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The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) will host a one-day event for business leaders and marketing professionals on 09 November 2012 at Espacio Pilar in Buenos Aires. “The Right Message. The Right Language.” will offer a program on reaching multilingual customers and developing effective localization programs to support international business, exporting, and globalization efforts. More.

See: kontax

“Imagine if all our health information was available only in Dutch!” said Lori Thicke, the co-founder of Translators Without Borders. Far from being a science fiction scenario, this is the kind of situation millions of people around the world are faced with everyday. It is a reality that especially affects people that may only speak minority or indigenous languages.

From India to Kenya, rural communities are ravaged by preventable diseases, such as AIDS, malaria, or cholera, while having very limited or no access to information in a language they understand can only compound the situation. A recent study conducted by Common Sense Advisory with translators in Africa revealed (pdf) that 63 percent of respondents believed greater access to translated information could have saved the life of a friend or family member. More.

See: Global Voices

Also listen to this interview with Paula Góes.

Cambridge University Press just launched a new API that is meant to make it easy for developers to add data from a variety of the organization’s dictionaries to their own sites and mobile apps. With the launch of this API, Cambridge University Press is following in the footsteps of other well-known dictionary publishers like Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as startups like Wordnik.

The service gives developers access to API methods like “get an entry,” “get pronunciation” and “get thesaurus list.” Developers can take the API for a spin on the company’s demo site. More.

See: Tech Crunch

Presented by Free Word Centre, English PEN, The British Centre for Literary Translation, Literature Across Frontiers , the British Council, the London Book Fair, the Translators Association, Wales Literature Exchange & Words Without Borders. ITD is supported by Arts Council England, Bloomberg, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European Commission.

Fri 5 Oct 9am – 5pm + Evening Special

See: Free Word

Also see: ProZ.com’s 2012 freelance translator virtual event series

Recently, a group of Yale Law School students have compiled and published what they call the Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States. The dictionary published on the web here lists seminal Supreme Court case names and audio files of their pronunciations – including things like Arave in Arave v. Hoffman being pronounced as ‘ay-rav,’ and Bache in Bache v. Hunt being pronounced as ‘baych.’

The purpose of the Pronouncing Dictionary of United States Supreme Court cases, compiled by  YLS students Usha Chilukuri, Megan Corrarino, Brigid Davis, Kate Hadley, Daniel Jang, Sally Pei, and Yale University Linguistics Department students Diallo Spears and Jason Zentz, working with Florence Rogatz Visiting Lecturer in Law Eugene Fidell, is to help conscientious lawyers, judges, teachers, students, and journalists correctly pronounce often-perplexing case names.” More.

See: JD Journal

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Spanish speakers in the US form one of the most prominent foreign language domestic markets in the world.

Their purchasing power is estimated at over $1 trillion and their online spending is greater than $20 billion (2011). As the Hispanic population in U.S. retains their culture and language, more so than other ethnic groups, by far the most effective way to target them online is through localized content. Their growing clout on the web makes them a group that is hard to ignore and American companies can benefit greatly by concentrating upon this group.

Targeting Hispanics
Currently, the Hispanic population is only engaged by a limited number of companies through the web. Although the amount of websites that support Spanish has increased greatly over the years, a complete online marketing strategy for this group is only utilised by some companies. Greater communication with the group will result in increased exposure to an internet savvy and high spending group increasing online revenue.

Translating to Spanish
For companies which are looking to target Hispanic users in the US, the primary focus should be to create content that is relevant for the target audience. Translating English content would be adequate but to effectively target Spanish speakers in a specific country, transcreation or localization of content would be more suitable.

Read more.

1.  RAE.

2. Fundeu.com.

3.  Linguee.

4.   Google Translator Toolkit.

5.  Wililengua.com.

6.   Elcastellano.org.

7.  Bubble Translate.

8.  Dynamic Language Tools.

9.  Right Click and Translate.

10. Wordreference.

The 7th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL 7) was held at the University of Buea in Cameroon 20-24 August. The theme of this year’s event was “Language description and documentation for development, education and the preservation of cultural heritage in Africa.” WOCAL, which takes place every three years, began in 1994 as an international gathering focused on a broad range of topics in African linguistics with a strong emphasis on the participation of African scholars. An opening keynote address was provided by Professor Jacques Fame Ndongo, Cameroon’s Minister of Higher Education.

More than five hundred researchers from around the world were expected to attend WOCAL 7, with more than two hundred presenting research, including twenty-nine staff of SIL and CABTAL,* a regional partner of SIL. SIL presentations of note include those by SIL President Dr. John Watters,
Dr. Mary Pearce, Dr. Ken Olson and Dr. Keith Snider. More.

See: SIL

You may download a collection of free AutoSuggest dictionaries from both SDL and SDL’s users here.

See: SDL Translation Zone

The Michigan Translators/Interpreters Network (MiTiN) will hold its third annual conference on translation and interpreting — “Work Locally, Think Globally” — on October 13, 2012, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Novi, Michigan.

See: PR Web

A group of Chinese academics has said English-language abbreviations which have become part of everyday life in China should be struck from the country’s top dictionary.

A letter signed by more than 100 scholars condemned the inclusion of terms including NBA (National Basketball Association) and WTO (World Trade Organization) in the latest edition of China’s most authoritative dictionary, the Global Times daily reported Wednesday.

Acronyms and other abbreviations derived from English are widely used in China, where millions of basketball fans refer to their favourite league as the NBA, rather than Mei Zhi Lan, the official Chinese translation.

English abbreviations for international bodies such as the WTO are also widely used, while PM2.5, a measure of air pollution, has become a familiar term among urban residents, who are increasingly concerned about air quality.

The latest edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, the country’s most authoritative linguistic reference book, included more than 239 terms containing latin letters, up from 39 in 1996, the Global Times reported.

The academics say in their letter that the introduction of English abbreviations threatens the Chinese language, and their presence in the dictionary violates Chinese laws governing language usage. More.

To honor their special contributions in spreading Chinese civilization to a global audience, China honored six specialists, including German translator Monika Motsch, UN vice-secretary Joseph Vermer Reed and Cambodian scholar Khlot Thyda with the Special Book Award at a grand award ceremony in the Great Hall of People on Aug 28.

The award is given by the General Administration of Press and Publication to show respect and recognition to writers, publishers and translators outside China who have been working to introduce Chinese culture to a world audience. It is an important national award held yearly during the Beijing International Book Fair.

“The specialists are like the third eye that witnesses, records and transmits the China story globally,” said Zhang Fuhai, director of the international exchange and cooperation department of the administration.

“They offer the objective views to make the picture of China a full one,” Zhang said.

Zhang added that this year’s winners were chosen from a larger body of competitive candidates, as the influence of the award is growing. More.

See: China Daily

A world-renowned expert on language revival says the loss of language is more damaging than the loss of land for indigenous peoples, and governments are likely to come under increasing pressure to compensate indigenous peoples for this loss too.

Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, and an authority on the Hebrew revival movement, which turned an historical sacred language into the national language of Israel with millions of native speakers, including Professor Zuckermann himself.

He’ll be giving a free public lecture at the University of Waikato next month [Monday 10 September], where he’ll discuss the importance of revitalising languages and the establishment of a new universal discipline – revival linguistics.

“There’s a huge underestimation of the role of language,” he says. “Language reclamation is becoming increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty and improve their well-being.”

Oceania, he says, ought to be the world leader in the field of revival linguistics.

Professor Zuckermann is currently working with the Barngarla Aboriginal people of South Australia to restore what he calls “native tongue title” after the tribe suffered linguicide (language killing) and the forcible removal of children.

“Language is the mouth of the land in Aboriginal culture, so it seems appropriate to give it rights too. It’s very much a Western idea to give money for the loss of land but not language, and I predict that in the future there will be compensation for language loss as intangible intellectual property.”

He says Māori communities are among the very few to have already understood the importance of this, with the submission of claims to the Waitangi Tribunal relating to language loss.

“Māori is a fascinating and multifaceted example,” he says. “There was a period of linguicide, when Māori were forbidden to speak their own language in schools, but there were and still are native speakers.

“Hebrew did not have that – there were no native speakers of Hebrew from the middle of the second century AD through to the late nineteenth century. The Hebrew revival in fact created a hybrid language reflecting not only Hebrew but also the Yiddish mother tongue of the revivalists as well as other vernaculars.”

But Professor Zuckermann warns against complacency.

“It’s very easy to check if a language is safe, you just need to look at the percentage of native-speaking children. And on that basis M?ori is still unfortunately an endangered language.”

Professor Zuckermann will deliver his lecture “Sleeping Beauties Awake – Towards the Establishment of Revival Linguistics” at 12-1pm on Monday 10 September at the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts at the University of Waikato.  More.

See: The University of Waikato

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The Center for the Art of Translation presented Margaret Jull Costa at the Book Club of California, where she spoke of the life and work of Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago. Center for the Art of Translation:  http://www.catranslation.org/

Watch the video here.

See: Center for the Art of Translation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has recently awarded 32 institutional grants to support the organizations’ Documenting Endangered Languages program, and two SIUE professors, Associate Professor of Linguistics Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt and Geography Professor Dr. Shunfu Hu, have been awarded grants to participate in this program. Hildebrandt and Hu were awarded this grant in February, but their research officially began this past summer.

With the grant, Hildebrandt and Hu are traveling to the Menang district, located in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, to contribute to the documentation of endangered languages found in that region for the next four years. The grant was awarded for a five-year study, and Hildebrandt and Hu began their research in Nepal this past summer, with Hildebrandt leaving for Nepal on May 22 and returning on August 8 and Hu departing on July 11 and also coming back on August 8. More.

See: This Week in Cas

(…) Last year, Hamilton County had 3,195 court hearings where interpreters were used.

“The court has to provide equal access to justice, so they have to provide interpreters,” Kevin Mercado, director of Hamilton County’s interpreter program, said.

The 3,195 court hearings last year in Hamilton County requiring interpreters was 3.2 percent of the overall 100,257 criminal cases in Common Pleas and Municipal courts. Interpreters are needed an average of 10 times each day in Hamilton County.

Those numbers are important because it shows the growth of the need for interpreters, said Rob Cruz, chair of the National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators.

“The demand for interpreters is increasing and will continue to increase across the board,” Cruz said. “The need for interpreters in the next decade will see a 20 percent growth … nationwide.”

That’s why, he said, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently added interpreters to its Occupational Outlook Handbook. More.

See: The Community Press Recorder

A state-funded bilingual primary school will open in Brighton this September.

The Bilingual Primary School, which will teach the national curriculum in both Spanish and English, is not the first bilingual school in England but they are far from common.

While Welsh medium schools, where lessons are taught in English and Welsh, have been common in Wales for many years, bilingual schools are still something of a rarity in England.

The first state-funded school to offer lessons in two languages (rather than language lessons) started in London. More.

See: BBC

The following excerpts are from Translation Times blog:

For the first time, the exam was offered on the computer at Prometric testing locations throughout the country, which seemed like a great and convenient idea in theory.

However, the exam hasn’t been updated to reflect the fact that it’s electronic, so many instructions tell the test-taker to “mark the correct answer on the answer sheet.” Of course, there is no answer sheet.

It appears to me that  Protemetric folks spent a lot of time looking for the worst possible location in which to have a testing center in Vegas, and they succeeded to secure a small office in the back of an industrial area where you take the exam accompanied by the sounds of 18-wheelers backing up right outside the exam room.The headset provided to block out the noise was cheap, hard, and hurt my ears immediately, so I had to tune the noise out by sheer will (a challenging endeavor).

Contrary to what it says on the Prometric website and contrary to the e-mail confirmations received from the testing folks, lockers were indeed available to store one’s belongings, even though the company had insisted they were not. That’s the reason I only showed up with my driver’s license, car key and water bottle and had to leave my purse in the car in a rather sketchy area. Test takers are not allowed to park directly in front of the almost-empty parking lot, but rather across the parking lot. I am not quite sure why paying customers should not be able to park in front of the business they are visiting. Who else is supposed to park there? Employees? Random 18-wheelers? Multiple signs remind you that you will be towed if you park in front of the building. I found this highly puzzling and not very welcoming.

The exam lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes. You are not allowed to bring in your water bottle. Trust me: this is quite brutal in the Vegas summer. For some reason, watches are not allowed either. More.

See: Translation Times

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance plans to pay tribute to Persian language and literature scholar and prominent Islamic historian Jafar Shahidi (1918-2008) during a meeting in his birthplace of Borujerd next week.

A number literati and scholars are scheduled to deliver speeches during the two-day meeting, which will open on September 2, Culture Minister Mohammad Hosseini said in a press conference on Sunday.

The Culture Ministry has also established Allameh Jafar Shahidi Literary Awards, which will be presented to authors of works on Imam Ali (AS) and Nahj-ul-Balagha.

Shahidi was a pupil of lexicographer Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, who wrote the most comprehensive unabridged Persian dictionary. He was later become a director of the then Dehkhoda Dictionary Institute, which Dehkhoda had established in 1945 to complete the dictionary.

He got a Ph.D. in Persian language and literature from the University of Tehran in 1961 and continued his studies at the Qom and Najaf seminaries, where he received permission to practice ijtihad, the use of reason to arrive at a knowledge of truth in religious matters.

His most notable work is the fluent and eloquent translation of Imam Ali’s Nahj-ul-Balagha.  More.

Although Wikipedia should always be taken with a grain of salt, the information it provides is usually a valuable help when we translate. One feature you can find particularly useful is the list of multilingual links that often accompany a Wikipedia page.

If, for example, you are looking for information of what “surge limit” means in a compressor, you won’t find an article specifically devoted to it in the English Wikipedia, but you’ll find an explanation of “compressor surge” under the Wikipedia article on Compressor stall. This page links to the articles devoted to the same subject in several other languages. Even if your language is not among the direct links (Italian is not, in this case), checking the articles in other languages may supply you with useful hints to arrive at the correct translation.

In this case, the French and Spanish pages for “Compressor stall” are titled in a similar way: “Pompage” in French, and “Pompaje” in Spanish. This was a critical clue: the Italian Wikipedia does not have an articled simply titled “Pompaggio”, but, in the article on “Compressore” you can find a section about the differences between “condizione di stallo” and “condizione di pompaggio” – which, in turn, leads to an article on “limite di pompaggio” that specifically mentions that “limite di pompaggio” is, in English, “surge limit”. I thus confirmed that I could use “limite di pompaggio” in my translation.

As you can see, the way to arrive to the correct translation is often roundabout, but learning to make good use of what Wikipedia has to offer for us yields goods results.