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Many of my business contacts mix up Machine Translation System with Translation Memory System. What does each do? Who is it meant for? What can you expect from both technologies? How are they used? We thought it was time to give those questions a clear answer…

As wikipedia puts it, "Machine Translation (MT) performs simple substitution of […] words in one natural language for words in another". It is commonly used today to give you a rough idea of the meaning of a (web) page or message published in a language you do not understand. If, in turn, you have an email message machine-translated in Chinese before sending it to your new holiday friend, this new acquaintance is likely to hate you for all those noughty words you threw at him…

Professional uses of Machine Translation for qualitative marketing communication is therefore not recommended. For those however who need to communicate into or from an unknown foreign language, following the NIST 2006 Machine Translation Evaluation list, Google is offering the best machine translation engine. Other well known commercial MT tools are Babel Fish, Systran and Worldlingo.

Since current MT systems are unable to produce output of the same quality as a human translator, the latter remains key to obtain professional results. Fortunately enough, Translations Memory Systems and Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) systems are here today to make his job faster, better, more reliable and cheaper.

Database-stored translation memories (TM’s) consist of text segments in a source language and their (validated) translations into one or more target languages. CAT tools feed TM’s and automatically retrieve existing translations to speed up the localisation process and make it more dependable. Commercial widely used TM’s and CAT tools are for exampleTrados, DéjàVu, Wordfast and SDLX.

At Connexion we have closed the gap between websites and Translation Memory Systems, by developing a platform that combines web content management and CAT tools, for perfectly and totally translated web content.

You’re a corporate mareketeer or webmaster and you are reluctant to translate your organization’s "English-spoken-only" website?

Up to recently, you had many a reason to prefer and ignore the truth, by assuming the majority of visitors understand English anyway: translating web pages was anything but cost- and time efficient. First, you needed to extract all text data, without forgetting to include the meta data (you know those descriptions that help visitors and Google to find the information fast and easily); not to be neglected also was to export the menu / button content as well as the page and window titles (that also need to be localized if you want your foreign visitors to find you via search engine); that being done, you had to include all the content into a file format that your (human) translators could use (easily)… without omitting to give them enough information about what destination each part of text was meant for!

Once you had received the different translations back from your translators, and after having those validated by your proofreaders, you were sweating hard, just thinking of all the tricky operations needed to import those language versions properly in order to have the translated web pages look good and work normally…

The good news is that the headaches associated with web translation now belong to the past. The guys at Connexion have developed a solution that is worth taking into consideration…

A lot of parents get the idea that the internet is not a safe place for their children anymore, especially when they're in contact with other people over MySpace. The social-networking site launches a software that allows parents to track all changes to their children's profiles.

CNET reports that the software, with code-name Zephyr, allows parents to find out about MySpace profiles that have been created on a computer, including name, age, and location in those profiles. They will not be able to change the profile however and children will be notified that their profiles are being monitored.This is the first time that MySpace offers its own solution to track user activity following other similar softwares from other companies. 


I don't think it's a bad thing to follow your kids like this, in the end it's all for their good, but they probably don't think that way.  As in the corporate world, online privacy is something that will always be a tricky thing. Your boss thinks he can monitor all your moves to protect his company from spies, virusses or lazy employees. The 'lazy' employee on the other hand believes he should be trusted with the responsibility to decide for himself if he's harming the company or not...

Tough deal! 

www.tropdeplaisir.net is a project that was brought online by one of our clients in the consumer industry. Most of the customers at Connexion are Business to Business companies, as this is the specialization we have chosen in the past, but there are always exceptions.

Manix is one of the condom brands marketed by Ansell, an important and interesting customer which proves that rubber is not only used in gloves, their main business. Manix has set up this tropdeplaisir website and did an advert on French national tv to launch it. The success it knows since its launch is incredible, mostly due to the nice design, but also for the funny angle on which they look at safe sex...

Certainly a site to visit if your in for some music, movie or laughs... 

Haven't we all learned by now that bad publicity is still publicity?

It is not something Apple forgot when launching its new iPhone this week in San Francisco. Apple knew all along it would get into trouble, as the following article from Ashlee Vance in The Register states. There have been talks with Cisco before about the iPhone name, so somewhere along the track all must have realized two things... 

1. Strong publicity will be in the making in all major and small media worldwide for Cisco, Apple and the iPhone. Even if the dispute doesn't get settled (which seems very unlikely) everyone returns home a happy camper.

2. The companies must have known in advance that the cost of going to trial would still be less than the money that will pour out of the eventual deal (for Cisco), the sales of the iPhone (for Apple) and of course the marketing gains (for both).

We are all here to witness another nice example of a good planned and calculated communication strategy which keeps business going...

I read this great White Paper yesterday from Harvard Public Relations. They have more information like this on their website, but this paper was interesting because of its unique approach to social media and as a consequence, also social networks. The foreword, written by Kevin Murray (Chairman of Bell Pottinger Group of which Harvard is a sub-company) immediately sets the tone of a straightforward document.   

Although they mainly focus on PR, I think that even for overall communication it is a correct assessment when they write on page 10:

• There is only scope for a two-way dialogue – no longer can companies deliver a controlled one-way delivery of message
• Transparency – credibility is key and discussions need to be open and their scope defined by the audience, otherwise content will be disregarded as marketing gloss
  

When marketing a new product, your target audience is of main importance. The selection of your  audience must go further than the a selection based on profession, language and address. The approach we would use is go out and look for the social groups that are connected to your service or product. 

Not that long ago, a mass medium would make a connection to a specific audience and as such take on an existing social group. These groups could be the residents of a local community, a political party, a religion or even a ethnic minority group. As an example a certain magazine would appeal only to housewives or a website would specifically target seniors.

Another kind of social group is these days more active, being the one that is being created the other way. Mostly because of new technology related to the internet like blogs, podcasts and videosharing, we see groups appearing with people being user or fan of a specific mass medium. Where these groups already existed in earlier days where they would grow around a well-known show, genre or performer, you can now see them form in sometimes unlikely social groups. An example could be a group of people who download podcasts of several weather channel each day and deem it necesarry to create a forum to discuss these and finally come up with there own weather forecast website.

As you see it is not that easy to go out and find that specific audience for your service or product. That's why communication agencies most of the time also focus on certain social groups and also know if your new product would fit these. An agency that focuses for example on people residing in the BtB, multilingual or IT world, could tell you immediately what your product will do for which audience and most important; how to market it!

So any mass media you use, wether it is televesion, radio, written press or internet, think about the fact that using media is a social event and goes much further to the numbers we see on our screen every day...