At Tomedes, we believe in a purpose which goes beyond just providing high quality translation at the most competitive rates. We aim to create a world which in-spite of the huge diversity of languages is no more limited by language barriers. We’d like to contribute to an environment where there is seamless and accurate language translation between all languages and in all spheres of life.
Tall order! But it excites us and we are on our way. We have noticed that a large number of people do not have proper awareness about language translation, its benefits and how to get good language translations. Consequently one of our major sub-goals is creating awareness about language translation all over the world. We do it through our blog and various other articles that we send out to reputed sites.
You can check out a recent article on avoiding translation errors at eHow.com.
Continuing on our spree of adding as many language pairs to our translation services as possible we formally added Romanian to Spanish (Spain) to our repertoire of services. We’ve already got a nice group of qualified and talented Romanian to Spanish language translation experts from various parts of the world and look forward to producing perfect translations in the area.
Translation customers with Romanian to Spanish document translation projects related to specific fields like legal translation, medical translation, business or web site translation are also welcome as we have translators with suitable specialized knowledge. If you don’t find what you are looking for do contact us and we will arrange the best translation service for you.
The professional Albanian translation experts registered with Tomedes are having a very busy life as lately we have been receiving many Albanian translation requests regularly. Keeping up with the ongoing Albanian translation spirit, I was killing some time by googling with search terms related to Albanian language when I came across a very helpful forum where there was a post about the most important Albanian word that foreigners should learn.
The word is “mire” and it means good.
Now in a typical Albanian conversation you will get loads of opportunity to use the word mire. Consider the following examples –
“How are you? “
“How do you find Albania?
“How have you been?”
All the above questions can simply be answered by the word “mire” or good. And I have just included a few questions from scores of possibilities. Additional tips – for “very good” say – “shume mire” or “goxha mire”.
Am developing an interest in the Albanian language 
so you can expect more tips in the near future.
A group of advocates have sued New York City’s welfare agency on behalf of welfare clients. The advocacy group filed a lawsuit for six clients who individually speak Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese, Spanish, and Soninke which is a West African language. The lawsuit was filed for non-compliance with policies and laws that made it mandatory for city agencies to provide language translation and interpretation services for the convenience of its clients.
The case was based on a law passed in 2003. “The Equal Access to Human Services Act” was passed after facing resistance in the beginning from the Bloomberg administration. According to the law, city agencies were given a period of five years to incorporate comprehensive language translation services (in person or by phone) in a phased manner. Moreover, the law also stated that city forms should be available in the six popularly used languages which were Chinese, Spanish, Haitian, Creole, Korean, Russian and Arabic. The deadline for total implementation was set for February 2009 which the welfare agency in question failed to meet.
The famous and delightful television series, “Friends”, is not only popular in the United States where it was produced but also in other countries which are not only far away in terms of distance from the United States but also in terms of language and culture. Similarly Japanese, Chinese and Iranian movies are quite popular in English speaking countries, especially in the United States.
This cross cultural popularity of videos has created a great demand for subtitle translation. There are many good sites on the Internet which serve as databases for subtitles. But avid watchers of global movies, television series and the like have quite often found themselves in situations where they cannot find the required subtitles in their native languages. If you are one of them dear reader, then you can kiss this problem goodbye as listed below are three of the best subtitles translators available on the Internet.
Open Subtitle Translator
Open Subtitle Translator automatically translates subtitle (srt) files line by line with the help of Google language tools.
Subtitles Translator
Subtitles Translator translates subtitles only in MicroDVD format that is ({start_frame}{end_frame}subtitles_line). The program does not support automatic translation, and one has to translate manually translate every line.
Gnome Subtitles
Gnome Subtitles works for the GNOME desktop. It supports subtitle translation, editing and synchronization for most of the common text-based subtitle formats.
Twenty years ago UNESCO instituted September 30th as Translation Day at the request of the International Federation of Translators. The day was chosen as it was feast-day of St. Jerome who is regarded as the patron saint of language translators.
The International Federation of translators celebrates Translation Day every year by suggesting a theme which would serve as a unifying topic on which language translators from all over the world would think and write about in relation to translation.
This year’s theme is “Working Together” and all translators who make their voices heard through their blogs and other tools including social networking are invited to share their thoughts on an international level. The International Federation for Translators has provided some suggestions to help guide the discussion efficiently.
Translators are encouraged to take a fresh look at their profession which has been popularly associated with long hours of solitary work. Times have changed and we should now think about how working collectively can contribute towards taking professional translation services to a significantly improved and better level. In fact, the proliferation of Internet has made it very easy for translators across the world to stay in touch and join forces.
We should take into account the increasing complexity of language translation work. A global pool of translators can be of tremendous help to all translators by fueling an exchange of ideas and strategies which would improve the quality of work, as well as efficiency. The involvement of translation buyers in this network would also go a long way in improving language translation services all over the world.
Do check out http://www.fit-ift.org/en/home.php for more details.
Author Adam Jacot de Boinod has come up with an amazing book on unusual words. The book features words taken from various languages all over the world which do not have any equivalents in English. Take for example the Japanese expression “katahara itai” which refers to the act of laughing so hard that the side of abdomen hurts - one Japanese expression which needed 11 English words to describe. The book “The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World” is a veritable gold mine of many such remarkable words.
It is not only highly enlightening but also very entertaining. According to the author Jacot de Boinod, the dictionary of a language is a great source of insight into its native culture. He cites Hawaiian as an example which has 65 words for fishing net and 108 for sweet potato and the Dutch vocabulary with a word like ‘uitwaaien’ referring to a walk in windy weather for the fun of it, which reflects the light-heartedness of the nation.
Adam Jacot de Boinod hit upon the idea for this book while going through an Albanian language dictionary in 2005. He then trawled through nearly 300 dictionaries to build a collection for this book. Do check out the website here - http://www.themeaningoftingo.com.
The title of this post sums it all; Google is now available in the Hawaiian language. Right now one can access the Hawaiian version of Google’s search engine from the Safari browser, but soon enough it will be available with other browsers as well. Although users of the Hawaiian version would find instructions in the Hawaiian language, the results would be in English.
This milestone has been the result of painstaking efforts made by Keola Donaghy, an assistant professor from the University of Hawaii-Hilo. In 1997, Donaghy had translated the web browser Netscape. He had been pursuing Google for three years trying to convince them to add support for Hawaiian languages.
For the Google project, Donaghy spent around a hundred hours working on producing the language translation. He supplied the Hawaiian versions of the 2,500 “strings” used by the Google search engine. These “strings” include words, sentences and paragraphs. Donaghy would now like to work towards a Hawaiian version of Facebook.
It seems like there’s no end to language translation gaffes. The latest victim being a student from Congo who ended up facing the fury of none other than the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
The incident took place at Kinshasa, the capital of Congo where Hillary Clinton was speaking to students in a Congolese University. One of the male students asked a question about what President Obama thought about the financial contracts between China and Congo. It seems the translator slipped and what Hillary Clinton ended up hearing was what Bill Clinton thought about the issue. The question rubbed her the wrong way and she replied sharply that it was she who was the Secretary of the State not her husband, and that she could only state her own opinion about the matter.
The issue has been reported widely over the media and reinforces the requirement for well trained and highly qualified translators which in turn can only be done by spreading awareness about language translation and creating solid educational and training programs for aspiring professional translators.
According to latest research, the best period for learning a foreign language is between birth and the age of 7, the ability declines significantly after puberty. Common knowledge you would say… most people must have observed how fast babies tend to pick up languages. True, most people know that, but what is it about babies that help them pick up a new language so quickly and efficiently? This is something that few people understand.
Those few people are scientists working towards deciphering this mystery and they may well have struck gold as it was recently revealed that these researchers have found that babies have a powerful ability to distinguish between various sounds. Now every language uses a unique set of sounds. Though initially babies are able to differentiate between all kinds of sounds, as they grow old this ability withers out. It becomes progressively weak as a baby’s native language starts getting dominant and by the time it has begun uttering its first words it already seems unable to differentiate between sounds that do not belong to the language it was taught predominantly.
The initial language learning process is quite like a new circuit being hardwired into the brain which guides the language learning abilities of a person throughout life. Amazingly, babies who are taught two languages at the same time seem to absorb both at equal speed and demonstrate a more efficient ability to absorb new languages in the future.
Scientists are now working upon the knowledge about how the ability to distinguish between different songs can enhance the ability to learn new languages. They are busy trying to come with methods with which adults could be taught new languages utilizing this principle.
