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A 23-years-old Lecturer of the National university Ostroh Academy (Ukraine) Mykhailo Yakubovych made the first full translation of the Holy Quran into Ukrainian. According to UKRINFORM, having worked on translation of the Quran, Mykhailo Yakubovych studied more than 1000 sources and read more than 40 full comments to the Quran. Author also unified the terminology and made a glossary chapter in his book.

See: WAM (Emirates News Agency)

Babylon Ltd. released a new application that enables instant delivery of organizational information from various Excel data sources.

BabylonPlus offers a simple and natural solution to the problems of information retrieval.  With just one click on a word or any on-screen text, BabylonPlus extracts the relevant and secure information from the Excel and delivers it to the worker’s desktop, increasing the velocity of business.

See: PR Newswire

Raytheon BBN Technologies has taken in $17 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to use in developing rapid translation software to apply to Arabic and Chinese news sources.

The funds are part of the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, which aims to translate speech and text in several languages using software that, by the end of the five-year program, will be 90 percent accurate. The company noted in a press release today that it is developing the software to automatically translate foreign-language text and broadcast news into English.

The GALE program employs speech and language scientists, as well as global researchers. The translation developments are intended to find the best language translation while accounting for different dialects and speakers.

See: MHT

Computer translation remains elusive for hundreds of lesser-known languages. So linguists are trying to harness the wisdom of crowds to do what machines can’t. It’s known as crowd-sourcing, and researchers think it could help them get closer to something they’ve been pursuing for decades: the perfect translation machine.

Philip Resnik, teacher of linguistics at the University of Maryland, and a handful of his colleagues are looking for ways to make human and computer translators work together. Earlier this month, they gathered at a conference in Maryland to trade ideas and real-world examples.

Linguists hope that crowd-sourcing holds the key to translating hundreds of relatively obscure languages, such as Urdu, Pashto and Farsi. But this is not a purely academic question — it also touches on both security and business concerns.

See: npr

Spanish can be heard on the streets of almost any major American city these days, as Hispanic immigrants mingle with the English-speaking majority.

But an increasing number, particularly children who’ve been through US schools, are bilingual. Very often they switch between languages within a single sentence, or borrow English words and put them into Spanish, making a hybrid known as Spanglish.

This group is now too big for media organisations and advertisers to ignore. New ways of broadcasting and marketing products are being developed to target them.

Many second generation Hispanics constantly navigate between two worlds and two languages: the English in which they learn at school and socialise, and the Spanish they speak at home with their parents.

The Spanglish hybrid is already filtering into some of the programmes catered specially for the second generation of Latinos, in television cable channels like MTV’s MTV Tr3s and NBC’s Mun2.

See: BBC News

eType is a software that works as your own personal creative editor that feeds you great phrasing suggestions as you type.  It is multilingual, with impeccable grammar and spelling.

Launched a few days ago  with six available languages, this international software of mystery will soon support virtually any language in the world.

See: PR Newswire

The history of publishing and printing in Tamil is as interesting and rich as the language itself.

The first book dates back to October 20, 1578. On the eventful day, Portuguese missionary Henrique Henriques (also Anrique Anriquez) published ‘Thambiraan Vanakkam’ with paper imported from China.

Tamil historian Pulavar S. Raju says the 10×14 cm book had 16 pages of 24 lines each and had the very Tamil font that was then used on palm leaves and stones.

The book was a translation of the Portuguese ‘Doctrina Christam,’ authored by Francis Xavier. Mr. Raju says the book was published as a result of Father Henriques’ efforts to have a prayer book in Tamil.

See: The Hindu

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced that it would use English in Commercial Court cases in a bid to attract more international business ­litigation to the country.

Under the original plan, oral submissions and witness statements could be heard in English without the need for translation. A draft bill, currently in discussion, proposes that written ­submissions and verdicts would also be dealt with in English, broadening the scope of the proposal and going further than last month’s pilot case.

It is believed that a nationwide introduction of English language cases would make German courts significantly more attractive to foreign clients.

Currently German courts would reject a case in English because it costs a lot of money and the proceedings can be held up by discussions over the translation.

See: The Lawyer

Over 50 students, graduates, translators, careers advisers and academics will today find out what the work of a European Union translator entails and how to apply. The event, held at the European Commission’s UK office, will see the launch of a video-clip “Translating for Europe – into English”, showcasing a few of the 1800 translators who work for the European Commission. During the film, they will hear not only about the work, but general thoughts about living in Brussels and Luxembourg. At the event itself, there will also be presentations on the various other careers open to linguists and a chance to ask questions to people doing these jobs on a daily basis.

The event comes as English language translation approaches a recruitment crisis.

In July new recruitment rounds will be launched, with opportunities for translators, interpreters and lawyer linguists. Candidates for English-language positions should be a national of an EU country, have a university degree in any discipline and be able to translate from two official languages* into native-standard English.

See: Media Newswire

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department will have its response next month to a civil grand jury’s recommendation that a Spanish translation be part of countywide reverse notification calls made through the 9-1-1 system.

The jury also recommended that the Sheriff Department’s online registration form also have a Spanish translation. Currently, there is only a brief Spanish translation of the system’s terms and conditions on the department’s Web site.

See: Noozhawk

A language blog written a few years ago suggested that Manute Bol might have been responsible for coining and/or spreading the phrase “my bad.”

The “my bad” item, written by British professor of linguistics Geoffrey K. Pullum (the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) quotes one source who recalls first hearing “my bad” in the Bay Area in 1988, after Bol had joined the Golden State Warriors. And indeed, if you run an archives search on “basketball” and “my bad,” the first three usages are all linked to Bol.

Note: Manute Bol has recently died, please see The Post’s obit, or Kevin Blackistone’s column from South Africa, for more on his legacy)

See: The Washington Post

It cost €3m to provide interpretation in the courts last year — with translators required in more cases involving Swahili and Lingala, the Bantu language of north west Congo  (DR), than for cases heard in Irish.  Now new rules are being brought into force that are designed to cut the huge cost to the taxpayer.

The Irish Courts Service has initiated a pilot scheme in the Border counties of Cavan and Monaghan which will mean that cases involving foreign nationals will be heard all on one day — rather than divided over different court sittings.

Judge Sean MacBride announced in Cavan last week he was initiating the move in relation to forthcoming court lists to avoid interpreters having to sit all day in courts, waiting for only one or two cases to be heard.

See: Independent.ie

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

On account of the state of the art of computer translation, Google’s translation program gives the best results with simple, declarative sentences that are being translated between similar language pairs, like English and Spanish.

Move away from that middle ground, towards more dissimilar languages–English and Chinese, say–or toward greater semantic complexity and the usefulness drops off sharply.

Google Translate works in any browser, of course, but it’s best in Google’s own Chrome. When you use Chrome to go to a page in any language other than English (or whatever your default happens to be) the software notices as much and asks if you’d like the page translated. You can even make translation the default, so it happens automatically. As with everything on Google, this takes but a few seconds.

See: Forbes

D.C. police say they’re installing new software in their patrol cars to improve communication with the deaf and hard of hearing community.

The department put the software in 15 police cars this week as part of a pilot program. It provides a video link that allows people to communicate with interpreters in American Sign Language. The translation is then relayed to officers.

Police say the technology will allow officers to gather information from the scene more quickly. The software also is in all seven police district stations and three substations.

See: The Washington Post

Beginning this week, the theme parks will offer sign language interpreters on a regular basis. No calls needed.

Every Monday and Saturday as many as eight interpreters will be available at Disneyland. At California Adventure, the interpreters will be available every Sunday and Friday.

See: Los Angeles Times

The adventure and excitement of travel includes the humor some people experience reading signs, menus and other printed matter.  Often it can be seen that the translation from the local language to English leaves a lot to the imagination or at least provides the laugh of the day.

Here are some funny examples:

In one hotel bathroom a sign read, “Keep the shower curtain in sight (inside, maybe?) of the tub.” As this was pondered, readers of the sign also couldn’t help but notice there was no shower curtain.

Menus often are delightful.

“Pavi Salmon,” which was translated into the English was “Paver Stone of Salmon.”

A museum brochure describing Catherine the Great, was unabashedly translated to “Catherine the Large One.”

And then, a brochure at a visitor center welcomed tourists with “You can stroll on our streets, or stop for a bite to eat, and all while ‘shopping for windows.'”

See: The Orlando Sentinel

Keeping track of what’s being said at this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is a truly gargantuan task which will involve 35 transcribers in St. Petersburg and 25 translators and editors in eight time zones around the world.

Eclectic Translations, the St. Petersburg-based firm tasked with transcribing and translating the Forum sessions, estimates that it will produce somewhere in the region of 360,000 words as it types up about 3,500 hours of audio and then translates it, creating thousands of pages of text which will be posted on the Internet within hours.

Each hour of talk will take about six hours to transcribe and translate, with the end versions being provided in English and Russian, meaning that Eclectic Translations, which has a permanent staff of just four, will have to take on dozens of temporary staff to cover the event.

See: The St. Petersburg Times

The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who explored Portugal’s troubled political identity in a series of novels published over the last four decades and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998, died today at the age of 87.

His translator Margaret Jull Costa hailed his “wonderful imagination” and his focus on the “dignity of the ordinary man”.

He continued to write until his death, and experimented with a daily blog, Outros Cadernos de Saramago, in 2008, which was published between hard covers as The Notebook in English earlier this year. He was expected to appear at the Edinburgh festival in August to promote his latest book in English, The Elephant’s Journey. His last book, Cain, was published in 2009 with an English translation expected next year.

See: The Guardian.co

Gerbrand Bakker has become the first Dutch writer to win the International Impac Dublin Literary Award from a shortlist of seven other titles including Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland .

Bakker (48) won the world’s richest literary prize for a single work of fiction after a long selection process begun late last year when more than 160 titles were nominated by libraries across the world.

The win was expected as the novel, one of only three titles in translation on the short list, has emerged as a popular work impressing literary critics and general readers. Originally published in Holland in 2006, the English language translation from Secker Harvill, first appeared in 2008 and the paperback edition from Vintage was published last year.

Last night’s win should hasten the translation into English of Bakker’s other books, as well as his forthcoming novel, The Detour , due out in the Netherlands in October. Also important is the emphasis this Impac win places on the role of the translator. Bakker’s translator, David Colmer, collects €25,000 of the €100,000 prize.

See: The Irish Times