Background
As a result of World Cup fever, every four years the YAHOO! FIFA website (http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com) becomes one of the world's most visited sites, providing the latest news, statistics, and trivia to football/soccer fans around the globe. For the 2006 FIFA World Cup GermanyTM, YAHOO! staged the site in nine official languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Challenge
Translations.com was presented with the task of providing sports enthusiasts with up-to-the-minute match and team news in nine official languages for the expected cumulative audience of more than 30 billion people. To accomplish this daunting feat, YAHOO! required a flexible and scalable localization solution that would enable efficient and accurate delivery of new web content on a continual basis. This included:

• Seamless integration with YAHOO!'s internal content management system
• Localization of over 2 million source language words of content.
• Automated and concurrent localization workflows for all source and target language pair variations
• A dynamic authoring process for content requiring 1 hour turnaround times and 15 minute response times

Solution
Translations.com, one of three language service providers selected to support language translation for the project, was also selected as the primary Globalization Management System (GMS) technology vendor.

• Volume commitments were addressed through extensive testing and certification of more than 200 translators in conjunction with Yahoo!FIFA's own linguistic experts
• Automated file transfer and project organization was provided through the integration of a customized version of GlobalLinkTM, Translations.com's premier globalization management system
• Epic Global Solutions, a division of Translations.com, delivered an efficient support infrastructure throughout the project, allowing for 15 minute response times on all support tickets submitted by YAHOO! as well as other translation vendors working on the project
• Aggressive delivery times were met and file integrity was assured through a localization process that separated linguistic tasks from technical localization, thereby allowing linguistic tasks to be completed without risk to data reliability

Translations.com and YAHOO!FIFA employed teamwork to score another goal for sports fans around the world. In total, more than 2 million words in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish were delivered on the YAHOO!FIFA website during the qualifying rounds of the WorldCup and the tournament itself, which ran from June 24 - July 9, 2006.