Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Revere’s (Massachusetts, USA) diverse community has given rise to a number of ethnic restaurants and grocery stores brimming with international products from countries such as Cambodia, Lebanon, and Thailand.

While these restaurants and stores provide a taste of home for immigrants, they may be confusing for residents who want to try new things but cannot read foreign-language packaging.

This was one of the arguments used by City Councilor George Rotondo when he asked, by way of a council motion, that Revere stores that sell products in a foreign language provide an English translation.

“I embrace diversity. I live it,” said Rotondo, whose wife is from Colombia and who can speak or read five languages. “Unfortunately, I believe it’s unfair that you go to a store and see something there and don’t know what it is, and have to rely on someone telling you what it is.”

His colleagues on the council last month approved the motion, which then made its way to Mayor Thomas G. Ambrosino’s desk. There it met a speedy death.

“The council passed it and the mayor vetoed it,” Rotondo said. “He thought it was ‘silly’; he wrote that in a letter to me.”

“I just thought it was kind of foolish,” Ambrosino said in an interview. “First of all, I don’t think we have the authority to have private companies translate their products into English. And I don’t think it’s an effort in which we ought to be expending our efforts.”

Read more > Revere 

SpeakLike introduced a Web chat application at Demo 08 that translates languages in real time. Currently available for English, Simplified Chinese and Spanish, SpeakLike aims to improved the speed and reduce the cost for translation services, according to CEO Sanford Cohen.

SpeakLike employs machine translation as well as a human assist. As you type text, the content is translated by machine and if it doesn’t pass inspection, a human translator corrects the machine-translated text in real time. Of course, it may not be real time if the translator is too slow. Translators can more easily deal with slang, idioms and instant messaging shortcut, Cohen said. The company has lined up a customer, with doctors from around the world who need to collaborate. The company also plans to add support for legal and medical translation. Pricing is 10 cents per message. A typical translation service cost about $1.75 per minute, Cohen said.

Read more > ZDNet 

It has been announced that the French ratification of the London Agreement was deposited yesterday, 29th January 2008.The Agreement will come into force on 1st May 2008, and will apply to all European Patents granted after that day.

What is the London Agreement?

The London Agreement is an international agreement designed to reduce the cost of validating a European patent by reducing the translation requirements at the grant stage, in states which are parties to the Agreement.

At present a European patent application must be prosecuted before the European Patent Office in any one of the three official languages, English, French or German and, on grant, translations of the claims of the other two languages must be filed to be published with the specification as granted. This procedure will remain as before.

In order to validate the European patent in the designated states, it is necessary to file a translation of the entire specification in an official language of the national patent office.

Read more > Patent Baristas 

The February issue of “National Defense” magazine reports on the use of iPod software that speaks Arabic and Kurdish and enables soldiers to communicate with locals. What’s new: The software will soon be available for civilian travelers.

The Soldier’s iPods run an application called VCommunicator, which soldiers use to play phrases in Arabic (or Kurdish), study missions, read maps and do other tasks as they hunt for insurgents.

For example, soldiers can show Iraqi citizens a photo of a terrorist, and the iPod says in Arabic, “have you seen this person?”

Another part of the application plays a wide catalog of useful phrases, and a character on the screen shows appropriate hand gestures to go with it.

These phrases are combined into “missions.” For example, soldiers can open the “checkpoint mission,” and all the phrases, images, gestures and other data useful for communicating with drivers at a checkpoint are listed.

Soldiers can also connect the iPods to a speaker or a megaphone, and communicate to crowds or groups.

iPods, especially iPod nanos, are ideal because they’re cheap (by Pentagon procurement standards), lightweight and the soldiers already know how to use them.

Read more > Computer World 

The localisation company, Translate.org.za, have launched a year long project called Decathlon to translate ten computer programs into various international languages.

The company recently received generous funding from the international grantmaking foundation, the Open Society Institute to help volunteers in those countries help make computer programs available in their own languages.

During the project, which is named the Decathlon project, volunteer translators from all over the world will be assisted to translate ten computer applications into their own languages. The Decathlon
project is a continuation of Translate.org.za’s efforts to promote the creation of translation communities by volunteer native speakers in all countries.

According to Samuel Murray, the Decathlon project leader, many world languages face an uphill struggle in countries where computer programs are in English despite the fact that few people speak English fluently. People who are passionate about their own languages do not always have the technical expertise to help make more software available in their languages, he says.

The Decathlon project was designed to bridge the gap between volunteer translators and developers of opensource software. The project makes use of a web-based translation tool, Pootle, which was created by Translate.org.za specifically to help volunteers do translation without requiring any programming expertise.

Read more > Press Release