Language Weaver today released a translated list of 25 frequently used phrases fans can use to communicate their feelings and reactions around the World Cup. Given the universal appeal of the game, these phrases empower fans from around the globe to share in both the glory and agony of the game and transcend national borders.

The list – which includes translations for phrases like “That’s got to be a penalty” and “Take a shot!” – is available in languages such as English, Spanish and Japanese. To download the full list of translated phrases, click here.

“Millions of people across the globe are going to be captivated by this year’s tournament for the World Cup, but they may be hampered by their ability to communicate in multiple languages at any one time,” said Mark Tapling, CEO of Language Weaver. “Through translation, we are hoping to bring together fans from around the globe by enabling them to more easily communicate while watching the World Cup.”

Download Popular Translated Phrases For 2010 FIFA World Cup >>

Yes, that is right – Language Weaver was just named a finalist for innovation in knowledge management by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). The announcement was made today at the Technology Services World conference in Santa Clara, CA.

What’s our innovation?

Our innovation - GlobalConnect™ –  integrates trusted automated translation, into existing knowledge base applications.

What does that really mean?

Instead of going through a bunch of manual steps to get online support content translated, content managers can initiate automated translations from within the content publishing process. Translations are requested from and returned directly to the KB application. Translations are returned within seconds with a quality score –the TrustScore. The translations can be routed (based on the TrustScore) for publication, review, legal approval, or other directions as needed. Even if the content owner doesn’t know the foreign language of the translated content, the score helps them know what they should do with the content.

Sounds cool, right?!

Here is what John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research at TSIA had to say about the innovation:

“The services industry is transforming,” said John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for TSIA.” “What worked a year or two ago is no longer enough to respond to the volatile economy and keep pace with technology advancements. Language Weaver is demonstrating the kind of successful strategies, tactics, and approaches that the industry can look to as we navigate new challenges and opportunities.”

Wondering where you can find GlobalConnect?

We recently released GlobalConnect^TM for RightNow® CX, the customer experience suite.

Knowledge base owners that use RightNow Technologies Web Experience solutions for knowledge base Answers are able to:

· Reduce publishing times for multilingual content

· Enable monolingual speakers to be a multilingual content publishers

· Reduce translation overhead by automating the translation for support content

· Publish all knowledge base content in multiple languages, at trusted quality levels

A 90 second demo of GlobalConnect™ for RightNow® CX is available at:
http://www.languageweaver.com/flash/GlobalConnectDemo.html

*Stay tuned – the winner will be announced Wednesday, May 5.

Daniel Marcu, co founder and CTO of Language Weaver discusses new government initiatives to meet the growing and evolving needs for this market.

Daniel Marcu, CTO

For those of you that are fans of NBC’s “The Office,” it probably comes as no surprise that fans have taken the fictional storyline from one of the episodes into the real world.

As reported by the New York Times over the weekend, Schrute farms, a fictional beet farm (turned bed & breakfast for one episode) has drawn and astonishing number of reviews on the popular travel review site TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com).

For loyal fans of “The Office,” around the world, Language Weaver has taken this spoof a step further. We have taken Schrute Farms global! Using trusted automated translation solutions trained for user reviews, Language Weaver automatically translates the English reviews into several languages. This has enabled fans globally to participate in this extension of the story line.

To write your own review or see what others have to say about their “visit,” check out Schrute Farms on the TripAdvisor site.

To see some of the reviews translated by Language Weaver, visit the pages below – look for the “translated by Language Weaver” icon.
• Spanish
• Italian
• French

Swamy Viswanathan discusses important things Website owners need to consider to get the most value out of their content, how to get value out of translated content and how a recent update from Google adds more control for site owners.

Swamy Viswanathan, Vice President of Products

Daniel Marcu, co-founder and CTO of Language Weaver, shares his thoughts on science and multilingual communication with Melania Dragan of Radio Cluj in a July 3, 2009 broadcast (interview in Romanian):

Observator Stiintific, Radio Cluj: Stiinta Traducerii Automate si a Comunicarii Multilingve

Daniel Marcu, Chief Technology Officer la Language Weaver, impartaseste cu Melania Dragan, Radio Cluj, gandurile sale despre stiinta, traducere automata, si comunicare multilingva:

>> Subscribe to the Language Weaver podcast

By Chris Bucholtz, Director, CRM Content, Focus

As I said in my last post, we can get so fixated on introducing new CRM technologies that we forget about one of the other underlying tenets or modern business – that of expanding into new markets. Nothing presents a bigger barrier to that than language. There are few things that say “I really don’t care that much about you as a customer” than the inability to speak that customer’s language. But that’s what many companies are forced to do every day. Translation costs a lot, and at a certain point you have to limit the number of languages you can support.

Are there ways to leverage technology to get around this? There are, and one of them owes its existence to the war in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban in 2002, the U.S. military brought back a lot of documents in Arabic – “a boxcar full of them,” according to Mark Tapling, president and CEO of Language Weaver. A request for a proposal was issued for technology to help in translating this material; Tapling and his team built a statistical engine that could perform source-to-target translation from Arabic into English, thus creating the platform that became Language Weaver.

The product now is an on-demand translation system that had 72 different targeted combinations of languages. The software can be “trained,” not just for the ideosyncracies of particular languages but also for specific industries, ensuring that even jargon can survive the translation process. Since it’s on-demand, Language Weaver is responsible for the computing power needed to complete translations, not individual users.

Read the rest of the article about Language Weaver here.

SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq:SPSS), the leading global provider of Predictive Analytics software and solutions, today announced that its Predictive Text Analytics customers now have access to translation services on demand through its partnership with Language Weaver. The software as a service (SaaS) delivery mechanism enables market researchers and organizations that gather survey feedback in many languages to receive cost-effective and precise high-speed translation capabilities.

With the use of this service, customers can now obtain automated translation of unstructured data sources (open-ended survey responses, call center notes, email, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis and social networks) across 30 languages into common English in order to fully understand preferences, motivations and intentions on a global scale.

Swamy Viswanathan, vice president of products at Language Weaver, said, “Language Weaver is pleased to be pairing our powerful automated translation technology with world class Predictive Analytics from SPSS to enable companies to quickly analyze and act on multilingual customer feedback from across the globe within a single application. Together, we enable companies to listen to the Voice of the Customer, in the language of the customer, and convert it into action through appropriate response.”

You can read the complete news release here.

Avatar Firm Next IT to Incorporate Language Weaver’s Solution

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor
TMCnet.com

Avatars who understand natural-language-posed questions via IVR and the Web are becoming the next generation ‘customer service assistants’: personalizing the interface between humans and machines.

Thanks to a new strategic partnership between avatar developer Next IT and Language Weaver, which provides statistically-based automated language translation, these avatars will now communicate in the tongue of customers’ choice. With Spanish, French, and increasingly Chinese being used in North America and with customers from all over the world interacting with firms via the Internet, this solution is timely and needed. It is much less expensive to use multilingual avatars than multilingual agents or translators and more convenient to communicate with customers via them if they are on your Web site compared with asking them to call.

Read the complete TMCnet.com article about NextIT and Language Weaver here.

There’s a good chance you have seen virtual customer support avatars that organizations like the US Army (via “Sergant Star”), Continental Airlines and Merrill Lynch are using to communicate with their customers. These sophisticated avatars are powered by NextIT. You type or ask a question and the virtual customer service specialist – the “ActiveAgent” – verbally answers your question for you and provides written answers and links as well.

Today Language Weaver is pleased to announce is that NextIT’s ActiveAgent virtual customer service reps will be able to communicate across scores of different languages thanks to Language Weaver’s automated translation software.

By implementing Language Weaver’s technology, Next IT customers will be able to enhance user experience by answering a user’s natural language questions across multiple languages with incredible accuracy.

Read the complete media release here.