July/August, 2010
Post Editing: Case studying
Katie Botkin
Learning often goes something like this: you "know" things in general theory, and only pay attention and apply them to your life after trial and error. For the shrewd and savvy there is another option ...
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July/August, 2010
PROMT Version 9
Eduardo Chacón
When it comes to rule-based machine translation (RBMT), two machine translation (MT) systems have been the major players in the market for quite some time: PROMT and SYSTRAN. PROMT, the younger of the two, was founded in Russia in 1991 ...
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July/August, 2010
Off the Map: The 'sensitive' U.S.A.
Tom Edwards
In the course of my geocultural consulting, I see and hear intriguing things about various cultures, which is one of the reasons I love the work that I do. Along with that, I also witness how various people react to certain cultures ...
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July/August, 2010
World Savvy: Code-sharing languages
John Freivalds
Lupiti, Galoshi par Tilti were Yiddish-Latvian words that my mother uttered meaning the rags and old shoes peddler is near. This peddler would go up and down streets shouting for housewives to bring out their stuff ...
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July/August, 2010
The Business Side: The business why and how of simship
Adam Asnes
The subject of managing releases over worldwide markets can be a contentious one, with pros and cons on either side of business and development cases. The concept of simship is that if you are releasing your product to worldwide markets ...
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July/August, 2010
Recruitment in the language industry
Denise Spacinsky
So often we hear harried hiring managers at the other end of the line talking about needing to hire their new person "yesterday." When a company's management knows they need new people, they mull it over for a while ...
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July/August, 2010
Optimizing software localization
Frank Lin & Boris Gurevich
Every company seems to want the utmost when it comes to developing and releasing a product. However, the constraints of the project management (PM) triangle — speed (time), cost (resource) and scope (quality) — tell us that ...
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July/August, 2010
Leveraging TMs with metadata
David Filip
Few would argue with the observation that companies are increasingly waking up to the true value of their corporate assets and trying to make the best possible return on them. Translation assets are no exception ...
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July/August, 2010
XML authoring cures localization headaches
Scott Bass
How do you predict whether a localization project will be a pleasure or pain? One of the best indicators is the quality of the content that is going to be translated. That's a central lesson we've learned ...
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July/August, 2010
Creating a framework for Arabic language technology
Mohamed Attia, Bente Maegaard, Khalid Choukri & Olivier Hamon
Arabic, one of the six official languages of the UN, is the first official language of more than 300 million native speakers in 23 Arab states located in western Asia as well as northern and eastern Africa and is widely spread ...
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July/August, 2010
Learning from the best global websites
John Yunker
When it comes to web globalization, best practices are as easy to find as opening up your web browser. The only challenge, of course, is in knowing which websites to emulate and which websites to ignore. Over the past seven years ...
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July/August, 2010
Technological developments for African languages
Claire Ulrich
The recent FIFA World Cup in South Africa has had an unexpected side effect: participants across the globe encountered African languages for the first time via their television sets and computer screens ...
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July/August, 2010
Takeaway: Agency specialization
Daniel B. Harcz
I have been running my own translation company for 13 years. The array of languages my agency has offered its clients makes quite an interesting trajectory, but I have recently arrived at the decision to reduce the number ...
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June, 2010
Post Editing: Continuing education
Katie Botkin
Maybe I'm just weird, but I really like learning stuff. I like using what I've learned, struggling to revisit what I once knew, reading familiar passages and discovering new ones ...
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June, 2010
memoQ 4
Angelika Zerfaß
From the very beginning, memoQ has been a tool envisioned by translator-developers for translators, with a side order of server functionality. As the developers of memoQ themselves translate and therefore know what translators need in their daily work ...
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June, 2010
Off the Map: Knowing culture through contact
Tom Edwards
One of my absolute favorite quotations happens to be this gem from Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), originally published in 1869 in his book The Innocents Abroad: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people ...
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June, 2010
World Savvy: ¡Qué vaina!
John Freivalds
Every country has a word or phrase that describes its character. In my experience Greeks would say glendi (party, or better yet, let's have a party), Austrians would say gemütlich (cozy), the Germans arbeitsam (industrious), the French would say ...
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June, 2010
The Business Side: Internationalization budget expectations
Adam Asnes
If you're considering internationalizing a large and complex software product, there's one thing you should be prepared for: it's expensive. There's just no way around it if you want an application that properly presents, inputs, transforms and reports complex data ...
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June, 2010
Perspectives: Educating the client
Susan Remkus
At some point in your professional life you've probably encountered a situation that left you at a loss for words. You wanted your questions answered and issues clarified, but you didn't even know what to ask because your frame of reference didn't provide you a starting point ...
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June, 2010
Perspectives: Embracing disruption: translating e-learning texts
Adam Blau
"Our company is developing and releasing new products and services quicker and in more markets than in the past five years. My group is responsible for instructor-led training for 12 markets; coordinating the logistics and distribution of eight new programs ...
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June, 2010
When cultural values interfere with globalized e-learning
Andrea Edmundson
I recently reviewed an e-learning course for a US company that wanted to redesign it to sell in a European country. The course included a video of interactions between leaders in a multinational company, including a young female CEO. Almost half the actors ...
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June, 2010
Guidelines for e-learning localization
Diana Karel-Longuevergne
E-learning has now become a full-fledged industry. By using existing web technologies, e-learning companies have been able to make educational content available to larger and more international audiences more efficiently than ever before ...
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June, 2010
Trends in court interpreter training
Jinny Bromberg & Irina Jesionowski
Interpretation is a performing art similar, in a way, to figure skating. Figure skaters start their training at an early age, and it takes them years to reach the professional level. Interpreters learn and master their working languages for many years ...
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June, 2010
MBA options for localization professionals
Tim Altanero
An MBA (Master of Business Administration) is an interesting and promising degree option for localization professionals seeking to move into higher management functions within the industry. It is a popular, widely-recognized degree offered everywhere from ...
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June, 2010
Education video games in China
Xiaochun Zhang
In a mere fifty years, technological advancements have dramatically changed the digital gaming landscape, developing from a niche activity to a mainstream global phenomenon. As an increasingly popular and profitable form of entertainment ...
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