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The European and Chinese patent agencies signed an accord that will speed up translations of patents in both languages in a bid to improve access to the offices’ information for researchers, scientists and inventors.

The European Patent Office and the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China agreed to cooperate to give access to a free Chinese-English translation service through the Internet by next year, according to a joint e-mailed statement today. Read more.

See: Bloomberg

UTA’s Adaptive Resource Center is working with a student and her dog to provide them the best Russian translations possible.

The Office for Students with Disabilities’ Adaptive Resource Center works to accommodate students with disabilities with their coursework.

This semester, Jaime Palma, Office for Students with Disabilities testing and assistive technology assistant director, worked closely with Laurel Wheeler, a blind French and Russian language junior, to translate her Russian textbooks.

One of the services offered is braille translation in every foreign language offered at UTA.

Normally, blind students use JAWS, which is text-to-speech or speech-to-text software, to read coursework. A problem arose when the program could not recognize Russian language’s cyrillic characters, or confused them with their English counterparts.

By translating the text to a braille book for each assignment, the center is able to avoid errors presented by using JAWS.

See: The Shorthorn

It’s been almost a week since John O’Brien, the founder of American publisher Dalkey Archive Press, announced he will publish a series of English-language translations of Korean literary works, the first time such a project is taking place outside Korea.

A joint project with Korea Literature Translation Institute, the series will consist of 25 works by Korean authors and poets. O’Brien, who founded the publisher in Chicago in 1984, is known for his preference for “lesser known” and even “avant-garde” works of literature. The company has since moved to Champaign, Illinois.

And such taste is reflected in the pieces selected for the upcoming K-lit series. The featured authors include: Yi Sang (1910-1937), considered one of the most innovative writers in modern Korean literature, and living author Yi In-seong, known for his explicit depiction of human psychology and experimental use of language.

See: The Korea Herald

The following excerpts are from Legally Speaking:

It all comes down to making your client’s life as simple, straightforward and pleasant as possible: good old customer service in action.

1. The basics – Delivering the translation on time and to a standard that is fit for its intended purpose is obviously job number one. No amount of service can compensate for a job poorly done in the first place.
2. Communicate – Do not drop off the face of the earth (it happens more regularly than you might think); reply to emails fairly promptly, with all the information required.
3. Email organisation – Keep all the emails for a particular project in a single ‘conversation’; don’t start a new thread for each phase of the project from quote, to query, to delivery, to invoicing. Keep the customer’s reference number or wording in the email header so they can search back through their emails and have the whole project’s correspondence in one place.
4. File naming – When you send back the files, label them clearly and using the original file name plus your language code (and the file type if need be). For example, if the source file is “99835 – Commercial Lease’, the bilingual target file should be something like “99835 – Commercial Lease_EN_unclean”. Do not under any circumstances send back a file labelled “Translation” or it could easily get lost or mixed up with other files.
5. Queries – PMs generally welcome queries from translators, as long as they are done in a timely and well organised way. Sending through queries one-by-one in emails just before the deadline is a big no-no. A simple Excel table detailing the troublesome source text and the relevant problem, sent well in advance, will have your PMs singing your praises. After all, you’re saving them a job and making their life easier.
6. Service with a smile – It’s a pain to do business with ungrateful or unfriendly suppliers, even if their translations are top-notch. Address your customers by name in most emails, say thank you, please and be generally polite. A bit of personality never goes amiss either: a PM may deal with 50 different linguists on a given day, so being interesting and interested will go a long way to keeping your name fresh in their mind.
7. Deal with amendments with good grace – If your translation comes back with changes and queries, do not immediately go on the defensive. Deal with them calmly and professionally and be prepared to admit your mistake and apologise if you get something wrong.
8. Formatting – Make an effort to keep the formatting coherent with the source, and generally neat and tidy. No PM wants to spend their afternoon re-formatting your translation.
9. Invoicing – Send your bills promptly, either after each project or at the end of the month, with all of the relevant project details (PO number, project name, rate, words, fee) and all your payment details, tax codes, etc.
10. Choose your clients carefully – That’s all well and good, but what if your clients don’t do their bit? What if they are rude, unbelievably demanding on your time and pay you late? I reckon you’re better off without them; move on and get clients that you’re actually happy to work with and serve every day.

See: Legally Speaking

Localization World Ltd. has announced a call for papers deadline of 9 January 2012 for its next conference to be held in Paris, France, on 4-6 June 2012.

Following the theme of “Reaching the Mobile World,” proposals should address issues in reaching the international mobile market, including topics such as business decisions driving a move to mobile, general communication issues, application development, games, content management and brand integrity on mobile devices.

See: Multilingual

Oxford English Dictionary may include some interesting Tech words this year including the word ‘Occupy’

English Language is always evolving and Oxford English Dictionary (OED) makes it a point to keep itself updated with the latest buzzwords if they are worth including in the Dictionary. Earlier this year, Oxford added LOL and OMG to its Dictionary while Retweet and sexting were acknowledged in August.

Some other notable tech buzzwords like Gamification, clicktivism and crowdfunding made the U.S. shortlist this year, while hacktivism, sodcasting and phone hacking made the UK list. However, there’s no guarantee that words on the 2011 shortlist will be added to the OED.

See: Technology Digital

While preparing to use Google Translate V2 in its LiveWebAssist system a company  uncovered a security flaw in Google Translate. IceWarp discovered that if Google’s sample code is used, the customer ID (which controls which of Google’s customers is charged for the translation) is embedded in the resulting web page, and can therefore be hijacked by an unscrupulous party to perform translations at someone else’s expense.

“Google Translate is an outstanding product, and we are proud to be in the first batch of its paying customers,” said IceWarp president Ladislav Goc. “We were really surprised to find out that virtually anyone with basic hacking skills can steal a customer code. It is relatively easy, since Google Translate is typically using JavaScript. The code is visible to everybody directly in the HTML code of the page.”

See: iTWire

In 2011, the buzz around the community is like the buzz around the post-PC era in 2010 and the cloud in 2009. Perhaps it is an overused word and concept, or perhaps it is a brilliant new approach to business. Whichever it is, many localization teams and companies are trying to figure out how to create communities of users that can engage internationally and get work done quicker and more cheaply.

This is not about social media marketing in the industry. It is rather a way to use community tools to make sure a company is communicating with its constituents wherever they are. And it also is not about doing something like translation for free. Creating and managing a community translation network are time consuming and require professional oversight.

A few companies and nonprofits are forging the way, and what they have learned can benefit everyone. We will look at four successful community translation programs: Translators without Borders, Kiva.org, Adobe and Google. How they are using community translation programs differs greatly. Read more.

See: Translators without Borders

The Skills Map was created by the National Network for Interpreting, part of the Routes into Languages initiative, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

Some of the information is basic, but it’s still very interesting to see which skills are listed and why they matter for different types of interpreting. It’s also a fun way to learn more about interpreting.

See: National Network for Interpreting

Also see: The Interpreter’s Launch Pad

“Access to information is a basic human right,” said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, according to the World Bank Institute, at a conference on the subject last year in Accra, Ghana.   Information is also power, and more and more organizations are recognizing that it will play an essential role in Africa’s future. Having access to information enables people to do things like take care of their health, understand their rights, start businesses, and participate in political processes.

When it comes to information access, most of the discussions are about the delivery systems such as mobile phones, which in many parts of Africa are the computing devices of choice. Obviously, getting information into people’s hands is critical. But what good is it if they cannot understand that information once they receive it? Africa is home to more than 2,000 different languages spread across six major language families – Nigeria alone has more than 500 tongues spoken within its borders.  Some of them – such as Amharic, Berber, Hausa, Igbo, Oromo, Swahili, and Yoruba – are used by tens of millions of people.

Because of its incrediblelinguistic diversity, Africa presents numerous challenges when it comes to translation. However, multilingualism is extremely common among Africans, which means that there are large numbers of individuals who could potentially, and with the right professional training, provide translation services. Also, as our research shows, the markets for translation and interpreting in Africa have been growing steadily in recent years, fueled by factors such as global trade and international migration. This has led to a proliferation of language service providers spread across the continent. However, even these positive developments cannot begin to address the need for translated information.

It’s been said that until Africa prospers, the world as a whole cannot prosper. Translation plays an important part in giving people the information that will allow them to prosper in many aspects of life. For this reason, Common Sense Advisory is conducting a new study on translation in Africa on behalf of Translators without Borders. Today we launched a survey for translators of African languages in order to collect more information about the issues they face and to learn more about their views on access to information. We’re inviting all individuals who translate into and out of African languages – whether on a volunteer or professional basis – to participate. Please encourage all translators for African languages in your network or contact database to take the survey.

See: Common Sense Advisory

Also listen to these interviews with  Nataly Kelly and Lori Thicke

Open Book Publishers has recently announced the forthcoming publication of Letters of Blood and other English Works. The book contains the English translations of selected poems by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. As well as Letters of Blood, the collection includes the full text of his statement “The Words of the Tribe”.

Göran Printz-Påhlson died in 2006. He was a critic, a poet, and a translator (he translated American, Irish and English poets into Swedish, and Swedish poets into English).

Open Book Publishers is an open-access non-profit publisher specializing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. They publish their books in paperback, hardback and digital format (pdf, epub, mobi), and include the full versions of all titles for free reading on Google Books.

See: About Translation

Celebrating its 10th year of promoting neologisms, the festival, held in the Altantic port of Le Havre this weekend, announced its word of the year at the weekend.

The winner was attachiant(e) – a combination of attachant (captivating, endearing) and the slang word chiant (bloody nuisance) to denote someone you cannot live with but cannot live without.

It was followed closely by aigriculteur suggesting a farmer unhappy with his lot in life – as many are – by mixing the French word for farmer withaigri (embittered) and with just a hint of aïe! (French for ouch!).

A particular favourite that made this year’s shortlist was bête seller, describing a particularly awful literary work that becomes an instant hit, and the timely eurogner – euro plus rogner (to cut down) – to suggest making savings in the euro zone.

Someone had also come up with the verb textoter (to write SMS messages on a mobile telephone), presumably something last year’s winner, a phonard – a pejorative term for someone who is glued to their mobile phone – does all the time.

Previous festivals have thrown up gems including ordinosore (ordinateurplus dinosaur, an out-of-date computer), bonjoir (bonjour plus bonsoir, a greeting to be said around midday), and photophoner (to take a photo with a mobile phone). Read more.

See: Guardian.co.uk

The internet is becoming a more inclusive place as far as languages are concerned: Browsers with multilingual functionality are not a big deal at a time when domain names are being registered in many Indian languages. The minimum number of languages a website needs to have in order to be competitive is 16. So, why not search in your own language?

Users searching for information on Google can do exactly that now. Google’s multilingual search lets users look up information in 14 languages – Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Hindi, Icelandic, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, and Welsh. When a user searches for a term, Google first looks up relevant web pages in the user’s language. Along with these results, it also produces translated, relevant results from pages that are in other languages. When the user clicks on such a result, the page it leads to is also translated using Google Translate, the company’s machine translation (MT) application. Thus, the search experience is encompassed in the user’s language.

This development furthers Google’s avowed mission of making information available to as many people as possible. It is also a huge boost to producing more content in many more languages and takes machine translation to a wider audience. It’s surprising that Google took long as it did to roll out this feature, considering the idea had taken root nearly two years ago and that it had the technology to do so. Others with fewer resources did so sooner – for example, Deep Web had envisioned and achieved multilingual search in 2009.

Linguistic quality issues may still persist with translated results, but our research has found that not all information has to be perfectly translated. Besides, there’s so much content out there – and is being added to by the second – that ’s crying to be translated, that machine translation has to be the feasible solution for achieving some sort of information democracy to make more content available in a wider range of languages .

What challenges does multilingual search pose for webmasters and global marketers? For one, their copy will need to be as local to the intended market as possible, so that the translated content holds more relevance. If they are not targeting particular geographies (and why aren’t they?), then it needs to be devoid of phrases and usages that will only make sense in a particular cultural context . Websites, especially monolingual ones, should seize the opportunity provided by Google’s MT engine to make themselves accessible to a wide-ranging audience. However, putting up more languages is still necessary to cater to major multilingual audiences.

English is one of the advantages India has which are said to be propelling it to economic superpower status.

There are all those Indians who speak excellent English. It’s the mother tongue of the elite and effectively the official language of the central government. Then there is the growing number of parents who now aspire to give their children an education through the medium of that language. But is the craze for English an unmixed blessing?

Back in the sixties the British regarded Indian English as something of a joke. The comic actor Peter Sellers had mocked it so comprehensively that I found it well nigh impossible to get the BBC to allow anyone with even the faintest Indian accent on the air.

In India, we native English speakers laughed at quaint phrases like “please do the necessary and oblige”, or more simply “please do the needful”, and “it is suggested that the meeting be preponed”, which appeared regularly in Indian official correspondence. (…)

he linguist Professor David Crystal speaking in Delhi said: “A language is dying every two weeks somewhere in the world today. Half the world’s languages will no longer be spoken in another century. This is an extremely serious concern, and English has to share the blame.” Others put it less politely, describing English as a killer language.

But should India worry if English kills off some of its 22 officially recognised and hundreds of its not-so-official languages?

Perhaps the answer is no.

See: BBC

The 400th anniversary celebrations for the King James Bible and the constant presence of Stieg Larsson in English bestseller lists have contributed to a new appreciation of the art of the good translation

Spanish-language versions of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish bestseller ‘The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest’ – in Spanish, literally, ‘The Queen in the Palace of Air’. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

We are told, in chapter 11 of Genesis, that once “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech”. In the aftermath of Noah’s flood, the survivors decided to celebrate their lucky escape in a time-honoured way: with triumphal architecture. “Let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach even to heaven” is how the Bible expresses this aspiration. “Let us make us a name,” said the children of Noah, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”.

Fat chance. According to the Old Testament, mankind’s urge to find a common purpose does not appeal to the Almighty. So the idea that men and women should be like gods was a non-starter, and the name of the doomed project was called Babel. As the King James version has it, “the Lord did there confound the language of all the Earth”. For good measure, he scattered the differently speaking peoples across the globe.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world remains a patchwork of more than 5,000 separate and competing languages. But for those who still dream of the restoration of a universal language, the outlook has rarely been brighter: 2011 has been an extraordinary year for the art of translation. Could the tower of Babel actually be rebuilt?

Many language scholars now accept philosopher Noam Chomsky’s ground-breaking perception that, notwithstanding mutually unintelligible vocabularies, “Earthlings speak a single language” – an observation Chomsky claimed would be evident to a visiting Martian. For a variety of reasons, we are perhaps closer than ever to making it intelligible.

Through the power of global media, there is more than ever before a market for literature in translation where the default language for such translations will be British or American English. Such versions may sometimes bear as much resemblance to the original as the wrong side of a Turkish carpet, but that hardly seems to lessen their appeal.

Lately in the US the appetite for “foreign fiction” – Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy or Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 – has sponsored a trend that has inspired new audiences for international literary superstars such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Péter Nádas. Perhaps not since the 1980s, when the novels of Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa became international bestsellers, has there been such a drive to bring fiction in translation into the literary marketplace.

In prose, if not in poetry, there are few worries about the “vanity of translation” identified by Shelley, who wrote that “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet”.

New editions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have pushed overworked translators – a shy breed – into the spotlight. David Bellos, whose new book, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was published this autumn, observes that, in Japan for instance, “translators are rock stars” with their own book of celebrity gossip, The Lives of the Translators 101.

The surge in this global audience for new fiction has been driven by the complex interaction of the IT revolution and the antics of literary promotions such as the Orange Prize and Man Booker hyping their brands through social media.

None of this would be thinkable, or commercial, without one extraordinary statistic. According to the British Council, backed by many other reliable sources, about half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – have knowledge of, or acquaintance with, “some kind of English”. And for the first time in human history it has become possible for one language to be transmitted and received virtually anywhere on the planet.

This unparalleled linguistic phenomenon is underpinned by the formidable power of global media. Lindsey Hilsum, the foreign editor for Channel 4 News, reports how, asking for the meaning of some Arabic graffiti sprayed on a wall in Tripoli, she was given a translation that made a comically incongruous cross-cultural nod to Anne Robinson: “Gaddafi, you are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

Unsurprisingly, given these expanded horizons, Google is in the vanguard of what is becoming a revolution in the scope and technique of translation. Google’s solution to a quintessentially human problem is the launch of a computer that approaches the holy grail of artificial intelligence and can translate “natural language”.

Previous forays into this minefield involved stripping language to its constituent elements and rebuilding it, with often comical results (“kindergarten” rendered as “children garden”, for example). This, says Bellos, has been the “hopeless pursuit of the purely hypothetical language which all people really speak in the great basement of their souls”.

Google Translate doesn’t do this. Instead, it implements Wittgenstein: “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.” So it will search stupendous archives of translated material and uses probability to derive the likeliest meaning, based on context. To do this, Google Translate draws on a database of several trillion words, taken from a corpus of UN documentation, Harry Potter novels, press reports and inter-company memoranda.

Recently Google Translate added five tongues – Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali and Gujarati – to its iPhone app, and can now supply translations for some 63 languages. Bellos gives the most succinct explanation of its mechanics: “Translation is what you get, but translation isn’t really what Google does. It’s like the difference between engineering and knowledge. An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly.”

The dream of a true universal language is in the end dependent on perfect translation. Aside from the lessons of Babel, the history of the Bible istelf offers other cautionary tales, particularly this year – the 400th anniversary of that great cathedral of language, the King James Bible. The anniversary has proved to be both a cause for celebration and for reflection on whether there can ever be an ideal or final version of such a work. Isn’t every new rendering bound to reflect the social and cultural context in which its translator works? Read more.

See: The Guardian.co.uk

The church has been working for months to prepare parishioners for a new English language translation of the Mass, which will be used in all parishes starting Sunday.

The new translation of the Roman Missal is one of the biggest changes to the lives of English-speaking believers in generations.

The changes were designed to be closer to the Latin text and it’s the product of years of effort and revisions. Some priests and parishioners have criticized the new missal as too ponderous and distant.

Parishes have been working to get people accustomed to the changes with seminars, cheat sheets and early introduction of some new wording.

See: Wall Street Journal

Like many children, Mae Alice Baird can sing a song, play a game, or tell a story. The difference is that she can do it in Wampanoag (Wôpanâak). If the name of this language sounds vaguely familiar to you, chances are that you heard about it at some point in history class, probably around this time of year. It was spoken by Native Americans back when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Although they might not know the name of these Native people, many Americans celebrate the Wampanoag each year at Thanksgiving. But very few are aware that the group’s descendants still live on their ancestral homelands in Southeastern Massachusetts.

In spite of the survival of their culture and communities, for the last six generations, no Wampanoag had spoken their ancestral language — the same language that gave English speakers words like pumpkin (pôhpukun), moccasin (mahkus), and skunk (sukôk). Various factors — such as religious conversion and laws prohibiting the use of the language — caused it to fade out, with the last fluent speakers dying out in the mid-19th century. That’s why it’s incredible that, after lying dormant for 150 years, Wampanoag is now alive again. It is spoken each day by Mae, her parents, and other members of her community. Read more.

See: The Huffington Post

In an ocean of contents, the most emotional medium on the web  cannot realize its full potential, a victim of  ”search engine dictatorship.” This is what happened to videos: Ranking and position are crucial  in Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. But these search engines cannot read “inside” the moving images to catch keywords and give them the proper visibility. Until they can, only written words can help to spread the value of video contents.

Captions solve this problem, and subtitles in any language make video discovery possible globally, as David Orban, CEO at dot.SUB, a company dealing with global video discovery, distribution and monetization, explains in this video.

TED conference uses dotSUB with crowdsourcing solutions, 6,000 volunteers translating in 90 languages, Orban says. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he was the founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., a tech start-up providing the infrastructure for an open “Internet of Things.” Orban is also an advisor for Singularity University.

Subtitling can even produce an unexpected viral effect when a specific topic strikes interest in another country and language.

See: Forbes

This post in the Interpreter Diaries blog describes  “The Four Stages of Learning” theory and how it applies to interpreting.

See: The Interpreter Diaries