Less than 7 months ago we got about 1.5 million hits on a search for the quoted string “lost in translation.” On 16 December, Yahoo turned up 5,090,000 instances to Google’s 3,110,000, more than doubling the latter’s number since 22 May. Given how our alerts pick up a few per day, we’d go with the higher Yahoo number.

And poor film star Scarlett Johansson must now be feeling typecast as the natural successor to St. Jerome — the popular media seem to have a rule stating that you cannot mention her name without including the “lost in translation” reference.

So we now pronounce the phrase a bonafide cliché, likely to be included whenever business reporters write about the topic of translation, localization, or globalization. On the flip side of that negative “lost” are some derivative phrases for “good” globalization — “found in translation” yields around 62,100 hits on Google to 70,300 on Yahoo. Meanwhile, up-and-coming “gained in translation” returns 674 hits on Google, 2,000 at Yahoo.

We’ll check back in May 2006 to see whether “lost in translation” and its 2 offspring have peaked — or more colloquially, jumped the shark (274,000 in Google vs. 469,000 in Yahoo, in case you were wondering).