Skype is one of the most commonly used programs for instant messaging, as well as chatting over the Internet and rightfully so, it has proved to be a simple, well designed and extremely reliable program which is free for all practical purposes. Since it is so popular worldwide, it’s obvious that Skype is used by people who speak a variety of languages. A large number of such users speak with others users who may not speak and understand their language and thus face a communication barrier. But this barrier is now a thing of the past with the recent release of an automatic translation tool for Skype called the Skype Translator.
The Skype Translator works only with Windows operating system and also requires Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. It is a plug-in that uses Google Translator to produce automatic translations for conversations in Skype. Google Translator itself does not need any introduction as it is one of the most widely used tools for automatic translation. Though it may not turn out perfect translations, it works fairly well especially considering the fact that it’s free. A very useful feature of the Google Translator is its api which can be integrated with other web services and even software to provide them with translation options.
After installation the Skype Translator require access rights in order to work. These rights can be allowed or refused in the first run of the plug in. After the rights have been given, a user can chat with his/her contacts using an external interface which is a separate window that contains translation options using which incoming and outgoing messages can be translated. When a user sends a message after enabling the translation option, the translated message will appear in the receiver’s window. One can chat in this external window without using the Skype interface. You can download the Skype Translator here.
In a move which brought back memories of the way Facebook went about its translation project, Twitter has requested its users to help it translate its services into different languages. Although right now the site is focusing its efforts on Spanish, French, German and Italian translation and is working with a small team of language translation providers, it has its doors open for just about any language. Language translation professionals all over the world who are interested in contributing their skills and expertise to Twitter can sign up at http://twitter.com/translate#translate_signup.
Translators working with Twitter would be getting a free badge displayed on their profiles. And depending upon the amount of translations they have carried out, the translators would be classified into levels from 1 to 10.
Twitter has also created leatherboards for every language that’s being translated. These provide translators with a bit more incentive than the plain knowledge that they have contribute to the site. You can check out the leatherboard for French translation at http://twitter.com/translate/leaders/fr.
Twitter also intends to offer translation files to the developer community as various language translations of the site get completed so that they are able to translate their Twitter apps for different language speaking markets.
Twitter has tried its best to ensure success by following a strategy that has already worked fantastically well in the case of none other than Facebook. Back in 2008 Facebook made the same move and it has paid huge dividends which have reflected in the site’s remarkable international growth.
Herta Mueller who grew under the oppressive communist regime of Romania used her experiences to produce poetry and novels; her creations where rightfully honored with the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize. The Swedish prize jury hailed the 56-year-old Romanian-born German national as a writer who depicts the landscape of the dispossessed with the frankness of prose and concentration of poetry.
Mueller’s family belonged to a German-speaking minority in Romania. During World War II, her father was a member of the German SS. After 1945, her mother was deported by Romanian communists to a labor camp in the Soviet Union. More challenges lay ahead as Mueller whose first job was as a translator, was dismissed from work when she refused to work for the much hated Securitate secret police under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. This spurred Mueller to turn her focus to literature. Her early works had to be smuggled out of Romania, eventually she defected to West Germany in 1987. With the Nobel Prize, life may be trying to compensate for what she went through in the early years of her life and compliment her for staying true to her calling even in the most trying of circumstances.
After the prize was announced books written by Herta Mueller entered into the bestseller list of Amazon.com. “The Land of Green Plums” whose sales ranking was 78,235th before the announcement jumped to the 7th position which is widely being seen as being one of the biggest jumps ever at Amazon. Similarly another one of her books “The Passport” which was in the 2,290,352th position rose to the 209th place.
Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH, Mueller’s publisher is suddenly facing a huge rush of offers for the worldwide English rights to her books. There are some of her books that haven’t been translated to English. These include titles like “Der Koenig verneigt sich und toetet” and “Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jaeger” which according to the foreign rights director of the Mueller’s publisher, are going to considered for translation.
Continental Airlines has announced that SDL plc, which is a leading provider in the field of Global Information Management (GIM) solutions, will be their premier localization solutions provider. SDL was chosen for its superior localization services, global scale, as well as its ability for delivering automated translations. SDL provides services to some of the most well known and reputed organizations of the world including ABN-Amro, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Philips, Chrysler, Sun Microsystems Bosch, Best Western, Virgin Atlantic, Canon, CNH, and SAP.
SDL will be entrusted with Continental Airlines’ web site translation into five languages. The content would include highly sensitive information pertaining to travel safety. Continental Airlines would be expanding its GIM footprint in order to accelerate the time-to-market process, as well as reduce translation costs. This will be achieved by using a combination of SDL WorldServer (TM) for process automation along with SDL Knowledge-based Translation System(R) (SDL KbTS (TM)) and localization services for all target languages.
SDL KbTS uses highly advanced automated translation technology which is supported by a team of highly skilled post editors working around the world. This setup is revolutionizing Continental Airlines global content delivery. It allows the company to get the required level of quality within the specified time frame – all this at significantly lower costs (Continental Airlines will be able to save up to 30% of the cost and reduce turnaround time for translations by up to 40%). According to Ken Penny of Continental Airlines (managing director, Internet planning and development) working with SDL would allow them to deliver high quality translation very quickly.
Not many people get the opportunity to do what they want to do, enjoy it and make a living out of it. Kenji Nimura, an erstwhile Spanish is among the lucky few who have been able to achieve the aforementioned. Nimura is a part of the Dodgers, he works as the interpreter for their Japanese players who understand very little of the English language.
Nimura who is 37 years old, was born in Japan. Life would have turned out to be much different had his family stayed back in Japan. Fate however, had other things in store – in 1983, his father was driven to Los Angeles in the search for new opportunities as the family’s import business in Japan was struggling to survive. Young Kenji was uprooted from familiar surroundings and transported to an alien L.A. His knowledge of the English language was limited to barely a few words, and he found himself to be the sole Japanese kid in a Latino school. All this and the loneliness stressed him out so much that it took him several weeks before he could go to school without vomiting.
Time passed and as he began getting familiar with Spanish he started liking the language. The language became a nurturing force which began and strengthened his friendship with the Latino children in his school. These new friends, many of whom were themselves outsiders, became a lifeline for Kenji. His other lifeline were The Dodgers, his hero being Steve Sax. Kenji used to imagine being a Dodger just like Sax. But life had other things in store for him, perhaps unknowingly Kenji’s English was polished by listening to Vin Scully and after three years of classes in English as a second language he moved on to the next level. After six years in Los Angeles, he had friends of all kinds – Latinos, Asians, whites, blacks, straight arrows, slackers, jocks, and surfers.
Kenji went on to teach Spanish to a wide range of people, from rich students at a private high school, to working-class ones at a junior college, to the members of the Japanese community in L.A. It was in 2007 that Kenji and his father became fans of Takashi Saito who was the Dodgers’ Japanese pitcher. Soon enough he came to know that the team was getting another Japanese player, Kuroda and would be requiring the services of an interpreter. Kenji submitted his resume on a lark and received his call within a week. He got the job after a single interview and considers that to be the proudest moments of his life. For Kenji, the Dodgers’ are not only his favorite team, but also a team that has global reach and that which stands for the things that he believes in.
Facebook’s move to provide option for Latin translation support to its website has created a surge of interest in the language which is not used anymore by regular folks in daily life. It’s a good time to reflect upon this language which was a major player until the 17th century.
Latin was originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It spread throughout the Mediterranean region and a significant part of Europe as a result of Roman conquests. All the Romance languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian have descended from Latin. Many other languages, especially the European ones, have either inherited or borrowed their vocabulary from Latin.
Latin played the role of an international language and was the primary language used by the academia and scientific community in Europe till the 17th century. Thus it was associated with progress and learning; several groundbreaking works in the fields of philosophy, science and religion were originally published in Latin. These books were so influential that there power has sustained to this day, drawing students from all over the world who aspire to study them and learn Latin for the purpose.
In the present day, Latin exists in the form of Ecclesiastical Latin which is used in edicts and papal bulls that are issued by the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church is in fact the largest organization that uses Latin language for official and quasi-official work. Science, law and the academia also depend upon Latin vocabulary for their terminology. The Latin alphabet, when combined with its modern variants like the French, English and Spanish alphabets, is the most widely used worldwide.
Though it is not used commonly, Latin is far from being a dead language because of its illustrious history.
Close on the heels of the announcement that the New International Version Bible would be revised, comes the publication of the “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text” by the Yale University Press. The book is the result of a two-decade long painstaking labor undertaken by Royal Skousen, a professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University.
Mr. Skousen who is also a Mormon, embarked on the project with the intention of creating a document that was error-free in the sense that it was closest to what the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith Jr., originally translated. It is believed that numerous errors were generated from the time Smith dictated the translation to his scribes till the first edition was published. Even after that the text continued to get altered with every new edition. The sources of these errors were varied, beginning from the mistaken understanding of Smith’s scribes when they heard him wrong or simply wrote the wrong word by mistake, to alterations made by Smith himself when he tried to change the King James style of the first edition into standard American English.
Royal Skousen has tried to restore the nonstandard English that was edited out by the church over time. “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text” also does away with chapter summaries, notes and columns that were added by LDS leaders. Overall this edition differs in more than 2,000 places when compared to the standard text. However, most of these differences are not very important as they do not shed a new light on the text. Some of the changes, for example, include replacing words like ‘inequality’ with ‘unequality’, or ’sword’ of justice with ‘word’ of justice. In the latter example, although the change appears to be more substantial, it does not actually contribute anything new to the big picture.
According to Mr. Skousen the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not want him to publish his work. Although he does not claim that his work depicts the actual revealed text, he does put forward that it is closest to the original revelation.
No one can accuse Google of resting on its laurels. This is one company that continues to be an inspiration for innovation. The company works ceaselessly to develop systems which make our daily lives, much better and efficient. It has been doing exciting work in the field of language translation for quite some time now. The past week, which included the International Translation Day, saw substantial developments in the field of automatic translation with Google announcing three pieces of translation-related developments that would help it provide its Web services in multiple languages.
Google has released a new Website translator gadget in the latest version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox 3.5 that provides automatic in-page translation ability. This gadget would enable developers to render the content of their site in the 51 languages supported by Google Translate. It works very simply - one needs to install the new Google Toolbar - the Website translator gadget detects the default language of the visitor from the browser and matches it with the language of the webpage, if both are same it does not take any further action. However, if the two languages are not matching, a translate button appears on the page by clicking on which, the user can translate the page into his/her preferred language.
Those who own web sites need only to paste a code snippet into their Web page in order to use the Website translator gadget. Overall these features call attention to the seriousness with which Google is developing its automatic translation capabilities.
Don’t get scared as this does not mean that you will need to learn Latin for using Facebook as the site is still available in English along with more than 70 other languages. 
What Facebook users get is the seamless ability to translate the site into Latin. Though Latin is supposed to be a nearly dead language, considering that it’s not used by people in day to day life, it is still studied by language students. And it is this group of people who can benefit from Facebook’s latest move as well as contribute to the development of such features.
Facebook also introduced language translation support for a few other languages namely Georgian, Faroese, Azeri and Nepali. Some of these languages are spoken by several million people worldwide while some are used by specific communities living in select geographic regions. Since Facebook relies upon crowd-sourced translations it’s up to the users to make good use of these benefits and see them grow.
It’s great to see such big and recognizable brands like Facebook and Google paying attention to languages other than English. Until recently, the web was dominated by the English language, not that it’s something bad, but then the world has so many other wonderful languages spoken by millions of people who should be given a chance to express themselves on popular global platforms.
An interesting bit of trivia - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg studied Latin and Greek in high school, he has also mentioned in interviews that he was thinking about studying classics at Harvard before he dropped out to run Facebook.
The exponential growth of enterprise content, driven by and coupled with increasing numbers of businesses opening up in overseas markets is creating overwhelming amounts of information that needs to be translated in various languages. Recently Common Sense Advisory organized a market research over the requirement for machine translation which included interviews with over 30 decision-makers at various business organizations and government agencies.
According to research findings, the interviewees said that they chose machine translation because of the extremely high amounts of content that was required to be translated and also because many such documents were required in the shortest possible time. There is a prevalent belief that machine translation is free, but it is not completely true because organizations that use it require to spend both time and money in configuring and training a machine translation engine. Furthermore, human input is required in the form of form of post-editing work because machine translation systems are yet to reach the stage where they can readily deliver language translations that are of acceptable quality.
It is important for companies to base their translation decisions on the overall picture to get a balanced idea of how much time and money they are actually saving by relying on machine translation compared to human translation.
