The pace of globalization is quickening. Startups today have a wider audience at their fingertips than ever before. Technology can help with this, and the next issue of MultiLingual, on startups, will cover this when it goes live in a few days.
Language
Localization Unconference: The First 10 Years
The event is still going strong and is now worldwide; organized by and attended by those interested in localization and related-areas of our industry who want to meet and make connections through the discussion of hot topics or things that normally don’t get on the regular conference circuit agenda.
The Only Irish Language Act in Town
If you’ve been reading Thomas Gilmartin‘s great piece on MultiLingual Insights about the deadly seriousness of the status of the Irish language in Northern Irish politics, or been amazed by the kind of mighty passions that can arise over the Irish for “selfie”, then you might consider that RuPaul is exactly the kind of language act we need to see more of on the island of Ireland.
Northern Ireland’s current language crisis
The current cultural conflict in Northern Ireland, and, in particular, the argument over the status of its languages, is at the core of a political crisis regarding restoring the power-sharing assembly.
Linguistic prejudice, race and machine translation
There are two basic approaches to grammar: the kind that says “this is what the rule book has said since 1858” and the kind that says “language evolves, and this is how it’s actually being used in the current world to communicate these specific concepts and grammatical differences.” The way pockets of minority speakers use...
Conversational UI Language Design at LocWorld35
Conversational UI localization and language design skills are central to a great user experience. CUI means we moved from a "user"-centric concept of design to a human-centric one. After all, what could be more "natural" that talking to a computer? Both humans and computers "converse" in dialog, and it's the language design knowledge for such a conversation that's critical to delivering a natural, human-like interaction between the two.
Catch the Pidgin at the BBC: Digital Flight of Fancy?
So what is pidgin, exactly? The BBC describe it as "a mix of English and local languages enabling people who do not share a common language to communicate".
How to rank well in French SEO
SEMRush completed a study of Google’s ranking factors in September 2017 and found that factors like the time visitors spend on your site and the number of pages they view are now more important than factors such as how often you include a specific keyword on the page. This reinforces the importance of creating a user-friendly website with a responsive design that considers human factors first.
The power of positive language
What if there was an easy trick to be more persuasive and more positive, just by changing your mindset and the way you phrase sentences? English speakers have the option to voice both a positive statement and a negative statement that convey the same meaning. For instance, “come to the restaurant on time” and “do not come to the restaurant late” both deliver similar messages; however, the connotation behind the former is much less negative.
Homage to Catalonia
The first thought that came to my head upon witnessing events in Catalonia during the independence referendum on October 1 was to wonder whether anyone in the Madrid government had ever read a history book. If even one of them had, they might well have avoided what has become a strategic and PR blunder of possibly historic scale, handing Catalan nationalism a huge boost in the process.