Opinion & features

The address space on the Internet is rapidly running out and the next couple of years on the Internet simply will not remain free IP-addresses for the deployment of new servers. This prevents the head of the Internet Corporation Icann Rhode Begstrom. According to Icann, the Internet is now free to a maximum of 8-9% IP-addresses, the rest being held by various providers and large companies.

According Begstroma, in order to avoid problems in the future, it is necessary today as soon as possible to implement support for the protocol IPv6. This version of the protocol supports addressing many trillions of web sites, compared with 32 billion units in the current protocol version IPv4.

See: it-Chuiko

The aQuatic (acrolinx quality assurance tool users) together with Bay Area MT User Group conference was focused on “Information Quality” (or IQ for short). The presentations showed that documentation creation is now a much more dynamic process and also showed how the community and Web 2.0 concepts are affecting the content production process.

Any efforts towards improving content early in the process makes all kinds of subsequent processes like translation and MT much easier and is clearly worthwhile considered. IQ as acrolinx calls it is sometimes mixed up with “controlled language” which is a 1st generation approach to making content more easily leverageable for translation and other downstream processes. Controlled Language is a strategy that was most frequently used with RbMT systems but some of the basic principles in a less stilted form can be useful to SMT as well.

See: eMpTy Pages

Sol Steinmetz, a lexicographer with more than 35 dictionaries and reference books to his name, is not a science fiction writer, but his new book, “There’s A Word For It,” could fuel hundreds of alternate histories. In “There’s A Word For It,” Steinmetz has collected and sorted words of American English into batches by their year of birth. The result is almost a pointillist history of the United States, spotlighting our artistic, cultural, scientific, and technical achievements, era by era and neologism by neologism.

See: Boston.com

Both strategies (developing a multilingual strategy around a language or a country)  have benefits and challenges, but before you commence your program, make sure you know exactly your path. It’s much easier to get it right in the beginning, rather than re-engineering your site after the fact.

Although every need and budget is different, here are some benefits and challenges associated with each tactic.

See: SearchEngineWatch

Catalan writer Jaume Cabré presented today his novel “Senyoria”- the first work translated from Catalan into Albanian.

The novel entitled “Senjoria” in Albanian has been translated by the Albanian writer and translator Bashkim Shehu.

See: ABC.es

Whether to work with direct clients, translation agencies or both is a personal and business decision.

Here are some tips that Corinne McKay finds useful: target your marketing, don’t lump all agencies together, charge real money and earn it (also see Determining your rates and fees as a translator and Translation: Determining what service you need and what it will cost ), focus on high-margin projects, use the objective data that is available to you,  target small and medium agencies.

See: Thoughts On Translation

John Dixon, service delivery director of Applied Language Solutions, provides some insight on how to face the current challenging environment.

He expects to see a clamour of companies announcing their intentions to move towards delivering solutions via machine translation and post editing of machine translation, to reduce cost of human input and potentially increase the speed of delivery. Translation companies will need to start differentiating themselves in this way and be able to demonstrate a solid delivery track record.

The key is to look at a more holistic approach to capturing customers and making your offer more attractive – create more of a partnership with your customer and become a trusted advisor; it will get you more loyalty in return.

See: Internet Retailing

Is it time for you to start worrying about someone infringing upon your English-language trademark in Spanish?  How close does the Spanish translation have to be to constitute a trademark infringement? And how can you watch for Spanish-language infringements?

To be too close, the Spanish-language translation must be a direct and literal translation. And if the Spanish-language translation introduces a new meaning, it might be hard to attack successfully.

If your English-language trademark is descriptive or nearly descriptive of what you sell, you’ll have a hard time stopping someone from branding the same thing with the same name in Spanish. If you brand your jeans under the name RUGGED PANTS, you might have a hard time stopping the use of the name PANTALONES RESISTENTES for jeans

See: Richmond Times-Dispatch

One of the pleasures to be found in The Secret in Their Eyes is its unusually rich and expressive English subtitles. Director Juan José Campanella, who speaks both Spanish and English fluently, says he made a decision “to do it in American English, not a neutral English.” Most foreign-language films are subtitled so as to be understood in Johannesburg, Canberra, Ottawa and Birmingham (England and Alabama). Campanella told the film’s translator, Tony Gray, to approach the subtitles as though he were writing dialogue for a David Mamet film.

See: National Post

One of the world’s most respected texts on autism is to be translated into Hindi and published in India. Currently over one million people in India are thought to be affected by autism.

The new translation of the book — Parents’ Education as Autism Therapists — will provide a useful introduction to Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) for parents and professionals working with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in India.

See:  ScienceDaily

It started with a typo in an interview transcript with a British neuroscientist, but within hours it became a way of life. The new word describes the mental abilities of computer nerds.

The word is actually a transcription error of “yuck and wow,” a phrase prominent British neuroscientist Lady Greenfield used to describe the way people act online, flipping from games to Facebook to YouTube.

See: FoxNews.com

In his blog Kirti Vashee states that while it is vaguely possible that this partnership could be a turning point in the translation industry, he believes it is too early to tell, and that buyers and partners need to be wary. The openness and the quality of this initiative have yet to be established.

He believes that the future is all about, collaboration, innovation and end-user empowerment and engagement. This still looks very much like the old command and control model to him, with minimal win-win scenario possibilities for partners. Actually, LIOX takes the “You give, we take” to a new extreme. But he may be wrong, big companies do sometimes get it right, and finally the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

See: eMpty Pages

It is sometimes easy to be misled by the word order of the source text, and to translate using a construction that means something different from the original. Some examples in English to Italian are provided here.

Paying attention to the logical word order in your translations is extremely important as  when you read with fresh eyes what you wrote you’ll sometimes see it means something different from what you intended.

See: About Translation

Siobhán Parkinson is one of Ireland’s foremost children’s writers, and for years she has juggled other impressive roles – literary translator, editor of children’s literature journals, and accomplished academic work, including a PhD on Dylan Thomas.

She is also the editor of a new imprint, Little Island, which is an offspring of New Island Books. Six books have already published, with more on the way including translations of children’s books from Swedish and Portuguese. Read more.

See: IrishTimes

Ian Mason has been a towering presence in the now flourishing discipline of translation studies since its inception, and has produced some of the most influential and detailed analyses of translated text and interpreted interaction to date.

Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason’s scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings.

See: StJerome Publishing

In his article, Tom Nicholson reflects on the use of English by Slovak authorities.

As a conclusion he states that although people deserve full marks for trying to communicate in a foreign language, especially if they have only recently started to learn it on formal occasions there is no excuse for not having the texts proofread.

He believes that all too often, the English of official Slovak speeches, and of the officials sent abroad to deliver them, has been well-below standard. This comes across as amateurish and hurts Slovakia’s international image.

See: The Slovak Spectator

Why Translation Matters is the new book by New Yorker Edith Grossman. In her book she argues that a world without translation would be “intolerably, inconceivably bleak,” comparable to living behind an “iron curtain,”

Although the touches somewhat on the nitty-gritty of translation its main focus is the cultural importance of the practice.

English-language literature owes a debt to Spanish-language literature and vice versa, a situation that Grossman depicts as not only healthy, but essential for cultural, artistic and intellectual development.

See: The Gazette

In my last entry I talked about three macro trends that are causing downward pressure on translation prices. And I got a fair amount of feedback, some agreeing and some challenging things I said. I also found out that I am being lumped together with others in the “Localization 2.0” camp. This confused me, since as a child I was denied the camp experience in apartheid based South Africa (no darkies allowed!), and CSA just released research that says that “Localization 2.0” is a failed experiment that was a non-starter and really, in the end it is all about translation. However several good questions were raised from this feedback that I would like to address here.

Am I “against” the TEP model?

I am not proposing tearing down the TEP model. I am suggesting that it has a place and is best suited for static content that has a relatively long shelf life. The TEP model made a lot of sense in the late 90’s and even early into the 2000 decade. But it is much less useful as a production model for the more dynamic content that is more common for global enterprises today. This “new” content is more voluminous and often has a half-life of 3-6 months or even less, but could be very valuable during this peak time. Much of this new content is user or community generated and strongly influences purchase behavior, so it is risky to ignore it. However, manuals and software still need to be localized and I do not advocate discarding this proven model for some kinds of content. I do expect it will need to evolve and connect to new technology and infrastructure.

If we are experiencing a content explosion and there is a shortage of human translators, how can prices be falling? This does not jive with standard market behavior where increasing demand typically results in higher prices.

On the surface this does sound illogical and inconsistent with standard economic theory. Usually, more demand = higher prices. However, for the longest time, we have seen enormous amounts of content on the web unavailable to customers and communities around the world. And why? Because traditional translation processes have been largely unaffordable and too slow for many of these new applications. By this, I mean content and communications such as web pages, intranets, knowledge bases, social network feedback, product documents, IM’s, blogs and emails.  I believe that the demand has always been there, but unable to fulfill itself in the cost/time scenarios that traditional translation production models were based on. But now the urgency created by globalization and internet based commerce makes this a much more pressing issue. Read more.

See: eMpTy Pages

Kalima, the translation project of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), has published Penelope Tuson’s book “Playing the Game: Western Women in Arabia” into Arabic. The book was translated by Abudallah Jaradat.

The book focuses on the Western women who lived, worked and travelled in Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century.

See: WAM

Ethan Shen, a Chinese translator, conducted a study to compare three different free MT engines (Google, Bing and Babelfish). Pase 1 of this study has been completed and the results can be seen here.

See: About Translation