Commenters note that machine translation is still inadequate.

Consider Piloting Blog-Based Marketing Campaigns in France. But Don't Let Your Message Get Lost in Translation

Global marketers would be wise to pilot blog-based marketing campaigns in France because it's one of the most Internet-savvy countries on earth, says Eric Kintz of HP on his Marketing Excellence Blog. But don't let your message get lost in a bad machine translation, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.

Continue reading "Consider Piloting Blog-Based Marketing Campaigns in France. But Don't Let Your Message Get Lost in Translation" »

SRF Global Translation Challenges and Corrects Google's Translation of Italian "Monitoring Your Brand" Blog Post As a Public Service to the Global Business Blogging Community

Yesterday, Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion spotlighted a post in Luca De Fino's Italian blog, Fluido, about how to monitor your brand online. Since the original was in Italian, he also linked to a Google translation of the post. It was complete gibberish, as machine translations so often are. Since every business needs to monitor its brand online, SRF Global Translations is providing a certified English translation (below) of the post and the comments it generated, created by a literate human as a public service to the global business blogging community.

Read the Google translation for a laugh. But think about how serious it could be if you used Google or BabelFish to translate something said about your company on the Internet. Every sentence in an incorrectly translated non-English blog post about your company could be a PR minefield, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.

Here's SRF Global Translations' certified correct English translation of the Fluido post.

Continue reading "SRF Global Translation Challenges and Corrects Google's Translation of Italian "Monitoring Your Brand" Blog Post As a Public Service to the Global Business Blogging Community" »

Off to London

I'm off to London til Saturday, June 10th. Will attempt to blog live from there. I'm speaking at e-consultancy's What's New in Online Marketing conference on Wednesday, playing in London after that. Have a wonderful, ethical week.

Vote in the Ethics Crisis Poll

We've added the Ethics Crisis Poll to our blog. Please use it to express your your opinions on various ethics and compliance questions. You'll find it along the right side of the blog. Tell us what you think.
Thanks,
Sloan Friedman

Blog Widget Provides an International Flavor

Typepad blog software from Six Apart now offers a Widget Gallery including this "Blog Tattoo"" that generates a "Kanji" (Japanese/Chinese character) at random.

What's a widget?
Technically, it's a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar content module on your blog. Six Apart has partnered with dozens of companies to bring you great new features such as job searching, polls, ways to share video, game playing, weather tracking, and photo sharing.

From a marketing point of view, it's an extraordinary opportunity for companies to gain high visibility on popular blogs by providing value-added content. It's the wave of the future for corporate marketing.

A screencast demonstrates how to install Widgets on Typepad.

What a really extraordinary feature! It would be nice to see one that could do multilanguage translations.

Technorati and Edelman Team Up to Translate Blog Searches

Steve Rubel, Peter Hirshberg at Technorati and Richard Edelman have announced (only in English as far as I can tell) that Technorati and Edelman have teamed up

"to offer Technorati's analytic tools in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Korean, starting with French in July and continuing into early 2007. That means not only will the user interface be translated into those languages, but the analytic tools themselves will be able to cluster blogs by language."

A Technorati Japan beta (independent of the Edelman partnership) was recently launched, available to everyone, and "can understand what a user inputs in their native language and then give back related results." As far as I can tell, in English, this means that you can't search in these languages now and get results translated into these languages, but you will be able to as a result of this partnership.

Available Primitive Machine Translations Not Suitable for Business Use
What is not clear is how the translations will be done. The announcements sound as if machine translations will be used, augmented with local translations by humans. Given the extremely primitive state of currently available machine translation software, that's a massive, and very expensive, undertaking. If it is what is intended, it would need to involve hundreds, if not thousands of local translators if the all-important nuance and localization of language are to be addressed.

Continue reading "Technorati and Edelman Team Up to Translate Blog Searches" »

MySpace Post: "bribery is an accepted and usual way of doing business"

On his MySpace Blog "Everything I Own is Broken", Gerry Alexander addresses the ethics (or lack thereof) of doing business in a foreign country where bribes are expected for accomplishing everyday tasks like getting a driver's license.

He writes:

"...If you were to personally pay the bribe, you have taken an unethical action.

If you go to your manager and he authorises then makes the payment, you have acted ethically.

This is wrong, foolish and completely unethical in either case as far as I can understand the concept of moral responsibility."

A similar issue is addressed in one of the anonymous confessions on Ethics Crisis, "We paid for new business in another country." Of the 296 readers who've rated this confession so far, the majority found the practice acceptable.

What Does Automated Translation Cost?

Gizmodo, one of the most popular blogs on the planet, stays ahead of the pack by trolling new product announcements in many languages since products often launch in other countries before the United States. They apparently often rely on free Google automoated translations, which are often worth what they cost. This post refers to a Google automated translation of promotional material about a new Maxell Fuel Cell as "bastardized". No wonder, here's the translation:

"The Hitachi マクセル corporation (President execution part: The Tsunoda justice person), the hydrogen occurrence system by the reaction with the water and the aluminum was established, the fuel cell which designates this system as hydrogen occurrence source was developed. Furthermore 10 watts which use this fuel cell (W) it succeeded in the development of class Mobile power source, it was possible to operate the note PC."

USB Hot Doing
Gizmodo discusses another bad Google automated translation here in a post about a USB drink cooling and heating device from Japan. Here's the Google automated translation:

"USB hot doing, if you use cool", connecting to USB of the personal computer, just change the switch hot and cool possibility, are the epoch-making commodity!...At the company and the like, when also it is difficult to guarantee the power source your own, it is but, "USB hot doing, if cool", connecting to USB of the personal computer, because it can leave on the nook of the desk, when liking with anytime, you can drink cool, warm drinking ones!!"

Got that? The automated Google translation of the operating instructions must be a lot of fun too.

Welcome to Ethics Crisis Blog

Welcome! This is SRF Global Translations new Ethics Crisis Blog, written by well-known blogger B.L. Ochman.

SRF Global Translations specializes in mindful, nuanced multilanguage translation of ethics compliance materials for multinational companies.

Ethics Crisis Blog will cover global business ethics issues, with a bit of a twist. Please subscribe to the Ethics Crisis Blog's RSS feed so you can read and rate the ethics confessions, which are already getting juicy.

Thank You,
Sloan Friedman, President
SRF Global Translations

Multi-Language Blog Translations Are Colorful

Multilanguage translations of blogs are non-existent, as English is still very much the dominant language in blogs. But the term "A-List blogger" has many translations. I've been described as "blogeuse professionale" and "Top-Bloggerin."