At my last job before Smartling – a big global ad agency with a 50 person developer team – I built a time-scheduling application that allowed project managers to schedule the efforts of us code monkeys. One of my great satisfactions was walking around the open floor of the department and seeing the application I had built up on many screens at any given time. It was a kind of poor man's Google Analytics. If you want to track the use of your product, just hover creepily behind your user's Aeron and see what he's doing!

“Go global by going local.” That phrase, or some variation on it, gets tossed around a lot - it’s almost become its own buzzword (buzzphrase?) – but it’s a crucial concept in localizing website and apps. Imagine walking into a grocery store, where all the items are labeled in English, but the prices are listed in rubles. Well, that’s helpful.

"There's a fine line between funny and annoying
– and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark.”
– Martha Brockenbrough

Another advantage for bilinguals, besides being smarter than the rest of us: a recent study at the University of Chicago found thinking in a foreign language reduces decision bias. That is to say, you’ll make more logical decisions in a foreign language than you would in your native tongue.

Did you know Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 35 million people aged five or over in the U.S.? Or that, if it were a standalone country, the U.S. Hispanic market buying power would make it one of the top twenty economies in the world? What's more, the per capita income of U.S. Hispanics is higher than Brazil, Russia, India, or China.

Machine translation (MT) gets a bad rap because it's perceived as low quality (and the results are sometimes hilarious) - but you'd be surprised how far this technology has advanced since it was first conceived in 1949. Recently, we found TAUS's comprehensive timeline of the history of MT , and it's an amazing read. But if you don't have time to read across 63 years of MT progress, here a brief overview:

Today, the Lexington Armory (on Lexington Ave. between 25th & 26th) was packed with NY-based start-ups. It was an incredible scene. Tables as far as the eye can see, wires streaming from laptops and displays, banners, stickers, pizza, cupcakes, and people - so many people. The inaugural NY Tech Day is wrapping after going non-stop since 9am this morning. 

Okay, let's see. Machine translation is done by a machine. Professional translation is done by professional translators. Crowdsourced translation is done by...a crowd? A crowd of what? Where did it come from, and how can it translate a website or mobile app?

You might be asking yourself, "But aren't all translations done in context?" Actually, no. In fact, most traditional translation happens outside of its context. You can read more about the traditional website translation process but the basic idea is:

Website localization - and the ongoing maintenance of localized sites - can be frustrating to the point of screaming. (A Fortune 500 client recently told us the process made her so miserable that "I vowed I would find another way!") Partly, it's the antiquated process (exporting strings, translation out of context, building new infrastructure, etc.). But it's also about lack of control and flexibility. One of the (many) reasons our clients choose Smartling's translation management software is because it gives the content/project owner total control and flexibility over the translation workflow, yet automates the painful part (i.e.. string extraction, presentation for translation in context, delivery of new sites).