SDL Users Group

The New York Times run a fascinating translation test on Monday, pitching human translation, Google Translate, Yahoo! Babel Fish and Bing Translator against one another for translations of snippets ranging from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ to Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation speech.

The results make for very interesting reading. Find out more here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/09/technology/20100309-translate.html

Journalists writing about machine translation always lean on the proposition that MT will one day put professional translators out of business. Just as likely, ubiquitous availability of “good enough” translation will do the opposite. Here is why. (more…)

We included 12 automotive brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.

And of the 12, Volkswagen emerged on top.

Volkswagen is one of the more globally consistent automotive web sites. In general, automotive sites are behind the curve in global consistency, so it was nice to see so many country sites leveraging the same global design template. Shown below are VW’s Italian and Finnish web sites:

Volkswagen also leads the category in global navigation, with a global gateway that is visually engaging, albeit a bit over-engineered, shown below.

Volkswagen also began supporting geolocation within the past 18 months, which is great to see, as it helps most users bypass the global gateway altogether.

While Volkswagen is ahead of its peers, you may have noticed that there were no automotive companies in the top 25 list.

The automotive industry is generally behind the curve in web globalization. And I should note that automotive web sites generally are ahead of the curve in language support; Toyota, for example, supports 41 languages.

But languages alone do not make a great global web site. Volkswagen did not lead in languages, but it did lead in a number of other categories, making it the best automotive web site of 2010.

Here is a full list of automotive brands included in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Audi
• BMW
• Honda
• Hyundai
• Lexus
• Mercedes
• Mini
• Nissan
• Porsche
• Smart
• Toyota
• Volkswagen

With the resurgence of minority languages across Europe an increasing number of bands are recording in exotic tongues from West Frisian to Galician.

The Guardian Music blog has a fascinating article looking at bands recording in languages such as Manx, Breton and Scottish Gaelic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/mar/08/minority-language-report

In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.

Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.

One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.

China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.

Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.

Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.

This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.

What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?