Visitors to the CM Pros website now have the option of choosing which language they can use to navigate the site. English is the default, but they can choose to see the user interface navigation translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, or none. “None”? That takes you the English navigation tags, of course. In a linguistic vacuum, cherchez l’English.
CM Pros faces the same content challenges as most businesses and governments around the world. Content volume is increasing faster than anyone can manage, much less translate into all the languages of their employees or external users. Faced with mass quantities of information written in other languages, most organizations choose not to translate most of that content – we call this “zero translation” (ZT). Many take the path of high-quality but relatively expensive human translation (HT), picking and choosing just a small subset of their corporate content to translate. A growing number choose the faster, cheaper, but imperfect option of machine translation (MT).[1]
By starting with just the navigation tags, CM Pros has taken the same approach favored by many organizations with limited budgets for website globalization.
1.
Translate the user interface first before
translating any content. Kudos to the CM Pro member volunteers that have
provided pro-bono translations of the site’s major and minor navigation tags. (Arabic
- Rana Allam, Dutch - Adriaan Bloem, French - Robert Bédard, Raymond
Bissonnette, Jane McConnell, Benoît Secher, German - Anna Fuhrmann, Jörg Dennis
Krüger, Hebrew - Yair Dembinsky, Italian - Paola Di Maio, Japanese - Tomoko
Yamato, Spanish - Mario López de Ávila Muñoz)
2. Translate content as resources become available. Translation will again be a volunteer effort, so anyone with the resources might want to consider contributing some work for the good of the cause.
Everyone will recognize that this isn’t the ideal solution, but it is a practical one. Seeing the need for supporting their international visitors or even recognizing that they should practice what they preach, this stepwise approach provides CM Pros with a framework for globalization. We suggest the following steps to increase site access by its targeted international audiences – without boiling the proverbial ocean:
3.
Monitor the site closely to determine what
people who choose any language click on. Follow the breadcrumbs. The CM Pros
webmaster should monitor this closely for both language choice and which
content they access.
4.
Human-translate the most frequently requested pages
of the site. We suggest focusing on the
top two or three languages by visitation. To increase the volume of content in
other languages, CM Pros should engage with teachers of translation at
international universities. They could have their students translate articles
for the site in an exercise that would be much less boring and far more useful
exercise than the usual translation class routine of having everyone translate
the same text.
5.
For all other pages and languages, we suggest a
mix of “tuned” and “un-tuned” machine translation. In both cases, users should
be forewarned that MT is afoot – “here be monsters” or some similar warning
would suffice.
For the top three languages, CM Pros should use a tuned solution for better,
more consumable output. However, this approach requires labor-intensive
customization of the MT software’s dictionaries to the domain of content
management and related technologies. It’s unlikely that MT vendors would offer
free professional services for this effort, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
For the less frequently used languages, CM Pros should use un-tuned MT. This
approach would yield the less-than-ideal, often vilified results you get with
the online machine translation (OLMT) offered by BabelFish,
Freetranslations.com, and other free sites. However, since this is an
educational and research site frequented by people who understand the issues at
hand, this tiered approach to MT shouldn’t be a problem – especially if the
alternative is no translation at all.
Finally, we would encourage CM Pros to publish articles that were not originally in English and translate them using machine resources. This would put the many Anglophone decision-makers on the other side of the language equation, giving them the experience of dealing with MT-translated content.
Copyright © 2006 by Donald A. DePalma. All rights reserved.
