Common Sense Advisory

This report on buying telephone interpreting includes an overview of market demand and a discussion of the major categories of buyers. The publication describes how customers buy over-the-phone interpretation. The report also includes suggestions for buyers on procuring telephone interpreting services.

Back translations are sometimes touted as a way for customers to "test" the quality of a translation service, but they give little insight into the capabilities of language service providers (LSPs). Here, we explain why globalization service buyers (GSBs) should agree to banish back translations - for good, and for their own good.

This report examines the ERP-like factors driving the translation management systems (TMS) sector, outlines buyer types, projects market size and growth, and details the assessment criteria for such systems. Common Sense Advisory will use these criteria to assess product offerings in an upcoming report. This report describes how corporate, government, and language service provider requirements for TMS differ.

Here we list the top 25 firms worldwide that provide language services -- translation, localization, over-the-phone interpretation, among them.

Nurturing a seed sown in May 2007, Language Line Services (LLS) made public this week its support for a pilot of a national medical interpreter certification test by May 2009. What provoked this interest in certifying medical interpreters? Why is the telephone interpreting pioneer parting with its own precious dollars to fund these efforts? We have a few ideas.

While the majority of spoken language services are still provided in person, the sheer enormity of the market demand has led to the development of remote interpreting through telephone and video-conferencing technologies. Interpreters depend more on machine-based assistance, engaging in what we call computer-assisted interpretation (CAI), with each passing day.

Google aims to break the Indian market open for web marketers, first with search in five Indic languages, and now with Google Translate. In this Quick Take, we give you the rundown on how the "pajama effect" plays out in India -- what languages web marketers will need in order to reach consumers at home in this vast, if incipient, online market.

Translation is an indispensable ingredient of business globalization. A thicket of technology, business practices, regulatory compliance, and marketing issues play themselves out in intricate combinations, but translation always remains at the core. So the question "What does translation cost?" is both a reasonable starting point and one of the most frequent questions that clients ask us. For this report we surveyed nearly three hundred language service providers on their prices for translating documents in six dozen language combinations, to and from English.

In Q4 2007 we compiled survey responses from 292 language service providers. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents hailed from Europe and 26 percent from North America. The data shows a modest drop in prices for most languages since 2004, the last time we surveyed the industry on translation pricing, but Scandinavian languages bucked the trend and rose during this time period.

Much has been said about the benefits of a global gateway, where visitors can find country or language websites. Common Sense Advisory contends that forcing visitors through a gateway impedes usability. Rather, we advise companies to employ geolocation and/or content negotiation. But global gateways cannot be written off just yet, since they remain a necessary fallback. In this Quick Take, we tease out best practices from the common practices based on examinations of 282 global websites.

Machine translation software developers continue to innovate, with most commercial MT and open source providers pushing new releases and features. In late 2007, Asia Online entered the market with a business model more focused on driving traffic to its portal than selling software. We recently spoke with the company’s CEO Dion Wiggins about the opportunity driving his business plan and the technology that Asia Online brings to the table.

Visitors to your website immediately find relevant content - as long as they live in the country of your corporate headquarters and speak the default language of your site. If you are based in the United States, with the largest domestic online population (for now), congratulations! Fifteen percent of the world's online population immediately gets relevant content at your site. But what about the remaining 85 percent? In this Quick Take, you will find information on geolocation and content negotiation techniques that will improve online customer experience for visitors coming to your site from other countries and speaking other languages.

On 11 February 2008 SDL bought software developer Idiom, the largest and most recognizable independent vendor of translation management software. In the immediate aftermath, we asked corporate translation buyers, LSPs, and software competitors how they viewed the transaction.

This report focuses on managing the suppliers you use for language services such as translation and localization. Nearly 90 percent of companies outsource some or all of their translation and localization work. Many use a stable of language service providers and freelance translators to meet their needs in product localization, website globalization, in printed collateral, online help systems, knowledge bases, technical user guides, and training materials. Learn how to do it better.

SDL announced that it acquired Idiom for US$21.7 million in a deal that has far-reaching implications for the market. This short report provides a detailed analysis of the benefits and challenges to SDL; advice to corporate buyers of Idiom; recommendations to LSPs who feel stranded by the deal; 4 scenarios about the future of the translation business; and a reiteration of our long-held recommendation to SDL to break itself into 2 companies.

By offering collaboration features and living “in the cloud,” Proz.com taps into the global nature of the translation industry and acts as a clearing house for all the players in the language services community: freelancers, agencies, and final clients.

A few content-centric software firms have begun offering translation support built into their mainstream workflow. With this support packaged up and integrated with the rest of their solution, companies and their LSP partners have the option of bringing translation earlier and deeper into the content life cycle or managing it after the fact with their traditional translation memory tools.

Successful website globalization renders a set of user experiences in a way that makes core information and services available to audiences in many countries, speaking many languages. Until now, no metric has existed to validate the success or failure of global websites. The Availability Quotient (AQ) gives site owners an objective yardstick with which to measure the effectiveness of their websites in reaching, or not, the billion plus denizens of the online world.

How will the supporting cast of characters, practices, services, and technology support business globalization in 2008? Read our predictions for the year.

Most companies follow the age-old translate-edit-proofread (TEP) model of translation. Collaborative, web-based technologies allow translation to become more agile, faster, and better with fewer steps.