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.
It’s all just metadata
A think piece on why all data is becoming metadata, from DavidWeinburger
There used to be a difference between data and metadata. Data was the...
Lex dura
The Japanese justice system is undergoing wide-ranging reform. The Office for Promotion of Justice System Reform working within the Cabinet has just today...
Cool typing trivia
Excessive verbiage typed into a chat room or IMS could suggest you’re lying. A report from Cornell University has found that monologuing liars
“talk too...
The Iliad a public hit in Italy
Alessandro Barrico, the Italian translator of Homer, has outperformed The Da Vinci Code in sales in Italy with his new Italian version of the...
Project to boost cross-lingual document interoperability
Thanks to Gary Price for this report on a European Commission/NSF project on “Quality of Service and Legitimacy in eGovernment,” a multi-institution initiative to...
Opening Up Africa
Check this IDG article on OpenOffice.org localization for three South African languages - Zulu, Afrikaans and Sepedi, plus information on Microsoft’s Kiswahili Local Language...
Localizing web domain names
For internationalization engineers, an interesting paper by John C. Klensin, former Vice President of Internet Architecture at AT&T, a Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI...
You make me feel like a natural language
The expression natural language seems to be going mainstream. It is shifting from a more technical application (natural L versus programming L) in the...
Cross-lingual search report
Multilingual information retrieval R&D in Europe has been the focus of a digital libraries initiative called Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for some years now....
Mobile Qur’an
The Gulf Daily News reports that the first Islamic mobile phone, the ilkone i800, was launched in Bahrain on Wednesay.
The new product is the...
Reading matter
Barbara Cassin, a French philosopher working with a team of other Europeans, has just published VOCABULAIRE EUROPEEN DES PHILOSOPHIES ; DICTIONNAIRE DES INTRADUISIBLES. A...
Michel, Muhammed and Sarkozy: spot the foreign name
Should call-center operatives reveal their real offshore names? The issue has come up in a recent French ruling to ostensibly bring call center behavior...
New language technology evaluation website
The industrious Jeff Allen has built a site collecting together a number of useful references in the field of translation technology evaluation. He plans...
Albanian in Albion and other fantasies
The United Kingdom is usually roundly mocked as Europe’s multilingual dunce. And we know why. However, the UK government’s brand new MyBusinessRates website ...
Arresting news from both sides of the Atlantic
Two contrasting ways of leaping the language barrier when you’re busting crime. First old tech. In Norwich (UK), shopkeepers ganged together under project Siren....
Crosswords at the crossroads with il computer enigmista?
Nature reports that Italian researchers Marco Gori and Marco Ernandes have developed Web Crow, a program that automatically reads a crossword clue, then...
Translating the Bush-Kerry debate
Last Thursday’s Bush-Kerry debate naturally attracted a lot of linguistic analysis and comment as experts tried to open a window onto the soul...
New translation blog
Gabe Bokor has started a translation blog on the revamped Translation Journal site that should interest freelance translators.
It is oddly called ‘interactive’, since the...
U.S. report on FBI Language Services
Further to my tongue-in-cheek blog the other day concerning the news about the FBI’s 120,000 hours of unread phone tap content, the report from...
yakushite distributed MT service
OKI Electric has finally launched its distributed automatic translation system as a free service for Internet users. The heart of this system is...
Bengal Bill
The Bengal Observer reports that Bill Clinton’s My Life is being published today in Bengali, the language of Bangladesh. Interestingly the report says:
The...
FBI yet to decipher secrets of translation
There are news items all over the map today on the U.S. Justice Department report that there are more than 120,000 hours of “potentially...
Can you speak German at the U.N.?
At the weekend, e-world thinker Esther Dyson criticized the United Nations efforts to work unilaterally (via a new Working Group on Internet Governance )...
What’s in a wor(l)d?
Blogged by John Battelle, the interview with Ramesh Jain in the latest Ubiquity reveals some interesting ideas about the ‘future of search’ meme, but...