SDL Users Group

Last week I said I’d love to see more profiles of global-minded business execs and, sure enough, the Journal delivers.

Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee.

According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s total sales. And it’s just getting started.

Some choice quotes from the interview:

The rush to emerging markets is there already for the last 10 years. What you have started to see is that, in many of these emerging markets, now you get growing local [Chinese] competitors who become either regional or aspiring global competitors.

It does not suffice to serve only the metropolitan areas. In India and in China you need to have good rural distribution.

For the emerging markets we have even more local responsibility. In general we try to push responsibility down in the organization and have everything necessary centralized. But for emerging markets we have done that even more than for the developed markets.

The Philips global web site finished in 4th place overall in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. Decentralization of control is a key ingredient of successful local web sites, particularly in emerging markets.

The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart.

This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages.

It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic.

Language technology supplier MultiCorpora today announced that it has acquired Beetext, another developer of translation management systems (TMS). The deal underscores the importance of offering a complete solution for companies managing large-scale projects.

MultiCorpora CEO Pierre Blais pre-briefed us on the acquisition earlier this week. Because both companies are family-owned and privately funded, Blais wouldn’t disclose the dollar amount of the deal but did say that MultiCorpora was paying for Beetext with cash on hand and would not need to borrow any money. The two firms will merge operations and staff, but the Beetext office in Montreal will remain open. Beetext president Benoit Desjardins will take a customer-facing strategy and support role at MultiCorpora. Blais said that MultiCorpora intends to integrate the two company’s products, its own MultiTrans and Beetext’s Flow MMX, in the next couple of months. He also said that MultiCorpora will also sell both solutions separately for buyers that would like to integrate either solution with commercial off-the-shelf or homegrown solutions.

Why did these two language technology suppliers come together? Blais said that MultiCorpora felt that it needed core workflow and project management components to MultiTrans so that it could participate in some deals. Previously, it had partnered with Plunet, but without MultiCorpora controlling all the technology, it could not offer prospects the level of language and project management integration that they were seeking. Many corporate buyers and language service providers evaluating TMS solutions don’t want to have to become integrators of disparately sourced technologies to get the full assemblage of language, project control, connectivity, business data, and system oversight they need to run their operations.

All told, the combined products add up to a strong TMS contender. In our assessment of translation management products, we found that MultiCorpora scored well with its language support, but fell down on project, financial, and vendor management. Conversely, Beetext has done very well on the business management axes, but was missing the language component. The performance of both firms on these language and business issues hearkens back to their original design centers, with each focusing on a different part of the TMS puzzle. Putting these two products under the same roof has the potential to create a much stronger product, without any of the “finger-pointing” problems associated with the arm’s length couplings so prevalent in the industry.

Who will buy this conjoined product? Translation companies certainly will take a look. Our report on “Tech-Savvy Language Service Providers” (Aug10) demonstrates that most translation suppliers seek a more unified platform on which to operate. On the end-buyer side, MultiCorpora will certainly push the technology into its traditional government, non-government organization, and business buyers, especially those with in-house translation departments but also the pure outsourcers. Blais specifically flagged the SDL (né Idiom) WorldServer community — he said that current WorldServer users want MultiTrans’ advanced leveraging technology (that is, sub-sentential segments, as discussed in “Beyond Global Websites,” Mar05), while other users simply want a replacement. It’s telling that 2-1/2 years after Idiom’s acquisition by SDL that the market still seeks an independent TMS solution.

MultiCorpora faces the classic challenges in bringing two software vendors’ code bases together. Besides the obvious issues of unifying interfaces, application programming interfaces, support and training, and vision, the newly expanded MultiCorpora will have to pump up its marketing and sales efforts to get a hearing in a marketplace against TMS contenders such as Across, SDL, STAR, and TransPerfect. However, the merger of products with clear strengths in their respective sectors bodes well for MultiCorpora’s offering.

Language services help the world go ’round. We’ve written before about how interpreters and translators help thwart public health outbreaks, end bomb scares, communicate with populations affected by oil spills and earthquakes, enable fans to enjoy the World Cup, and assist diplomats with international relations snafus. We thought we’d seen it all, until some bright and shiny objects — stolen diamonds — caught our attention.

No, these aren’t the alleged blood diamonds that recently “inconvenienced” Naomi Campbell, but rather, the 887.24 carat gems that were stolen from a recent jewelry show in India. What’s language got to do with it?

Quite a lot. Apparently, four of the individuals who have been detained in connection with the heist speak Spanish. Since Spanish<>Marathi interpreters cannot exactly be found on every street corner in Mumbai, investigators are using a process known as relay interpretation, in which one person interprets from Spanish into English, and then another interpreter renders the information from English into Marathi.

While this addresses the language barrier for purposes of taking the statements from the alleged diamond thieves, more language services will inevitably be needed as the case proceeds forward and justice is sought for all, including the rightful owners of the diamonds, Israeli firm Dalumi Group. Will the language pairs evolve to include Hebrew<>Marathi?

While diamond heists are often the themes of  Bollywood and Hollywood films, the very real and growing demand for less common language combinations only stands to increase as globalization continues. In today’s world, all people — including criminals — are more connected than ever before, making language services an essential component of battling international crime.

In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category.

In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround.

In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance.

It’s nice to see the business press taking notice.

This Wall Street Journal profile of Johan Svanstrom, the head of Hotels.com’s Asia group, sheds light on why the company has done so well. The article begins:

Online travel giant Expedia Inc. had fewer than 20 employees in Hong Kong and no Chinese-language website when Johan Svanstrom took on his role as Asia-Pacific vice president of Expedia unit Hotels.com five years ago. Under 38-year-old Mr. Svanstrom, Hotels.com has added 13 new country-specific websites in the region and more than 160 staff.

Hotels.com is clearly betting big on Asia, and with good reason. Says Svanstrom:

According to the [International Air Transport Association], Asia Pacific overtook North America as the world’s largest air-travel market with 647 million passengers in 2009—a true milestone. When these people arrive at their destination, very many of them need a hotel to stay in. Add to that the fact that travel is one of the top three verticals of e-commerce and a natural pair with the Internet? All the stars are aligned.

I love to see profiles such as this; I hope to see more in the months ahead. Despite all the doom and gloom in the news these days, a lot of companies are booming abroad — and, in large part, thanks to smart bets on web globalization.