Dilbert: Translating Documentation from Elbonian

It usually pays off to ensure your technical writers are well trained long before documentation needs to be translated.

Somewhere in Elbonia

Dilbert: I've been assigned to check the software you're writing for us under contract.
Elbonian #1: The documentation is written in our own Elbonian language.
Elbonian #2: Is that a problem?
Dilbert: That's better than I'd hoped. I was afraid no one here knew how to write.
Elbonian #1: Writing is easy. Someday we hope to read too.

Scott Adams has created some great Dilbert comic strips related to translation. Here are a few more:

• Tina's Chinese Translation
• Minor Translation Issues
• Spanish-English Translation from the "No Help Whatsoever Desk"

1st North American Summit on Interpreting

It's rather easy to find national and international industry conferences that focus on translation or localization. Unfortunately, it has been a little more difficult to find national and international conferences focused on interpreting. As the interpreting marketet is smaller, this is certainly to be expected. Fortunately, interpreters have something big to look forward to in June. The 1st North American Summit on Interpreting will be held June 17th in Washington, DC.

Now interpreters and interpreting companies can attend a serious conference where presentations on interpreting are billed as the main event instead of being included as almost an afterthought. The organizers, Barry Slaughter Olsen and Katherine Allen, have lined up some big sponsors and good speakers including Diane DeTerra of the National Foreign Language Center and Nataly Kelly of Common Sense Advisory.

Crowdsourced Comparison of Machine Translation Engines

Ethan Shen and Gabble On are "harnessing the wisdom of he crowds" to compare and evaluate the quality of three machine translation engines: Google, Bing (Microsoft), and Babelfish (Systran). As an incentive, participants will have the chance to win a new Apple iPad.

The system is very simple. You can participate and start comparing at http://www.gabble-on.com/. Participants simply enter in text, view the three resulting translations, and rank them accordingly. Check it out and rank translations in any combination of the following languages:

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Haitian Creole
• Hebrew
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai

It would be interesting to learn the following from this research project:

• Which language pairs will draw the most participation?
• What will be the self-declared fluency of the evaluators?
• What subject matter will be entered for translation comparison? Or will that even be included in the results? This could be an important element as SMT engines and RBMT engines will each fare better with different subject matter and different types of language. It appears an additional field to identify subject matter was sacrificed for the sake of simplicity.
• Will the prize (and possibly the novelty) motivate enough crowd participation to provide useful evaluation data?
• And, of course, which engines will fare the best in each language pair?

It will also be nice if the results take into account the instances in which engines produced equal results. Currently, the survey only allows for the selection of a single "best translation" and does not allow for a "tie," so the first engine listed (Google) will naturally be favored to win.

L10nCafé: New Collaboration Platform for the Localization Industry

I've just been checking out L10nCafé, the new collaboration platform created by Michael Cox and Worldify. Here is where you too can find out more about the L10nCafe, "the free collaboration platform for the localization industry:"

1. Read the press release about the L10nCafe
2. Sign up for the L10nCafe (and receive your login info via email)
3. Login to the L10nCafe

So far, this appears to be a welcome upgrade for those who already enjoy collaborating on existing localization-related communities that have popped up on LinkedIn, Ning, and other forums. At the very least, it will be refreshing to have a forum with more flexibility and organization, as Michael describes it in the press release:

The L10NCafe facilitates the debate of technologies, standards, strategies and processes. This, in turn, accelerates progress in our industry. By employing rating systems and other methods we can organize and summarize community opinion. This information will feed strategic decisions made by tool and service vendors. It basically helps us get everyone onto the same page more quickly.

L10nCafé is currently built with SharePoint, so it is indeed very flexible. Unlike other localization forums that have appeared and quickly lost life, L10nCafé has a very clear opportunity to grow and progress into a truly useful collaboration platform that will keep us coming back for a long time. The platform is stil in its early stages and will undergo some fine tuning in the next little while; however, if you have an idea for what you want to do with L10nCafé, then its a good opportunity to join early and help form it into something great! Michael and Worldfiy have quickly implemented a half dozen of my suggestions, and they are looking to implement many more!