Product news

bab.la GmbH, a wiki-style language portal, has launched an online Arabic dictionary, bringing the total languages offered to 17. Bab.la’s dictionaries are also available on mobile phones.

See: bab.la

Athtek has built in a lot of extra value to Google Translate Desktop.  It requires no installation, and at a minuscule 250KB, runs like a rabbit. You can configure it to start with your computer if you find yourself consulting translations fairly often.

You can import files to translate, save the translated text to a file, or have the Desktop read the results for you in a perfectly decent human-type voice.  Google Translate Desktop is so small and portable that it is worth getting, even if you think will only use it occasionally.

See:  Bangkok Post

Multilizer Translation Validation Wizard helps to automate translation consistency check, which helps to achieve better quality in less time. It allows the user to validate the translation of the selected target language. Using automatic Translation Validation ensures that the software in the company has consistent translations across different products and localization projects, saving project time and costs. Multilizer Translation Validation Wizard is the latest of 9 Wizards added in Multilizer localization tool to help with the various tasks and processes in localization (QA and productivity).

See: Earth Times

Best Buy is going mobile, launching a free cellphone application for Universal Pictures’ “Despicable Me” that not only will help the studio promote the toon but could turn the electronics giant into a key marketing partner for Hollywood beyond hyping traditional homevideo releases.

This week, the company is bowing Best Buy Movie Mode with “The Minionator,” a free download that will enable audiences of “Despicable Me” to understand what the mischievous yellow creatures in the film are saying, as the end credits play, through a translation that appears on their cell-phone screens.

Once the DVD and Blu-ray are released later this year, auds will be able to get a translation of the Minions’ special language as the entire movie unspools.

The translation starts when the app is activated through a sound cue after the film starts playing.

See: Variety

AppTek has announced the addition of Farsi and Urdu language automated speech recognition (ASR) engines to its PlainSpeech platform. This improved ASR engine will also process various other key languages like Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, Turkish and English.  This ASR is attuned for machine translation usage, providing a complete solution to the customers without the involvement of integration costs or complex development.

See: TMC Net

Google confirmed that its Goggles visual search application would be coming to Apple’s iPhone soon. This is a big step in helping Goggles reach a broader audience. Google apps such as search, Google Maps and YouTube are popular on the iPhone, which has shipped more than 50 million units. Google also said it would release the image recognition technology that powers Goggles via APIs by the end of the year. Google just launched APIs for Google Latitude and Google Buzz to let programmers feed off of its work.

See: eWeek

Across Systems partners with Gilbane Group in a Webinar on the integration of content management system technology with translation management on Thursday, June 24, at 10 a.m. PDT/1:00 p.m. EDT. The one-hour Webinar, entitled “The Integration Calculus: CMS + TMS = Turbo-accelerated Creation of Multilingual Product Documentation,” will include a case study presentation by Frank Erven, a language technology consultant and technical writer from Voith Turbo, a leading German industrial manufacturer serving paper, energy, mobility, and service markets.

See: Earth Times

The Babylon Pro application allows you to optimize your searching for unknown data.

Clicking on any term from any desktop application brings you results from Babylon’s extensive database of language dictionaries, glossaries and conversion tools

With Babylon’s Writing Aid tools you can easily find the exact word you need, ensure correct usage and paste it directly into your documents.

See: Softpedia

A language agency owner tells the story of starting an agency after being a linguist and corporate manager for a decade. The book narrates the core issues and challenges encountered while founding, running and growing with an agency.

See: Books for sale at ProZ.com

When Day Software upgraded its content management platform to CQ5.3 it came with a number of useful enhancements, but no translation abilities. Day has just rectified that by teaming up with Translations.com to produce a quick-response solution to enable companies to launch localized products in numerous languages.

Focusing on marketing needs, the new pre-built integration can build websites for one language or region and have them translated by using an extension from the Translations.com  online catalog PackageShare.

See: CMS.Wire

On June 4, 2009 SDL Trados Studio was launched. A whole year has passed during which the team has worked on many initiatives and additional releases such as Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2.

More recently a trial was launched giving access to everybody to the technology for 30 days.

See: SDL Blog

Dictionary .Net promises to be a general purpose translation and lookup utility which leverages the power of Google’s various language and search APIs to provide you with quick results without needing to fire up your browser and do it yourself.

Basically a shell program, Dictionary .Net leaves the real work to Google. You type in a word, and Dictionary .Net fetches the definition from Google. You want the word translated from English to Hindi, and Dictionary .Net invokes the necessary Google APIs and displays the results.

See: The Washington Post

Adeptol launches a Translation Add-On to allow users to view document content from right within the viewer in more than 40 languages.

See: ebiz

Symantec announced Norton Everywhere today–a new approach to security that abandons the traditional PC-centric model and takes a more holistic approach to delivering security across all Internet-enabled devices. Norton DNS, a component of Norton Everywhere, provides alternative DNS servers that can be used by any Internet-connected device for a faster and more secure surfing experience.

See: PC World

After over half a year in a perpetual beta, Google has now posted stable Chrome releases for Linux and Mac. As a result, Chrome 5.0 is the first stable release of the browser to support all three platforms.

See: Geek.com

Xisen Science Technology  has introduced the Magic Multilingual Dictionary 2.0 for iPhone/iPod Touch. The application combines six complete dictionaries: English>Korean, Korean>English, Chinese>Korean, Korean>Chinese, Japanese>Korean and Korean>Japanese.

See: pr MAC

WordSteps is a free Web site that provides vocabulary drills in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. The site claims it can teach you twenty new words a day in fifteen minutes.

Exercises include flashcards, writing the word by translation or vice versa, translation variants, and “Alphabet Soup,” played as Scrabble. You can keep track of the words you learn via a number that is kept visible near your profile picture.

See: AppScout

AppTek, a developer of human language technology, has added Farsi and Urdu automated speech recognition (ASR) engines to its PlainSpeech platform. The enhanced ASR engine also processes several other languages such as Arabic and English, and is compatible for use with machine translation

See: Multilingual

International search marketing agency WebCertain announces a partnership with Waltham, Massachusetts based IMN, a content-driven email marketing solutions provider, to offer an international, search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly e-communications service for international organisations interested in building brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing sales.

The partnership combines WebCertain’s multilingual online marketing expertise with IMN’s innovative e-communication service, primarily e-newsletters, to produce effective web marketing solutions for large organisations. Multinational organisations can leverage such solutions to target global audiences that speak multiple languages with high-quality content that addresses a wide range of topics.

See: openPR

A translator’s productivity tool that seamlessly integrates Google Translate into all text applications.

Google Translate for Translators (GT4T) is a translator’s productivity tool that can help you translate faster by replacing selected source text of your choice with translations from Google.

See: Softpedia