Can real-time language translation software turbo-charge Web revenues? EBSCO is about to find out.

Although it may be the mother tongue for relatively few people on the planet, English has come to dominate the Internet. But that was then. This is now. has to changeOverseas World Wide WebWorld Wide Web users—accent on the first "W," s’il vous plaîtiz—are proliferating rapidly enough that, according to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, a sister company to CXO Media, Inc. the publisher of CIO, by (DATE half of them will not be Americans. And Computer Economics(stet thru "Inc.") Computer Economics, Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif., predicts that by 2005, 57 percent of InternetWeb users will be non-English-speakersnot speak English.

Real-time, on- demand translation of wWeb documents into other languages has been a fantasy of anyone buying or selling on the wWeb. Successful translation services will trigger a flood of additional overseas revenues for one-language sites. And a privately held firm that sells everything from magazine subscriptions to fishing lures to hunting rifles to deer scent is leading the way.

EBSCO Industries, Inc. of Ipswich, Mass., a division of Birmingham, Ala.-based EBSCO Industries, this last month [October] is scheduled to unveiled a translate-on-demand feature for articles from 6,300 scientific journals. Think about all the non-English- speakers who want an original English document translated into their native tongue.

TThe new automatic translation feature EBSCO’will enable Wwill enable Web users to to click a "translate" button to request thatand have a specified article be translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese from its original English; EBSCO soon plans to add Chinese, Russian and Japanese to its repertoire. The on-the-fly translation capability is based on software purchased from Translation Language of Merrimack, N.H., running on a Windows NT server.

"EBSCO really is alone with this implementation," says Steven McClure, a research vice president at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, a sister company to CXO Media, the publisher of CIO. "[The technology]at should significantly expand [EBSCO’s]its revenue in the existing translation markets and the new ones that will be created by the globalization of the wWeb population. Other than a few small European ones, there are no other major products supporting cross-language information retrieval."

Colorful Hhistory

Launching real-time document translation services was not a haphazard activity for EBSCO. While the privately -held company has a colorful and eccentric history, beginning in the 1930s when Elton B. Stephens began a selling magazine subscriptions door to door in the South to pay law school tuition, its 4,000 employees working for 80 subsidiaries in 21 countries are anything but haphazard in their technology investment choices, according to EBSCO Publishing CIO Mike Gorrell.

"We don’t do much on a wing and a prayer around here," Gorrell says says. "We developed a solid business case that says the translation-on-demand product will pay for itself in two years and will make us tens of millions [of dollars] in five years." EBSCO officials predict that the company’sits overseas revenues from providing access to documents will increase to 40% of revenues from 10%, due to the increased number of articles to be accessible by non- English- speaking site visitors. Meanwhile, EBSCO’s the company’s licensing cost for the translation software will run around $100,000 a year, according to a Translation Language officials.

In addition to the cost-benefit analysis, EBSCO’s evaluation and implementation of translation software started began with a competitive bake-off: It rated the ability of six software packages to translate English into Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. To successfully test each language translation module, the companyit ran a series of medical and legal documents and 21 diverse sentences through the translation systems, and then 21 experienced translators evaluated the results. Technological compatibility and scalability were other criteria assessed in the EBSCO evaluation.

Interestingly, the EBSCO evaluators were not looking for the perfect translation score. As with horseshoes, close enough is good enough when it comes to translations. EBSCO’s goal was a "good" speed and accuracy performance rating of roughly 60 to -65 percent, although a small number of packages achieved 80 percent in a few of the tests.

"It’s very difficult to predict the accuracy of automatic machine-translated (AMT) documents," says Christoph Mosing, director of professional services for eTranslate, a San Francisco-based Web globalization solutions provider. "It all depends on the strength and the sophistication of the machine translation engine.

"Depending on the needs of the target audience, there’s a decision to be made between AMT and human translation. AMT can be done in real time, but you lose accuracy. Humans can’t translate in real time, but they’re much more accurate."

"If you look at the debates about AMT versus human, everyone prefers humans," says Judith Biewener, EBSCO’s director of business development. "But scale of our data and translating it into five languages obviously prevents it. We know machine translation is less than perfect. But we have to accept it."

Not Perfect p

According to Charles McGonagle, vice president of marketing for Transparent Language, foreign users need only the "gist" of an article, not a perfect 10. "It absolutely is not about getting every word translated correctly," McGonagle says. "It’s about making the translation-on-demand product useable and accessible."

Translation Language’s ease of use and Spanish capabilities led to its selection, according to Pete Marsh, EBSCO’s former director of wWeb development and design. "Spanish is our most used non-English language, and our market research indicated that we could expect the most access to our new package from people who wanted to translate English into Spanish."

EBSCO will monitor its web site traffic and wWeb revenue stream to determine if the translation- on- demand software is as big a revenue spinner as expected.

"We already know which users use which of our foreign language interfaces," notes Gorrell, explaining that it EBSCO has tracked the use of its Spanish articles by Spanish site visitors, and French articles by French speakers and so on, etc. "So it will be very easy to determine which ones are used more frequently after we add the new product. We also can track which [areas’] sales volume increases."

EBSCO won’t charge extra for the translation service. Gorrell notes that the company’s business model is to sell content, so it will make more money by selling more content. Gorrell views this new service as another example of how the company improves customer service. "We don’t get points for having the latest and the greatest," Gorrell says. "We get points for supporting customers."

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