Last month, SDL announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Language Weaver Inc. (“Language Weaver”), a pioneer in statistical machine translation. While the press release and accompanying FAQ detail a lot of the rationale behind this acquisition, we’d like to give a brief explanation on the impact of this acquisition for users of SDL Tridion.

The web has hugely increased the amount of content that organizations publish. Diversification of product portfolios, shortening of product life cycles, increased global reach and an increase in the amount of targeted marketing are just a few factors that have contributed to this content growth.

Translating all of this content for all markets simply isn’t cost-effective or even feasible. This is where machine translation comes in. Machine translation allows organizations to make more content available in more languages, albeit in a lower quality of translation.

Use cases for machine translation are numerous, but the most obvious ones are:

• User-generated content that resides on corporate websites

• Product descriptions

• Support content, such as knowledge bases and FAQ’s

• Less-read marketing content

• Website content for smaller or emerging markets

Obviously not all content is suited for machine translation: for high-quality high-visibility content human translation will be better (though translators may still use machine translation to get an initial rough draft translation).

Ad-hoc machine translation is already available for SDL Tridion customers through SDL Tridion World: an eXtension is available there that provides an integration with FreeTranslation.com. FreeTranslation.com is SDL’s free translation website and uses Language Weaver as its machine translation engine. More seamless integrations can also be achieved, see, for example, how TripAdvisor uses Language Weaver to translate user generated content on their site.