‘Post No Bills.’ Translators could be forgiven for rendering this unusual phrase into its German, French or Japanese equivalent of ‘Mail No Invoices’.
This phrase is the American way of urging the public to desist from flyposting or billposting, equivalent to Britain’s ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted.’
Accurate translation incorporates cultural factors as well as linguistic conventions, and the many pitfalls involved in substituting one set of words for another are worth recalling now that machine translation is reaching critical mass. Already, some IROs have received requests for annual reports and other shareholder communications which, on the syntactical evidence, seem to have been composed by machine-assisted foreigners.
Powerful yet easy-to-use and affordable translation software is available for individuals and corporations alike. Software programs can translate dozens of languages rapidly and accurately. Some programs learn as they are corrected, can accept hundreds of thousands of technical terms and specialized dictionaries, and work in conjunction with speech recognition technology. Bowne & Co (www.bowne.com) swears by translation memory, from companies such as Trados (www.trados.com). This technology further speeds computer translation by remembering and automatically converting previously translated words and phrases.
Go global
The popular AltaVista search engine (www.altavista.digital.com) uses translation software from French company Systran to offer free translation to the masses. A ‘translation’ link appears on the opening page, and after a single mouse click, users key in the text to be translated and select among English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. The translation is delivered within seconds.
More than boosting the pen pal industry, this inware minimizes or removes language barriers generally, especially in searching for and then reading web pages. With AltaVista, when the translation is provided, the user is prompted by a hyperlink to ‘Use the above text to search the web.’ A simple mouse click starts the process.
This site further encourages users to ‘Visit international versions of the AltaVista search service for local and regional content. Search in Chinese – once you set your browser to read in Chinese, you can use our service to find pages in Chinese on the web.’ Korean and Japanese are other options.
Reba Rosenbluth, Systran sales and marketing manager in the firm’s California office, notes that searching can also be performed ‘by non-English speaking web surfers to search for, translate and understand English-written web content in real time.’
IROs who have received communications reliant on this software know that the translations can be partial or flawed. On AltaVista, ‘Post no bills’ came back in German as Geben sie keine Rechnungen bekannt and in French as Ne signalez aucune facture. When these phrases were then re-translated back into English, the results were ‘Post office No bills’ and ‘Do not announce any invoice’ respectively.
Oooh-la-la, le web
The machines can even stumble over simple words. Systran comfortably handled an English-to-French request for an annual report – Veuillez m’envoyer votre rapport annuel annuel – but inexplicably repeated the final word.
‘Machine translation is at best only 90 percent accurate grammatically. This makes it useful only for overviews of information, and unusable for legal documents or contracts,’ says Damian Lewis (damian@teamnetsol. com), web designer with Netsol, which manages the Halifax web site (www.halifax.co.uk). Bowne also relies on human rather than mechanical translators for financial or legal industry services.
Robert Minsky, executive vice president in charge of IR for translation specialist Berlitz, offers guarded praise for machine translation: ‘Most of the time software can tell from the context whether a bat is a wooden stick or a flying animal, but ‘most of the time’ isn’t good enough.’ And with Oriental languages, says Minsky, the probabilities are even lower: ‘With Japanese, an English word may have no equivalent, and you get five Japanese choices.’ A human has to intervene.
IRO Emi Takase at Hitachi in Tokyo is also skeptical: ‘I tried machine software but often you get very funny translations. French to English is not difficult, but with Japanese to English, I don’t know anyone who has found great software. It is better than nothing, but the translation generally is not satisfactory.’
Although Hitachi is global, ‘English is the most important language for us. We receive foreign-language communications by all methods – phone, fax, e-mail. 90 percent is in English.’ Hitachi sends its annual report and other shareholder communications to an outside firm for translation. But the process involves a constant back and forth between Hitachi and the external translators.
A major raison d’être for machine translation is to find a faster and cheaper alternative to human translators. For some web sites – newspapers, news and information aggregators, search engines and other internet dealers in mass volumes of information – translation is done by machine or not at all. Many of these sites traffic in hundreds of thousands of pages daily, and even if money were no object, there are simply not enough translators available to get the job done in time. Indeed, the market for machine translation is expected to top $1 bn by the year 2000.
For Hitachi as for many companies, the corporate name in the middle of the web address (www.hitachi.com) locates the corporate web site, which is in English. Actually, this is Hitachi’s American subsidiary. In Japan, the corporate web site is in Japanese.
A page of Japanese text appears on a Japan link on the Berlitz web site (www. berlitz.com), but this is a graphic, rather than actual text. The picture is a solid block; the individual words can’t be edited.
Bjorn Austraat, software localization specialist and web engineer at Berlitz, explains that, ‘Japanese characters are encoded in double-byte characters, and you need either a Japanese computer system or a utility enabling you to see Japanese characters on a western single-byte system.’ A shareware utility can be downloaded from www.njstar.com.au/njwin/download.htm.
Swedish electronics giant Ericsson has a single corporate web site (www.ericsson.com) in English. ‘We had a short period during which we translated much of our IR material into German and Spanish,’ explains Ericsson IRO Karin Almqvist Liwendahl, but this was stopped because of lack of demand. ‘People do fine with English. Swedish is a truly minority language. Who speaks it except Swedes? So we can’t push our domestic language.’ But Ericsson’s annual report and other shareholder communications are in Swedish and English on the web site. ‘If we did not have Swedish, we would have been criticized. One large group of internet users here are retired people who did not learn English in school. They want their native language.’
British retail group Kingfisher (www.kingfisher.co.uk) also has a sizeable body of French shareholders – because of its ownership of French supermarket group Darty – and the company obligingly communicates with them in their own language. Kingfisher has French pages for its annual report, corporate profile, and some help commands, such as those which assist people to register for e-mail.
‘I believe that, because of the French information on our web site, the French shareholders stayed with Kingfisher,’ says IR director Andrew Mills. ‘And I think it is also responsible for the fact that we picked up a solid number of new French institutional investors.’
Other UK companies are missing this potentially important opportunity. Mark Hill, director of the London-based IR Group, which manages the Kingfisher site, has conducted an informal survey: ‘Very few UK web sites cater for foreign investors or web site visitors. I examined 28 web sites of UK companies with total market capitalization of £440 bn – 40 percent of FTSE by market cap. Not a single site had a foreign language.’
Cat scans
According to Marc Bautil, senior marketing director at Belgian speech recognition and translation specialist Lernout & Hauspie (www.lhs.com), ‘Our engine can translate more than 1,000 pages per hour. We are conducting tests with Bloomberg, which already has some foreign language pages and may translate many more.’ Machine translation may allow tens of thousands of pages to be translated daily.
AltaVista already handles three million translations per week – an enormous number even if the total includes multiple requests from single users. Demand for translation software will almost certainly follow the path of e-mail – a sudden downpour after an initial trickle.
Documents translated by machine will flow out of IR departments as well as into them. With computer-aided translation (Cat) human translators polish machine translations. Giving the expensive grunt work to computers will transform cross-border investor relations. The question is not whether it will happen – but when.
