Language Technology Division

July 2010 Newsletter: Now Online

Dear LTD Member,

The Language Technology Division’s July 2010 edition of Language Tech News is now available online.

HIGHLIGHTS in this issue include:

• From the Administrator
• Annual Meeting
• Cloud Computing, Cloud Sourcing & Machine Translation
• The Beetext Flow Leadership
• Multilingual Reference Material
• The “X” Files
• Trados Tip

Enjoy!

Emily Tell
Language Tech News Editor

HOW TO DOWNLOAD:
For a direct download of the LTD newsletter, click on http://tinyurl.com/246t8u3 or visit the Newsletter Archive.

From the Admin Desk: Don’t try this at home

Probably you have. Leave all your electronic valuables to the risks of theft, damage, and other worldly disasters. Help can only be given to those who read the following article from our esteemed Webmaster Michael Wahlster. Michael had to add a minor correction to the well written piece which we will publish here.

“As of version 0.8 from June 2010, Google Mail support has been removed from FireGPG and the add-on will not be developed further. A possible substitute is the Gmail S/MIME add-on by Sean Leonard and Richard Jones.”

Now the article can be found at: Protect Your Most Valuable Assets: Data Security and Confidentiality. And did I mention it was the Feature Article of the ATA Chronicle in its June issue? Congratulations Michael!

From the Admin Desk: Denver anyone?

The other weekend I attended the ATA Board Meeting as they were in town. And one thing led to another. That is the question what we want to do this year at the LTD General Meeting, part of the annual ATA Conference? For those who attended last year in New York you will remember that we took a good part of the GM to listen to an excellent panel on the hot topics of 2009. And for this year I would want to entertain the idea to ask our membership. What would you like to talk about, listen to, know more about? Join us on our LTD mailing list or drop me a note and let me know what you think we should put on the Agenda of the General Meeting

From the Admin Desk: AMTA 2010 conference: Call for MT User Presentations

Call for MT User Presentations: Commercial Users and Translators

The AMTA is seeking case studies and user stories for the AMTA 2010 conference – October 31-November 5, Denver, Colorado, immediately following ATA conference.

More »

From the Admin Desk: Editors & Writers wanted

All hands on deck!
We are looking for LTD members interested in and thinking about some volunteering opportunities in the LTD. We have something for You! Join our production team of editors, reviewers or fact checkers (yours to decide) in any upcoming LTD newsletter production cycle. Currently we use a publication model that really serves us well given the fact that everything we do is based on volunteering efforts: We finish articles for publication as we do have time and as they are submitted by the writers. First step is to post them here. Once we reach our publication volume threshold we DTP the articles and publish them in a newsletter. That helps us with the coordination, deadlines etc. As you can tell there is no commitment anxiety you would have to fear. There are only take aways: to gain experience, exposure and do something to be proud of!
So if you are interested and would like to know more, please contact us.

The creative outlet
We are also looking for great content to be published in our newsletter, blog or in our collection of great articles. Sure there is some limitation to everything in life. Here it would be content needs to be related to Language Technologies used in the process of Translation and Localization. But from there the sky is the limit. Translation Environments, CATs, MTs, Speech to Text, Office Utilities and mechanical pencil sharpener. Surprise us!

The Quality of Relationship

Interesting post in the TranslationGuyBlog about Jost Zetzsche’s presentation at the recent Translation Company Division conference in Phoenix.

Jost [...] is the author of the Tool Kit, an online newsletter that is a must-read for any translator or language service provider concerned about the interface between translation technology and their paycheck.

Op-Ed Contributor: I, Translator

OPINION | March 21, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor: I, Translator
By DAVID BELLOS
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21bellos.html?emc=eta1
Why Google Translate won’t put me out of a job.

Will we soon have speech-to-speech translation, a la “Star Trek’s” universal translator?

Well, Franz Josef Och, over at Google, things we will!

See an interview with him by the Los Angeles Times here.

A snippit:

Is it just short step from here to real time, speech-to-speech translation, a la “Star Trek’s” universal translator?

To really do the integrated speech-to-speech translation, where you can have a phone call with someone and it would interpreted live? I believe that based on the technology that we have, and the improvement rate we have in the core quality of MT and speech recognition, that it should be possible to do that in the not-too-distant future.

Naomi de Moraes