27. Weaving a Multilingual Web

Translators of the world, unite! Or so a Honolulu-based software company would have them.

Professional language translators labor in a business that is unorganized and haphazard. Most are freelancers, contracting with book publishers, marketing companies, product document producers, or anyone else requiring language translation. While many large cities boast resources for translation, like the German cultural center Goethe Institute, corporations looking for professional translators usually hire locally, especially for the more obscure languages. The result is that language translation remains one of the few services in the globalized economy not networked in a significant way.

World Point, a management-software developer, wants to change that by consolidating the language-translation business. Deploying its network of 6 000 independent translators from around the world, the company can translate a corporate Web site into potentially 75 languages and then provide software to manage the resulting multilingual site.

World Point's Passport software works like other Web-site management packages, offering webmasters a way to centrally administer Web development, such as iteration controls, HTML authoring, reporting, cookie manipulation, and a built-in database-scripting language. Where the software distinguishes itself is in its ability to support multiple languages. The multilingual-content management tool has such innovations as single-click language addition, easy localization to target languages using the company's translation service, speedy language importation, and an automatic language search engine and site map generation.

"Before the Internet, translators were limited to their local translation shops," said Michael Demetrios, chief architect at World Point. "Our system is designed to facilitate collaboration. You can use someone locally, but you really don't want someone who left, say, Germany, 15 years ago and isn't current on the latest words. Especially on the Web, new words are coming into languages at a very fast rate."

The translation business is set to boom, according to researchers. The market for text-based language translation is predicted to climb from US$10.4 billion in 1998 to $17.2 billion in 2003, according to a report recently released by Allied Business Intelligence, an analyst group in Oyster Bay, New York. The Internet has spurred the explosive growth of translation, according to the report, calling it the "single most significant future market" for translation.

World Point, whose customers include Kodak and Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, plans to capture part of that growth by offering the largest network of independent translators.

World Point pays its translators by the word. Asian languages cost more than European, and the average cost to establish a multilingual Web site usually runs from $20 000 to $1 million. The company's translators are proficient in everything from Spanish to dead languages like Old English. World Point guarantees the sites will read fluently and be culturally sensitive.

World Point's software leverages economies of scale by allowing translators to work as a team, with each translator converting about 2 000 to 3 000 words a day into another language. Despite the logic of networking, translators remain wary of affiliating their services with centralized companies, according to Demetrios. "A lot of them are watching us to see how it goes," he says.

If the Internet is responsible for translators finding more business at their doorsteps, computers also provide a cautionary flip side: speeding the day in which consolidation and specialization will be necessary. Automation in particular may play a role in the conversion of the translation business from mom-and-pop operators to an organized industry.

While Demetrios dismisses the near-term impact of computer-translation software, the European Union reports that machine translation of documents rose from 2 000 pages in 1988 to 250 000 pages last year.