Profiled: iLanguage
www.ilanguage.com
President and CEO: Marc Bautil
Number of Employees: 50
Founded: 1999

Coming up with an accurate translation of a marketing spiel might be demanding, but consider the work and expertise that must come into play to accurately translate and customize information for all of the different types of documents an organization might have—including Web content, technical manuals, software, multimedia presentations, customer communications, and marketing materials. For companies that desire to have a global reach, the need to get fast, cost-effective translations of content is critical to their profitability.

Helping companies bridge their language gaps is the goal of iLanguage, a company that provides translation and localization solutions to businesses and governments on a worldwide basis. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California with operations around the world, the company relies upon a team of translators and editors that can produce quality translations in 12 languages—nine European languages and three Asian, including Japanese, two forms of Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Korean.

While it has been battered throughout the past several years for all the things it hasn't lived up to, the Internet has emerged as one of the fastest and most cost-effective vehicles to market products and move content. iLanguage is positioned to meet the needs of the growing digital economy, and companies with Web sites recognize that using English alone will not be sufficient to reach other cultures effectively.

"At its core, iLanguage is a company that is focused on adapting content for different languages and into different languages," says CEO Marc Bautil. "Our mission is really to enable content to move across languages and also to move across platforms."

This includes a partnership with MSNBC.com, a leading Internet news site that is syndicated to more than 100 countries. iLanguage uses its own proprietary computer-aided translation technology in combination with its in-house team of translators and multilingual news editors to deliver editorial-quality, localized stories. Additionally, companies such as Warner Brothers use iLanguage to offer a variety of entertainment content. "We help them localize their content," Bautil says. "The nature of these companies is to create top value content that consumers around the world want. We help them move into those markets so it goes beyond just translation and localization, but we also help them to understand the local markets to make sure that the message they want to bring across or whatever properties they are promoting in those regions is done in the correct way." And while a technical manual might not require as much finesse to translate as a lyrical poem might, getting the words right means hiring skilled translators and editors who can tailor the translations to meet specific markets. And for Web content, it's not just simply the words, but the code behind the words, including meta-tags and infrastructure concerns.

Sending the Right Message
A humorous tale of translation gone awry can be found in iLanguage's own white paper on the subject, illustrating the fact that words and concepts are not as easy to translate as one might think. Example: The Parker Pen Company had an ad it was marketing to Mexico. The slogan to be translated was, "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." Unfortunately, the company used a Spanish word that is often used to describe another uncomfortable condition. So the catchy phrase became: "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant." As the Parker Pen scenario so clearly illustrates, in order to become effective globally, a company must be able to depend on a translation that will understand not just the language, but also the subtleties of that language to have the desired impact on an audience.

Although the company uses automation and technology tools, CEO Bautil believes that the human touch is still crucial to produce a superior product. "A mistake some of our bigger competitors have made in the industry is to try and present automatic machine translation as a panacea," Bautil says. "Obviously, translation can be costly because of the human-intensive nature of it. So they try to present two options to the customer—either you pay full price for top human translation or you pay almost nothing for the machine translation process. We think it's more of a process that is something in between. We constantly optimize the technology solution in order to improve the process, but the end goal is always to deliver top translation quality to our customers. Our clients are corporations, Fortune 1000, technology and entertainment companies that have a lot to lose for bad localization of their message and their product." In short, no virile pens allowed.

End-to-End Globalization Solutions
iLanguage is also working with companies that offer other types of content-centric solutions, such as WebEx Communications, a leader in Internet infrastructure for interactive business communications. By partnering with iLanguage, WebEx implement- ed a Web conferencing solution that could support multiple languages in a single Web meeting, enabling users to work in the language of their choice. The partnership also involves a complete translation of Web page content, localized graphics and coding, translation of collateral documents and forms, and voiceover development of the company's training modules. WebEx currently has support for French, German, Japanese, Korean, and traditional and simplified Chinese languages.

"We are working with a number of companies like WebEx to try to provide as comprehensive a solution as possible," Bautil says. "For instance, a Web site can be published in English and can then have a tie-in to an interface of the customer's publishing environment so content will flow through our translation process and be available directly in the customer's environment to publish in the different languages."

While iLanguage's Bautil admits that today's current economic climate has caused companies to become more circumspect in how they go about translating and localizing content, the need to do so continues to grow. He gives the example of Oracle, a leading provider of systems software, including database management, application development, and application server software that has Web sites around the world. "For instance, they have a Web site that is published in English, but yet when you go into the French Web site, I would say that about half to two-thirds of the information is not even available in French for those customers," Bautil says. "And you're talking about government customers, multi-nationals, and French companies that oftentimes need to be able to view content in their own language. But the issue here is not just the cost of translation," he says, "it's also the whole automation into the enterprise environment and also making that information available on the Web site and also different platforms for print, multimedia, and CD-ROM platforms."

iLanguage helps companies determine how best to maximize their efforts and to decide how many languages to translate content into. "You have to look at the return-on-investment so that's why we always try to advise our customers based on our experience and understanding of different markets," he says. "There's a lot at stake for a lot of these companies, and whether they're American or European, the global markets are definitely a reality today. So, if a company decides not to invest money into a specific language market, then it may lose a multiple of that in revenues and profitability."