June, 2008
Post Editing: Coming along slowly
Donna Parrish
". . . and the Spring comes slowly up this way." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
While the Coleridge quote refers to April and I write this in May, spring has certainly come up slowly this year in north Idaho. But it is here now, and we are treated once again to flowers ...
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June, 2008
Lingvo 12 Multilingual Edition
Galina Raff
The Lingvo electronic dictionary, well-known in Russian-speaking countries, was likely the best-selling electronic dictionary in the former Soviet Union. Lingvo 1.0 was published back in 1990 and ran under DOS. As the hardware and operating systems evolved ...
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June, 2008
The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur
Katie Botkin
The Translator is a snapshot, an autobiography of one life among millions, rather than a textbook example of how to conduct interpretation sessions. Recently featured on US National Public Radio and reviewed by many other media outlets ...
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June, 2008
Off the Map: What makes a country a country?
Tom Edwards
Perhaps nothing stirs the public's consciousness about geography more than the announcement of a new country on the global stage — the ascendance of a nation of people to "country" status, with all the powers, pomp and recognition that such an event implies ...
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June, 2008
World Savvy: Mumbo jumbo
John Freivalds
Mumbo jumbo is an English expression denoting something confusing or meaningless. One etymological theory is that the phrase comes from British colonizers in Africa who described a mysterious ritual as mumbo jumbo ...
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June, 2008
The Business Side: Unicode primer for the uninitiated
Adam Asnes
Unicode is an underpinning for global software applications and websites, allowing them to support worldwide language scripts. It's a very important standard to be aware of, whether you're in localization, an engineer or a business manager ...
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June, 2008
Perspectives: Tactical challenges vs. strategic opportunity: the localization crisis
Nicholas McMahon
Comedian Frank Muir once remarked that "'strategy' is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner. 'Tactics' is getting her to drink it." The localization industry needs both for a clear game plan, but too often we're so tied to the tactics ...
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June, 2008
Localizing websites and software for Japan
Steve Kemper
Japanese has long carried the reputation of being not only one of the most difficult languages to speak and write, but also to process and display electronically. St. Francis Xavier, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary ...
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June, 2008
CAT tools in Japan
Shigeo Mikawa
Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools such as translation memory (TM) and translation software are used quite differently in Japan than they are in the United States and Europe. This difference is due to the unique sentence structure of Japanese ...
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June, 2008
Linguistic software for Japanese companies
Melanie Siegel & Todd Ettelson
Many of us have seen messages like those on a pocket knife manufactured by a Japanese company: "CAUTION! Blade extremely sharp. Keep out of children." Indeed, websites such as www.engrish.com, which posted this example, are devoted to collecting such errors ...
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June, 2008
Gender differences in Japanese localization
Rik Grant & Naomi Okada
The Orient is often referred to as an area with an air of inscrutability, and perhaps one of the foremost reasons for this is its languages. With many intricate characters and myriad meanings gleaned from seemingly cryptic glyphs ...
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June, 2008
Indirect communication: I see what you mean
Pernille Rudlin
I keep discovering new Japanese expressions for communicating indirectly, even though I have either lived in or had interactions with Japan for over 30 years now and think of myself as a fluent Japanese speaker. I already knew the word ishindenshin ...
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June, 2008
A comparison of eight quality assurance tools
Julia Makoushina
When we started our own company in 2002, we were anxious to make sure that our few but valuable customers never had cause for disappointment. I personally reviewed every file to make sure that terms were consistent, all the numbers were correct ...
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June, 2008
GMX-V: a word count standard
Clove Lynch
Evidence of word counting methods for academic and commercial purposes dates back 2,000 years, and yet there is still no universally recognized standard to base counts upon. This is at least partially because the highly complex, variable ...
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June, 2008
The future of CATALYST: Tony O'Dowd comments
Thomas Waßmer
On February 29, 2008, Translations.com announced its merger with Alchemy Software Development, Ltd., the developers of the software localization tool CATALYST. The effects of the recent acquisition on the availability of CATALYST ...
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June, 2008
What is the future for the localization industry?
Göran Nordlund
At the Localization World conference in Berlin in June 2007, I had some interesting discussions with different people starting around the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell and the question ...
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April/May, 2008
Post Editing: Tools vs. toys — the tools have it
Sandy Compton
The first computer I used — OK, played with — was a 60-pound Tandy TRS-80 displaying green type on a black screen. It had about 100 KB of RAM, ran TRS-DOS and featured a game called Pirate in which I "died" — over and over again ...
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April/May, 2008
TranslatorsTraining.com
Ignacio Garcia & Vivian Stevenson
Jost Zetzsche's new site TranslatorsTraining.com puts a uniform comparison format to translation environment tool (TEnT) vendors so that you can see before you buy. Freelancers can now dabble before they take the plunge, while developers ...
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April/May, 2008
Off the Map: Keeping faith in spatial data
Tom Edwards
So you're driving down a narrow road on a dark and stormy night, and you look to your car's dashboard to see where your trusty global positioning system (GPS) unit is directing you. No more paper maps to fumble with and try to fold ...
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April/May, 2008
World Savvy: Your global home companion — Minnesota
John Freivalds
When I travel around the United States and even the larger world and mention that I lived in Minnesota, the response I get is typically about the "many lakes there" or Prairie Home Companion, the immensely popular radio-program-cum-franchise ...
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April/May, 2008
The Business Side: Lessons from globalization management system ashes
Adam Asnes
They say that the early bird gets the worm, but you could also joke about the second mouse getting the cheese. Personally, I think cheese tastes better. Metaphors aside, a point we've seen in our industry and beyond is that early ...
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April/May, 2008
Perspectives: Localizing a localizer's website: analysis
Gary Muddyman
As I write this article in January, we are deep into the planning phase of Conversis' revamped website. I always thought of our site as a sort of process where we could let the creative juices run wild, resulting in something spectacular ...
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April/May, 2008
The evolution of machine translation
Jaap van der Meer
It is amazing how much the world of machine translation (MT) has changed in just a few years' time. The word revolution would be appropriate to describe the change in attitudes. For 50 years, MT technology led an academic life, hidden ...
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April/May, 2008
Machine translation: not a pseudoscience
Vadim Berman
It always amazes me how the business model of fortune-telling works. The essential part of this industry is to have plan B ready — to explain why the future does not correlate with the predictions. The machine translation (MT) industry ...
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April/May, 2008
Putting MT to work
Lou Cremers
Machine translation (MT) has been around since the early 1960s, but even today companies hesitate to invest in the technology. On the other hand, there is no hesitation whatsoever to invest in translation memories (TM), although both ...
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