All news

Boston.com’s soccer blog, Corner Kicks, has integrated  Google Translate into its user interface: click a button, select a language — from Afrikaans and Azerbaijani to Welsh and Yiddish — and the blog’s text will be translated for you, instantly.

The automated translation service — though steadily improving — isn’t perfect, though.

See: The Nieman Journalism Lab

This state of affairs is unacceptable. You can read all the miserable details here (No quality controls laid down for courts and Garda translators), and here (Hundreds of court, Garda interpreters have no qualification), and here (Lost in translation).

Let’s be frank here – we’re not talking about a shoddy translation of some manual for an external disk drive. We’re talking about people’s rights not being properly represented within the legal system, and handsome monies being paid out of the public purse for the privilege, apparently to some people who are not capable of doing the job in the first place.

I, for one, will be submitting a Freedom of Information request to the Irish Department of Justice and Law Reform for more details on the extent of this nonsense and who is being paid for what, how much, and according to what criteria. Given some of my tax Euros are being spent here, I want to know exactly what’s going on. Considering the amount of time the industry spends talking about quality and metrics, I think everyone should reflect on these stories.

A civil rights group is suing Harris County in federal court to force the county to provide interpreters to more indigent people in civil cases.

When needed, interpreters are automatically appointed in criminal cases. But Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project, charges that failure to do so in civil cases violates the constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law.

Robert Soard, chief of staff to the county attorney, said his understanding of county policy is that judges have discretion to appoint free interpreters to the indigent in other cases and to assign payment of interpreters’ fees to the losing party.

See: The Houston Chronicle

A new Aboriginal Interpreter Service office has opened in Wadeye (Australia).  Indigenous Development Minister Malarndirri McCarthy says the Wadeye office, and another soon to be opened in Nhulunbuy, will employ some of the 77 interpreters living in the east Arnhem Land region.

The Aboriginal Interpreter Service is one of the largest employers of Indigenous people in the Territory, with 42 interpreters and translators applying for accreditation testing.

See: ABC News

Uruguay is set to pioneer the latest mobile-phone technology in its pursuit of communication skills.  An entrepreneur´s most recent product is an English learning service via mobile phone.

Rodolfo Llanos, co-founder of Soloingles, spotted a niche market for his product in Uruguay and six years on Soloingles now has clients in Mexico and Spain, and is making a modest profit of $2,000 a month.

The aim is to offer practical but short lessons that will appeal to busy people who are on the move, and the content is entirely automated. The team of teachers update the site with new practice material but they do not guide learners.

See: Guardian.co.uk

This case summary describes what can go wrong when no interpreter is provided to facilitate communication between hospital staff, the patient, and the patient’s family.

The plaintiff alleges that during the patient’s heart surgery and his subsequent stroke and  convalescence, the Hospital failed to provide a sign  language interpreter to him and his wife, who are both deaf, in violation of numerous federal, state, and local  regulations, so that their two minor children–-(of normal hearing)–were forced to interpret.

See: More Law

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

More than 80 agencies currently employ people with translation skills in more than 100 different languages, with demand increasing.

The Partnership for Public Service has taken a look at the shrinking pool of people with the language skills the government needs, why it’s shrinking and suggestions for change.  Part of the problem is that federal jobs require candidates to be citizens. Ninety nine percent of all federal employees are citizens, so native language speakers sometimes have difficulty because they may be here with visas and work permits and everything else, but if they’re not citizens, there’s an extra hurdle to federal employment.

The study makes recommendations for three major institutions -Congress, federal agencies, and colleges and universities: make greater use of existing programs, invest in strategic workforce planning to identify long-term goals and project hiring needs, intensify efforts to train and retain employees, partner with colleges and universities.

See: Federal News Radio

In his blog Kirti Vashee provides a review and summary of the sessions he attended at Localization World Berlin 2010. The reviews cover the following sessions:

MT Pricing – Buyers, Sellers, Developers: insight on how MT cost/benefit/value could be viewed, how to price MT, post-editing and better understand the value that MT could deliver to the various stakeholders.

MT in the Real World — Successes, Challenges and Insight from Teams of Customers and Providers: it provided both the customer and the vendor perspective on the same situation and described the following issues in three different “real world” situations.

Optimizing Content for Machine Translation

TAUS Data Association Update: TDA currently has 2.5B words of TM and hopes to double this in the next year, TDA currently has 70 members and is trying to make it easier for smaller members to join, they are trying to get more open source tools available to help members process the data more easily, they have annual operating costs of about $500,000, The three main uses of TDA data so far have been: monitor terminology use and practices across an industry,TM Leveraging, provide larger mass of training corpus for SMT (But use with care after cleaning and normalization)

Translingual Europe 2010: International Conference on Advanced Translation Technology. The EU and the DFKI are working hard to further the state of MT and related language technology.

Microsoft´s presentation was about their effort to develop the Haitian Creole system and user presentations by the EC, EPO and Symantec.

See: eMpTy Pages

The Access to Information Working Group is finishing up its preparations for the July 1 launch of the new policy. Though the policy was approved in December, AIWG has been working for 6 months to train staff and create guides for the new policy.

The AIWG is still working with CSOs and other international organizations to determine the best way to approach a new translation framework. Rather than hard rules about which documents are translated into which languages, a system which would inevitably have gaps, the translations sub-group is hopeful that they can create a flexible system wherein translations are provided based on demand.

See: Bank Information Center

Although translation exercises are included in the syllabus of state schools, they are generally absent in the further education sector. The majority of Germany’s 957 Volkshochschulen, which provide over six million hours of language training to just under 2 million learners each year, favour communicative language teaching (CLT) which focuses almost entirely on oral practice in the target language. It is perhaps also significant that while state-schools teachers are drawn almost entirely from the local population, the adult education sector includes a high percentage of native English speaker teachers who received their training in an English-only environment in which translation was not an option.

The practice of translation has been referred to as “the poor relation of language teaching” while others see it as “the most important channel of intercultural dialogue”, but however you define it, you can’t ignore it, for the simple reason that all language learners are to some degree translators and need to become accustomed to negotiating meaning between two or more languages.

Much of the negative reputation of the use of translation as a teaching aid stems from the fact that translation is strongly identified with the grammar/translation method.

See: The Guardian.co.uk

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

The presentation of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize proved as popular as ever and was packed with authors, publishers, journalists, agents and other literary professionals. The award is one of the few to recognise that fiction in translation has to be a successful coalition between author and translator; each gets £5,000 and a magnum of champagne.

The 2010 winner was Brodeck’s Report by the French novelist Philippe Claudel, translated by John Cullen.

Five out of the six shortlisted titles were published by independent presses, suggesting that it is the smaller, independent publishers – often working on a shoestring – that are keeping international fiction alive in the country. New publishers seem to spring up all the time but struggle to get the publicity and coverage enjoyed by larger publishing houses; so foreign fiction in translation became a little thinner on the ground in 2009.

See: The Tribune Magazine.co.uk

There is something lost in translation when the item on the menu is “cutting from beef language moves with a horseradish and mustard.” This is the power of Google and other instant translators. What should be “comes with” in Russian becomes “moves with.”

And rather than check the translations against reality, menu-writers are putting the words up for all to giggle about.

See:  The Vancouver Sun

Language Business Innovation – Shared Opportunities

The TAUS User Conference is the once-a-year, non-sponsored event focused on translation automation, localization business innovation and industry collaboration. The User Conference is combined with the TDA General Meeting.  It will be held from 3-6 October at the Governor Hotel, Portland (OR), USA.

See: TAUS

The archive was set up to exhibit “a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds”. Native and non-native English speakers are recorded – or record themselves – reading the passage, chosen because it contains most of the consonants, vowels and clusters of Standard American English.

You can search the online archive by language or geography, or just enjoy a browse; alongside each recording is a phonetic transcription. So, for example, you can compare the accent of a female native Afrikaans speaker aged 27, who learned to speak English at nine, with a 43-year-old man, from a different region of South Africa, who learned English at four; or you can hear accents of native Arabic speakers from Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Syria.

The archive is used for teaching and research. As well as linguists and phoneticians, groups who use it range from teachers of English as a foreign language, and engineers training speech recognition machines, to speech pathologists and actors who need to learn an accent.

See:  Guardian.co.uk

Facebook’s top 15 languages have been surveyed, looking at such stats as the absolute number of people using the site in those languages, and the basic demographic splits by language. Note that these numbers reflect how many people have pointed their Facebook language settings to a given language or variant within a broader language group. The site’s top 10 languages are:  English, with over 52%,  Spanish, with around 15% (this number includes totals for all Spanish variants,)  Turkish 5%, French 5%, and Indonesian 5%,  Italian, with 3.9% , German, with around 2.7% , Chinese and Portuguese.
What’s notable about these language stats is not that English is the dominant language of Facebook (that should be obvious), but rather that the next languages in line do not fall neatly in line with Facebook’s list of top countries by overall userbase. That indicates that users in some of the countries that are contributing significantly to Facebook’s “over 400 million” total usage figure are still using the site in English, despite the fact that Facebook is now fully localized in their languages.

See: Inside Facebook

If you’re a freelancing mom or dad, school vacation is both the best of times and the worst of times! Apart from being grateful for the flexibility of the job if it’s hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the regular school schedule, it’s really hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the summer, no-school schedule. What’s a freelancing mom or dad to do?

There are a few basic options: pay for child care in the form of a babysitter or summer camp, try to work while your kids are at home with you, work less or take the summer off, trade or barter child care or find a source of free child care, or patch together some combination of these strategies. As with all things parenting-related, I think that the ideal solution depends on how much you need or want to work, how many kids you have and how you get along with them, what financial resources you have available and how your spouse or partner (if you have one) can pitch in.

#Enlist your kids in the planning.
# Steal an hour here and an hour there.
#Get your spouse on board.
#Barter child care.

See: Thoughts on Translation

Boston— The IMIA along with other associations developed an important survey, the fifth Annual National Salary Survey for the medical interpreting profession. The data gathered will be used to benchmark current compensation trends in the US and create an industry standard tool to document the working conditions of medical interpreters and healthcare interpreters worldwide.

This national salary survey data is very important to be able to quantify national costs for  requests to the federal government for the reimbursement of medical or healthcare interpreter costs.

See: SEO Press Releases

Dr Saeidi Mehr, university professor and writer in the field of philosophy at the review session of “An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Mind” called the current time the era of translation and said “This era reminds us of the third-century translation movement of Iran. Now, after centuries there is felt a need for translation and a special attention should be given to translation next to compilations”.

See: Iran Book News Agency