Oops!

We add Twitter to our home page & this happens! Not our fault, surely?

And now this:

Où en est le Marketing Vidéo ?

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 :

• Augmentation de 1,5 % à 15 % des internautes qui passent “à l’acte” et visitent le produit montré quand il s’agit d’une vidéo (société de vente de cheminées), donc conversions x10
• 45 % d’amélioration des ventes (société de produits de mariage)
• 24 % de baisse des produits retournés (boutique de e-commerce)

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.

Brightcove – B2B Marketing with Video

View more presentations from brightcovecp.

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Viral video buzz networking thingummy quoi?

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

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Reset or Overload

It just has to be said – good translation is more important than you think!

Whether in the form of mistranslated policy, misinterpreted interviews, misleading subtitles, or in this case, just one word to sum up the new US-Russian Relationship…

Just take a look here at how big a gaffe can become without proofreading, and re-proofreading, and still more proofreading:

Reset/ПЕРЕГРУЗКА

www.VoxAppeal.com

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Mumbai Mayhem –

Westerners, Indians, Hindus, Jews, Moslems, Christians…

United.

The sight of cheering crowds of Indians – whether Hindu, Moslem, Sikh or whatever, outside Nariman House, the Mumbai base of Chabad-Lubavitch, the Jewish outreach group, when the news came over that the building had been secured by Indian security forces, was immensely encouraging for the health of inter-cultural and inter-religious relations worldwide.

When any believer of any (or no) religion recognises that every individual’s own right to believe whatever seems right to them and to express themselves through their beliefs is a sacrosanct fundamental human right, the rest of us can feel we have something profoundly in common with them.

This is why it is quite possible that the terrorist acts in Mumbai may well have the opposite effect to what the organisers may have had in mind. I say the “organisers” because in every case like this, the terrorists themselves – usually young, lost, impressionable males fuelled by adrenalin and testosterone, and the promise of some virtual “redemption” – are lemmings. Sheep to the slaughter. Fodder for someone else’s political/”religious” agenda.

That doesn’t excuse them. Rather, it is a reminder that every young (and not so young) adult needs to regularly re-examine & question his/her beliefs and influences, keep their feet on the ground and always afford a measure of doubt for their Gurus, however much they claim self-righteousness and some divine authority, and whatever their belief.

Ultimately, however, political leaders can capitalise on this event (excuse the term) by solidifying their relationships with one another, across all territorial, cultural and religious boundaries, and by displaying this solidarity as the best possible weapon in defeating any sympathy for the terrorist agenda. The terrorists concerned may have carried Indian, Pakistani, British, Mauritian, or other passports, but it should be accepted that they do not represent these nations – you can find violent, disorientated and impressionable individuals in every society.

But will we be adult enough to refrain from the knee-jerk responses which only nourish the divisive terrorist agenda? Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would do well to keep his accusing finger down long enough to develop a bipartisan response with his neighbours. The reaction to 9/11 was a severe lesson that we could all learn from. From Al Qaeda’s point of view, it was probably even better than 9/11 itself!

Yes, the hunt for the organisers must go on, but as a child, I was always told to count to 10 when I felt angry and violent. That’s surely not too long to wait to get a wide coordinated reaction across international, religious and cultural boundaries?

www.VoxAppeal.com

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Translation in media turmoil

The development of the Internet, the explosion in bandwidth and the massive development of related software tools over the last few years have taken translation and localisation to dizzy heights of necessary expertise… while the vast majority of language graduates and undergraduates are still a long way from the ground-level reality of what these new technologies require in terms of translation (I use the term loosely).

There was a time when 2 languages and a typewriter would suffice.

Many still believe that 2 languages and a computer will do the job. But when a client requires translation of their specialised Rich Media website with Flash videos in PHP containers and SMIL captions rendered in 11 languages with time-coded voiceovers (some dubbed, some phrase-synced) and subtitles (some optional & some embedded), to begin with… requiring a dozen separate software programmes and formats to handle with the highest mutual conversion fidelity and lowest manageable margin of error, not to mention the essential project directives to the individual translators… Let’s face it, your Vista + Word just ain’t up to it any more.

But the technology involved is not the main stumbling block. That is the personnel: translators specialised in audio/video/multimedia techniques (or A/V/M engineers specialised in translation/localisation) are hard to come by, despite this being perhaps the sector of both industries with the highest growth potential.

The role of translation project manager, too, traditionally the logical next career step for an experienced in-house translator, requires new scope, responsibility and expertise as the field of localisation itself grows.

To the point, perhaps, that multi-faceted localisation management will require engineer-level training and status. Is that what translators want?

www.voxappeal.com/

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Hi all!

This is just a quick word to say that, well, whatever else I have to say, I’ll be saying it later, as this blog’s been up for about 52 seconds at the time of writing. (Make that 1′04″ now…) Main issues are audio/video/multimedia – in all languages (yes, guess what – the Internet has no borders!): Translating, recording, voiceovers, subtitling, techniques, business, communication, issues, how-tos, advice, questions & answers… as well as news, views & brews, general comments, off-the-wall, farfalutin’ ideas & inventions of all sorts, politics, environment & energy (or lack of it), sport, Internet & no doubt the odd senseless rant! Make your suggestions anytime, or just come check in again from time to time.

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