Winning Online

Language localization is the process of translating content into different languages or adapting a language to meet the needs of a specific country or region. Companies with a global presence are taking language differences such as pronunciation, spelling conventions and grammatical patterns into account when creating a web strategy targeted towards specific regional markets.

Collaborative translation, which is translation carried out by a group of people who are not professional translators but have a good knowledge of the specific subject, is growing in popularity. Facebook has been receiving considerable media coverage recently due to their large-scale collaborative translation project, which in a few short years will make their website available in over 200 languages.

As the term suggests, “collaborative” translation involves groups of people working together to produce the localized content.  For some obvious reasons, there are some critics of this type of translation.  Since the group members have different backgrounds and degrees of translation ability, the issue of credibility has become one of the noteworthy arguments against collaborative translation. This is certainly a consideration for those organizations looking to start a project of this nature - we also endorse the following suggestions:

• Standardize terms and styles of translation
• Store correct translations and reuse them effectively
• Make the collaboration a lively exchange between the members.

If you are looking for more information about translation and/or website localization, here are a couple of web sites you can take a look at for further details:

• Translations.com
  Provider of website localization, software localization, GMS (Globalization Management System) software products, and enterprise-level, professional translation services.
• Traduwiki
  Traduwiki enables you to eliminate the last barrier of the Internet, the language. Use it to spread your writings, blog posts, textbooks and other texts across the planet. Traduwiki has tools that ease collaborative translations so your friends could loom your text translations with little efforts, and others can do the same.
• Worldwide Lexicon Project
  The Worldwide Lexicon is a service which enables community-driven translations on any website. If you speak two or more languages join our translation community and help share the most interesting content on the web with the people around the world.