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

By Charles Wooters of NextIT and Daniel Marcu of Language Weaver, 07/17/09

Virtual agents can engage with customers anywhere in the world in any language and through any communication channel. The good ones have all the right answers, and they embody the best qualities of your best human agents. They can handle huge volumes of customer queries, save money and time, shorten hold times and keep customers from wandering away to competitors. What’s not to like?

Read the article by Charles and Daniel on CRM Buyer and E-Commerce Times.

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.

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.