Machine and Human Translation 5: Self-help In the report of the BBC's experiment in conferencing with MT (March 24 post), there’s an example given of the output from Google Translate: Dowry Allowathb of Khartoum, Sudan, submitted a comment in Arabic on the topic "If you could say one thing to the world, what would it be?" which came out in English as: That the budget of one war enough to satisfy the hungry Africa, not to mention the budget arm of one of the major powers. “Not perfect, but intelligible,” is the reporter‘s verdict. As the reporter says, a proposition doesn’t have to be perfectly stated for it to be intelligible. Here’s another story about self-help. Back around 1990, a branch of the Canadian government was using MT to translate into French the notices of job vacancies that were posted up each day in government employment offices. “The only people who complain about our translations are university professors like you. That brings us up against two other phenomena of input tolerance. Dave Lee.
Explorations of real-world traffic Traffic visualizations, mostly in the form of geographic maps, have been popular lately. Governments and organizations have been releasing lots of GPS data, and as a result, we get to see some impressive animations and explore some slick interactives. We don't often get to see how cars, trains, subways, airplanes, etc move in physical space, because, well, we're usually in them, so it's always interesting to see the big picture. The activity feels very organic as traffic peaks during rush hours and slows down during the night, taxis provide service to and from the airport, and air traffic continues into the late hours. The maps pulsate with energy. Let's take a look at some of these great traffic visualizations, some new and some old. Traffic in Lisbon Pedro Cruz's maps showing traffic in Lisbon (above) are the most recent on the list. NYC MTA Ridership Sha Hwang, now a part of Stamen Design, spun off of the fruminator's subway sparklines with a Modest Maps rendition of NYC MTA Ridership.
The War For the Web On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work. As it turns out, it wasn’t just links imported from Twitter. The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. All of this is well-intentioned, I’m sure. But this isn’t just about Facebook. The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. P.S.
Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive | Epic MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive — a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service. The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans. Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet, enabling fans to get the free music they’re going to find anyway while contributing at least something to copyright holder coffers. That dream is fading fast. As legitimate sources for free on-demand music dry up, fans will likely head back to file sharing networks, which is bad news for everyone involved in music — except for, perhaps, hard drive manufacturers. See Also:
Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Ven Editor’s note: Guest writer Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker that seeks to give consumers the information and tools once limited to real estate agents. Previously, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, which had a public offering in 2002 but is now part of Oracle. Below he shares the best questions from investors during a recent fund raising. For startups, Christmas comes in November. Partners come back from vacation in September and deals start closing a few months later; since the credit crisis deferred fund-raising for most of the past year, November 2009 will probably end up being especially busy. Redfin is one of the companies that just closed a round. VCs are good at asking questions. Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business. 1. 2. Good question. 3. We knew our margin before, but hadn’t broken the numbers down into their most easily handled form. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Way.
The Word of the Year and How to Translate It This week, “unfriend” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In multilingual circles, this quickly prompted many — including us — to ask the question, “How do you translate that?” According to major media outlets (including the Telegraph, MSNBC, and many others), the term originated with Facebook. So, we went straight to Facebook to see how these community translation veterans rendered this celebrated word into other languages. The response? Locale/Translation ar_AR / ????? While we were glad to receive the translations for “remove connection,” our linguistic curiousity was piqued, and we had to ask, “So, if not at Facebook, where did ‘unfriend’ originate?” While it is unclear who first used 2009’s Word of the Year, people have been “friending” and “unfriending” each other since the advent of Livejournal.
Report from the 50th ATA conference « Musings from an overworked Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA, Random musings, Translation. trackback Opening Ceremony of the 50th ATA Conference I have finally worked my way through all the mail, bills, errands, etc. that piled up while I was traveling to Myrtle Beach and NYC. It didn’t help that I immediately got slammed with work (not that I am complaining about that!!!) when I got back from the conference. The view of Times Square from my hotel room The hotel bar As I’m sure you have read everywhere else, this year’s conference had a record 2,300+ attendees. Michael Wahlster presents the ins and outs of Twitter to a packed room The presentations were without a doubt top-notch this year. Amanda showing off her double microphones and conference badge My presentations were very well-received. Tuomas at the start of our presentation I was most excited about my second presentation of the conference, Making Portable Document Format Files Work For You, with Tuomas Kostiainen. Presentation at the SDL Trados booth Like this:
CRM Provider Partners for Multilingual Customer Care In a February 2007 report on multicultural marketing, we highlighted the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) software in improving the quality of interactions with multilingual clients and prospects. Last month, machine translation supplier Language Weaver and newly-minted translation management system (TMS) provider Sajan announced multilingual support for RightNow Technologies' CRM solution at the latter's 2009 Summit. CRM software can do a lot to improve how well a company knows and treats its customers. At its simplest, it can automate responses to common queries, suggest responses to less usual ones, filter out spam, ask respondents about the appropriateness of the answer they receive, and route messages based on the skill set of individual customer service representatives. More evolved systems tailor interactions to individual or demographic preferences. Language Weaver previewed its integration into the RightNow Agent Desktop through the TranslateNow button.
Buyers Join Forces to Tackle the Translation Quality Conundrum We've written extensively about translation quality from the buyer's perspective, arguing that companies purchasing translation services should assume a more proactive role in defining their requirements, developing their own metrics, and communicating with suppliers about how they intend to evaluate their performance. Last Friday, we convened approximately 30 delegates from the industry's largest buyer organizations for a Common Sense Advisory colloquium hosted by Google in Mountain View, California. In our earlier research on buyer-defined translation quality ("Buyer-Defined Translation Quality," Aug08), we revealed the findings of interviews with 28 companies that translate hundreds of millions of words into multiple languages each year, most of which spend in excess of US$1 million on translation services annually. The report answered the question, “What does translation quality mean?” Few buyers formally measure translation quality.
The Other Immigrants Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Acc By Nicholas Kolakowski | Posted 2009-11-13 Email Print Microsoft announced a broad range of new functionality for Bing, its search engine, on Nov. 11. In addition to incorporating results from Wolfram Alpha, a self-described computational engine that provides a definitive numerical answer to a search query, the revamped Bing offers a more robust video page, with feeds from MSN Video, Hulu and ABC, and more intensive search in categories such as local events and cities. In a sign of the increased importance of social networking to corporations such as Microsoft and Google, Bing has also incorporated Facebook and Twitter into its search features. Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Access by Nicholas Kolakowski Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs.