Thursday 13 October 2011

Bots aren't wordsmiths

 "A New York City translation tech venture, Smartling, today released a host of new features and services to help users translate their websites, mobile, and other digital content into many languages, quickly, affordably, and accurately.

Despite attempts to automate and manage translation by companies that predated Smartling--from Google Translate to AIT's Projetex--"content localization" has remained a challenge for businesses large to small for a number of reasons.

Translating, say, an English website into Chinese sounds pretty straightforward--just hire a Mandarin speaker with a good knowledge of English, right? But it's generally far more of a challenge, explained Jack Welde, CEO of Smartling, which is backed by U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock, First Round Capital, and IDG Ventures.

For example, business owners have to know if text on a site they want to translate is encoded in something called UTF-8. If not, the site can't render Chinese characters and will need a code rewrite. Also, companies need to ask "Where am I going to store all my multilingual content? Do I have a database for that?" Welde said.

Smartling has been automating the code-crunching process and helping companies find translators--whether robots, pros or volunteers--for about two years. Until recently, the company served large enterprise clients, providing them with dedicated sales staff, tech support, and other hand-holding perks. These were typically beyond the needs and budget of most small businesses and non-profits, however."

Read more on http://bit.ly/qri7aR

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Visiting speakers at MScTrans - autumn term

The following visiting speakers have been confirmed for the autumn term. This term all events take place in 303A/B in Sherfield building, 4-5pm. More information on our relevant webpage.

19 Octuber 2011
Dr Lucia Specia, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Estimating Machine Translation Post-Editing Effort

2 November 2011
more information soon

16 November 2011
Dr Noa Talaván, Universidad Nacional de Education a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
The Use of the Mixed Method Approach in Translation Research: Subtitling and Foreign Language Education

30 November 2011
Dr Anabel Borja, Universitat Jaume I, Spain
Multilingual Communication in Judicial Settings: A Case for Action Research

Evening classes at Imperial's Humanities

Every year the Humanities department at Imperial College organises evening classes that are open to everyone. You can find the flyer underneath. The 20 week evening courses (6-8pm) not only cover many languages at many levels (FRE, GER, SPA, ITA, RUS, ARA, JAP, CN-MAN…) but also include courses on Film Appreciation, Creative Writing, Opera and Music Technology...

Autumn term starts next week. You can enrol online. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/eveningclasses