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.
New language technology blog
Language Technology Business appears to be a brand new blog dedicated to tracking business news on language and speech technologies. Nothing like a little...
Mind tapping
In France, there’s a court case underway to find out who, ten years ago during the Mitterrand years, was responsible for tapping the phones...
More on the FBI translator scandal
Useful udate from The Village Voice for anyone following the FBI’s (mis)management of its vital translation resource. It mainly centers on the perceived professional...
polyglot (the name) up for sale
ENLASO is selling (may have sold by now) its wonderfully evocative and brilliantly business-attractive polyglot.com domain rights, originally created in July 1995 and up...
Bridging the common language gap
Churchill quipped that the US and the UK were two countries divided by a common language. Despite a two-way stream of mass media products...
Quechua and Mapudungun go digital
Indigenous South American language communities are getting localized software from Microsoft. The Quechua version of Office XP and Office 2003 is coing out next...
Cross-lingual search engine
Need to search the web with your language as the search input and another language for the result? Check out Babelplex, where this link...
Just nine
No one will have missed the ubiquitous English-language response to news headlining the blogosphere this week that Google’s eblogger service is being localized into...
Writing and reading content c. 2050
Most authoring done on personal computers today is just automated paper document creation or automated letters for an automated post office. Worse, the advent...
Fractal power play at Spanish Language Congress
While eminent speakers of castellano discussed Linguistic Identity and Globalization’ at the Third International Spanish Language Congress in Rosario, Argentina, an alternative movement held...
Translation market in China
News just out from the Translators Association of China (TAC): China’s translation industry generated about 11 billion Yuan (US$ 1.32 billion) in 2003, and...
Slav(e) labor?
Backbytes reports on a job ad in the U.K. that went as follows:
European Systems IT and business development manager, Wimbledon…An Accountancy company based in...
Global language stats for the web
Was a time when I used to visit Bill Dunlap’s pioneering Global Reach site regularly to find out about the fast changing figures on...
Beyond mobile keyboards
Handwriting or scribbling was the only way to make a personal textual record before the typewriter started imitating standardized print records in the late...
Great dictator
If you’ve never had a chance to try out text input via speech recognition, Jon Udell has captured his own attempts at using the...
Of rats and English-speaking men?
This is an airy story. The New Scientist recently reported the following:
An array of rat brain cells has successfully flown a virtual F-22 fighter...
MT book of the event
For 45 €, you can buy Machine Translation: From Real Users to Research, the book of the 6th Conference of the Association for Machine...
XLIFF explained
Rodolfo M. Raya has recently published a second article in his series on XML for localization.
This second part focuses on XML Localisation Interchange File...
Spleak speaking
If you use MSN Messenger and like playing English language games with chatterbots, try the beta version of Spleak, a female avatar produced by...
The virtues of Simple English Wikipedia
One of the more endearing aspects of the Wikipedia (online open source inspired encyclopedia) project is its decision to include Simple English among the...
Must-have translation and localization resources
In the wake of the great native speaker quality English machine translation system, how about a map of the London underground fully localized into...
Language police strike again
UK schools are to be given official guidance (a 60 page booklet called Introducing the Grammar of Talk) on how to teach pupils...
New web terminology interface
Babeling, a French terminology engineering software developer, has just released Motilus, an interface to multi-database term queries over the web. Or as Babeling puts...
MT = mobile translation in Singapore
GistXL, an English (or Singlish) to Simplified Chinese SMS translation platform embedded in SingTel’s Singapore network, won a Merit Award in the recent...