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One of the wonderful discoveries I made when I first signed on to Twitter in 2008 were the TED talks. These are riveting talks by remarkable people free to the world and available as a long term resource. I happened to catch some Twitter coverage of TED2008 early in my use of Twitter and I have been hooked since. These talks cover a lot of ground and I don’t think I can really do them justice by my descriptions so I am just going to highlight some of my favorite TED talks and hope that some of you may watch. They are as much about deep exploration of the human condition as about awareness, technology, love, passion and social trends in general. Many are truly “ideas worth spreading” and TED also has one of the most successful crowdsourcing translation projects on the web today. Almost 10,000 translations into 75 languages by inspired volunteers. TED is a regular source of inspiration and new ideas for me and I thought it would be cool to share some of my favorite talks. I probably could make a series of blog entries highlighting more and perhaps I will.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk is a prime example of amazing insights presented in a crisp clear way to completely transform one’s view of everyday life while educating and inspiring you. Still moves me deeply.

Hans Rosling has several talks that are all wonderful and it is hard to choose one but I have chosen one where he talks about a Rising Asia. He makes talking about long term socioeconomic trends fun and I love his use of graphics.

Jose Antonia Abreu has transformed young children into an astonishing orchestra and even if you don’t really care about classical music you will realize that what these kids have accomplished is special. If you know something about classical music your reaction will likely be amazement.

Ethan Zuckerman whose essay on the Polyglot Internet has become the manifesto for the Open Translation Tools community and who I have referenced often in my blog. Here he lays out how the internet could actually create closed communities of “sameness” rather than really connect diverse people globally, if we are not vigilant.  Read more.

El congreso se realizará en el Hotel Panamericano los días viernes 1 y sábado 2 de octubre de 2010. Pueden inscribirse en http://www.proz.com/conference/136

See: ProZ.com in-person conferences

The cost of hiring translators to help migrants claim benefits has soared to £6million during the recession. It is double the figure from six years ago when Labour allowed uncontrolled levels of migrants into Britain.

A spokesman for the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: “With translation costs on the rise it’s more important than ever that the Government insists newcomers learn English.”

David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and his coalition have pledged to reform the welfare system.

See: DailyStar

The dictionary holds more than 50,000 words, expressions, examples and an abstract of Persian language grammar.

The book is a result of Ibn-Sina’s researchers in Sarajevo which was accomplished during a decade. It was authored in order to bridge the cultures of Persian and South Slavs and a great step towards deepening the ties and cultural interactions between Iran and a part of Balkan.

See: Iran Book News Agency

A translation, interpreting and transcription company plans to make its mark in the North after opening a new office in Yorkshire.

Global Lingo has moved to offices in The Leeds Innovation Centre, which will be the hub of the company’s marketing and sales operations.

The company will employ five staff and expects further expansion within the next six months.

See: TheBusinessDesk

It has been revealed that the compilers of The Oxford English Dictionary keep a room in their offices devoted to as yet unsuccessful words; words created and nominated, but which, in the dictionary’s view have not yet attained the level of use and exchange required for inclusion in the standard corpus of English-language words.

The archive contains millions of words which have not caught on. Apparently, members of the public very frequently write to the dictionary saying that they have coined a word. Could it be included in the next edition?

Some of the are clearly contrivances of this sort: “nonversation”, for verbal burbling, “optotoxical” is a jocular way of saying “a look that could kill”. Some, however, are lovely pieces of fantasy which might well catch on.

“Furgle”, meaning to search fruitlessly in a pocket for a small object, and “wibble”, referring to the tremor of the lower lip before crying, seem perfectly appropriate for their proposed use.

The OED sets its barrier for inclusion quite high, though.

See: The Independent

A Colorado magnet school for refugee students, a primary school in the heart of the Midwest and a large K-12 school district in eastern Washington are the winners of the first K-12 Translation Grants from K12Translate. This diverse group of schools/districts earned the grants for their ambitious initiatives to build the home-school connection with non-native-English-speaking students and their families.

Place Bridge Academy (PBA) is the recipient of the $1,000 in-kind translation grant. A magnet elementary school for refugee students, PBA serves 900 students hailing from 30 different countries and speaking more than 40 languages, with the majority coming from Central America, Myanmar (Burma), Bhutan and Somalia. With only a small percentage of these students living in households where English is the primary language, translation and interpretation are always high priorities at PBA. . In the grant application, PBA Resource Advocate Erin Sovick said that the school will use the K-12 Translation Grant to translate larger documents, such as school registration packets, information about the mobile health clinic that serves the school, free- and reduced-lunch forms and parent/teacher conference information. This would allow PBA to “strengthen the writing communication with the families who are new to America, bridging the gap between home and school for our children.”

See: PR USA.net

This book is a biography, not of the modern German language proper, but of the Germanic languages and the people who speak them. She takes in the development of Yiddish, Dutch, Icelandic and of course English, as well as others. As such it is an ingenious telling of just how German emerged from the primordial Germanic soup, and how many other ways it could have been if, say, Luther had been born 100 miles farther north. For all its flaws, this is an enjoyable yet still-scholarly read for the historian, linguist and Germanophile alike.

See: The Economist

The allure of the Chinese market is prompting western companies and business locations to have their names translated into Chinese. It is a ticklish task, since Mandarin characters can have both phonetic and descriptive meanings.

Guernsey is one of a second wave of western organisations seeking meaningful identities in China. Big consumer brands went in years ago. Pizza Hut, according to Mr Lin, adopted a transliteration of its name with the dual meaning “always triumphant guest”. That had connotations of customer service, but was a little elliptical. So the stuffed-crust titan added characters that stood for “happy canteen”.

According to the China Daily newspaper, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has meanwhile chosen a Chinese name that inspires queasiness because its sounds like the word for “sickness” in Mandarin.

Eager to dodge such pitfalls, Notebook commissioned an evocative Chinese translation of its own name from Mr Lin. He came up with: Apparently that means “tube of ten thousand patterns” or, more simply, “kaleidoscope”.

See: The Financial Times

For years, linguists came to the Sea Islands and listened, trying to understand descendants of slaves who had been transported there mostly from the West Coast of Africa.

They called a small bird “bidi.” They called a white man “buckra.” They said “dash away” to get rid of a bad habit. And used “de” instead of “to be.” They used “e” as a pronoun for “he,” “she” and “it.” They said “eh” for “yes.” And “fanner” was a basket used to thresh rice. They said “hudu” was something that brought bad luck. And whispered sweetly “nyam” while encouraging a child to eat.

The root of Gullah words are explained in the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum’s exhibit “Word, Shout, Song,” which opens Monday, August 9 and runs through March 27. The exhibit presents the work of scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner, perhaps the first well-known African American linguist, who was called “the father of Gullah studies.”

The exhibit — which includes photographs from the African Diaspora, artifacts from the Sea Islands and rare audio recordings of spoken Gullah — follows Turner’s linguistic detective work into the Gullah and Geechee communities. It traces Turner’s travels to Georgia, South Carolina, Brazil and Africa as he tried to get to the root of what these Gullah words meant and translated them for a wider audience, providing insight into isolated worlds.

See:  The Washington Post

Historical linguist Nikolaus Ritt from the Department of English and American Studies at Universitat Wien (Austria) claims that it may actually be language which controls us, the speakers, rather than the other way round. Applying a generalised Darwinian framework to linguistics, he is particularly interested in how words and sounds change over time and how they use humans for the “selfish” purpose of getting themselves replicated.

Nikolaus Ritt examines language change from an unconventional point of view. Contrary to established, speaker-centred theories of language change his generalised Darwinian approach does not reduce the properties of human behaviour to the intentions and goals of free-willed human agents.

As opposed to hermeneutic theories of historical linguistics, the generalised Darwinian approach is radically analytic and regards cultural and linguistic change as something that happens with speakers’ selves being only partly involved in the process, and experiencing it rather than driving it.

“The crucial point of this Darwinian approach”, says Nikolaus Ritt, “is that speakers play no central role in our explanation of this directed evolution. Of course humans are the ones who speak, and they are the ones who acquire language, but the pattern of change that has come to unfold over the centuries results from the interaction of rhythm and sounds. From this perspective, speakers only provide the machinery which ‘selfish’ sounds use to replicate themselves, but they do not actively steer this evolutionary process.”  Read more.

See: PhysOrg.com

Businesses up and down Britain are bracing for a drop-off in demand from important clients across Whitehall and local councils. Some are already reporting lucrative state contracts have been cancelled, according to the Markit/CIPS UK services PMI survey.

In a recent British Chambers of Commerce survey two-thirds of companies said they expected spending cuts already announced would hit their profitability for a variety of reasons. A fifth of companies expected a hit because of lost public sector contracts.

Some companies found a silver lining from Britain’s downturn which has translated into a pick-up in private sector work. With the way things are in the economy many businesses have been looking to sell goods and services overseas. So there are people going on trade missions who need their brochures translated or telephone interpreters to set up meetings. There’s a big drive by people to do business in China, India, Brazil and Russia.

See: The Guardian

Lingoport announced today that it will present a live Webinar Tuesday, August 24th 2010, titled “Internationalization in Action.”

The free Webinar will be held between 11:00am and 12:00pm PDT on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010. To register for the event, simply visit http://www.lingoport.com/webinar-internationalization-in-action

See: Marketwire

Kannada Development Authority (KDA) has planned to bring out a folk dictionary in Kannada to preserve and promote the regional and cultural diversity of the language.

KDA Chairman Mukhyamantri Chendru told reporters here today under the project it was proposed to collect colloquial, slang and folk words used among the people in the rural and tribal regions of the State for documentation of oral tradition in a year at a cost of Rs one crore.

The 2000-page dictionary will be completed with the help of the Janapada Akademy.

Mr Chandru said a case pending in the Madras High Court challenging classical status to Kannada will come up for final hearing on September 2 and the verdict ”is likey to be in favour of Kannada.”

See: Mangalorean

Arabic language dubbing has become growing phenomenon across the Middle East.

For the past eight months, Pan-Arab satellite-TV companies MBC and Showtime Arabia have been broadcasting hundreds of Tinseltown movies across the region. Previous attempts to translate them had been to add subtitles in classical Arabic. But in a region where 70 million people ages 15 and older are unable to read, this attempt effectively ignored many Arabs whose only form of communication is through one of the regional spoken dialects.

Some viewers remain skeptical. But according to Samer Shalaty, a film art director who now produces dubbed movies for the Showtime Arabia channel, the region’s thirst for American cinema means that dubbing is here to stay.

See: The Christian Science Monitor

Watch this video for the discussion.

See: Localization  Industry 411

At the turn of the 21st century it was hard to imagine how much translation would change in a short space of time, or that four companies – Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft – would have such an impact on the end-user and business experience of translation.

Facebook would attract over 500 million users and rely almost entirely on them to localize its products
Google’s computers would produce ten times more translated words than the entire professional translation workforce worldwide
IBM would call on their own global workforce to customize their machine translation engines
Bill Gates would finally identify MT as one of his five strategic technologies for Microsoft.

The activities and visions of these leading IT companies account for much of the technology infrastructure of our digital lifestyles and business concerns. And they are all deeply engaged with translation technology and process.

These four innovators show the path forward to new realities in 21st century translation: universal, ubiquitous access to information and communication across most languages of the world, enabled by professionals and committed volunteers, supported by ever more sophisticated technology. For the translation industry, we live in interesting times! Read complete article.

See: TAUS

Aria Systems, Inc., provider of cloud billing and subscription management solutions, today announced that Lionbridge has deployed Aria Platform Enterprise Edition. Dominion Digital, an Aria Certified Systems Integrator Partner, delivered the implementation which provides automated self-service and self-activation for Lionbridge clients in more than 100 countries around the world.

See: Market Watch

Microsoft Corp. researchers in Beijing are using data mined from the Web to enhance an online Chinese-to-English dictionary and language-practice service, a technique that could one day be used in similar tools for anyone learning a language.

Engkoo is written in Chinese with two characters meaning “English” and “vault.” It has a core of translation data that Microsoft draws from sources such as dictionaries, which it licenses from their publishers. That content is mixed with data that Microsoft gleans by such methods as sweeping the Web for sites with parallel Chinese and English versions.

Microsoft computers align the parallel websites—their paragraphs, sentences and individual words—then assign a quality ranking to the resulting translation and file it away.

Microsoft’s researchers plan versions of Engkoo for other languages, including Japanese and English. A version for English speakers learning Chinese is also a goal, but the company’s research so far is focused on Chinese to English, said Eric Chang, director of technology strategy at Microsoft Research Asia.

See: The Wall Street Journal

A tribal linguist has determined the translation used for the past century for the town of Sequim (in Washington State, USA) – long believed by many to mean “quiet waters” – is wrong.

The correct translation, it turns out, is a “place for going to shoot,” a reference to the Sequim-Dungeness Valley’s once great elk and waterfowl hunting, said Timothy Montler, an expert in the study of dying languages.

The “quiet waters” reference is ingrained in Sequim history, with references in regional visitor guides and historical publications and on websites.

The executive director of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce said there are plans to update brochures and a website to reflect the change – as soon as time and budgets allow.

See: Seattle Times