Andrew Joscelyne
European, a language technology industry watcher since Electric Word was first published, sometime journalist, consultant, market analyst and animateur of projects. Interested in technologies for augmenting human intellectual endeavour, multilingual méssage, the history of language machines, the future of translation, and the life of the digital mindset.
Get me a pronouncer!
On WOI Radio at Iowa State University, they’ve developed a Pronouncing Dictionary of Music and Musicians for use by personnel as a computerized database...
Ludwig plays the lexicography game
The Guardian has a curious story about the recent sale for £75K of the proofs of a 42-page spelling ‘dictionary’ compiled by Wittgenstein in...
Language: the 3D computer game
For all the sites for language games , constructed languages , artificial languages, Klingon, palindrome collectors, machine translation jokery, slang rangers and the like...
Out of print in France
There was a sepia tinted article in Le Monde this weekend on the grim fortunes of the French Imprimerie nationale , founded by...
Alternative translation networks
For anyone interested in how progressive groups such as the European Social Forum handle the political minefield of multilingual communication (all languages are equal,...
Report on the European Language Tech Industry
Under government auspices, a new report has been published by French information and language industry bodies on “Automatic Language Processing in the Information Industryâ€,...
Lesser spotted MT specialists
Friday trivia. In one of the most extraordinary bursts of messaging I’ve ever seen on the MT list, an online forum for machine translation...
Updating Kanji
Useful item from Burritt Sabin on a recent Japanese Language Subcommittee report on kanji, calling for an overhaul of the joyo kanji (the official...
Patent searcher
Further to my post on IBM releasing numerous language and speech tech patents to the open source (OS) domain, it’s worth mentioning that The...
Recent translation industry research
Common Sense Advisory (CSA) has published its Fourth-Quarter Global Business Confidence Survey on the translation services industry.
The surveys polled buyers and suppliers of...
Proper Names
The Adamic power to name things has gone novaburst in the last 50 odd years since people all over the world started hitting computer...
How a new EU eContent program can help you
Last week, the European Parliament voted in favor of the E-Contentplus program, set to support the development of multilingual content for innovative, on-line services...
Localizing propaganda in World War I
How much “official†translation was there and into how many languages in government departments and other power centers in the world before the League...
New organization to support translation automation users
The indefatigable champion of out-of-the-box thinking in the translation industry, Jaap van der Meer recently launched a Translation Automation Users Society (TAUS) to provide...
Mood gear shift
I remember a language tech product that came out in France in the late 1980s designed to evaluate ‘attitude’ in documents. It used a...
Inside the brackets
People delivering products and services in the area of translation, multilingual content management and the like need to be able to appreciate the real...
Speechless in Europe
Is Asia edging ahead in the translation technology innovation stakes? News from Japan and Korea suggests that automatic speech translation (i.e. not written) will...
Translating the Dewey Decimal System
Peter van Dijck has an interview with the editor in chief of the Dewey Decimal System about translating the DD taxonomy. It’s worth noting...
Japan Prize to Nagao
Tip of the hat to Makoto Nagao for winning in the Information and Media Technology category of the 2005 Japan Prize for his...
EU factoids and figuresques
Anyone wanting a facts ‘n figures snapshot of where translation is at in the European Commission can find a start of the year summary...
Patent news
Just before Christmas, Microsoft Research discreetly filed a patent for a data-driven type translation system:
An adaptive machine translation service for improving the performance of...
Can graffiti and public scribbling go digital?
In the Christmas edition of The Economist , there’s an interesting article on graffiti which concludes that the heyday of graffiti is over (partly...
Translation in the blogosphere
How can translation automation be tapped for the online world of blogs to ensure that information and ideas circulate freely in dark times? Tim...
Multilingual scribes
There’s a meme going round about ‘amazing scribes’ at the recent ICANN meeting who transcribalated (don’t ask) spoken text onto screens. What attendees appeared...