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 a trial agreement. LanguageWeaver’s statistical approach will be trained for key vertical domains.
LanguageWeaver to test MT with P.H. Brink
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 brand sites and an upswing in what he calls ‘international’ sites. Alexa people comment: “international sites (are) moving up in the rankings and other very popular US sites slowly dropping. (…) we were initially surprised by this trend. Recently we’ve read several research reports and news stories indicating that global web usage is outstripping US web usage.â€
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 interpretation work among other opportunities. India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) is “organising a national level seminar in Bangalore to offer a platform to the companies offering multi-lingual services to share their experiences and how the global delivery model can help address different aspects of this new processâ€.
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 a poor relative of language and speech technology applications. The only globally successful company in this area I know is the French company Auralog, which has carved out a niche for its speech training software. Anyone interested in latest R&D developments should probably attend the NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems to be held this month in Venice.
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 long time Xerox PARC researcher, Rao usefully locates searching etc with the ‘information workplace’ . Note the snail-like pace of linguistic processing in the development of better information provision.
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 what will be needed to develop an ‘Arabized’ internet.
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 has probably produced the largest volume of news stories about translation/interpretation in the history of journalism. Although many have been amused accounts of Maltese problems or feigned awe at the size of the EC’s translation budget, such coverage can do nothing but good for the cause of multilinguality. Above all by drawing public attention to the real problems of managing large-scale translation loads across a very large number of languages. If our global future is to be multilingual, then any solutions the EC comes up with (training, technology, sizing tasks, rethinking authoring specifications etc) will probably become benchmarks for such emerging multilingual regions as South Africa, India, and South East Asia. In fact, I wish the EC would report even more widely and deeply on its problems and on some of the efforts to solve them (e.g. the outcome of the 2003 tender for ‘computer-based language resources’
. That way we might be able to push public awareness about ‘big translation’ beyond the usual ‘tower of Babel’ headline.
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 a split second, understand the natural language of a webpage, deciphers the tone, concepts and ideas presented, and gets ads Internet users will find relevant based on the exact content. The result: Targeted, relevant ads are connected with internet users without tracking online user behavior, collecting personal information or relying on misleading keyword matches. (…)
Take a page detailing the negative effects of a protein rich diet. Key word searches would pick up the word “protein” and send an ad for a “How to Get Started on a Protein Rich Diet” book. BlueLithium’s service would understand the negative context of the page using natural language processing algorithms and send relevant ads for alternatives like South Beach or Weight Watchers. This is one to one advertising that connects Web users with ads that are relevant, useful and targeted like never before.
Will it be able to decipher those killer modes made famous by Monty Python’s Piranha brothers – “dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire”?
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. de Cespedes, Gerardo, the unfortunate Spaniard (1622)): “Translations are, in respect of their originals, like the knottie wrong-side of Arrass-hangings, in which the fair outside could nill be seene without helpe of the knots within.†To modernize, translations are like the backs of wall-hangings (or carpets), where you see the knots that ensure the smoothness of the visible surface.
Literary translation, of course, has always celebrated this belles infidèles, traduttore traditore, ‘lost in translation’ dimension of the noble art, mainly because both original and copy co-exist, prompting an endless round of inspection and commentary, and a constant realization that semantic paradise has indeed been lost. Commercial translation, whatever its form, has a far more complex relationship with the ‘original’, which may no longer exist as such by the time the translation enters circulation. Certainly there is a vast swathe of multilingual websites, magazines, product labels, brochures, instructions and directions produced all over the place, but most people read these rapidly in the language they know best. Only other translators tend to inspect them for the ‘knots within’…
In fact translators in many contexts today (international organizations, for example) often produce a much more ‘fair outside’ than the original, especially when material is authored quickly in a second language. Rather than playing the guilty linguistic smuggler, they actually end up as language gendarmes, making sure that meanings circulate freely and clearly in the language of the tribe.