Software Clears Spanish Site for Takeoff at Continental

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December 19, 2005 (Computerworld) -- After two years of manual translation work by contractors, Continental Airlines Inc. was still moving slowly toward creating a more fully featured Spanish-language version of its Web site. But the process ramped up in August, after the airline brought in software that automates much of the work involved in adding new languages to sites.
The software enabled Continental to go live on Nov. 16 with a relaunched version of its Web site that expanded the airline's very basic Spanish-language offerings to include its online flight-booking tool, said Ken Penny, director of Internet planning at Houston-based Continental and general manager of the Web site.
Continental is using WorldServer, an application developed by Waltham, Mass.-based Idiom Technologies Inc. The airline, which is running WorldServer on a Windows Server 2003 system, has tied the software to Microsoft Corp.'s Visual SourceSafe version-control system and a database of the English-to-Spanish translations done by the outside translators.
Penny declined to say how much the airline paid for the software, nor would he disclose what it has spent on the translation project as a whole.
Idiom doesn't handle the actual word-for-word translations. Instead, its software, which also runs on Linux and Unix servers, uses algorithms to automate the matching of English content to translations already prepared in Spanish or other languages.
In addition to helping launch the initial translations, the software makes it easier to keep the Web site updated by automatically making changes to the Spanish pages as their English counterparts are modified, Penny said.
Other pages that are currently only in English, including ones for booking hotels and rental cars, may become available in Spanish in the coming months, he added.
Idiom's competitors include SDL International PLC, a Maidenhead, England-based vendor that offers translation services as well as translation management software.
Don DePalma, an analyst at Common Sense Advisory Inc. in Chelmsford, Mass., said Idiom's approach to wrapping its software around a company's existing content management system means that users "don't have to bulldoze what they've done before" to integrate translation management.
The idea of making Web sites multilingual is growing, said Ron Rogowski, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. He added that if Continental's business strategy "is to focus on different markets, then they've got the backbone on which to build."

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