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.
More vendor newsletters
Received new newsletters from two young language tech companies this week. Newsletters are obviously a well-established media for keeping in touch with clients and...
Translator slavery in India!
In an interesting article in India’s leading tech e-news paper, Venkatesh Hariharan, co-founder of Indlinux.org, talks about the speed at which Indian software is...
Belarusian spell-checker needed for English
The useful DMEurope news service alerted me to the fact that the first Belarusian spell-checking programme for MS Word 2000, (Litara 1.0), has been...
Newsletter on MT implementation
CrossLanguage, possibly the only company in the world dedicated to providing machine translation implementation services (as opposed to actually offering MT technology), has issued...
Visualizing language
Visual Thesaurus is a fun, for-sale tool that represents synonymy (and antonymy) relations between English words as graph displays looking like Calder mobiles of...
LanguageWeaver to test MT with P.H. Brink
Translation automation supplier Language Weaver is going to integrate an English-to-French translation module into language service supplier P.H. Brink’s existing automated workflow system under...
Web traffic shifting east?
Rajesh Jain blogs an interesting article by Brian Dear showing that Alexa’s monitoring of website frequentation shows a drop in traffic to US main...
India to ramp up multilingual BPO services?
Sister site Blogalization reports an intriguing story about the potential for multilingual (i.e. other than English) skills in Indian outsourcing centers, covering translation and...
Language learning technology
Second language learning – a huge market if we are to believe the rare figures found here, and there - has so far been...
Good article on searching
If you want a useful overview of information retrieval from the Memex to Google, read this Ramano Rao article courtesy of Gary Price. A...
Arabic lessons
After reading Language Log’s discussion on George W. Bush’s pronounciation of the notorious Arabic place name Abu Ghraib, check out this Reuter’s report on...
Why stories about the European Commission getting lost in translation are a good thing
Courtesy of the Financial Times, here’s the latest from Brussels on EC language and authoring management issues. The recent round of EU enlargement...
Hot air?
BlueLithium is a very new provider of online advertising technology and services. It has just launched BlueTheory which (it claims):
reads a web page in...
Tying translators in knots
I came across a splendid 17th century definition of translation from one Leonard Digges in the preface to a translation from the Spanish (G....
European Union Inter-Agency Terminology Exchange
Margaret Marks has blogged progress on the project to build a “single central terminology database for all the institutions, agencies and other bodies of...
Online Vietnamese Dictionary
For an online Vietnamese-English and Vietnamese-French dictionary, go here. You can browse the resource, but the site has not been globalized, so peripheral information...
Search me
If anyone has managed to miss the ongoing search wars saga, here’s a few handy links. On the commercial front, Google is (at last)...
Aynu localization of OpenOffice
One of the more recent localization efforts for OpenOffice has been into Aynu. Or more traditionally, Ainu. Googling for this pre-Nihongo language in Japan...
A brace of glossaries
The Karolinska Institutet Library has made a Swedish-English medical term browser available, using a MeSH tree model. Allows you to search through a concept...
NLP Masters opportunity for non-Europeans
Jeff Allen has drawn attention to an International Masters in Natural Language Processing with grant, for students who have already received a BA degree...
The limits of executive English
Article originally from Associated Press on executive linguistic skills.
Languages-on-the-web portal
Thanks to languagehat for news about a new mega portal called Languages on the Web. Vast array of links to what they call...
Only 300 years before intelligent searching
In a CNET.com interview, Google technology director Craig Silverstein was asked when he thought advanced artificially intelligent search (such as “search pets” or agents)...
History teaser
Further to my history blog of the other day, here’s a taster of the sort of topic threads that could be followed up in...