• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I hadn't realized there was contention around our use of Trados or problems with how localization was proceeding. It seemed to me things had improved enormously. Quality was up. Costs were down. I needed more data to support our position, so I talked with the one translator I knew who had the tech chops not to be intimidated by the console or any other online tool.

Dennis Hwang—the same Dennis who drew homepage doodles—had used the translation console to render our interface into Korean. In his opinion, the technology had two major flaws. The most serious was a lack of context. Translators using the console saw one word or phrase at a time, without any awareness of where on a page it might appear. So when a translator saw the word "Bulgarian," he didn't know whether to use the word for a Bulgarian man or the Bulgarian language. And since each piece of text might go to a different translator, there was no continuity in the flow. Once it was reassembled, it often read awkwardly or even nonsensically.

The other problem was that when the console presented a word to be translated, it took the translation and pasted it into exactly the same place the English word had been, and with the exact same formatting. That led to inappropriate bolding, italics, and spacing that could change the sense of a phrase.

I shared Dennis's feedback with Marissa. It was unlikely we'd find translators who were more comfortable with the console than Dennis, and if he felt there were problems, we should probably address them. I was sensitive to burdening engineering, but the primary concern of the marketing group was that the finished translation not embarrass us as we tried to build market share in a new language.

The engineers saw clearly that the problem was the people, not the technology. If we could improve the quality of the translators, we could get by with just the translation console. From my perspective, translators were not engineers and shouldn't have to waste time learning to use software mismatched to the task at hand. Even Marissa admitted having felt frustration while translating our site into Bork, Bork, Bork.

We negotiated a compromise. Work on all but the top eight languages* would be done exclusively by volunteers in the console, while professional translators could use Trados. Those translations would be imported into the console by a yet-to-be-developed automated script. That script remained yet-to-be-developed for years, but the agreement meant we had clear guidelines for moving ahead. The tradeoff was accepting the risk of unprofessional translation in all but a handful of languages. A couple of months later Sergey noticed that a volunteer had used the console to change the Search button on our Russian homepage to say "Click here bitch." Another volunteer changed Google Malta's Search button to a traditional Maltese insult, "penis in a can."

The word, according to engineering, was that a few bugs remained in the system.

Yet, once again, risk reaped rewards. The willingness to suffer a few quickly eradicated indignities opened up enormous gates to international audience growth. The world tolerated awkward translations and the occasional insult in order to access Google's search technology. It was a reminder that perfecting the polish was not as important as giving people access to the product behind it. The results we returned and the speed with which we returned them were ultimately all that mattered. They were the essence of Google's brand.

Can You CPC Me Now?

Unfortunately, the results we were getting for another part of Google were not proving satisfactory. Our AdWords system kept growing, but we were concerned (and this time it wasn't just me) about the rapid expansion of our competitor GoTo. Their "search results" were actually ads, sold by online auction, with the top listing going to the highest bidder. These ads were distributed across the Internet, and each time someone clicked on one the advertiser paid GoTo, who gave a small percentage to the site