All news

Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabaei University will hold a commemoration ceremony today for the late Iranian linguist and lexicographer Ali-Mohammad Haqshenas.

Noted Iranian linguists Mohammad Dabir-Moqaddam and Kourosh Safavi will speak at the event to be held at the university’s Literature and Foreign Languages Faculty, ISNA reported.

Known as the Father of Iranian Linguistics, Haqshenas passed away last month at the age of 70.

See: Tehran Times

A New Zealand academic who developed a new spelling system for a dying Pacific language from Vanuatu says it’s now being taught in kindergartens.

Dr Laura Dimock spent nine months studying the previously undocumented Nahavaq language on the island of Malakula. She says only 700 people speak Nahavaq and says its survival is in doubt because of the effects of globalisation, economy and tourism in Vanuatu.

See: Radio New Zealand International

Sealaska Heritage Institute has published a new series of learners’ dictionaries for the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian languages and the first-ever Alaska Haida phrasebook.

All of the dictionaries include sections translating Native words to English and English words to the Native languages.
The “Alaskan Haida Phrasebook” was written by Erma Lawrence, one of the few remaining fluent speakers of Alaska Haida. It includes more than 4,000 sentences covering food, family, weather, health, traveling and more and is said to be the most comprehensive phrasebook to date for any Alaska Native language.

See: The News Tribune

The ambitious project of Deccan College to create a Sanskrit language dictionary comprising words from 1,500 Sanskrit scriptures from 62 knowledge branches, is in the doldrums due to the meagre strength of language teachers available for the research work.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry of the Union government has not filled the vacancies at the institute.

The state government is supposed to recruit 14 researchers for the Sanskrit dictionary project.

See: Sakaal Times

Hong Kong, China (HKBU): The Fourth Cross‐Taiwan Straits Symposium on Translation and Intercultural Communication (CSSTIC) will be its first convention in Hong Kong. The event will take place on 8-10 July 2011, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong. It is Organized by the Translation Programme and the Centre for Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University.

See: tran.hkbu.edu

Cultural differences can cause confusion about what words or even actions mean, an issue that has come to the forefront recently following the arrest of a Chinese doctoral degree student in New Jersey.

Zhai Tiantian, who studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology, has been accused of trying to set fire to a campus building and of making threats to a professor who gave him a low mark. For a few days, Chinese media mistranslated, or misunderstood, the charges and reported that Zhai was being charged with terrorism.

The charge of making a terrorist threat can include a range of verbal threats, according to an Associated Press report.

Officials at the Stevens Institute issued a clarification, saying they were concerned the story was being misreported and that a long-running disciplinary situation has been blown out of proportion into an international incident.

See: English Xinhuanet

Late German author Hans Fallada has often been dismissed by literary experts as a “bourgeois” writer, but now, over six decades after his death, his work is attracting international acclaim. Following the recent translation of his wartime novel – titled “Alone in Berlin” in the UK and “Every Man Dies Alone” in the United States – he has gained a large following in the English-speaking world.

In the UK alone, 100,000 copies of the novel have been sold since its initial release in hardback in 2009. Penguin Classics, the novel’s UK publisher, expects to sell 250,000 copies by the end of this year. For a country where translated novels usually account for only one percent of the book market’s sales volume, this is a particularly astonishing figure.

See: DW-world.de

Also see: The Guardian.co

Once, localization in Ireland was a driving force of the “multi-lingual and cross-cultural information society”.

Irish-based localization itself is now a “lower-level activity” we’re told. That Microsoft’s 25 Years in Ireland article can be such an underwhelming assessment of the contribution localization made to Ireland’s growth (let’s put aside the other incorrect facts in there) is particularly disappointing (I should disclose I am a former employee and current MSFT stock-holder and have let Microsoft know my feelings – with no response.) Remember all that stuff about Ireland being the world’s biggest exporter of software? All in English, was it? That’s some low-level activity.

The lessons for other countries are clear:

* Keep in touch with the localization needs of the community.

* Find the pulse of local innovation.

* Know your markets and users.

* Stay small, smart, and agile.

* Use your contacts.

See: Multilingual blog

Linguist Amanda Galsworthy told the Hay Festival in Powys of her work with three French presidents over 26 years.

She spoke of how President Francois Mitterrand once in the 1980s used her origins to “infuriate” then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

See: BBC news

Hamid Davoudabadi, the writer of “July 82 Ambush” announced the publication of the English translation of this book and said that with the cooperation of the foundation for the preservation of relics and values of the holy defense and 14 Tir Students’ Movement copies of this book have been given to international organizations such as the Red Cross and the United Nations.

See: Abna.ir

Sneak peek at some of the most important findings of the Common Sense Advisory´s  annual global study of the language services market.

* As of May 2010, Common Sense Advisory’s database of LSPs contains 23,380 unique records.
* Common Sense Advisory calculates that the market for outsourced language services is worth US$26.327 billion in 2010.
* As of 2010, Common Sense Advisory calculates that the language services market is growing at an annual rate of 13.15%.

See: GlobalWatchtower

Lexiophiles has just announced the Top 100 Language Blogs 2010.  The translation blogs included among the Top 100 are:

• 6. Atominium the art of translation
• 9. Beyond Words
• 10. Translation Guy
• 21. ATR Blog
• 22. Translation Blog: Trusted Translations
• 36. Translation Tribulations
• 40. Algo más que traducir
• 42. Words to good effect
• 53. Blog de Traducción: Trusted Translations
• 56. JodyByrne.com
• 66. Medical Translation Blog
• 70. Trad Online
• 76. Spanish Translation Blog
• 79. Thoughts On Translation
• 80. (Not Just) Another Translator
• 94. Les recettes du traducteur
• 97. wéb-tränslatiôns

See: Lexiophiles

Also see: About Translation

Translators at court cases in the Tyrone and Fermanagh district – which includes Dungannon, Cookstown and Omagh – have earned more than £113,000 in the last year, the highest total cost for the seven districts in Northern Ireland.

The cost of providing translation services to defendants of foreign nationality in criminal cases in the area also represents almost a quarter of the combined total for Northern Ireland’s courts during 2009/10.
Belfast Court District’s translation costs were the second highest at £105,029, while the Craigavon area stands at £42,537 and Armagh and South Down at £81,193.
According to figures revealed in the Northern Ireland Assembly, payment for translation services at criminal cases is the shared responsibility of the Public Prosecution Service, the Northern Ireland Court Service and the NIO.

See: The Tyrone times

Stanford University’s new Literature Lab investigates the evolution of literary style by teaming up like biologists and using computer programs to “read” an entire library.

It’s a controversial vision for changing a field still steeped in individual readers’ careful analyses of texts. And it could become a more common way of doing business in the humanities as millions of books are made machine-readable through new tools like Google’s digital library. History, literature, language studies: For any discipline where research focuses on books, some experts say, academe is at a computational crossroads.

Data-diggers are gunning to debunk old claims based on “anecdotal” evidence and answer once-impossible questions about the evolution of ideas, language, and culture. Critics, meanwhile, worry that these stat-happy quants take the human out of the humanities.

See: The Chronicle

A recent ProZ.com poll showed that more than 50% of translators have no or very few direct clients. Long-time translating twins Judy and Dagmar Jenner believe that any translator who would like to focus on working with direct clients can find them as long as she or he starts thinking as an entrepreneur. This book will teach you how to start your entrepreneurial linguist journey. Written in a purposely non-academic style, “The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation” will show you how to market your services to direct clients, build and nurture relationships, grow your client base in a structured way, use web 2.0 to promote your services, and much more. If you are ready to take your translation or interpretation business to the next level, then this book is for you.

See: ProZ.com/books

For the general public, what actually goes on inside the White House remains a mystery. An interpreter for seven past American presidents, Harry Obst has just released his new book, White House Interpreter: The Art of Interpretation. He takes a look at the five presidents he had the most interaction with – Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan – and shares an intimate look at the inner happenings of the Oval Office.

See: ereleases

PARIS—A technology consortium funded by the French government unveiled multimedia search tools Thursday, as part of a scaled-back attempt to challenge the dominance of U.S. search engines.

The project was started four years ago by the French and German governments, and then-President Jacques Chirac said they would “take up the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo!” The venture was christened Quaero – Latin for “I seek.”

Quaero showed off software that converts spoken language into written text; a program that synchronizes electronic books to audio books; and an automatic translation device which turns German into English (though not into French).

Quaero groups some 26 partners, mostly French businesses and universities, who share research. The government hopes Quaero will nurture smaller French technology companies. So far, the software is aimed at the French market.

See: The Wall Street Journal

Major UK language and education brand Collins and leading language-learning and reference publisher in China, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press (SFLEP), have today signed a joint-venture agreement to publish the largest Chinese into English dictionary dataset in the world. It will be a landmark copyright, published in both unabridged and abridged editions, in both print and digital formats.

See: booktradeinfo

Google Translate recently added language support for Eastern Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian. Turkish and Persian (Farsi) came online last year.

See: The Armenian Reporter

Nearly 60% in California high schools are not proficient despite more than six years of a U.S. education. Flaws in the English-language programs could imperil the state’s economic future, report says.

In a survey of 40 school districts, the study found that the majority of long-term English-language learners are U.S. natives who prefer English and are orally bilingual. But they develop major deficits in reading and writing, fail to achieve the academic English needed for educational success and disproportionately drop out of high school, according to the study by Californians Together, a coalition of 22 parent, professional and civil rights organizations.

See: Los Angeles Times