Author Archives: GlobalVision International

The Devil is in the Details!

By GlobalVision International | Published: June 30, 2009

With all the advances in technology and tools, sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves of the basics. One of the key features of successful projects is efficient information exchange. This is true for all businesses including localization projects.

A translation management system is a great tool to help keep the project files and resources organized and available to all at any time of the day. It also greatly facilitates communication and collaboration. But often, while handling complex projects and multinational teams, it’s easy to forget the power of the little details!

Here are a few examples where old fashioned communication trumps technology.

Recently, one of our sales reps mentioned to … Read More

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Google’s free translation portal

By GlobalVision International | Published: June 22, 2009

Recently, Google released its Translation Toolkit enabling the translation of HTML and DOC files via an easy to use web portal that offers a WYSIWYG translation environment integrated with its Machine Translation engine.

If you don’t mind correcting machine translations, or retyping the English source text when you need to revert back to English, then the environment will be a plus for the average translator that does not currently use computer aided translation (CAT) tools.

Google smartly predicted that professional translators, which are a key crowd that Google wants to attract, will not be satisfied with just the machine translation option. So they included the ability to upload glossaries and … Read More

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Google Wave- The Future of Localization Collaboration

By GlobalVision International | Published: June 15, 2009

This month Google released the Google Translation Toolkit. But what overshadowed this release was the preview of its new Wave technology geared for release as an open platform at the end of this year.

Soon, emails, instant messages, blogs, forums, wikis, tweets, tickets, bugs, queries, docs… will all morph into a Wave!

The promise of Google Wave is to store all that information in a content manager and allow users, or collaborators, to access it simultaneously in an easy to use environment, eliminating local storage, check-in, checkout, locking and unlocking requirements.

Since there is no information sending and receiving (no ftp, pop or smtp servers), the information is static … Read More

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Are New England Companies Behind the Curve on Globalization?

By GlobalVision International | Published: June 8, 2009

On Friday I attended the acclaimed Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council UnConference about the “Future of Software and the Internet”.

The event drew some 250 attendees including many C-Level executives, technology gurus, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from Massachusetts and the surrounding area.

Now keep in mind that this was an unConference. The agenda was to be assembled by the attendees at the beginning of the event. To help let the juices flow, the organizers offered some ideas by email and during the registration process to include the following:

Market Forces & Innovation Catalysts
- Industry Consolidation — Good, Bad, or Ugly?
- Innovation Catalysts — Low barriers are bringing in new … Read More

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International Markets: Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks and Dogs

By GlobalVision International | Published: June 4, 2009

In the 70s, the Boston Consulting Group developed the product life cycle matrix to help companies analyze their product portfolios for the purpose of strategic planning and effective resource allocation.

They divided products into 4 groups:

1. Low relative market share and low market growth rate: They called it a “dog” and recommended phasing out these products.

2. Low relative market share and high growth rate: They called these products a “question mark” and recommended investing in some.

3. High relative market share and high growth rate: They called this category a “star” and recommended heavily investing in them.

4. High relative market share and low growth rate: They called … Read More

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Localization tools are only as good as their users

By GlobalVision International | Published: May 27, 2009

In all industries, including the localization and translation industry, new tools are continuously designed and sold to streamline the key processes used in the business. The overall goals of these tools center on improving efficiency, saving time and reducing cost.

Organizations that depend on the management of projects involving the expertise of multi-specialized professionals require a strong leader at the helm, no matter how sophisticated the tools. This is true for a general contractor for a large construction site, for a program manager for a manufacturing or software company, or for the project manager of an elaborate NASA shuttle mission. This individual is responsible for making sure that the end … Read More

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Translation Collaboration Portal

By GlobalVision International | Published: May 15, 2009

With the advent of the internet and Web2.0 technologies, collaboration portals are put to use in all industries, including translation and localization.

Exactly a year ago, GlobalVision released the industry’s first online collaboration portal to handle translation and localization queries between all translation and localization projects’ stakeholders.

Immediately after the release, translators began initiating queries regarding the text they are translating from within the translation management system allowing our clients’ in-country, documentation and engineering experts to respond to these queries in a secure easy to use environment with a web browser.

gvCollab, the online translation collaboration portal, quickly became an integral part of GlobalVision’s larger translation management system (TMS), gvAccess… Read More

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The Language of Business is the Language of the Customer!

By GlobalVision International | Published: May 10, 2009

Last week, we got the following email from a prospective client: “I am aware of the services for translation and localization that exist in the market place such as yours. My challenge is on how to then take the translated / localized versions of our field service solution and go to market with it in the foreign marketplace. To accomplish this in house would not only require investment into the translation services but complete hiring of an internal bi-lingual marketing / sales / support staffing.

Before I can make the investment to engage in your services I would require assistance in identifying solid partner(s) with the ability to market / … Read More

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Statistical Machine Translation for All

By GlobalVision International | Published: May 5, 2009

In the 80s, I worked for a large European chip manufacturer who at that time was marketing a new technology in video chips. They architected a solid state CCD (Charge Coupled Device) relying on the Frame Transfer (FT) technology to compete with the common Interline Transfer technology adopted by most Japanese video camera manufacturers.

Although the FT technology was superior, it never took off. Why? The company focused on the scientific and professional markets instead of the consumer market that was dominated by Japanese companies. Lacking consumer volumes, they could not justify financing their technology for too long, hence its demise.

Lesson learned? Volume often trumps technology!

But what if … Read More

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Staged GUI Localization

By GlobalVision International | Published: April 29, 2009

Often when companies decide to take on the world, they undertake the localization of their software product into multiple languages in parallel.

But in some cases, either due to limited resources or budgets, young software companies prudently consider their options and end up localizing their product into one language first, before embarking on more. This was recently the case with a small software publisher that was localizing its highly technical engineering software for the first time.

The first step taken was pseudo-translation. It ensured that no graphical user interface (GUI) text remained hardcoded and enough space was present in the dialog boxes to allow for text expansion after translation. … Read More