#Internet Marketing Consultant, among others at Globalink, a company specialized
in language translation software and services
Randy Hobler has been a consultant in Internet& marketing at IBM, Johnson &
Johnson, Burroughs Wellcome, Pepsi, Heublein, etc. In 1998, he was an Internet
Marketing Consultant for Globalink, a company specialized in language
translation software and services. He wrote: "The joy for me is the ability to
combine my vocational skills in high-tech and marketing with avocational
interests like language into one. To love what you do and do what you love."
Globalink was bought by Lernout & Hauspie in 1999.
*Interview of September 3, 1998
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend
is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries,
but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing
use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.
Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is
bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of
multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call
"Language Nations"... all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for
whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language
nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of
Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco.
= Can you tell us about the future of machine translation?
We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate machine translation of
text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in computer platforms, and
even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the growth of the Web
slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and the saturation of
language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market, language
transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too limiting a
vision for those selling this technology. The next development will be
"transcultural, transnational transparency", in which other aspects of human
communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into
play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this
varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle means 'OK' in the United
States. In Argentina, it is an obscene gesture.
When the inevitable growth of multi-media, multi-lingual videoconferencing comes
about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit' gestures on the fly. The MIT
(Massachussets Institute of Technology) Media Lab, Microsoft and many others are
working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric access
identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a US business person
to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video conference to an
Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect Argentinian Spanish if he
makes the "O" gesture at the same time. Computers can intercept this kind of
thing and edit them on the fly.
There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of
these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other.
They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions,
clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc.
Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and
selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate
better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to
international understanding.
*Interview of September 10, 2000
= What do you think about e-books?
E-books continue to grow as the display technology improves, and as the hardware
becomes more physically flexible and lighter. Plus, among the early adapters
will be colleges because of the many advantages for students (ability to
download all their reading for the entire semester, inexpensiveness, linking
into exams, assignments, need for portability, eliminating need to lug books all
over).