Here’s an interesting language blog from one college student with enough time on his/her hands (what, anOTHer one? Just wait till they get a job!).
Actually, his/her blog SHOULD be their job because there’s some great stuff there – e.g. the “Facebook / Twitter – interdits” entry. Ca vaut le détour, franchement.
Dubbing in the USA: http://silentschwa.com/2010/09/03/dubbing-is-the-devil/trackback/
Faceb*ok / Tw*tter: http://silentschwa.com/2011/06/16/facebook-et-twitter-interdits/trackback/
Fiona Graham writes on bbc.co.uk about the importance of using professional translators when translating your company’s website.
What your “afterthought” translation process could look like.
Or you could call the professionals.
Citing one UK-based company: “you need to get one good person that speaks that language really well” and “I speak French so it was easy for me to determine someone is the right person to have”, language services professionals will have their heads in their hands. What a revelation! Here’s another big secret that you probably haven’t stumbled upon yet: When going to school or to an important meeting, bring a PEN! (Success not guaranteed.)
That’s about how basic this information is, and equally how much of a foregone conclusion it should be. But as the article reveals, most companies, even multimillion-$ turnover companies, have no idea how to go about translating one of their most fundamental marketing tools, yet they virtually all THINK they know.
Unfortunately, the article just scratches the surface and does not go into the essentials of specialisation. Website translation today requires a range of expertise: in translating AND proofreading in each of the language pairs and in the field of activity concerned, in target-language SEO, in website architecture & coding, in multimedia, in imagery localisation, in page layout, etc.
For “the right person”, read “the right company”, with all the necessary expertise.
Also under-emphasised in the article – It is absolutely essential to get professional advice before taking the first step, as professional linguistic management companies may otherwise have to UNDO a lot of what has been done, even down to the website architecture, in order to provide a professional, scalable, futureproof and efficient translated site.
Ideally, moving to multilingual should be a step that is forward-planned to coincide with a major overhaul of your company website. That way the architecture will be designed to be multilingual from the foundations up.
Professional website translation, to be efficient and ultimately profitable, is NOT something to be added as an afterthought, otherwise it may only offer the kind of return that the example in the article offers (+20% overseas trade for +400% market size).
Probably because they got “the right person”!
Very good observation by Patricia Ryan on the downside of English-language domination:
http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/28/dont-insist-on-english-patricia-ryan-on-ted-com/
Suite à la visite dans nos locaux il y a quelques jours de l’équipe de France 3, et au plateau télé que le PDG de Caractères Et Caetera, M. Vincent Renard, partagera avec le maire de Morlaix et le Député Européen, Agnès Le Brun, vous pourrez suivre un sujet sur notre société sur France 3 Ouest ce samedi 12 février, entre 10h30 et 10h55, avec un accent fort sur l’activité de VoxAppeal, service de traduction et linguistique pour l’audiovisuel.
Avec peut-être des réponses aux questions que vous ne nous avez pas encore posées !
Si vous ratez l’émission ou que vous êtes hors de la Bretagne, vous pourrez dans les jours suivant la diffusion, la revoir sur le site de France 3, à cette adresse : http://bretagne.france3.fr/info/la-voix-est-libre—bretagne-64545437.html?onglet=videos
Allez-hop ! Réveil pour 10h, un bon café, secouez les coussins et installez-vous…
Just to add a little clarity to your misty vision of a specialisation that draws from several distinct activity sectors, just take a peek at some of the samples now up on the VoxAppeal channel on YouTube.
Included are brief HD 1080p and 720p renditions of some of our customized subtitling options, excerpts from TV reports & interviews with some of our staff & management, and some samples of older stuff (just to show how far the industry has come in just 3-4 years).
There are billions (nearly) of our projects that have NOT been uploaded so as to protect our clients’ media, intellectual property & copyrights. But a short list of just some recent projects include media translation and localisation for the likes of Microsoft, PagesJaunes Group, Streamwide, Société Générale, Bouygues Construction, Brainsonic, Fleishman-Hillard, BIVB wines, Pierre et Vacances, Sofrel, Teoxane and more, but this first glance into the global world of media internationalisation may give you a little more than an inkling of what we’re about.
More to come of course, so you’re more than welcome to tag along!
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Go to VoxAppeal.com
Whether it’s a contract, a company video or a cookbook, you can never underestimate the value of professional proofreading!
VoxAppeal‘s seasonal offerings to our clients in this challenging and changing climate:
Bold, Frankness, Sense and Mirth
Bold – is our aggressive, competitive pricing and responsiveness.
Frankness – in the detail of our prices and services and in consulting meticulously with you on your projects.
Sense – Our processes and methodology are continuously re-examined to ensure logical traceability, efficiency and economic precision.
Mirth – …and all in an enjoyable spirit of commitment to the challenge.
But of course, that’s not all!
VoxAppeal has further refined its multimedia expertise and support base so as to be able to return your avi, mp4 or Flash videos (amongst others) in a range of multilingual formats including swf and flv with embedded or selectable languages, voiced or subtitled (or both).
Our REMOTE INTERPRETING and RECORDING service now offers you remote CONFERENCE INTERPRETING at a snip of what live local interpreting cost you before.
Our TRANSCRIPTION and TRANSLATION services, hot off the heels of several major new contracts in several spheres including banking, are further developing their specific (e.g. financial) translation tools.
All this with the added bonus of a major customisable Translation Memory tool, ensuring greater consistency throughout each client’s specialised project portfolio.
In short – quality, turnaround times and budgets that have been decidedly reined in, leaving you to enjoy what you do best.
Whatever your media – web, video, audio or text – and whatever your event, product or service, our sackful of language media tools will take it to a new horizon.
En tout cas, il semble qu’entre le moment où j’écris ceci et le moment où vous le lirez, les outils de marketing vidéo n’auront pas cessé d’évoluer !
Les derniers chiffres des recherches Forrester exposés dernièrement lors du récent webinar de Brightcove démontrent la tendance et révèlent un dynamisme fort dans le sens de l’exploitation poussée de la vidéo sur internet à des fins commerciales et de marketing. Le webinar a cité des exemples tirés d’une vingtaine de secteurs et a décortiqué le process d’application, de suivi et de contrôle de la webvidéo avec les capacités “Web 2.0″ d’intégration et interaction et donc sa grande pouvoir d’accroche sur l’internaute à travers le divertissement.
Sous-titrage vidéo sur le Web – Cliché d’une vidéo récente, sous-titrée pour Brainsonic, par VoxAppeal
Les exemples cités font ressortir des augmentations de conversion, non pas dans les virgules, mais de l’ordre de 20 à 1000 % et des indices de satisfaction considérablement améliorés.
Quelques-uns des chiffres les plus intéressants de ce Webinar (qui est résumé en anglais ici), au hasard :
Mais ça, c’est le présent. L’institut de recherche britannique Coda, prévoit que d’ici 2017, la consommation de vidéos sur le web dépassera les 1,8 exaoctets (milliards de GO, si vous ne le saviez pas)… par mois ! Et ceci essentiellement sur des appareils mobiles.
Entre temps, il est intéressant de constater que, pour toute société sérieuse qui ne se freine pas à ses propres frontières, la vidéo en ligne est d’ores et déjà visible dans toutes les langues dans tous les pays et que sa traduction et localisation, par la superposition de voix ou de sous-titres, se fait facilement et professionnellement à moindre coût, si on trouve la bonne adresse du spécialiste qui intègre la traduction et l’audiovisuel !
Il ne fait donc aucun doute que l’expérience du Web s’annonce bien plus dynamique qu’on la connait actuellement et passera inexorablement par la vidéo. Après… The world is your oyster !
Et à l’aube du salon E-Commerce à Paris ce mois-ci, c’est une vraie mise en bouche.
It’s definitely not television, is it?
In fact, although I watch TV less and less, whenever I do, I now get this strange, vacuous, helpless sensation, from the knowledge that despite all my best reflexes, I cannot change or interact with what is happening in front of me.
I can’t tell the producers what I think of their programme, I can’t personalise news/information/documentaries to the items I want to hear about. I can’t return to the weather for my region if I’ve missed it… and the channel has no idea what I really want to see; they’re just happy to dilute it to the lowest common denominator among their target audience…
And I can’t submit my own material to them even where the channel is close to my issues of interest.
With WebTV, however, I can submit content to a number of Web video channels dedicated to my specific audience, interact with viewers, change, improve and adapt my content, on my own channel, on various hosts. (My own example: http://www.metacafe.com/channels/VoxAppeal/)
The question remains though, with social network hosting services exploding in such numbers that it’s getting harder & harder to keep up: Are they losing the focal impact that they have had until now?
Before they’ve even mastered the means of reaching across cultural boundaries?
Several Buzz sites are cross-linked – WordPress to Twitter, Twitter to Facebook and Facebook to YouTube, etc., but as they cross-link and multiply (see the “Share” list below), the walls dividing each language group from the next are as high as ever. If not higher still, as the impression of comprehensive reach to anything that matters is greater than ever, so you just don’t know what you’re missing on the other side of that wall. In fact, we no longer even notice the wall because we think that the whole world is speaking in our own language.
I have noticed that some subjects are better covered in specific language communities than in others. English is of course the most widespread, but still only accounts for about half of all web content, including content created by 2nd-language English writers. But for example, I have found a huge amount of information on Web programming on French sites and forums, and the Japanese are way ahead of the rest in terms of digital subtitling techniques, software and references (drawing from a rich Manga culture, no doubt). I can’t begin to list what I am missing in languages I don’t understand, let alone emphasise the importance of simply understanding the cultural particularities of each community.
“I hate America” – How others see us?
Also extremely useful would be to know, for example, how Iranians, Chinese or Latvians report their news and views, in contrast to how the English contributions to Twitter, WordPress and the BBC report them.
Maybe that final frontier of networking, the language barrier, could be crossed with the creation of a global translingual social network (the fact that “translingual” just showed up underlined in red tells me it really is a more foreign concept than I had imagined!)?
Or maybe what we need is an optional tweak at the root of Google (or any other search engine) allowing the search of translations of websites into the searcher’s language, before displaying the list?
Or maybe both would be required before either could work properly?
In the interim, it feels like we are sinking into that TV-sofa passivity again, where we’re happy with what we’ve got, because it’s a bit better than what we had before. At least until, eventually, frustration sets in again.
Enfin, ça viendra, un jour.
ﺎﺒﻳﺮﻗ ءﺎﻘﻠﻟا ﻰﻟا
AuBlogEtc. Silent Shwa
