Language Barriers Broken, mrc Says

August 9, 2011 Alex Woodie

Development tool maker mrc last month unveiled new software that it claims will help eliminate the hassle that organizations face when trying to prepare and maintain Web sites in multiple languages. The company says its new product, called m-Power Translate, automatically generates copies of the same Web site in multiple languages.

According to mrc’s announcement, m-Power Translate eliminates the need for companies who want to do business internationally to pay for multiple translations for each language, and then to pay for the ongoing maintenance of those website whenever something changes.

Instead of handling translations manually or as a one-off job, m-Power Translate creates a single Web application that’s associated with multiple presentation layers for each language the organization wants to target. The m-Power user simply selects which languages to translate into. At runtime, the m-Power application will automatically detect which language to display. Visitors also have the option of overriding that decision.

In addition to eliminating the upfront time and expense of manual translations, mrc claims that m-Power Translate pays dividends on the backend, too, by automating any updates that an organization wants to make to its application or its website. Because the underlying application is the same, updates to the application do not affect the language layer.

The software doesn’t appear to be a total panacea for language barriers, however. For starters, the user must create a language dictionary with custom translations to ensure that all apps are translated perfectly. Computer-generated translations are notoriously error-prone, and this approach is needed to ensure accuracy.

Nonetheless, mrc is upbeat on the prospects for m-Power Translate to simplify the language translation challenge. “Up until now, creating Web applications in multiple languages was expensive and time consuming,” Brian Crowley, mrc’s director of development, says in a press release. “”With the new m-Power Translate plug-in, companies can instantly create Web apps in any language they desire.”

m-Power is a model-based development tool that generates J2EE-based Web applications that can run on a variety of platforms, including IBM i servers. It is commonly used to create mobile Web apps, Web portals, e-commerce sites, executive dashboards, business intelligence systems, and other applications. For more info, see www.mrc-productivity.com.