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.
Pronunciation (pronounced /prer’NUnsi’EIsh-n/)
Mark Liberman’s learned Language Log post on Italian pronunciation and how The New York Times journalists get it wrong inadvertently draws attention to a...
MT prizewinners
Tip of the hat to MT companies who have recently won or helped win prizes for their enterprise solutions. On Monday the Depart of...
European Patent Office MT system project
A recent post on the European Machine Translation mailing list from Jim Calvert of the UK Patent and Trademark office suggests that the European...
yüerowz
European Central Bank President, the Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet, has apparently told EU finance ministers that the word ‘euro’ was being spelt differently across...
Cultural bias in taxonomies
Numerous bloggers, especially John Battelle, have picked up on David Weinberger’s dissection of bias in the apparently neutral Dewey Decimal system. As Weinberger says,...
Arabs and Arabic
Further to my blog on a new Arabic language translation center, .languagehat has blogged a Politics, Language and Cultures of the Arab World...
Beit al-Hikma 2?
Good news from the UAE, where the Ajman University of Science and Technology has just set up a ‘state-of-the-art’ Linguistic Research, Studies & Translation...
Interpretation anywhere
One of cutest and presumably sincere soft-kill press releases that has come my way is an announcement for a brand new telephone interpreting service...
Belgium 1 and 2
According to a news report from Brussels, Belgium’s new Foreign Minister, Karel de Gucht, suggested on Monday this week that Flanders (Flemish speakers) and...
Paws up for the original Rex
A lot of people probably saw the announcement that speech tech developer Wizzard Software is entering its product Rex, the talking prescription bottle, in...
MS owns up to locale glitches
The localization community probably knows many of the venerable multicultural screw-ups made by various web designers when targeting communities and locales they simply don’t...
Words that count
Sorry I’ve been offline again for a long time. Promise to keep on track now I’m back from la France profonde.
Let’s start back with...
Europe’s Multilingual Companion
Most people these days know how to smile at the ‘five year’s away’ promises from the IT sector, especially in the language technology industry....
Crystalline
Crystal - there’s something about that wonderful lucid, mineral name. Students of linguistics who remember it will be happily amused to see that British...
80,000 pages of EU law into Irish, anyone?
Eurolang reports that the Irish Government is to “initiate a process of discussions with the other EU Member States and the EU Commission with...
Spivack on metalanguage
I don’t usually trust the explanatory power of obvious analogies between the Web and the brain / mind or genes and memes, so I...
Bloccitanian news
Sorry to have been abruptly off-line so long. The problem was part a sudden change in holiday plans, part connection hassles in a village...
Bonn voyage
I’m blogging from Bonn, John Le Carre’s famous small town in Germany for a certain generation, where I’m attending a very dynamic second edition...
Reverse globalization for Spider-Man
Here’s a cute story from the Chicago Sun Times for people who worry about what localization and globalization have in common. Apparently Spider-Man is...
Shakespeare as he woz spoke
The UK Telegraph ran a fun story about the London Globe Theatre’s project of putting on a Shakespeare play using the pronunciation as...
New report on Arabic digital language resources
While the U.S. Government is recruiting madly to translate and teach Arabic or develop Arabic language automation systems, an EC funded project – NEMLAR...
Winning the information war
Very interesting article by Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times on the inadequacy of U.S. government attitudes to strategic language study in...
Pictographic writing
For something completely different, check out the only ‘living’ pictographic language (think Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphs) in the world today used for ritual purposes...
U.S. Language Map
Lots of blogs are circulating the good news about the Modern Language Association’s MLA Language Map, which “displays the locations and numbers of speakers...