July 9-10, 2013
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Windows announced Bing Translator for Windows today. It’s a touch-enabled version of Bing Translator for Windows Phone that is now available for Windows 8 laptops, desktops, and tablets.

Bing Translator will translate more than 40 languages on web pages, in images, or in what Microsoft calls an augmented reality translation via a live video stream from your device’s camera:

The app, which Microsoft says is based on years of research into advanced machine learning, is free. It does use Internet access, but because that can be difficult or expensive when traveling, users can download offline language packs for the most common languages, such as French, Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish. More offline languages are coming soon, Microsoft says.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bing Translator is that with this app, Microsoft has enabled fully-system-integrated translation.

“The Share Charm lets you quickly translate highlighted text in any Windows 8 app; with Snap View you can multitask while browsing, chatting, or more by snapping Bing Translator to the right or left of your screen,” Vikram Dendi, Microsoft’s director for Bing Translator wrote in an announcement.

And, of course, when on the go with your Windows tablet, you can also use Bing Translator to speak the translation out loud in certain languages, allowing you to communicate back to people even if you don’t know their language. Google Translate for Android has had this feature for several months now.

Bing Translator supports 42 languages — 43 including Klingon — eight fewer than Google Translate.

Here’s the full list:

Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Klingon (Kronos), Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese

Image credit: Microsoft

While Star Trek Into Darkness is still a few days away from premiering in theaters, Microsoft’s Bing is teaming up with Paramount to celebrate a little early with a brand-new feature.

Now, trekkies can use Bing’s Translator to translate text and whole websites into Klingon, the alien language spoken by the wrinkly headed warrior race. (For instance, majQa’ means “well done!,” which is exactly what I have to say when using this new tool.)

The translations themselves are done using the Klingon alphabet Kronos (see screenshot above) or a direct translation using the English alphabet. From here on out I will most certainly use the latter option to insult VentureBeat copy editor Jason Wilson in responses to all inquires he has on my articles.

You can access the Klingon translations via the Bing Translator website or through the Windows Phone Bing Translator app.

July 9-10, 2013
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Sometimes, you just have to say wow.

Google is releasing 50 offline language packs for its popular Google Translate on Android app. This means that when you’re off in the wilds of Tanzania on the ultimate African safari and need to communicate with the locals, you can. Assuming, of course, they speak one of the supported languages.

With the Google Translate app, which has been downloaded over 50 million times, you input words that it translates via voice, writing on the screen, or your camera. It will then translate into your language of choice and can even speak the translation out loud.

Until now, Google Translate was a cloud app — it required network access. The big servers in Google’s worldwide empire of iron would chug, and the text you sent to the oracle was returned, magically transposed into a different language. The new feature means that the small computer you hold in your hand and speak to your family with is now powerful enough for instantaneous machine translation.

There is one caveat.

The offline translation packs are not quite as comprehensive as the full networked equivalents, but are perfect, Google says, for “translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access.”

I think that’s probably code for: “You’re overseas and the roaming charges start at Volkswagen and end at Mercedes.”

Either way, it’s pretty cool. No word from Google on any upcoming iOS support, however.

Supported languages include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish

photo credit: GraemeNicol via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Language learning startup Babbel has raised $10 million in its second round of funding with a goal to grow globally and help more people speak new languages.

Founded in 2008, Babbel wants to make learning a new language as fun as a game. It claims to offer more than 6,500 learning hours to help people become fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and eight other languages. On top of its site for learning, Babbel also offers apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle Fire, and Windows 8. The company says it has more than 15 million users in 190 countries, but its largest number of users is in Germany, where Babbel is based.

Just last week, Babbel also acquired San Francisco-based startup PlaySay to further help it grow. It invited all of PlaySay’s members to join the Babbel community and hopes to make further inroads with U.S. users.

The new funding round was led by Reed Elsevier Ventures, with participation by Nokia Growth Partners, Kizoo Technology Capital, and IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft (via VC Fonds Technologie Berlin). Prior to today’s round, Babbel had raised $2.2 million in debt and equity.

“Babbel is a European digital media success story,” Reed Elsevier Ventures general partner Tony Askew said in a statement. “Babbel’s excellent mobile and online products consistently rate as consumer favorites, and Babbel is very well positioned for explosive growth in the rapidly growing category of mobile and online language learning.”

Businessman translating via Helder Almeida/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Trying to get your amazing video more views in other countries? YouTube can help with that, thanks to a new partnership to get your video captions professionally translated.

YouTube has already offered caption translations for more than 300 languages using its Google Translate service since September. But if you’ve got a killer video and need people to understand what the dialog actually is, Google Translate may not cut it.

So Google has partnered with translation services Gengo and Translated.net so their services are accessible from within YouTube. They offer the ability translate professionally in up to 36 languages. When you request that some captions need translation, YouTube will now display these vendors (and eventually more) with how much they cost and estimated delivery date.

After you click on one of the vendors, you will be directed to the vendor’s site where you can place your order. When the vendor is finished, the translations come back to YouTube for you to approve.

Ideally, you’ll get professionally translated captions in a quick fashion and be able to get your video more of a spotlight in other countries you want to make an impact in.

Translation image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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YouTube rolled out an update to its captions feature today that allows you to automatically translate video captions, meaning you’re no longer restricted to watching content produced specifically for your primary language.

The new feature will work on any video that already has closed caption translations of spoken dialog. To activate a translation, users need to click the “CC” button along the bottom of the YouTube video player and select the default desired language. Then you’ll have to click the button again to toggle on the translated captions. You don’t need to determine the original language of the video.

The feature was previously offered to English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish captions. And as of today, YouTube has added another six languages, including German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch.

Personally, I’ve found that the feature works really well for thoroughly written captions translated from most European languages to English. Asian language translations (Japanese, Russian), however, weren’t as useful, but that could be because of the particular videos I chose. It’s worth noting that YouTube does let video creators improve upon erroneous translations, so they should improve for popular videos over time.

You can check out the new auto-translate caption feature in the embedded video below.

French flag image via Vepar5/Shutterstock

A picture speaks a thousand words, and with its latest update, Google Translate can translate both.

The updated Google Translate app now lets users translate objects like street signs and notes just by photographing them.

While the feature is new to Google Translate, it’s been a fundamental part of Google Goggles for a while now. Goggles lets users search the web by photographing physical objects like landmarks, books, and text on street signs (which can then be translated).

Lack of pure novelty aside, the addition is a massively important one to Google Translate, which can now help people save lots of time when encountering new words in a foreign language.

Alongside the camera addition, the Google Translate update also improves Japanese handwriting input, adds dialect preferences, and offers instant translation results.

Photo: Shutterstock/Stephen Aaron Rees

Twitter has today added beta support for Greek, Basque, and Czech, upping the number of languages the information network carries to 33.

Members can switch their language in settings menu and tweet in the dialect of their choosing.

The three languages added are among the top six most-requested languages since Twitter introduced its Translation Center in 2011. The company added support for Ukrainian and Catalan, two of the other top six, in early July.

Each of the translated languages comes courtesy of Twitter’s 500,0000-person volunteer community that works to help the company meet the communication needs of its expanding user base.

The new languages are also being introduced during the Olympic games, which means people of Greece and the citizens of the Czech Republic, along with those Basque-speaking folks in Spain and France, can now cheer on their national heroes and favorite athletes in their native tongues.

Photo credit: Paolo Rosa/Flickr

Path, the less-is-more social app that lets you connect with only 150 friends at a time, is coming soon to 20 new languages, thanks to the translation power of the crowd.

Like Twitter, Path is taking an interesting crowdsourced approach to bringing its app to new languages — and new audiences.

“The response internationally [to Path] has been amazing,” wrote a Path staffer on the company blog. ”We’ve heard from students and professors to avid travelers and programmers — all offering time and knowledge to help improve our translations.”

The app will be available soon in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. In the future we are planning to add Traditional Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Russian, Turkish, Malay, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian Bokmål, and English (UK).

Twitter did a lot of highly visible work in this area. Currently, the company says hundreds of thousands of volunteers have helped bring Twitter to dozens of languages, from Japanese to Farsi.

Path’s new translation center will be powered by Smartling, a bit of website translation software that will help Path capture its content and outsource its translation tasks to a crowd of online volunteers. Would-be translators can log in and apply to start translating. Soon enough, Smartling and Path will start delivering the approved translations in updated versions of the app.

There are tons of markets — especially outside the U.S. and definitely in parts of Asia — where Path’s less-is-more philosophy about online friendships will go over quite well. It’ll be particularly interesting to see whether the translation project ends up having a big impact on the app’s number of active users.

New York City-based Smartling lets businesses create multilingual sites and apps using both professional and crowdsourced translators, but the process of managing translations was previously a bit cumbersome. Today’s updates will simplify the translation process, letting just about anyone create multilingual offerings in just a few minutes.

New features include a Style Guide, which lets site owners create guidelines for their translations, a Progressive Glossary, a continually updated collection of terms that translators can refer to, and complete search engine optimization (SEO) compliance for translated pages. Additionally, Smartling has added management tools for handling crowdsourced translators.

“Quality web translation should be available for any business, not just for major corporations with massive localization budgets,” Smartling CEO Jack Welde said in statement today. “With great feedback from our enterprise users, such as SurveyMonkey, we’ve simplified the traditionally complex and costly translation workflow and re-applied it for the pace of Web 2.0 businesses.”

The company offers a free level of site translation for up to 5,000 multilingual page views a month, and you can pay up to $249 a month for 100,000 translated page views. For more heavily trafficked enterprise sites, Smartling also offers custom plans.

Smartling recently announced integration with the website optimization company Cloudflare, which lets Cloudflare customers instantly translate their websites with the click of a button. Smartling currently provides translation services to companies like Foursquare, Kobo, and Threadless. The company competes directly with Cloudwords, another cloud-based translation service.

Smartling recently raised $10 million in funding, on top of a $4 million round from earlier last year. Investors include Venrock, First Round Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and IDG Ventures.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

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Cloud-based translation startup Cloudwords on Wednesday formally announced a powerful new solution for speeding up localization called Translation Management Automation, or TMA.

Launched in mid-February by ex-Salesforce.com employees, Cloudwords helps small-to-midsize companies expand their global presence by finding them translation service that best match their needs. It provides lists of partnering translators who will translate various kinds of content, whether websites, marketing materials, customer requests or something else.

With a lot of translation-bidding services and automated translation services already available, Cloudwords is entering a highly competitive field by positioning itself almost halfway between the automated and non-automated services. It pre-screens all translators before allowing them access to bid on customer projects, and it gives customers a host of automated tools for managing the whole translation process. These tools include a marketplace with translator ratings and reviews, analytics apps to track spending throughout a project, an open API that lets customers connect their systems directly to Cloudwords, and the ability to manage and store all translated files in the Cloudwords cloud.

The company is currently targeting mid-size companies more so than larger players because a lot of them are stepping into global markets but don’t have as a large a budget, Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt told VentureBeat.

“There are a lot of underserved businesses that top players in translation aren’t touching, so there’s a lot of potential here,” Meinhardt said. “Companies that are looking to spend $1 to $5 million a year on translation are what we’re targeting now.”

Cloudwords customers are currently translating their content into more than 100 languages across 50 countries. Customers include Coupa Software, Calypso Technology, Phatmacyclics and Veeva Systems.

Meinhardt also said the company has had talks with big names like Walmart and LivingSocial about translation solutions.

The company estimates the translation industry is valued at $20 billion and growing at 15 percent a year. Founding Salesforce.com CTO Dave Moellenhoff and one of Cloudwords’ first primary investors told us the company is well positioned relative to translation titan SDL because Cloudwords is more nimble and can better serve smaller players that have been “orphaned by SDL.”

“We’re the upstart in this space,” Moellenhoff said. “We can be a significant leader in translation because we want to lower the overall costs.”

San Francisco-based Cloudwords thus far has raised $3 million in funding from individuals including Moellenhoff, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, current Salesforce CTO Craig Weissman, and Todd McKinnon, the CEO of Okta.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The Internet is an international place. You can be in India on one page and Brazil the next. However, translation can be costly for small content publishers. Translation software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Smartling, wants to change that.

The service works like this: For each desired language, clients create separate DNS, or domain name system sites, which assign new IP addresses. Then, websites, mobile apps and more are dropped into Smartling’s dashboard, which is an end-to-end web application. This enables translated content to populate the website directly. Think of it as a WordPress back-end for translators.

Smartling offers two types of translation: one for the enterprise and one for small and mid-sized companies. According to Smartling chief executive Jack Welde, enterprises generally like handholding and invest in professional translations, so Smartling partners with external translators, who access content in the dashboard. But those can be very expensive and lock out the little guys who make up a good percentage of content on the web.

For those smaller publishers, Smartling uses crowdsourcing.

“It is a great way to reduce the cost of ownership in translation,” said Welde, who estimates that professional translation can be 20 to 25 cents a word. Crowdsourcing can cost nearly nothing.

In essence, small and mid-size businesses approve groups or individuals who volunteer to translate sections of content. The idea isn’t new. In fact, Twitter announced its own crowdsourced translator in February and Facebook offers something similar. But Welde says Smartling has a hook. With Twitter and Facebook’s crowdsourcing, bits and pieces of text needing translating are mailed out to various translators. Sometimes, those bits and pieces will be missing some critical contextual details that are necessary to distinguish between two possible meanings of the same word.

Also, Smartling works for translating things like buttons. If your translated phrase is too long for the button, you can see that and adjust the text as needed.

Additionally, websites and apps placed in Smartling become living documents. “We automatically see updates to your site,” explained Welde. A trigger in Smartling then deploys the content to approved translators.

Smartling plans to use its funding to hire more developers, streamline network operations and focus on marketing. “We have to tell two parts of the story,” said Welde, “Whatever size you are, you will benefit from being multilingual. It’s not just for the big kids.”

Currently on the client roster are companies like Survey Monkey, Foursquare, Scribd and others. Being a SaaS company, Smartling only charges based on usage and not on method of translation. Pricing levels start at free, $99/month, $249/month and an undefined enterprise level.

Welde said the company is excited to partner with new investor, IDG Ventures, due to its international publishing experience.

Smartling was founded in 2009 and has 30 employees split between its New York and European offices. The company received a $4 million first round of financing in 2010. Investors to date include Venrock, First Round Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and IDG Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Just when you thought you’ve seen everything mobile apps have to offer, along comes an entry like Word Lens that makes you feel like you’re in the future. The app instantly translates Spanish into English (and vice versa) whenever you point your iPhone’s camera on text.

Translation apps aren’t anything new, but what’s amazing about Word Lens is that it translates text in real-time — there’s no need to take a photo and wait for the translation to process. Instead, the app offers an augmented reality (AR) experience by laying its translated text over a video feed from your iPhone’s camera.

This means that you can point your phone at a menu or sign in Spanish, and the app will instantly translate it into English text on your iPhone’s screen. The app also doesn’t require an internet connection to work, so you can use it even when you don’t have reception.

Word Lens is developed by Quest Visual, and the app itself is free. Inside the app, you pay $4.99 for translation dictionaries (only Spanish to English, and English to Spanish are available right now). The app doesn’t come bundled with any dictionaries, so it will effectively cost you $4.99 to start using it. With its in-app purchasing model, Word Lens could easily add support for other translation dictionaries.

Judging from the amount of buzz Word Lens is generating online this morning, I think Quest Visual has a hit on its hands. It’s also notable as a genuinely useful implementation of augmented reality, even more so than Yelp’s Monocle feature. Instead of being flooded with AR data, as many AR apps tend to do, Word Lens simply offers another way to view what’s directly in front of you.

You can view a demonstration of the app below to see just how innovative it is.

July 9-10, 2013
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Blog publishers wanting to translate their works into multiple languages now have a range of human-powered translation options from translation company Speaklike. The company, which launched a translation service for instant messages last year, has built a plug-in for the popular WordPress blogging system used by VentureBeat and The New York Times.

The system isn’t instantaneous, but it uses experienced freelance translators rather than amateurs or machine translation.

Speaklike offers a pay-as-you-go system for small publishers, and an enterprise-scale service for bigger companies. According to Speaklike CEO Sanford Cohen, there are now around a million freelance translators around the world. Speaklike contracts to them as needed. The company has an internal rating system through which the best translators are promoted to enterprise services, and those who aren’t good are let go.

Independent bloggers pay around six cents per word for translations that are done within a day. Enterprise customers can pay for guaranteed one-hour turnaround, and can set up a terminology manager and style guide so that translators don’t mangle the product lingo on their sites.
“If machine translation were perfect, it would already be integrated into everything that we use,” Cohen told me in a phone interview. But the most important factor for selling translation, he said, is, “It should be easy. You shouldn’t have to think about it.”
The most obvious demo is atop Speaklike’s home page. Select one of the languages from the menu to read Speaklike’s site in Dutch, Chinese, or Ukrainian.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Even big companies can get it wrong when they fail to do their homework before launching in new markets.

The examples have become the stuff of legend: In the mid-1960s, Pepsi’s slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” failed to energize Taiwan, as the translation read “Pepsi Brings Your Relatives Back From the Dead”.

Coors’ campaign “Turn it Loose” went flat in Spain, urging drinkers to “Get Diarrhoea”. Few had it worse than poultry baron Frank Perdue, though, whose billboards in Spain mistranslated his well-known slogan “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” to read “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate”.

For big businesses, the gaffes are amusing missteps that might briefly impact the bottom line, but don’t put the company at risk. For entrepreneurs, having your message lost in translation can be catastrophic.

If you decide to expand into overseas markets, localization is key – and it’s never a good idea to take shortcuts. Online translation tools or tapping the knowledge of an employee’s foreign language skills might seem like good money-savers, but they can have disastrous ramifications. To make an impact, you’re best off hiring a professional translator.

The fact is there is a significant difference between being fluent in a language and being a native speaker. Professional translators normally only translate into their mother tongue, since the nuances of language are so subtle – and so glaring if they are missed.

Ideally if you are getting something translated, you should be offered the opportunity for feedback and revision of the first draft translation.  This is especially important if you intend to run the text past a focus group of native speakers.

Try, also, to find a translation company that has expertise in your industry. You’re looking for someone that not only is a native speaker, but also knows the ins and outs of your industry.

If you need promotional material, look for companies that also provide native-speaking creative copywriters.  This service, sometimes called transcreation, is vital for advertising material and brochures with culture-specific references.

Localising a product or service means more than producing marketing literature in that country’s language.  The customs and overall culture of the country are equally important.

For that reason, the best translation companies employ only people who live in the country and are immersed in the culture for which the translation is intended.  Had Colgate consulted such a firm before launching their toothpaste called Cue in France, customers might have been spared the embarrassment of being presented with a hardcore pornographic magazine when they asked for the product. Turns out the magazine, which shared the name, had been around for years.

Make sure your translation service also has a firm grip on the colloquialisms and slang in your target country.  The Scandinavian company Electrolux failed to do so when launching in the U.S., causing some snickering when its slogan – “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux” – began appearing in marketing literature.

It’s worth noting that these same considerations apply to website localization.  Marketing online in the language of the country you are targeting enjoys significant competitive advantages – but getting the language wrong can hurt you badly.

Finally, if you’re expanding to a market where widespread illiteracy is a problem, you’ll need to think about translation in a different manner.

Gerber learned this years ago when it began marketing its baby food in Africa. The company used the same packaging it did in the US and Europe: a picture of a happy Caucasian baby on the label. It was only later that it discovered that because a large proportion of the population was illiterate, most companies only put pictures of the contents on the label.

Christian Arno is founder of translation company Lingo24 which operates across four continents in more than 60 countries covering every industry sector, with a global network of over 4,000 freelance translators.

Google said today it will offer a range of new features in its search results, including things like a new navigation bar at the top left side of the home page to things like Google’s Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Picasa Web Albums.

The effort is part of what it calls a move to “universal search,” much of which will be subtle at first, but will change over time.

Many of the changes will begin today (Wednesday). Many of the features, including the navigation bar, still weren’t live as of this writing. We checked with Google, and a spokesman said the changes are still rolling out, and that everyone will see the changes by Thursday morning. The changes were announced during Google’s Searchology event today, which VentureBeat attended.

More significantly, the move is also an answer to a threat posed by a string of other search engine companies, including Ask and Hakia, which are starting to give users clusters of information about a search term neatly on the first page of results — rather than spitting out the pages and pages of results like Google.

Google said that search results will include links to more sources, such as videos, books and blogs and maps. Take the example of a search for Star Wars character Darth Vader. Google said users want info about the character and the actor – not just web pages that mention the movie. Google will deliver search results that include different elements — such as a humorous parody of the movie, images of the Darth Vader character, news reports on the latest Lucas film, as well as websites focused on the actor James Earl Jones – ranked according to how relevant Google thinks they are to the query.

See image below for what we are seeing as of 1pm on Wednesday:

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Google said it is introducing a new “technical infrastructure” to enable the intensive computations to produce universal search results — and that it’s upgrading its ranking algorithm to compare the different clusters of information.

Here are the other parts of Google’s announcements today:

New links have been added above the search results — For example, a search for “python” will now generate links to Google’s Blogs, Books, Groups, and Code pages. See below.

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Google Experimental — Available on Google Labs, you can use this to search results on a map or timeline. For instance, when you search for “Albert Einstein” you can choose to see search results on a map that shows locations mentioned within web pages about Einstein or on a timeline illustrating the history of Einstein’s life. We don’t see this feature yet, either.

Updated

Cross-language search engine — This is coming. Until now, you’ve been able to download Google’s toolbar and you can get translations of words and phrases by scrolling over text. However, this new cross-language feature will be different: Queries will be translated into other languages, and results from other languages will be translated on the fly back into your language of choice.

More videos in Video search — Videos will be pulled from video sites beyond Google Video and YouTube, including for example MetaCafe.