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January/February 2012
Katie Botkin
Drawing the old year to a close is always a bit bittersweet, and hence the nostalgic tradition of marking the new year with a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” And then we turn and look forward, toasting, in this case, 2012 -— a leap year that happens to be eschatologically interesting, which has also been designated Alan Turing Year, after ...
January/February 2012
Nancy A. Locke
The Interpreter’s Journal: Stories from a Thai and Lao Interpreter by Benjawan Poomsan Becker might be more aptly entitled An Interpreter’s Journal because it describes the unique experience of one interpreter, from her relatively humble beginnings in Isaan (Thailand) and study abroad experience in Japan, to her trials, personal and professional, in her adopted homeland (the United States), ...
January/February 2012
Enterprise Innovators: Automating Intel's multilingual chat
Lori Thicke
Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products, Intel introduced the world’s first microprocessor in 1971. Today, Intel has over 82,000 employees globally. Based in Hillsboro, Oregon, Will Burgett is the product manager for Translation Innovation & Services in Marketing Solutions ...
January/February 2012
Off the Map: Comparative cultural values
Kate Edwards
Whenever we travel to or experience other cultures, our ever-comparative brains look for similarities and differences and then weigh those against any potential emotions, memories and ideas we may already possess about a specific culture. The fact that we all do this is completely natural, and it’s built upon an innate sense of curiosity that we all possess in childhood ...
January/February 2012
Perspectives: Cloud computing, SaaS and translation tools
Andrzej Zydroń
Over the past 20 years we have seen substantial progress in the field of computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools and technologies, and with the advent of cheap desktop computing and the internet we have seen the barriers to entry drop. To start a localization company, all you need is a PC, an internet connection and a list of potential ...
January/February 2012
Hassan Sawaf & Jonathan Litchman
Earlier this year on Jeopardy, IBM’s Watson won over $77,147 and showcased the latest advances in speech recognition and language technology with its answer to the Final Jeopardy question, “William Wilkinson’s ‘An account of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’ inspired this author’s most famous novel” with “Who is Bram Stoker?”
iPhone’s much-discussed Siri is not only ...
January/February 2012
Machine translation for less-resourced languages
Andrejs Vasiļjevs & Indra Sāmīte
We have been witnesses to the evolution from human to machine-assisted translation. This is a propitious time for rapid advances in language technologies. We now have enough computing power to support the complex algorithms that drive statistical machine translation (SMT) and powerful open-source tools like Moses. In recent years, SMT has become a major developmental breakthrough by providing a cost-efficient ...
January/February 2012
The translation center behind Translators without Borders
Enrique Cavalitto
A new, fully-automated translation center means that Translators without Borders can donate ten times as many translations to support humanitarian work around the globe. Translators without Borders is an independent nonprofit association dedicated to helping non-governmental organizations (NGOs) extend their humanitarian work by providing free, professional translations. The funds saved through the use of volunteer translations can then be used ...
January/February 2012
Ten essential steps to TMS selection for LSPs
Benjamin B. Sargent & Vijayalaxmi Hegde
Companies adopt a translation management system (TMS) to address an array of challenges, but the selection process can be challenging in itself. It generally involves developing selection criteria, making a shortlist, identifying best-fit solutions using weighted business and technical requirements, and undergoing a proof-of-concept before making a final decision. This article provides a simple ten-step model ...
January/February 2012
Cross-lingual text analytics: a new frontier in linguistics
Meta S. Brown
In Atlanta, a brand manager needs to know what consumers are saying about soft drinks in Thailand. In Washington, D.C., an intelligence agency analyst wonders if an international terrorist group is using twitter to organize a bombing. In Tokyo, electronics engineers want to better understand quality problems that are leading to product returns in North America. These diverse professionals share common concerns. Each of them needs ...
January/February 2012
Localizing worldwide mobile apps
Talia Baruch
The urban nomad sounds familiar, almost like someone we’ve transformed into. We’re on the go, and we demand instant information anytime, anywhere. The urban nomad in us is never bound to one place. Wherever we are, across oceans and continents, our carry-on mobile device is our port of communication with the world around us. We pull it out to check our calendar, to interface with our connections, to play games, to purchase goods or just to slide-flick through our menu bar while we’re trapped in the elevator, trying to avoid ...
January/February 2012
Crowdsourcing your localization testing
Doron Reuveni
Congratulations! If you’re trying to find the best way to test your web and mobile products for localization, it means your application was popular enough to warrant expansion into multiple markets. The need for localization testing is a mark of true success. Unfortunately, it’s also among the most difficult quality-related challenges to solve since it requires highly specialized skills from software-savvy native speakers who ...
January/February 2012
Takeaway: Managing a translator database
Daniel B. Harcz
Ever since I founded my small translation business around 1997, I have managed my agency’s freelancer database. I have always been proud of it, thanks to the fact that it contains the details of several thousand native freelancers representing a total of over 250 languages.
However, by the time you feel your translator database is complete ...
December 2011
Katie Botkin
I ran across a discussion board not long ago in which someone was chastising someone else for using the term Indian to refer to someone hailing from India. Apparently, this person thought that Indian was derogatory, no matter who it referred to, since it could be misunderstood to be a backwards, ignorant or redneck description of a Native American.
As someone semi-obsessed with word meaning and culture, this ...
December 2011
SDL Trados Studio 2011 SDL's best translation suite to date
Thomas Waßmer
In 2009, SDL Trados Studio integrated the formerly independent translation memory (TM) products SDLX and Trados into one consistent graphical user interface. The only remnants of the two merged products are different user profiles that use keyboard shortcuts and pre-translation and translation settings similar to Trados or SDLX, respectively. In addition to these concessions to old Trados and SDLX users, the default user profile ...
December 2011
Enterprise Innovators: Highly collaborative globalization at Sybase
Lori Thicke
Sybase is an industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software to manage, analyze and mobilize information for business intelligence. Sybase’s SQL Server was the first client/server database on the market. SAP acquired Sybase in 2010. Founded in 1984 in Berkeley, California, Sybase now has 4,000 employees in 60 countries. Steven McDowell is based ...
December 2011
John Freivalds
I am busily involved in writing a memoir on the life of my wife, Margo, called Till the River Runs Dry. She spent a lot of time in Thailand and wrote frequently of Thai dealings with farangs, or foreigners.
It is generally believed that the word farang originated with the Indo-Persian word farangi, meaning foreigner, which may come from the word Frank via the Arabic word firinjı-yah. Due to the fact that the Frankish Empire ruled Western Europe ...
December 2011
Off the Map: Careful culturalization in India
Kate Edwards
Any glance at the current geopolitical landscape of Asia quickly reveals that there are undeniable movers and shakers within the region. If asked, most people would readily say that China is a dominant economic and cultural force in the region, and they might add Japan as well. Yet among the quickly emerging economies and influential geopolitical powers of the region and in fact the world, India must be considered ...
December 2011
Translation needs in India, present and future
Bob Myers
Visit the panasonic.co.in website, and you will find no language menu. There is only one language: English. You can shop for cameras, televisions, washing machines and hair dryers here, but not even in Hindi, the official language of India as enshrined in the 1950 constitution and spoken by half a billion people or more, depending on who is counting. Nor should you think that Panasonic is merely being lazy ...
December 2011
India offers new business opportunities
Sandeep Nulkar
India stood tall amidst the financial ruins of 2008 in the company of only a few other countries. A gross domestic product growth rate of 6.7%, braving global recession, had a subtext that not many in the language industry seem to have understood. For one thing, this growth was achieved backed by a strong domestic demand, not to mention ...
December 2011
India: Many languages, one emerging market
Elanna Mariniello, Matthias Steiert & Afaf Steiert
The Indian translation industry is a $500 million market and is expected to increase drastically within the coming three years. This may come as a shock to some; however, both the general industry and translation in India have been creeping into the forefront of global business recently. In 2010, Reuters’ Alastair Sharp pointed to the fact that both Google and Microsoft placed Arabic and Hindi in their top ten languages that need prioritized attention. As stated ...
December 2011
Yogini Dahiwadkar
As India continues to grow as a world economic power, language industry professionals and business people who work for companies with global communications needs are becoming increasingly aware of the need to learn Hindi and Marathi.
Hindi, spoken by 490 million people, ...
December 2011
Translation for the audience: The case of Vietnamese
Pham Hoa Hiep
Not long ago, I received a job offer from a translation company based in the United States. In the e-mail, the project manager warned: “the biggest problems we’ve had with Vietnamese translations for this client are that they were too ‘Vietnamese’ ...
December 2011
Localization Portland, Oregon-style
Jeff Williams
Portland, Oregon, is well known for its professional basketball team the Trail Blazers, nearby Mt. Hood (which lands in the national news every so often when hikers and skiers go missing) and the perception that it’s a rainy place with strange people. Indeed, a local bumper sticker proclaims, “Keep Portland Weird,” so that perception is perhaps well founded. Portland is also known ...
December 2011
Ensuring appropriate language proficiency
Bill Hindle
In the July/August 2011 edition of MultiLingual, Elizabeth Colon described the terrifying story of Willie Ramirez, a Florida teenager who was rendered quadriplegic at least in part because hospital staff may have taken his family’s description of the teenager as intoxicado to mean intoxicated, ...
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