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Thursday, December 29, 2011

Review: Most Popular Blog Posts from 2011

Blogs are about sharing with authenticity. A good blog can help you really connect deeply with your audience in a meaningful way because the content is not only relevant but insightful and personal. I think most enterprises miss that point. When you do it right, your customers will walk away not only having learned something new but will also feel much more connected to your brand.     David Armano EVP, Global Innovation & Integration at Edelman Digital
Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it. -- Erin Bury

 One of the things that I enjoy about blogging is the feedback that one gets, and the continuing and evolving  discussion that sometimes comes forth from these posts. I find it helps to clarify my thinking on what really matters, and the critical feedback one gets, on assumptions that may previously go unquestioned is very useful in just evolving my own thinking on these issues. The feedback and the rankings helps me, and others too, I think, to understand what strikes a chord in the reader community, and can also sometimes help to guide further evolutionary thinking on the subjects at hand. This is is a ranking of the most popular (Unique Visitors and Page Views) posts of the year based on the data provided by Google Analytics.
  1. Analysis of the Shutdown Announcements of the Google Translate API and the subsequent posts on what this may mean for the translation industry were by far the most popular posts of the year. The original post authored by Dion Wiggins was also referenced by the Atlantic and  other mainstream media and still continues to be an influential view on the announcement today, probably much more so than any other publicly offered opinion in the professional translation industry.
  2. The Continuing Saga & Evolution of Machine Translation was coverage of the IMTT 7th Conference in Cordoba triggered active debates and discussions MT, automation and translator compensation in several forums and clearly struck a chord for many.
  3. The Future of Translation Memory (TM) is a posting that continues to receive high new visit rates long after it was originally published.
  4. The Building Momentum for Post-Edited Machine Translation (PEMT) a number of case studies on the increasing use of post-edited MT to meet business timeliness and production cost requirements.
  5. Has Google Translate Reached the Limits of its Ongoing Improvement? More evidence that more data Is not always better especially for MT, but even for Search, and the many reasons to consider the data quality, yet again.
  6. The Growing Interest & Concern About the Future of Professional Translation About reactions to the changes underway in translation
  7. Standards: the Importance of Measurement A guest post by Valeria Cannavina on how standards can drive quality improvements
  8. The Moses Madness and Dead Flowers A post that questions some of the assumptions made by “instant Moses” advocates and challenges the long-term value of these experiments. Strong opinions voiced in the comments.
  9. Translation Crowdsourcing An exploration of the driving forces underlying successful translation crowdsourcing efforts.
  10. An Exploration of Post-Editing MT – Part I Discussion on the nature and compensation of post-editing MT work.
Please Repeat: Influence is NOT Popularity --  Brian Solis

While reader traffic is one way to measure the impact of articles, there are also other ways that capture the relative influence of individual posts. PostRank is one such measure that I think monitors how others reference the posts, and monitors where and when content generates meaningful interactions across the web. They provide a truer picture of the relative influence and impact of individual blog posts, and thus I include the latest PostRank snapshot here. (You can link to the posts through the table on the right of this blog text).  This table shows that some articles that may not have had high direct readership may actually be much more useful to readers and it is interesting to see how different the two lists are though it is clear that the analysis of the Google Translate API shutdown/pay-wall was a major hit no matter how you look at it. 

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It is also interesting to note that some older posts continue to strike a chord with readers and remain active in terms of visibility because the themes are longer lived and also perhaps because they ring true. The original post on standards and some of the posts discussing disintermediation were also posts that generate continuing interest and continue to show up in both the Google Analytics and PostRank ratings.

I have noticed that we are getting more clarity on post-editing MT work in many different ways including new models for more equitable compensation. I am hoping to highlight best practices in this area in the coming year as I believe it will be critical to ongoing adoption and success with MT technology. I also think there will be much more to share on best practices of post-editing MT and I expect that we may find that it is not quite the dreaded beast it has often been portrayed to be.

Social Media is not just a set of new channels for marketing messages. It’s an opportunity for organizations to align with the marketplace and start delivering on behalf of customers  -- Valeria Maltoni, conversationagent.com

I would also like to invite some of you to contribute to the discussion in this blog (guest posts) and assure you that I believe in open discourse and think it is useful for many different viewpoints to be aired to get closer to the “truth”. So please don’t hesitate to send me contributions that you think might be interesting to the audience that has been following this blog. I thank you for your support and I hope that the content here will continue to earn your interest and comments to extend the discussion beyond my thoughts on key issues.

For those who are not aware, there are some very interesting videos from presentations at TAUS that I reported on in the 4th ranked posting above on PEMT momentum.   


Videos of presentations and panels at the recent TAUS User Conference in Santa Clara are now available on YouTube for everyone. The links below will take you to playlists on specific themes: 



I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and look forward to sharing observations in the coming year, a year that many say will be a turning point across many dimensions.

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