Business

Machine translation in global businesses
Sophie Hurst
We have all heard stories of people using automated or machine translation (MT) on the internet and the bizarre translations that have come about. While sitting in a restaurant in the Ukraine, I saw a menu item "Submit in a teapot," which ...

Columns and Commentary

Off the Map: Time (in)sensitive content
Tom Edwards
You've no doubt heard the well-known saying that goes something like this: "History is written by the victors." This quotation, which has been attributed to George Orwell and many others stretching back to ancient Greece, rings of a ...

World Savvy: Accents are power
John Freivalds
Everyone has an accent, whether you like it or not, and you have to recognize that it will affect people one way or another, sometimes positively and sometimes not. People react to accents at all levels, from schoolteachers to statesmen ...

The Business Side: Internationalization engineering 'secret sauce'
Adam Asnes
Just recently I got a call out of the blue from a colleague who leads his own internal internationalization team at a well-known software company with many leading commercial products. The discussion particularly related to ...

Perspectives: Localizing a localizer's website: the challenge
Gary Muddyman
We in the localization community have some serious housecleaning to do. As some of you might have heard during my presentation at Localization World Seattle this past October, we are not practicing what we are preaching in terms of ...

Takeaway: Client vs. vendor: can we work together?
Aki Ito
This column is a message to the vendor community. You often hear the notion of client side or vendor side in the localization industry, and you see "clients only" or "vendors only" sessions at conferences such as Localization World ...

Industry Focus

Multilingual computing for the visually impaired
Libor Safar
Imagine yourself blindfolded (your travel eye shades will do), seated in front of your computer screen, your hands on the keyboard, ready to work. What do you do? This may seem daunting, but today's technologies turn computers into a ...

Language projects serving the common good
Laurel Wagers
Language workers around the world are participating in building tools and applications, programs and companies to serve the common good. Thousands of translators assist countless organizations and individuals with language ...

Reviews

Bit Literacy
Dena Bugel-Shunra
All neat desks are neat in the same way, but each messy desk is messy in its own unique way. It often starts with preliminarily neat stacks of bills, mementos, reference books, periodicals, flyers, coupons, writing implements — and soon enough ...