GALA Blog

Nowadays, VMware has become an essential tool for ApSIC’s localization and internationalization testing team, effectively phasing out the former arrangements based on disk images.

So now it’s good news that the entry product for VWware server-grade line-up, VMware Server, will be available for free to entice businesses to start deploying server virtualization, with a view that they get some conversions to their currently pricey high-end server virtualization solutions.

I first learn about VMware, back in 1999 when I read a press release about a start-up that had released a product which would allow running Linux and Windows virtual machines on a Linux or Windows host operating system.

At that time we were frequently dual booting Windows NT Workstation and OS/2, so I wrote them to ask if they were planning to add OS/2 as either a guest or a host operating system, and they replied almost instantly saying that due to certain technical particularities, support for OS/2 was not feasible. (Fortunatelly, weeks later we deployed a solution to avoid frequent dual booting with a combination of Windows NT Terminal Server 4.0 and OS/2 client machines.)

We forgot about VMware for a while, and the main driver to revisit VMware in our testing process was a couple years ago, because when we expanded the testing lab with newer machines the only way to test Windows NT was on a virtual machine, due to the lack of drivers for new machines.

Ironically, lack of NT support for newer hardware was a good show-stopper to run into, because VMware has since become instrumental in our testing efforts!

Web 2.0 is defined many ways, but one simple definition is “the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web.”
The social networking and blogging phenomena appear by my estimation to be dying down and losing their appeal as web business models since everyone has exhausted and copied what you can do with sharing information with your friends and making new friends. The trend seems to be toward creating little online applications using existing client-server technologies or API (Application Programming Interfaces) provided by other toolmakers, like making a site that shows you where all the good beer is in town http://www.beerhunter.ca/ or plotting your jogging routes http://www.walkjogrun.net/ or sharing travel information in a journalistic, collaborative way travbuddy.com through Google’s maps API.

Borrowing from a couple of “Top 10 Web 2.0 Innovations” lists, I have attempted to examine some of the applications/websites in terms of their potential for future localization.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. Everyone shares favorite URLs with their friends, so why not make a website where you can share your Favorites with the rest of the world? Yahoo! recently purchased it, and although Yahoo! isn’t as localized as heavily as Google, they obviously have an interest in markets beyond their front door. It stands a fairly good chance of becoming a localized application, or perhaps the similar existing Yahoo! application http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ will be.

netvibes.com is a personalized page to display your favorite newsfeeds, shopping alerts, weather alerts, etc. It looks to me an awful lot like my customized my.yahoo.com page, only the content is aggregated from any RSS source. I wasn’t especially impressed with it, but it bears mentioning because it is one of the only Web 2.0 apps I could find that has bothered to make an attempt at localizing its interface. If you click on the languages at the bottom of netvibes’ homepage, you will still see most of the content in English, obviously, because the sample aggregation is pulling in English newsfeeds.

flickr.com was cited as a top Web 2.0 app of 2005, even though it has been around for a while longer than just last year. Photosharing is pretty hot stuff with a lot of people, and flickr has an appealing interface. As an aside, I think that online digital photo-sharing is preferred by the hipper younger crowd, and am not sure why companies like HP continue to market photoprinting devices so heavily to this target market. Flickr is another cool web app purchased by Yahoo!, and I look for its interface to be localized in the next year or so. Native English-speaking people aren’t the only ones who take digital photos and share them with each other.

Looking for a light, online word processing tool that you can easily use to collaborate with other users? You have quite a few choices, and I predict that Google or Yahoo! will have an entire office suite of online applications in the not-so-distant future in an attempt to compete with each other as well as anyone else who makes an office suite. In the meantime, there are several online word-processing applications springing up : writely.com, writeboard.com, rallypointhq.com, zohowriter.com. The last one mentions multilingual support, i.e., you can write in your "mother tongue", however, once again, the portal and the interface are English-only.

In a similar vein, a few "online project management" suites have sprung up: basecamphq.com, centraldesktop.com, sidejobtrack.com. Once again, every single one of them has foregone the option of localizing the interface.

Like the multitude of blogging tools that came before them, these apps are used by multilingual users everywhere. It seems obvious to me that companies developing an application to be used by the entire world would pause to consider that most of the online world consists of non-native English speakers.
If you click through blogger.com’s random-blog button, you discover that there are probably more bloggers writing in Portuguese or Spanish. Yet, after more than five years of existence, Blogger still has no localized user interface whatsoever. As an aside, Blogger happens to be owned by Google, which is highly praised for its localized site. However, looking past its search interface and the machine translation tool for websites, Google has failed to localize most of its tools http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/.

Hopefully, the case will be different for the more robust online applications that are popping up everywhere. The decision to localize a web application interface doesn’t involve the level of investment risk it once did. A successful web app localization requires a relatively small investment yet will dramatically increase use and exposure in major non-English language markets.

If the thin-client, online software trend continues (the bulk of the data processing occurs on the server rather than client-side) and isn’t simply a fad of online application gadgetry, then all of our beloved office tools will move completely online. At some point, this will have implications for the translation and localization industry, in terms of how files, translation memories and projects are managed, and how collaboration takes place across the globe on translation projects. Of course we already see this to some degree, but will this increase, or even become the norm? How do you see the technologies of Web 2.0 affecting/being used by the localization industry, if at all? Are we all going to be “Linked In” as one hive, translating mind?

However, the more pressing question as to how this new trend of applications relates to the translation industry is, why are so few of them being localized?

Further reading:
http://www.web2con.com/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
http://www.web20workgroup.com/
http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/172417.htm
http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Top-10-Innovative-Web-2-0-Applications-of-2005/10891
http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6031272.html

Following the heels of Trados 7.1 upgrade in late December there seems to be an upcoming release, SDL Trados 2006, some time in March. This release is about bundling the Trados Workbench and SDLX products, making them available together and according to proz TGB, at a price level comparable to each of the former CAT tools separately. The fact that SDLX does not appear in the name of the product seems to suggest that the SDLX brand will be the one that eventually will phase out.

So it seems that finally SDLX and Trados will be soon merging functionalities more seriously, but at this pace of releases, I wonder if we are in front of a shift to a rent-a-CAT model, with upgrades every few months, almost a subscription!

Regarding the tools themselves, what I liked from SDLX was how it simplified things for the translator and what I liked from Trados was the scalability (in terms of response time) of their translation memory engine. What I disliked from SDLX was the little annoyances here and there of its features, which IMHO needed more testing before release and, from Trados, the feature-stagnation of the translator’s front-end. I’m anxious to see the outcome from this upcoming merger of tools. I’m also anxious to learn about the few CAT alternatives that are said to be in the pipeline, and that should hit the market over the next few months.