Going Global? Don’t Let Your Business Get Lost in Translation

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If you have a design team in one country, a factory in another and sales teams on different continents, an integrated translation solution is vital to global success.

Translation technology has made exciting advances this year with consumer apps like World Lens and Microsoft’s new Skype Language Translator. You can now point your phone at a sign for an instant translation onscreen or use real-time speech-to-speech translation on Skype just like Star Trek’s universal translator. Instant word-for-word translation apps like these let people bridge basic communication gaps and bring different parts of the globe a little closer.

But when it comes to expanding your business globally, translation needs and requirements quickly add up and become complex.

Those simple apps won’t let you translate and convey a critical manufacturing change to multiple factories in Brazil and China before the end of the day. They won’t adjust a cultural nuance in one language for marketing materials that need to be available online and printed in two hours and in six different languages for your multicountry European sales team. And they won’t let you update product documentation in 19 languages across websites, tablet readers, PDFs and print pieces — all in one week.

These are common but complex problems that arise with the globalization of business and the translation of documents.

To grow a business globally, you need a translation strategy that breaks down communication barriers not only with customers but also manufacturing and distribution teams and across your entire enterprise. Companies can deploy an integrated translation solution that not only translates accurately with many linguistic nuances but also delivers the new versions in multiple formats, quickly.

The good news is integrated enterprise translation solutions have been advancing at an impressive rate. Gone are the days with numerous files exported, niche-language human translators and separate files created for each language that need to be reimported into the distribution platform to finalize their formatting.

Today’s solutions are dynamic, accessible, flexible and cost-effective. This flexibility allows for greater collaboration between various international teams, the capability to manage foreign subsidiaries and factories efficiently and better infiltration into new markets.

Here are the top three benefits of an enterprise translation solution:

1. Integrating with existing information systems.

New solutions have the ability to bring all your content into one hub where it can be accurately created, translated, edited, updated and delivered to the web (or a PDF or print format) all from one platform. This means one solution will produce communications for teams, involved with design, manufacturing, distribution and sales.

2. Making changes fast in 2 to 100 languages. 

A centralized hub allows for content to be updated and translated immediately anywhere on the linked network. Making a change to a document in one language will update the translated content across the network with an integrated work-flow setup. This means you don’t have to start the translation process all over again for each language when there is a critical change to a document.

3. Offering cost-effective benefits.

Human translators are expensive and the export or import process to the text is tedious and time consuming. Using machine translators in an integrated solution costs significantly less and can be just about as accurate. You then have the option of hiriing human translators to edit the machine translation at a reduced cost.

Each time changes are added, an integrated machine translator will run another translation and the accuracy will improve as it learns the language of your business and the cultural nuances of your audience. Machine translations can now achieve almost 100 percent accuracy.

Language translation is reaching new heights. The fewer communication gaps and misunderstandings due to language barriers, the smoother and greater a company builds, runs and sells. It will take more than an app on your phone to translate your business needs, but integrated enterprise language solutions can be a key contributor to your company’s continued global growth.

Original article published here: Entrepreneur

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Slated iOS 8 Keyboard Translates Your Text Messages

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Communicating with others can be difficult, especially if not everyone in the conversation speaks the same language. Computer-based translation is easing a lot of that pain, but in general it still means a lot of cutting and pasting has to happen, along with interpreting possibly imperfect translations. Slated, a new keyboard now available for iOS 8, aims to change that with real-time translations of input text that you can use and send with just a click.

The Slated app can translate between 81 languages, and will show you your evolving translation below the text entry bar as you type. The keyboard itself is basically a mirror of the stock iOS keyboard, minus the autocorrect and suggestion functions, so that should help lower the adjustment barrier for new users. The app also translates backwards so that you can understand the other side of the conversation: All you need to do is tap and hold any message in the conversation window, then hit “copy” to see the translation appear in the same window below the text entry bar where your own translations show up.

Slated’s creator Alaric Cole says that while the app is designed to be used to make it possible to have entire conversations with people whose language you don’t understand, and who don’t understand you, he also finds himself using it as just his standard keyboard – a big plus if you’ve spent any time using iOS 8 keyboards, which can become frustrating to switch between. Cole also told me that he’s using the app to learn his wife’s first language, as you inevitably end up picking up some of the languages you’re translating to with frequent use.

I used Slated for a while last night, chatting with my former colleague and current Engadget writer Chris Velazco in Tagalog. Chris’ Tagalog is a bit rusty, and he says he had to speak the sentences out loud to get my meaning, but in the end he also said that all of the translations managed to convey my meaning, even if syntax wasn’t always perfect.

The app is $2.99 at launch, though it will go back to its regular price of $4.99 eventually, but if you’re interested in communicating with someone in real-time in their own language, it’s a fairly small price to pay. Other apps, including Translator Keyboard, already offer this kind of functionality, but Slated seems to have really nailed the UI, and it works in many more languages at launch. The app is currently rolling out through the iTunes Store, so be patient if the direct link to the app isn’t working for you just yet.

We’re nearing the era of the true Babel fish, people, and it’s amazing to watch.

Original article published here: TechCrunch and iMore

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Breaking the Language Barrier to Get New Immigrants to Vote

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Volunteers with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an Los Angeles-based non-profit, work the phones to get Asian-American voters to the polls in California. The phone bank is part of the “Your Vote Matters” campaign, an effort to get 30,000 infrequent voters to cast their ballots.
A Chinese restaurant during the lunch rush isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a campaign event. But here’s Republican congressional candidate Carl DeMaio, working the banquet room at the China Max restaurant in San Diego and answering questions from local Chinese and Vietnamese reporters.

“The Asian community, all communities, want the same thing,” DeMaio tells a small group of supporters. “We should be focused on what unites us, not divides us.”

The event is one of several DeMaio has held targeting Asian Americans. It’s not a voting bloc that Republicans historically court, but DeMaio is in a dead heat against incumbent Democrat Scott Peters. He knows there are plenty of independents in this room who might help him win this election.

“This is a toss-up seat,” says Jacqui Nguyen. “It’s registered one-third Republican, one-third Democrat, one-third decline-to-state. Within that registration, there’s between 18 to 20 percent Asian American votes out there. That’s a lot of votes that both candidates can try to grab.”

Asian and Pacific Islanders now represent nearly nine million eligible voters nationwide, the fastest growing minority group in the country. The voting bloc has doubled in size in the last decade, and there’s an effort to get more of them out to vote.

That’s why the Republican National Committee has hired Nguyen and two other full-time staffers in California to reach out to Asians and Pacific Islanders. Similar staffers, ones plugged into Asian communities, have also been hired in Colorado, Texas, New York and Virginia. The effort is a direct response to the 2012 presidential election, when Asian Americans overwhelmingly voted for President Obama.

Getting these votes out means overcoming cultural differences; many Asian Americans have never voted at all, even in their native countries.

“They come from countries where democracy, this kind of a voting process, isn’t part of their natural culture,” says Tanzila Ahmed of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a civic enagement group. “They have to learn about what it means to be a voter. It’s a very new process for them.”

But more than anything else, it’s about breaking breaking down the language barrier. More than a third of Asian-American voters aren’t fluent in English, and they don’t share a common language. That makes Asian American voters hard to reach for many candidates.

“It’s too difficult for them to translate the mailers, it’s too difficult to try and find volunteers that speak their language,” Ahmed says.

She points out that that “a lot of what it means to be engaged in the political process in the US is getting materials from candidates and campaigns because they’re trying to win your vote.” Many Asian Americans simply don’t get that opportunity at all.

So Ahmed is running a phone bank that uses young student volunteers to answer questions about voting in 17 different languages, including Vietnamese, Bengali, Urdu and Mandarin. The goal is to get roughly 30,000 registered voters who don’t usually go to the polls to cast their ballots.


Volunteers at a get-out-the-vote operation in Los Angeles speak 17 different languages, including Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Language barriers are a big factor in low voter turnout for Asian Americans.

Ahmed says she’s noticed that engaging potential voters can be as simple as knowing a greeting in their native language. She often uses an Arabic greeting to engage Muslim voters, and she also likes to share her own story with potential voters.

A few months after September 11, FBI agents came to her parents’ home in California to question her cousin, a young Muslim American. Ahmed says her cousin was singled out because of her family’s religion, even though they stopped attending their mosque and wore patriotic pins to ease suspicions.

She remembers what her mom said back then: “She said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been in this country, or that I have my citizenship. I’m always going to be treated as a second-class citizen,’” Ahmed says. “That’s a message I take with me whenever I do voter engagement work.”

As Ahmed becomes more politically active, she’s seen the tide turn. California’s online voter registration site added eight new Asian languages this year, including Hindi, Tagalog and Thai.

That may help increase participation in races this November, but the real test will come in two years. With a presidential election on the ballots, candidates will amp up efforts to bring out historically overlooked voters who, hopefully, will influence how the country chooses its next leader.

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The US Census Bureau reports that while Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing communities in the country, their voter turnout, among eligible voters, is dramatically lower compared to other ethnic groups.

Original article published here: PRI

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