Google Planning Statistical Machine Translation for Additional Languages?

Google is about to launch statistical machine translation for languages other than Arabic, according to Garrett Rogers at ZDNet. Would you want to stake your reputation on translations that are often more confusing than edifying?

There's a school of thought that says any translation is a start, but statisitcal machine translation still can't get cultural references without human intervention, and leads to strange and overly dramatic translations. They build up their own dictionaries of words and phrases by comparing many pairs of documents that translate each other, known as "parallel texts."

Continue reading "Google Planning Statistical Machine Translation for Additional Languages?" »

How Do You Say "WASP" in Portugese?

ABC TV is making the interesting move of franchising Spanish-and Portuguese-language versions of the first season of "Desperate Housewives" for broadcast by networks around the region, using star-studded local casts to re-enact the original scripts.

Producers will shoot different versions of “Desperate Housewives,” to take into account cultural and linguistic differences within Latin America. Argentine Spanish, for instance, is heavily influenced by Italian and has many usages and phrases that would sound odd in Mexico or Venezuela.

Challenges emerged not only in translating the backgrounds of the main characters, says the NY TImes. (subscription required), but also in translating words like "WASP" and "Desperate."

Language lessons are part of Hollywood's global approach

In 1998, American director Bryan Singer, introducing his movie "Apt Pupil" at the Toyko International Film Festival, decided to surprise the crowd by speaking in Japanese.

But he bungled the translation and, instead of saying "I look forward to seeing you after the film," he said he was looking forward to having sex.

He went back to Japan last week to promote "Superman Returns," but he practiced his Japanese - a lot, says the New York Times

via Agenda Inc

Esperanto: Lost in Translation

How come the website of the 2006 World Congress of Esperanto is not in Esperanto?

Esperanto was invented in 1887 with the goal of creating a universal second language that would foster peace and understanding and there are said to be between 100,000 and two million speakers worldwide. No country has ever adopted Esperanto as an official language.

Wal-Mart is sometimes lost in translation

Wal-Mart's woes are not limited to Germany, where it is closing its stores, says The International Herald Tribune.

"The retailing colossus has struggled in several countries, from South Korea to Brazil, as it discovered that its formula for success - low prices, zealous inventory control, and a dizzying array of merchandise - did not translate well in markets with their own muscular discount chains and shoppers with very different habits."

In fact, the retailer's experience in Germany has become a sort of template for how not to expand into a country.

The nuanced translation of business materials and corporate culture are necessary for success in the global marketplace, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations, which specializes in certified multilanguage translations for multinational companies.

Match.com's Theme Lost in Multilanguage Translation

Love is complicated. Match.com is simple." is online dating service match.com's theme. It's broadcast on TV, radio and billboards across the United States. But this nuanced brand message was lost in translation to singles in Europe, Asia and South America.

"We learned that it was not just about taking the copy off our English site and translating it," says Match.com Chief Operating Officer Joe Cohen, who oversees the company's international operations and expansion efforts. He now understands that localizing a website is very different from translating it.

SRF Global Translations specialzes in the multilanguage translation of marketing and advertising materials for multinational companies. "SRF Global Translations absolutely guarantees high-fidelity transfer of meaning between languages we translate, along with localization, nuance, and cultural awareness, says SRF President Sloan Friedman.

via CMO Magazine

Translation Issues Can Impact on Search Engine Placement

Search Engine Roundtable, reporting from Search Engine Strategies Latino, notes that translation issues can have impact on search optimization and sales.

"Challenges, cultural aspects, different languages, different vocabulary, different user profiles, different web use habits and more. When preparing a campaign you need to understand all these items.

You should have different ad management styles for each country. Each country may have its own objective, which areas are a priority, so managing the results locally is important. A good report should support web site strategies definitions, should highlight user profile differences on each country, should bring up strategic information that may be used by marketing department even offline."

SRF Global Translations provides nuanced, certified, localized multilanguage translations of marketing and advertising materials for multinational companies.

The Real Issue in Machine Translation: Post-Editing

Machine translation has a lot of enemies, although some of them can be even more pedantic than the machines themselves. Some critics, for example, take a paragraph from Joseph Conrad or Henry James and feed it to Babelfish or to some other free machine translation services available online.

The results are often hilarious, but rather than demonstrating that machine translation does not work, they show that critics often don'tt have a clue about the real issues with machine translations. The biggest issue in machine translation of multilanguage advertising, marketing and consumer information is the impossibly high cost of high post-editing.

The fact is, it is often cheaper, and faster to have multilanguage marketing content correctly translated by a literate human to begin with, rather than having it corrected after a machine translation screws it up.

Continue reading "The Real Issue in Machine Translation: Post-Editing" »

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" »

Expanding Globally? Language is an All-Important Issue for Data

Expanding globally? The world of international direct marketing is complex, and partnering with a company that has in-depth knowledge of the local market, the language and relevant legislation can be the key to your success, according to BtoB online.

When selecting a list broker, you'll need to consider "the all-important language issue: Do you plan to communicate in English or to translate into the local language?" asks Mediaprisme U.K. Director Denise Henderson-Cleland. "The only way to tell if a contact is proficient in English is by selecting someone who either reads an English-language publication, has attended an English-language event, purchased from another mailer who recruits in English or who is a known English-speaking expatriate. If you are not sure, don't write in English is the rule."

SRF Global Translations specializes in the multilanguage translation of compliance and marketing materials for multinational companies. Don't leave English without us.

Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?

What is plain language use in one language can become poetry – or gobbledygook - in another. Gossip, arrows, airplanes, and time can fly. But preferably not in the same sentence.

Advertising text relies heavily on ambiguities and metaphor, which need to be translated on two levels - linguistic and cultural. Humans excel at sorting through ambiguities in their own language to get to what the writer intended to say. Machine translation software simply can’t do that.

Meaning depends on context
The computer is supposed to "understand" what the source text means, and computers have never been good at this, maybe for the simple reason that nobody really knows what understanding is.

Meaning often depends on context. If we come across a sentence such as Time flies like an arrow in a soap opera or during a philosophical debate, we wouldn't hesitate to construe it as a statement about the nature of time.

The same sentence, when uttered in a science fiction movie about entities called time flies -- a type of fly that flies across time -- would become a statement about what these time flies like (they just happen to like arrows).

Continue reading "Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?" »

eBay Live to Tutor Sellers on Multilanguage Marketing

In a session called International Money-making Opportunities, the sold out eBay Live conference later this month will address how sellers in international markets can more than double their user base and revenues by providing customer support and marketing in different languages.

The Las Vegas conference will launch eBay Blogs and eBay Wikis as sellers' marketing tools, heralding the largest corporate move into Web 2.0 to date.

Sellers large and small have been slow to institute multilanguage marketing programs, despite the fact that much business is ripe for the taking for companies that recognize the opportunity for international growth.

Japanese Have Fun With Engrish

SRF Global Translations' translators of Japanese see a certain amount of playfulness, that we in the West seem to have lost, in how the Japanese deal with language, especially foreign language. The website www.engrish.com contains a wealth of funny instances of English called to serve in Japanese advertising, with products that target the locals. "Engrish," says the site, "can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design."

Does calling a brand of moist tissues "My Wet" mean that advertisers and marketing specialists in Japan have chosen to ignore the importance of accurate, and culturally sensitive translation? Of course not.

Japanese Text: Ornamentation, Not Information Sells Better
Anyone who has studied the phenomenon will explain that many Japanese marketeers use English text as an element of design, not to convey information. Apparently, merchandise packaging that displays strange alphabetic pictures on it sells better with the Japanese public.

Continue reading "Japanese Have Fun With Engrish" »

SRF Global Translations: Machine Translation of Chinese Fails Because of Word Order Confusion

Word order in a sentence can often be very confusing for English into Chinese and Chinese into English machine translation. In Chinese, word order is often the only way of expressing grammatical meaning, according to KaiYu, SRF Global Translations' expert in Asian languages.

Simple translation software that proceeds on a word-by-word basis will render the sentence "We are going to eat in the morning," as "We go eat morning." More sophisticated software will attempt to reconstruct the context, often with random, if not pathetic results.

ERC: Tone, connotation crucial in multi-language translations of corporate codes of ethics

In a statement about globalizing a corporate code of ethics, The Ethics Resource Center, the oldest non-profit in the United States devoted to organizational ethics notes:

"... a pure/literal translation of the [corporate] code [of ethics] may not be sufficient. Translating the code back to the original language might reveal inconsistencies.

Tone and connotation are fundamental to this technical and sensitive document.

Continue reading "ERC: Tone, connotation crucial in multi-language translations of corporate codes of ethics" »

Perfect Machine Translations Are a Long Way Off

Lots of people seem disappointed that Skype's live translation service isn't a more Star Wars type solution.

Instead, of an earbud to translate Klingon to English, Skype's voice service is relying on a third-party company staffed with live translators, who, as Arstechnica points out, for $2.99 a minute, "will listen patiently as you try to tell your Korean girlfriend what you think of her new blog post and then translate what you said using traditional tools such as the human brain."

"... development of machine translation is clearly not quite dead yet, and as algorithms improve and processing power becomes greater and more affordable, it's only a matter of time (though admittedly maybe a long time) before we have access to instant translation between any two languages known to man or Klingon in a little earbud. I want mine to look like a fish."

Related Ethics Crisis blog entries:
- SRF Global Translations: Machine Translation of Chinese Lacks Crucial Contextual Understanding
- CAT vs Machine Translations: Cardiologist vs Proctologist
- SRF Global Translations Demonstrates the Difference Between Machine and Human Translations

SRF Global Translations: Machine Translation of Chinese Lacks Crucial Contextual Understanding

Machine translation limits and failures are especially evident between languages that do not share much cultural background, according to KaiYu, SRF Global Translations' expert in Asian languages. For example, when translating between English and Chinese, context understanding becomes more important than word semantics.

For example, there is no word for "Hello" in Chinese. The translator can choose to transliterate it as the sound "Hello", using Chinese characters to indicate the sound, but such a choice requires the reader to know in advance what "Hello" means in English. With Chinese audiences other than young generations, "Hello" is thus often translated as "How are you?", which works as "Hello" in most contexts.

CAT vs Machine Translations: Cardiologist vs Proctologist

An Ethics Crisis reader asked, what's the difference between Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) and automated Machine Translation like Google's and BabelFish.

In Machine Translation, the computer translates the crucial passage from one language to another, and the human translator then corrects the process.

CAT simply helps to keep the work of a human translator organized and consistent. A main function of CAT Tools is to store text segments translated in the past in special files called Translation Memories (or TM), which are then used as a basis for new translations.

Both methods make use of computer processing power in different ways. The key is to be aware of the inherent limits and associated risks of each method., and to have an understanding of nuance and local usage.

Cardiologist vs Progtologist
If , for example, we are to translate the sentence "If in doubt, talk to your cardiologist" into, say, Hindi, and the TM already has in storage a Hindi match for "If in doubt, talk to your proctologist", the translator would get a fuzzy match for the first sentence and will only have to replace the proctologist with the cardiologist virtually leaving the rest of the sentence intact. The machine will insist it is a 99 percent match. If the translator is not paying extremely close attention, huge problems can ensue.

When used judiciously, CAT Tools help save time and costs to everyone involved in the translation project. A good translation agency, like SRF Global Translations, can always tell the projects needing this type of computerized assistance from projects that do not require it.

Continue reading "CAT vs Machine Translations: Cardiologist vs Proctologist" »

Incorrectly Translated Blog Posts Can Be PR Landmines

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.

"What would happen to most American companies if a blog in a language other than English said something negative about them?" asks Friedman "What if they went to Google or BabelFish, got a wrong translation, or missed the nuance of the language, and responded incorrectly? They could find themselves in a blog swarm, or worse." Even the wrong translation of a positive post could have unforeseen consequences on a firm's reputation, he notes.

A Special Offer from SRF Global Translations
To demonstrate the difference between SRF Global Translations' nuanced multilanguage translation and an automated Google or Babel Fish translation, SRF will translate a non-English blog post that mentions a company's name, and a response, for the special price of $US 98. (Back translations are US $125.) "For a small amount of money," Friedman says, "an experienced translation company like SRF Global can help companies avoid potential PR catastrophes."

How the multilanguage blog post translation process works:

Upload a Chinese, Spanish, Italian, or French blog post of up to 200 (or so) words that mentions your company name

Receive a certified correct edited version of the post in English

Write and upload your company's response to the translated post so SRF Global can translate it into the original language and you can post it on the blog

or

Upload an English blog post and response that mentions your company and needs to be translated into Chinese, Spanish, Italian, or French.

Or you can phone Sloan at 212.291.7525

Not Everyone Speaks English
Google and AltaVista translations are fine for casual, personal use, but they may be inadequate for business use. In the global economy, and especially in the fast-moving blogosphere, Friedman says, companies need to add a certified, reliable translation service to the services they can call on quickly.

While English is still very much the dominant language in the blogosphere, the top blog in the world is now Chinese movie star Xu Jing Lei's blog, written in Mandarin. Thousands upon thousands of non-English blogs with millions of readers cover business. It's simply not enough to monitor only English language blogs.

Coping with the Compliance Headache

CRMDaily.com reports:

"The truth is, companies cannot afford to have point solutions for the DEA, DoJ, EPA, FDA, OSHA, and SEC, not to mention state and local requirements. If it is true that more and more business will be driven by regulation in the future, then alignment of business and I.T. is more critical than ever. ...The question becomes how to minimize the impact on business operations."

The article does not mention multi-language translation of corporate ethics compliance materials,, says Sloan Friedman President of SRF Global Translations, although corporations are required by Sarbanes-Oxley to translate codes of conduct, ethics codes and other corporate compliance material into the languages of the countries in which they do business and of all of its employees.

John Hagerty, vice president of research at AMR Research, says:

"the 'overlapping requirements' of the individual compliance mandates mean that the enterprise must have in place nine technologies: an integration infrastructure Relevant Products/Services from Insight; business process management and workflow; learning and education management; content and records management; a data warehouse; a rules engine; an alerting engine; identity and security management Relevant Products/Services from ; and management dashboards and analytics."

Better add certified multilanguage translation and make that 10!

In Chinese, Every Sentence Can Turn Into a Minefield

Commenting on my MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog post, Why You Need to Monitor Foreign Language Blogs, Gavin Heaton of Servant of Chaos blog said:

"As Western companies begin to engage more with China, there will be a pressing need for good language skills. When every character has a unique story, every sentence can turn into a minefield. And China is one country where having a good reputation is paramount."

Depending on machine translations can be dangerous to corporate reputation.

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.

Patagonia: Earth's New Finger

Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations, pointed out this translation from the Visit Chile website.

Patagonia is the scene of the world's great adventures. Even if we know little of the place, the name itself inhabits our subconscious, whispering of an unknown finger of the earth.

Some bad translations are harmless, even charming, but there are many stories about bad translations' impact on multinational businesses. Please do share any bad trasnslations that you find with us.

SRF Global Translations Demonstrates the Difference Between Machine and Human Translations

What's the difference between a machine translation by AltaVista's BabelFish or Google Language Tools and a nuanced, professional translation by a literate human at SRF Global Translations? Here's a demonstration.

Machine translations can be quite a hoot. Unless you are depending on them in business. "Misled ladies and horsemen of marketing:" began the advice in the BabelFish translation (to English) of a blog post -- written in Spanish -- by Andres Bianciotto, manager of Area6, Mexico, on his blog, Verborragia, about the recent Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-commercial contest.

Here's Bianciotto's original post, in Spanish:

Chevrolet lanzo una campana al estilo "publicidad 2.0" donde publico en linea una serie de elementos (musica, secuencias de video, imagenes, etc) para que cualquier persona pudiera componer un anuncio sobre la nueva Chevy Tahoe y ganar una pila de premios.

Esta bueno, si esto se hacia bien, Chevrolet podria aprender mucho de como sus clientes (o cualquier individuo interesado en hacerse con los premios) veian y expresaban las caracteristicas del producto.

Lo malo, es que la gente esta produciendo anuncios TAN contrarios, que ahora en GM lloran y los borran.

Despistadas damas y caballeros de marketing y publicidad de GM: no se trata de "dejar que la red forme el mensaje, del que despues nos aduenamos", se trata de hacer un producto u ofrecer un servicio f*&#ing amazing. Asi si uno deja que la gente disene los anuncios.

Mientras eso no ocurra, hagan un anuncio, compren TV y revistas, y taladren el "mensaje" a la gente en la cabeza a fuerza de repeticiones, no de dialogo.

Here's the nuanced, certified translation created by a literate human at SRF Global Translations:

Chevrolet launched a campaign in the style of "Web 2.0", by publishing a series of items online (music, video clips, images), so that anyone could compose a commercial on the new Chevy Tahoe and have a chance of winning from a large pool of prizes.

Well, had this been done properly, Chevrolet could have learned a lot about how its clients (or anyone interested in getting a prize) see and feel about the features of their product.

The problem is that people are coming up with commercials SO hostile, that now people in GM are crying over the feedback and deleting it.

Here's Google's automatic translation:

Chevrolet sent to a campaign to the style "publicity 2,0" where it published a series of elements in line (music, sequences of video, images, etc) so that any person could compose an announcement on the new Chevy Tahoe and gain a battery of prizes.

It is good, if this became or, Chevrolet could learn much of how their clients (or any individual interested in taking control of the prizes) saw and expressed the characteristics of the product. The bad thing, is that people are producing SO opposite announcements, that now in GM they cry and they erase them.

Confused ladies and horsemen of marketing and publicity of GM: one is not "to leave network it forms the message, which later we appropriated ourselves", is to make a product or to offer a service f*&# amazing. Thus yes one leaves people it designs the announcements. While that does not happen, they make an announcement, they buy TV and magazines, and they drill the "message" to people in the head by force of repetitions, not of dialogue."

Here (he he) is the BabelFish translation:

"Chevrolet sent to a campaign to the style "publicity 2.0" where it published a series of elements in line (music, sequences of video, images, etc) so that any person could compose an announcement on the new Chevy Tahoe and gain a battery of prizes.

It is good, if this became or, Chevrolet could learn much of how their clients (or any individual interested in taking control of the prizes) saw and expressed the characteristics of the product. The bad thing, is that people are producing SO opposite announcements, that now in GM they cry and they erase them.

Confused ladies and horsemen of marketing and publicity of GM: one is not "to leave network it forms the message, which later we appropriated ourselves", is to make a product or to offer a service f*&#*g amazing.

Thus yes one leaves people it designs the announcements. While that does not happen, they make an announcement, they buy TV and magazines, and they drill the "message" to people in the head by force of repetitions, not of dialogue."

Got that confused ladies and horsemen?

Google and Babel Fish: Worth What You Pay forThem
Ardian at SRF Global Translations explained:

"The purpose of machine translation is to let people who do not speak the source language get a quick idea about the contents of the text. The results are often funny, because the machine cannot properly construe the metaphoric and idiomatic uses of words, and comes up with silly mistakes.

"Damas y caballeros", for example, is a very common Spanish expression for "ladies and gentlemen"; the Babelfish machine here translates "caballeros" as "horsemen" and the result is funny, because the text is obviously not targeted at horsemen.

The Spanish "pila de premios" is rendered as "battery of prizes", because "pila" also translates as "battery", and the machine often picks the most probable of the various meanings of a word. Babelfish is a free translation program, so one cannot expect much from it. As a rule of thumb, free translation programs should only be used as a preliminary tool, before having the texts translated by human beings.

If you "ladies and horsemen of marketing" find BabelFish and Google translations confusing, email or call Sloan Friedman at SRF Global Translations at 212. 391.7528 for a professional translation. Don't leave English without him.

Related posts:
- How Culturally Biased is Technorati?

- Incorrectly Translated Blog Posts Can Be PR Landmines

Chinese Blogger Is Now the World's Most Popular. Look Out English!

Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regularly gets thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of page views for each article she writes, is now the most popular blogger in the world, according to blog monitoring service Technorati -- and she's writing in Chinese, not English.

Technorati responded to criticism about its English language bias by blogger Sam Flemming on his "China Word of Mouth" blog.

Xu Jing Lei displaced Boing Boing and