From Babylon to the age of agile translation

Ever since the Tower of Babel, people have sought to overcome language barriers. In those days, news was shared via word-of-mouth at the pace of the swiftest runner. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and information travels around the world at the speed of light via the cloud, consumed by users on the Web and on mobile devices.

Text by Jack Welde

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From Babylon to the age of agile translation

Image 1: The confusion of tongues/ Image 2: © Jirsak/ istockphoto.com

We live in the age of the dynamic Web, where content is created and updated on a continuous basis. Publishing organizations have become very good at content creation and distribution, just as software engineers have become very good at iterative development and rapid deployment. Unfortunately, the translation industry has not evolved as quickly. The age-old problem has intensified: how does translation keep up with the lightning-fast pace of content change?

Take Apple for instance. The company tops Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful brands and has an international presence across 126 regional sites. When Apple releases a new product, or updates its website, content must be available immediately, customized for each region. Beyond just translation, each new release involves a slew of localization challenges including currencies, cultural nuances, date and numeric formats, and ...