Global Watchtower™

Cisco Convenes LSPs for Insight into Globalization Strategy

Donald A. DePalma — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:43:40 +0000

While Wim Elfrink makes headlines as Cisco’s chief globalization officer and developing human capital around the globe, Brian Shorey and his team have the more mundane task of globalizing the company’s internal systems. Last week, Cisco held a vendor-palooza to which program manager Richard Faubert invited language service provider partners (and us) to learn about the company’s globalization strategy, meet with buyers, and network. (more…)

GlobalSight to Go Open Source?

Donald A. DePalma — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:06:55 +0000

Last week at the LISA conference in Foster City, California, CEO Smith Yewell raised the possibility of putting Welocalize’s recently acquired GlobalSight Ambassador software into the open-source arena. Meanwhile, disenfranchised Idiom buyers brought up the topic of open-sourcing WorldServer as SDL outlines its plans for migrating them to its own SDL TMS product. Open source, discontinued product lines, and invisibility characterize the fates of the contenders for the 1999 Globalization Software of the Year award: eTranslate (now at Translations.com), GlobalSight (Welocalize), Idiom (SDL), and Uniscape (SDL). (more…)

Translation Memory Data Sharing: What’s Next?

Donald A. DePalma and Renato S. Beninatto — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:15:49 +0000

Major high-tech suppliers like Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco, EMC, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, PTC, and Sun Microsystems have signed on to support the TAUS Data Association (TDA). TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society, launched its data sharing initiative a little more than a year ago. At the end of June, the TDA will formally incorporate in Amsterdam with its charter members (34 are currently signed up). The TDA aims to “establish a secure and legitimate platform for storing, sharing and leveraging language data; access to large volumes of trusted language data for increased translation efficiency and quality; industry collaboration to harmonize multilingual terminology.” We recently spoke with TAUS founder and presumptive TDA director Jaap van der Meer, who updated us on progress since the effort took flight in March 2007. (more…)

Interpreting Tool Graces the Silver Screen

Nataly Kelly — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:15:01 +0000

We’ve had many a chuckle at the universal translator devices of science fiction lore — and it’s never a surprise to us when these fictional creations show up on screen, enabling an alien’s roar to be converted into perfect English (usually with an American accent). In fact, we gave a presentation on the topic at Localization World in Berlin just a couple of weeks ago. However, even we were surprised when an interpreting tool popped up in an unlikely spot — a movie set in present-day times.

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