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Tavultesoft Pty. Ltd., a developer of keyboard mapping software, has released Keyman Desktop 8.0. Enhancements include a Language Switcher for swapping languages and keyboards, and the new version is compliant with Unicode 6.0.

See: Multilingual

The 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics kicked off Wednesday in a Chinese university, marking the first time for it to be held in the world’s most populous country.

More than 1,500 participants from 63 countries and regions are attending the five-day congress under the theme of “Harmony in Diversity: Language, Culture, Society,” according to the China English Language Education Association (CELEA), one of the Chinese organizers.

During the congress, linguists will discuss linguistic teaching, language application in different careers, and language in society.

Applied linguistics is usually described as dealing with the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which language and communication are the central issue.

The five-day congress is held every three years. Since its debut in Nancy, France in 1964, each has focused on the discussion of the most heatedly debated linguistic issues of the time.

The International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) organizes the congress, and it’s hosted by branch institutions in different countries and regions.

Chinese scholars made their first bid for the 15th congress at the 2002 Singapore Congress, hoping to host the “Applied Linguistics Olympics” side by side with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but lost to Essen, Germany.

It was not until July 23, 2005, when a second bid won the right to host.

See: Cri English. com

Researchers from all over the world are to descend on a Lancashire university to examine how people use language and how it changes in society.

Edge Hill has been chosen to host the eighth UK Language Variation and Change event, which is the leading conference on this subject outside the USA.

The event will take place from September 12-14 and will include a number of presentations and papers given from a range of academics.

Dr Lourdes Burbano Elizondo, senior lecturer in English language at Edge Hill said: “It’s fantastic that we have been chosen to host such a prestigious conference that will give scholars in this field the chance to come together to present and discuss recent research.

“The conference will play a key role in the development of language variation and change study in the 21st century as we look at current and emerging trends.”

There will be a host of highly acclaimed keynote speakers and anyone wanting more information about the conference or to book a place should visit the website www.edgehill.ac.uk/events

See: lep.co.uk

Teaching English is a big business in China because, although all schoolchildren are supposed to take lessons in the subject from the age of six or seven, many parents believe it is worth paying for extra classes. Concerns are often raised that English is taught in schools with a view to just passing exams, so without additional training, children may lack the ability to communicate properly.

As well as the children learning English are thousands of adults, many of them business people, taking intensive English courses.

According to figures reported in state media, the English-teaching industry was worth 15 billion yuan (Dh8.61bn) in 2009, and total revenues are increasing as much as 15 per cent annually. Estimates suggest 30,000 institutions in China offer English training, some online.

“The number of students is increasing year by year. Everyone has to learn English,” says Ge Qiuyan, a training manager for Talenty in Changchun, a city in north-east China.

“They have to write reports or articles, see films and travel. For these, learning English is very important. For kids, they have to start very young.”

Many senior business roles in China now require people to speak English, says Angel Lin, an associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Hong Kong and co-author of the book Classroom Interactions as Cross-cultural Encounters: Native Speakers in EFL (English as a foreign language) Lessons. Read more.

See: The National

Freelancers, especially copywriters, could be turning their personal cottage industry into an international enterprise, by teaming up with translators to go global.

The web is becoming an increasingly multilingual place. The growth in internet accessibility worldwide means that, in the near future, English will no longer be the ‘lingua franca’ of the web.

Web surfers prefer to browse the web in their native language – and this means that if you want to reach an international audience, you need to go multilingual.

1. Boom Times in the International Web

The good news is that there’s a massive untapped opportunity for businesses of any size to take advantage of – including freelancers. The fact is that there’s less competition for search engine rankings in the foreign language internet than there is in the English internet, purely because there’s less content overall.

Internet marketers who work across language divides all agree that it’s much easier to get to the top of the search rankings for a key phrase in French, Spanish or Swahili than it is in English – and the cost to develop a translated and optimized microsite for a foreign language is relatively small, compared to the potential return on investment.

2. Developing the All-in-One Multilingual Package

Let’s say you’re a freelance writer, who produces articles in English for publications around the web. Chances are, once you’ve written a story, you’ll only be able to sell it once – nobody wants to pay for duplicate content.

But, if you were to team up with professional translators for a range of different languages, you could sell your translated article five, ten or fifteen times over, to websites or companies in other language markets.

For writers who specialize in producing content for online marketing purposes, the bonus here is that Google’s duplicate content rule does not apply across different languages – one article which is translated and localized (which means paying careful attention in the translation to ensure that the references, currencies, symbols, etc, are appropriate for the target market) can be sold to websites in German, Russian, Swedish, etc, and will count as new and original content in each language.

Businesses small and large are starting to realize the benefits of exporting internationally using the web (such as in this BBC article), and a massive part of any international digital marketing strategy is content. Companies need snappy website copy translated into multiple languages for their localized websites and social media profiles, and they need informative and useful articles for content marketing purposes.

Rather than simply offering your clients a copy in one language, you could be offering them the complete package to export internationally. Plus, using your translator connections as go-betweens, you could start sourcing clients in foreign language markets – tools like Google’s Global Market Finder are brilliant for working out which countries represent big opportunities for keywords like ‘copywriter’.

To connect with translators, try websites like ProZ and Translator’s Cafe, which are online hang-outs for professional linguists and the ideal place to start putting together your multilingual copy dream team.

3. Increase Your Customer Base – Reduce Your Risks

There are some obvious benefits to expanding your customer base beyond one language market. Naturally, there’s the possibility of dramatically increasing your client base, which means more work.

There’s also the benefit of hedging your currency risk – if you’re being paid in US dollars, Euros, Pound Sterling and RMB, then if one of those currencies takes a dive, you can focus your efforts on selling in other markets. If you only earn in one currency, you’re at the mercy of that currency’s fluctuations.

The fact is that the future of the web is multilingual. Those copywriters who act now to stake their claim across a range of language markets will reap the benefits. Whether you go the whole hog and form a multilingual copy partnership, or simply hook up with a translator to sling some of your articles in foreign languages, there’s money to be made for writers in the foreign language web.

See: Freelance Switch

The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize, instigated by Maria Brodsky and Natasha Spender, celebrates the poets’ long friendship and the rich tradition of Russian poetry.

Entries must arrive no later than 31 August 2011.

Please email [email protected] with any queries.

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Conditions of entry

Entrants

1. Entrants may be of any nationality, resident anywhere in the world.

Adjudication and prizes

2. There will be three prizes: £1,500 (first), £1,000 (second) and £500 (third).

3. The Prize will be administered by the Stephen Spender Trust and judged by Sasha Dugdale, Catriona Kelly and Paul Muldoon. Their decision will be final and the organisers will not enter into any correspondence about the results.

4. The winners will be notified and the results announced on the Trust’s website by 16 January 2012. The winning entries and any others the judges wish to select will be published on the website.

Entries

5. All entries for the competition must reach the Stephen Spender Trust no later than 31 August 2011.

6. Entrants are invited to submit an English translation of a published Russian poem, together with a commentary of no more than 300 words (see below for guidelines). The submitted translation should be no more than 60 lines long, so entrants may submit an extract if their chosen poem is longer. Self-translation is not accepted. Collaborations are permitted so long as the names of all the collaborators are declared on the entry form.  Read more.

See: Stephen Spender Trust

Alyson McCarty speaks Latin. She knows a little Greek and few words of Spanish. But when the 14-year-old sings, she sings in her mother’s language of Yup’ik.

McCarty recently recorded her seventh CD of Yup’ik and English hymns. Of the 14 tracks, McCarty recorded four in Yup’ik. There’s a rendition of “Amazing Grace” called “Naklekuti Nitnirqekria” and a translation of the Lord’s Prayer. Even the thank-yous, “Quyana,” are in the Western Alaska language.

McCarty’s CDs have been heard on radio stations in Bethel, Nome and Fairbanks. She sang “God Be With You” in Yup’ik at a memorial for Lu Young, Don Young’s late Gwich’in Athabascan wife, at the 2009 Alaska Federation of Natives convention.

That year she recorded a CD of hymns entirely in Yup’ik.

McCarty counts her growing discology as one more step – along with efforts to create Inupiaq language educational software or revive the dead Eyak tongue – in the effort to preserve fading Alaska Native languages.

Vogue Italia has apologized for an online feature about gold hoop earrings that the magazine referred to as “slave earrings,” setting off a firestorm of angry public opinion after the news spread on Twitter and was featured on Jezebel.com.

“We apologise for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Franca Sozzani, said in a statement obtained by the Guardian. “The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into ‘ethnical style earrings.’ Again, we are sorry about this mistake which we have just amended in the website.”

Both the title and description of the jewelry slideshow have been changed. The feature has been renamed “ethnic earrings.” But under the “Tags” section, the word “slave” still appears. Read more.

See: The Washington Post

Faith Comes By Hearing has added eight new language recordings to their catalog of Audio Scriptures. In addition, single-voice recordings in Achuar and Zapoteco Mitla are being replaced with complete, dramatized New Testament recordings.

Combined, these eight languages represent more than 3.2 million people that now have an Audio Bible available in their heart language. These recordings are possible because of dedicated translation work by: Wycliffe Bible Translators, The Bible League, United Bible Societies and the Bible Society of India.

Crimson Life Sciences today announced the publication of their Japan Medical Device Digest, a free monthly report that provides English translations of Japanese-language news items.

See: EON

Hungary’s government wants to dethrone English as the most common foreign language taught in Hungarian schools. The reason: It’s just too easy to learn.

“It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.

Instead, the ministry department in charge of education would prefer if students “chose languages with a fixed, structured grammatical system, the learning of which presents a balanced workload, such as neo-Latin languages.” Read more: The Wall Street Journal blog

See: The Wall Street Journal blog

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. “The blue of cup,” he would say, meaning his blue cup.

This wasn’t a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: “of” was standing in for the Mandarin particle “de” to turn the noun “blue” into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying “this one” or “that one”–he was rendering the Chinese “zhege” and “neige” in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.

Adding a second language means a child can play dumb in two languages at once. Or play smart: “Daddy can’t speak Chinese,” he says sometimes, when Daddy speaks rudimentary Chinese to him. Then he demands to borrow my smartphone, so he can look up Chinese characters in the dictionary software.

Mostly, though, Mandarin in the hands of a toddler is not a practical tool. Trying to justify it that way is a bit like the efforts to put a dollar value on liberal-arts education. Chinese is, like math or music, a distinct system of representation, another way to think about the world. You may learn a language because you need to, but you stick with it because it is interesting to think about. Read more: The Wall Street Journal blog

See: The Wall Street Journal blog

International Languages Week is an annual event held in New Zealand during the third week of August. It is a special awareness-raising occasion which provides time for schools, universities and wider communities to promote language and culture from around the world.

According to Philippa Kruger, Head of Languages at St Hilda’s Collegiate School, International Languages Week primarily seeks to “celebrate languages”. Nation-wide, teachers and students have been organising many exciting activities to this effect. This year’s theme, ‘Languages Take You Places’, aims to highlight the benefits of learning additional languages.

“Learning languages is a really powerful step to take,” Mrs Kruger states. “It opens pathways.”

This is because studying a language is not just about acquiring new words – it’s about learning a new culture, a new people, a new place and a new way of life. It’s about becoming part of the global community.

As New Zealand becomes more internationally interested and influential, it makes sense that we become more diverse in our communication.

Read more: 3 News

In a summer when Italy’s latest debt-driven austerity budget threatens to slash pensions, close schools and shut down local services, one woman is warning that Italians stand to lose something less tangible but in some ways far more important – their language.

Nicoletta Maraschio is fighting to stop the closure of the Accademia della Crusca, the Florence-based institute she runs which has been considered the foremost custodian of the Italian language since it published Italy’s first dictionary in 1612.

Almost 400 years on, the government has announced plans to eliminate the academy’s €190,000 (£165,000) annual funding as part of its cull of dozens of state-funded research organisations which employ fewer than 70 people.

Read more: the Guardian

See: the Guardian

The Translation bureau reduced its head count dramatically, the decision will become effective on September 1st. Around 40 employees, ten of which are translators, will lose their jobs.
Concern was raised about the quality of French which might suffer. Read more.

See: Cyberpresse

Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.

Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear.

Other words on the list include “wittol”– a man who tolerates his wife’s infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.

Read more on The Guardian.

See: The Guardian

This is the first in a series of guest blog posts on the T.O. by member Konstantin Kisin. Konstantin has some valuable tips on communication, negotiation with clients, productivity, and striking a balance between life and work (be sure to check out the interview with him in last week’s podcast as well).

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“Work/Life Balance as a Freelancer”, by Konstantin Kisin

During the London workshop on Negotiation Skills, I asked the attendees to raise their hand if they felt they were “too busy” and more than 50% did. I then asked the group to answer the question of “How busy do you want to be?” and most people looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief!

You see, a lot of us think that the answer to this question is obvious: we “should” be as busy as possible. This belief is so ingrained that even when we notice the impact of being “too busy” on our lives (poor health, relationship problems, stress, mental and emotional suffering), we “get on with it,” “get through it,” “tough it out,” “try to stay on top of things” and so on.

As language industry professionals, we spend a lot of time with words and it can sometimes be useful to look at them very literally. Take the word “freelancer” as an example – whatever it means, one of the things it tells us is that a freelancer is someone who is free… or is she? Many of us become freelancers to enjoy the flexibility being your own boss can offer, and yet “having freedom” and “being free” are very different things. If you have the freedom to work your own hours but end up working 12 hours a day with little or no time off, you may not be as free as you think.

If there is one thing I know to be true, it is that the success of your business and your quality of life depend on the questions you ask yourself. Only if you can answer questions like “How much do I want to work?,” “What level of income do I want to have?” and “How do I need to change what I am doing to achieve this?” can you understand what you want and how to get there.

Many people who attend my webinars, presentations and workshops comment that the ideas we discuss apply to all areas of their lives, not just their business. This always delights me because I don’t believe you can separate the two, especially as a freelancer. Whether you are happy or unhappy, healthy or unhealthy, excited or bored, energized or tired, pleased or frustrated will affect how you treat your clients, how many mistakes you make, how you handle difficulties and misunderstandings, how motivated you are and all this determines how successful you are in your business.

In the next few blog entries and podcast interviews, I will share ideas and suggestions for achieving more of the balance you want in a way that creates more happiness, health, excitement, energy and freedom.

For now, I invite you to ask yourself these important questions and listen carefully to the answers.

See: Translator T.O.

The following excerpts are from About Translation blog:

Main ideas:

• Translators are writers

To be a good translator, you have to remember you are a writer. That means concentrating on making your target text effective. Translate accurately, of course. But that, by itself, is not enough to craft an effective, well-written target text that does not feel translated: If you only concentrate on accuracy, neglecting effectiveness, you’ll produce, in Chris Durban’s words, “a description of a text, rather than a text in its own right”.

Sometimes (or at least in certain fields) your translation may need to wander rather far from the source to achieve the desired effect in the target language. Sometimes, you’ll need to shorten, lengthen or even change your text, because often what your customer needs but cannot articulate is rather different than a run-of-the-mill translation. A translator who sees himself as a “humble servant of the source text” (Ros Schwartz’ definition of this gun-shy attitude) is unlikely to be as effective as one who makes the text her own.

In certain fields at least, use of translation memory is a hindrance – unless you find ways to ensure the target text flows well and is effective. I’ll suggest a technique to achieve this in a later article.

• Techniques to achieve more effective translations

Use statistical analysis to see what a translated text should look like, comparing it to similar documents written originally in your target language.

To give an example presented by David Jemielity, if in translating into English CEO’s letters to shareholders you follow your source language conventions, you might refer to the company in the third person. You may even be asked by your customer to follow this path… after all, they are French (or Italian), and they are accustomed to writing of themselves this way (“Nel 2010 ACME ha fatto questo e quest’altro…”). However, if we can show our customers that CEO’s letters written originally in English are overwhelmingly in the first person (“In 2010, we did this and that at ACME…”), we may convince our customers to let us translate their letter this way, to make it more effective for them.

Similar strategies, buttressed by clear documentation, may show us other ways to improve our translation: sentence length and variety, use (or not) of the article before a company’s name, use of nominalizations, and so on.

• Marketing ideas

Look for direct customers by taking part in their industry’s events. When you attend such events, don’t ask if they need translations. Try other tactics, such as asking questions, complimenting the speaker, letting slip in the fact you are a translator. Gently point out to someone you have met at such an event, that something in their presentation was unclear, or that it should be phrased differently in your target language, offering (for free) to suggest improvements to the text. Don’t do this, however, in an aggressive way (“gotcha!”), nor when you are asking a question during an open session.

And let’s not market against ourselves: Be careful in what you say in online fora, tweets or blogs. Translators all too easily fall into bitching mode (about bad agencies, expensive software, opaque tools, cheap wannabe translators, or whatever). Remember, however, that what you write online may come back to haunt you.

See: About Translation blog

The hashtag to see the tweets about this event is  #catskills2011

Li Jihong started learning English at 12. Stillunder 30, Li has 21 published volumes oftranslations to his credit. He completedtranslating Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novelThe Kite Runner, about growing up in the pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, into Chinese, in just 10days. The translation has gone into 17 reprintssince it appeared in 2006.

Li, who is translating Neale Donald Walsch’sself-help book Friendship with God and F ScottFitzgerald’s early 20th-century classic aboutchasing the American Dream, The GreatGatsby, almost simultaneously, has also pickedup a fair share of criticism along the way.

The Kite Runner has been pulled up for ironingout the cultural bumps into a silky smooth read,dropping politically contentious references andstripping words of their Islamic/religiousconnotations – translating the burqa as the Chinese equivalent of the long gown (changpao), for example.

Li, of course, robustly defends his choices.

While some of the political references in theoriginal were deleted or modified in keeping with General Administration of Press andPublications restrictions, and therefore were beyond Li’s control, Li’s approximation of genericAfghan ideas into their familiar Chinese counterparts has drawn mixed reactions, most notablyon the website Paper Republic, after Bruce Humes published his interview with the translator.

Asked if he did not want his audience to work too hard figuring out what was going on, Li was abit defensive.

“I’m too busy to worry about what my readers would think while reading my translation. I run asmall publishing business, and finish four or five works per year,” he says. “I am not anewcomer to this profession. I don’t need praise to confirm myself as a qualified translator.”

In marked contrast Fan Ye, who has just launched his translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’sOne Hundred Years of Solitude – the book’s first Chinese version approved by the author -seems keen on retaining the original syntax, cadence and punctuation.

The Peking University professor of Spanish says this is in deference to his readers, who, hebelieves, would want to pick up a translated work because “they’d like to taste some thing’foreign'” in the first place.

He has tried to avoid using Chinese idioms that are too culture-specific. He has recast the punsin the original, in Chinese.

In the parts where Marquez is paying a tribute to his eminent predecessor poets, Fan tries toreplicate the original form of the lines, in Chinese.

Of course, such strict adherence to the original structure works only up to a point. For instance, “sentences in the Spanish text have too many subordinate clauses, which will be weird to readin Chinese,” Fan says.

That’s when he flips for a smooth flow of the text over “loyalty” to the original.

At the end of the day, as Li Jihong says, “A translation is not the original work. It has its ownfunction and destiny.”

See: China Daily

Police forces across Britain spent more than £82 million on translators for migrant criminals, victims and witnesses in just three years, it has been revealed.

That is an increase of 60 per cent since 2004 when the European Union expanded to allow Poland and other eastern countries to join.

The translation services for the police are costing an average of £75,000 a day – which could fund 3,542 extra officers on the beat. Read more.