Thursday, September 29, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

What is Machine Translation?

by Ray Michales  of Localization, LLC Translation Services 

Machine translation has been in the works since 1950s. There are two types of machine translations: machine translation and computer assisted translation.

Machine translation is something like Google translate. You put a text in, choose a language and Google gives its version. Anyone who has used Google translate or any other machine translation program knows that it’s far from perfect. We do not recommend using it for something that will be published or seen by other people. One can use it to translate something small and personal like an email or a post card. Most of the time one is using machine translation the results will be quite incomplete and the person will have to do some guessing and to get the whole picture of the translated text.

The second version of machine translation is computer assisted translation tool: CAT Tools. These programs are used by professional translators and agencies. It serves a different purpose that the actual translation. It’s more of the organization and memory tools. Say, you are translating a similar text to the one you just translated a few days ago or maybe even years ago. If you used CAT Tools on the first translation, will be able to assist you with the new translation. It’s like a dictionary, a database of all your past projects. If you client wants a specific translation of certain term, CAT tool will remind you of that so that all of your terms are organized properly and are consistent.

CAT tools are a standard with professional translators and translation agencies so when you ask them whether they use CAT Tools and they say “What’s that?” we say it would be a good idea to keep looking.

Localization LLC Translation Services
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Cleveland, OH 44131

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Translation Agencies Ohio

What is Crowd Translation?
by Ray Michaels, Localization, LLC Translation Services
Crowd Translation is used by social media companies to translate their content into various languages. The translation is done by the site’s users. Companies who use crowd translation take a big risk since most of the site’s users work as volunteers and are not professional linguists. This is a great way to save money, however the damage may be much more than a company is saving.
Please contact us should you have any  questions

Localization LLC Translation Services
4807 Rockside Rd Suite 400
Cleveland, OH 44131

Contact us:
Cleveland
Ph : 216.785.5252

Chicago
Ph: 773.279.5949
Washington D.C.
Ph: 202.407.9092

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

School district offering Chinese language program

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 Source: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/27/3941960/school-district-offering-chinese.html
The Associated Press
Published: Tuesday, Sep. 27, 2011 – 6:27 am
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. — A Southern California school district is offering a Chinese language immersion program, starting in kindergarten.
Capistrano Unified School District trustees on Monday night approved the Mandarin Chinese program, the first in Orange County and one of about 80 nationwide.
School board clerk John Alpay says in a news release that there has been intense demand for instruction in Chinese, the most spoken language in the world.
The immersion program begins next year.
Enrolled students begin studies in kindergarten or first grade with 80 percent of instruction in Mandarin.
The district says 165 families have already committed children to the program.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/27/3941960/school-district-offering-chinese.html#ixzz1ZAJywjPp

Monday, September 26, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

Latest News in Translation

Neb. commission denies 911 funds for translation

Published 04:00 p.m., Sunday, September 25, 2011
Source: http://www.chron.com/news/article/Neb-commission-denies-911-funds-for-translation-2188279.php

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Public Service Commission has denied Grand Island's request to use 911 funding for a translation service.
The city spends about $3,000 a year for a service that translates 911 calls in more than 90 languages. It had asked the state commission for help paying for it but was told this month that the cost is considered a personnel expense and won't be covered.
Census data cited by the Independent shows almost 18 percent of Hall County residents don't speak English as their first language. Most of the city's non-English calls to 911 have been in Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese, Somali and Somali Arabic.
Emergency management director Jon Rosenlund told NTV-TV that the 911center employs some bilingual dispatchers but they can't cover every shift or speak every language.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

English-Indonesian Translation by Localization, LLC

Indonesian

A language of Indonesia (Java and Bali)

ISO 639-3ind
Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.
Population 22,800,000 in Indonesia (2000). Population total all countries: 23,187,680.
Region Widespread in Indonesia. Also in Netherlands, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United States.
Alternate names   Bahasa Indonesia
Classification Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayo-Sumbawan, North and East, Malayic, Malay
Language use Official language. Over 140,000,000 L2 speakers.
Language development Fully developed. Bible: 1974–2000.
Writing system Arabic script. Latin script.
Comments Reportedly modeled on Riau Malay [zlm] of northeast Sumatra. Has regional variants. Over 80% cognate with Standard Malay [zsm]. Muslim.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Translation Services Ohio | Localization, LLC

Robots make up their own language

Source: The Washington Post
Scientists in Australia have created robots that can make up their own language to describe new places — even ones they haven’t physically experienced. Called Lingodroids, the robots “can develop coherent symbols for places, distances and directions, and can use those symbols to refer to novel places beyond the limit of their cognitive maps — imaginary places,” the University of Queensland scientists write in a 2011 paper cited by Discover magazine. Here’s a video showing two Lingodroid robots finding a new location in their environment. One robot invents the word “pize” to describe the spot and teaches it to the other robot: The University of Queensland scientists claim it’s the first demonstration of robots who’ve been able to generate “an evolved language” and use it to accomplish concrete tasks. The scientists’ ultimate goal? To create robots that can serve as “caregivers, companions and butlers,” one scientist tells Discover.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

Poking Fun at the Mayor, El Leadero in el Stormo

By
Source: The New York Times
Published: August 31, 2011
Rachel Figueroa-Levin has a dog, three cats, five fish, a snake, a turtle, a parakeet, a gecko (“like the Geico lizard,” she explained) and two sugar gliders (picture little flying opossums). The gliders’ cage sits beside a screen that streams “Sesame Street” videos for her 9-month-old daughter, Adiella, whose playpen and bouncer are strategically arranged by the living room’s centerpiece: a Macintosh computer where Ms. Figueroa-Levin blogs, posts messages on Twitter, and writes about, well, anything.
It was there, on Saturday morning, that @ElBloombito was born. Hurricane Irene was bearing down on New York City, and Ms. Figueroa-Levin was chuckling about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s heavy American accent and prolific mispronunciations when he delivered warnings in Spanish about the storm during a news conference the previous night.
So she took to Twitter, and began to type.
“Hola Newo Yorko! El stormo grande is mucho dangeroso!” she wrote. And then the Twitter messages began to flow — from the living room computer, from a laptop in her bedroom and from the iPhone she carries everywhere, having mastered the skill of typing on it with one hand while holding her daughter in her other arm.
“Fill los bathtub con agua por preparando el no agua,” read one post. “Los floodwaters!” exclaimed another.
By Sunday morning, @ElBloombito had about 2,000 followers. By Tuesday afternoon, there were nearly 15,000, among them Mr. Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg).
“I can’t believe that THIS is my 15 minutes,” Ms. Figueroa-Levin, 25, of Inwood, said on her other Twitter account, @Jewyorican, where, among other things, she wrote live Twitter posts during Adiella’s birth, “from the first painful contractions to accidentally peeing on my husband,” she said in an interview Tuesday morning. She also has a blog, The Misadventures of Mrs. Levin, where she writes about her marriage, motherhood and her neighborhood.
The @ElBloombito page began as a joke, she said, “a way to keep my friends entertained while we were on lockdown” because of the storm. Taken together, though, the Twitter messages provided a genial, if twisted, account of the storm and its aftermath.
Saturday night: “Remain in la casa para much rain y lighningo y thundera! El Bang Bang!”
Sunday morning: “Ay Ay Ay! Yo forgoto to evacuato el isla de Rikers!”
Sunday evening: “El FDR es el cerrado por que muy aqua mucho. Necesito un boat de row!”
Monday: “Los trainos y el bussos son muy operation. Go to worko. No excuso.”
Ms. Figueroa-Levin said she had no problem enunciating Spanish words; her mother is Jewish, but her father is Puerto Rican, so she grew up accustomed to the way the language sounds. But she is not really comfortable speaking it. “I would not be able to give a press briefing in Spanish,” she said.
But Ms. Figueroa-Levin’s Spanish is good enough to notice — as many have — that when Mr. Bloomberg speaks Spanish, it sounds as if he is engaged in a wrestling match with his own tongue, which tends to roll when it should rattle against the roof of his mouth. Also, he often accents the wrong syllables.
But, flawed as Mr. Bloomberg’s Spanish can be, @ElBloombito’s is worse — like all parodies, it is a clear exaggeration, in this case a form of Spanglish created in Ms. Figueroa-Levin’s imagination.
“The mayor’s Spanish is a lot better than a lot of people really think it is, and the funny thing is that the people who criticize it the most are exactly the ones who don’t speak a second language,” said Juan Manuel Benítez, a political reporter for NY1 Noticias, a 24-hour Spanish-language television channel serving New York City.
On Monday, Mr. Benítez asked Mr. Bloomberg about @ElBloombito at a news conference. The mayor, smiling, said: “Tengo 69 años. Es difícil para aprender un nuevo idioma.” (Translation: I’m 69 years old. It’s difficult to learn a new language.”)
Later, on her @ElBloombito page, Ms. Figueroa-Levin asked if anyone could send her a video clip of the mayor’s answer. Within minutes, Mr. Bloomberg’s staff heeded her request, posting a link to the video from @MikeBloomberg, along with a provocation.
“Me escuchas, @ElBloombito?” the mayor’s office wrote. Do you hear me?
Ms. Figueroa-Levin has given several interviews since Sunday, when The New York Observer called her “the best thing about Hurricane Irene.”
On Tuesday, she was on “The Howard Stern Show” in the morning and on WNBC-TV in the afternoon. Lunchtime was spent in the company of a literary agent, one of several she said had called her. (Her husband, Mike Levin, a director at 360i, a digital marketing agency, took the day off to care for Adiella while his wife enjoyed her fleeting fame.)
So, how much longer will @ElBloombito go on?
“For as long as I’m having fun,” she said.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

How Google Translate works

Source: The Independent
The web giant’s translation service might serve up the odd batch of nonsense, but it’s still one of the smartest communication tools of all time, as David Bellos explains
Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn’t an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.
In fact, at bottom, it doesn’t deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.
It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.
The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.
Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what’s been submitted to it.
Much of the time, it works. It’s quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for “fully automated high-quality machine translation”.
Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.
Google’s own promotional video doesn’t dwell on this at all. At present it offers two-way translation between 58 languages, that is 3,306 separate translation services, more than have ever existed in all human history to date.
Most of these translation relations – Icelandic to Farsi, Yiddish to Vietnamese, and dozens more – are the newborn offspring of Google Translate: there is no history of translation between them, and therefore no paired texts, on the web or anywhere else. Google’s presentation of its service points out that given the huge variations between languages in the amount of material its program can scan to find solutions, translation quality varies according to the language pair involved.
What it does not highlight is that GT is as much the prisoner of global flows in translation as we all are. Its admirably smart probabilistic computational system can only offer 3,306 translation directions by using the same device as has always assisted intercultural communication: pivots, or intermediary languages.
It’s not because Google is based in California that English is the main pivot. If you use statistical methods to compute the most likely match between languages that have never been matched directly before, you must use the pivot that can provide matches with both target and source.
A good number of English-language detective novels, for example, have probably been translated into both Icelandic and Farsi. They thus provide ample material for finding matches between sentences in the two foreign languages; whereas Persian classics translated into Icelandic are surely far fewer, even including those works that have themselves made the journey by way of a pivot such as French or German. This means that John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT’s Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will. And the real wizardry of Harry Potter may well lie in his hidden power to support translation from Hebrew into Chinese. GT-generated translations themselves go up on the web and become part of the corpus that GT scans, producing a feedback loop that reinforces the probability that the original GT translation was acceptable. But it also feeds on human translators, since it always asks users to suggest a better translation than the one it provides – a loop pulling in the opposite direction, towards greater refinement. It’s an extraordinarily clever device. I’ve used it myself to check I had understood a Swedish sentence more or less correctly, for example, and it is used automatically as a webpage translator whenever you use a search engine.
Of course, it may also produce nonsense. However, the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)
Human translators, on the other hand, produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can’t tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source – in which case you don’t need the translation at all.
If you remain attached to the idea that a language really does consist of words and rules and that meaning has a computable relationship to them (a fantasy that many philosophers still cling to), then GT is not a translation device. It’s just a trick performed by an electronic bulldozer allowed to steal other people’s work. But if you have a more open mind, GT suggests something else.
Conference interpreters can often guess ahead of what a speaker is saying because speakers at international conferences repeatedly use the same formulaic expressions. Similarly, an experienced translator working in a familiar domain knows without thinking that certain chunks of text have standard translations that he or she can slot in.
Translators don’t reinvent hot water every day. They behave more like GT – scanning their own memories in double-quick time for the most probable solution to the issue at hand. GT’s basic mode of operation is much more like professional translation than is the slow descent into the “great basement” of pure meaning that early mechanical translation developers imagined.
GT is also a splendidly cheeky response to one of the great myths of modern language studies. It was claimed, and for decades it was barely disputed, that what was so special about a natural language was that its underlying structure allowed an infinite number of different sentences to be generated by a finite set of words and rules.
A few wits pointed out that this was no different from a British motor car plant, capable of producing an infinite number of vehicles each one of which had something different wrong with it – but the objection didn’t make much impact outside Oxford.
GT deals with translation on the basis not that every sentence is different, but that anything submitted to it has probably been said before. Whatever a language may be in principle, in practice it is used most commonly to say the same things over and over again. There is a good reason for that. In the great basement that is the foundation of all human activities, including language behaviour, we find not anything as abstract as “pure meaning”, but common human needs and desires.
All languages serve those same needs, and serve them equally well. If we do say the same things over and over again, it is because we encounter the same needs, feel the same fears, desires and sensations at every turn. The skills of translators and the basic design of GT are, in their different ways, parallel reflections of our common humanity.
This is an extract from ‘Is That A Fish In Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything’ by David Bellos published by Particular (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £16.50 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on             08430 600 030      , or visit independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Translation Services Cleveland Ohio

Latest News

Vocre App Makes the Universal Translator Get Closer to Reality

September 15th, 2011 By: Lambert Varias
Source: http://technabob.com/blog/2011/09/15/vocre-universal-translator-app/


One of the things that breaks my immersion when watching sci-fi shows is when everyone speaks the same language, from people of different nationalities to aliens (not to mention the dog and pig people in Dragonball). But many sci-fi franchises also address this real world convenience with a fictional explanation – the “universal translator.” A new app called Vocre (pronounced vo-cray) is trying to turn iOS devices into this mythical device.
vocre language translation app
A company called myLanguage made Vocre using their own technology, as well as magical bits from voice recognition company Nuance. Like most iOS apps, using Vocre is simple. Or at least it’s supposed to be simple – first, select the language and gender of the person you’re talking to. Then, while your iOS device is vertical, speak into the phone. Finally, tilt your device into a horizontal position to cue Vocre to translate what you just said, both verbally and orally.
Vocre is currently available on the iTunes App Store and can handle English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin. It seems like a great idea, one fit to be in a United Colors of Benetton commercial, but right now it has a couple of major drawbacks. First is the flip to translate gimmick, which is the only way to order Vocre to translate what’s been said. The problem is, reviews on the iTunes App Store have said that it’s faulty and doesn’t work all the time. Besides, I think it’s a totally unnecessary feature. What’s wrong with a virtual button? Or, if we insist on being flashy, why not have the speaker say a magic word at the end of his message to cue the app to translate instead?
This faultiness may be forgiven since it’s in its only been released recently, but the problem is compounded by myLanguage’s current pricing scheme – you get 10 free translations when you download the app, after which you’ll have to pay $0.99 (USD) per 10 translations, or $8.99 for 100 translations. You can see why that’s a disaster right? The wonky activation can lead to inadvertent translations, and each time that happens means that’s 10 cents gone. Hopefully myLanguage can improve the app and come up with a more forgiving pricing scheme. And add a Klingon language pack for kicks.
[via TechCrunch]

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Translation Services Buffalo New York

Latest News
War of Words Lost in Translation
Analysis by Jacques N. Couvas
Source: IPS News
ANKARA, Sep 14, 2011 (IPS) – Bellicose dialectic between Turkey and Israel reached a new height last week and has precipitated the deteriorating relationship between the two former allies to new depth. But it is for the moment unclear whether Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threats to cut the Israeli navy’s perceived power and presence to size in Eastern Mediterranean represent a true tactical decision in Ankara’s strategy to expand its influence in the Middle East, or a mere coup-de- theatre for domestic and Arab consumption.
The crisis began ten days ago, following the publication on Sep. 2 of the Palmer Report by the United Nations (UN), which qualified Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip as legal under international law. Israel imposed the blockade in 2007 after Hamas took control of this Palestinian territory from Fatah, a rival revolutionary faction. Egypt also reacted adversely to this change by closing the border with Gaza. The decision was recently repealed, to allow cross-border circulation by individuals only.
Hamas, founded in 1987 in Syria, is a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian religious militant movement. It is considered by the United States, the European Union, Israel and a few other states a terrorist group.
Relations between Ankara and Jerusalem became sour at the end of May 2010, when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) boarded a Turkish vessel, Mavi Marmara, which was the flagship of a flotilla attempting to break the blockade and deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip. Encountering resistance by some of the passengers, IDF commandos opened fire, killing nine Turkish citizens.
Turkey has insisted on receiving an official apology from Israel, compensation for the victims, and lifting of the blockade. Israel has so far offered to express regret for the loss of life due to “operational mishaps” and to provide limited monetary damages to the families of the deceased. U.S. State Secretary Hilary Clinton has in the past 15 months tried to reconcile the positions of the Israeli and Turkish PMs, but the release of the Palmer Report triggered Erdogan’s ire to a level unexpected, in all evidence, by Washington.
The conclusions of the UN investigation committee on the incident were due for publication early this year, but their communication was delayed, first on the request of Turkey, which was heading to national elections last June, then by Israel, whose prime minister is facing serious domestic unrest because of the country’s housing shortages and rising cost of living. But it proved difficult for the United Nations to hold on to it any longer.
The Palmer Report grants legitimacy to the naval blockade of Gaza by Israel and reprimands IDF for excessive use of force against civilians. Turkey has reacted by rejecting the validity of the verdict and threatening to take the matter against Israel to the International Court of Justice, though this got confused with the ICC, which is the International Criminal Court.
The threat last week from Turkish President Abdullah Gul speaking to Arab TV, may genuinely reflect Ankara’s wish, but has very little legal foundation, according to international law experts here and in Washington consulted by IPS. The ICC does not operate like a regular court, before which one can file a complaint and initiate a trial. It is at the discretion of its prosecutor to determine whether an investigation can be opened against a party, based on information obtained from another party.
A prerequisite for this is that the accusations concern a war crime, crimes against humanity, or genocide. Moreover, there is doubt as to the court’s jurisdiction, as Israel has not ratified the treaty creating the ICC.
Turkish officials were quick to point that there had been a translation error in the declaration and that Gul had meant the International Court of Justice (ICJ), not ICC. This avenue still presents legal standing problems, as neither Turkey nor Israel accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court.
As soon as the Palmer Report was released Turkey downgraded diplomatic relations among the states to the level of second secretary. Ankara had recalled its ambassador to Jerusalem last year.
Last week Erdogan announced that all trade between the countries was suspended, a decision rephrased soon thereafter to limit the sanction to military purchases only. Israel is a major supplier of defence solutions to Turkey. Ankara also cancelled all military cooperation agreements with IDF, many of which go back to the 1980s.
Friday of last week saw additional escalation, with Erdogan accusing Israel of abusing its naval power and announcing that the Turkish navy had been instructed to escort any maritime convoys, flying the country’s flag, attempting to break the blockade and deliver supplies to the Palestinians in Gaza. He reportedly added that Turkish warships would be routinely present in Eastern Mediterranean in order to ensure free navigation in the region.
Later in the day government officials corrected the meaning of the declaration, taken by foreign diplomats and observers as intent by Turkey to police international waters, as inaccurate translation of the prime minister’s interviews with different media consolidated and used out of context by press agencies.
Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak downplayed the Turkish missives, preferring to opt for a cooler attitude. Netanyahu, however, reassured his constituents that the Israeli navy is “a long and powerful arm” of the country.
The majority of the Turkish public seem to be taking a distance from all this. Trade with Israel remained high in 2010, in spite of the Mavi Marmara incident, at 2.7 billion dollars, although the travel and hospitality industries were negatively impacted, with tens of thousands of Israelis booked to visit Turkey changing their destination.
Despite the rhetoric, prospects of an armed conflict between Turkey and Israel are slim. The organisers of the 2010 flotilla said over the weekend that they had no plans to mount another humanitarian expedition in the foreseeable future. Palestinian groups might, of course, charter Turkish flagships and send them to Gaza, in which case Ankara’s threat would be put to test. But the U.S. Sixth Fleet, dedicated to the Mediterranean, would certainly act as a buffer to avoid any direct contact between the Israeli and Turkish navies. (END)

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Translation Services | Localization, LLC

Latest News

Translation app makes menus multi-lingual

It also offers ingredient lists, pictures and instructions about food allergies

Source: MSNBC
Foodie culture has sent America’s culinary adventurers into the deepest regions of their local ethnic neighborhoods in search of new delicacies. Unfortunately for more open-minded eaters, they often find themselves confronted with unintelligible menus written in an intimidating foreign language.
A new app from Purdue University helps intrepid restaurant goers overcome that language barrier by not only translating the menu, but providing instructions about food allergies in a number of different dialects.
The user types the name of a desired dish into a prompt field in the graphical user interface. The text is translated, and the best possible translations are then listed, along with other information, including pictures and ingredients. The user can then browse the multimedia database to obtain more information about the dish or the ingredients. When appropriate, information and questions for the waiter are suggested.
“You type in the menu listing and the application translates it automatically without talking to a server,” said Mireille “Mimi” Boutin, an associate professor in Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It only takes a fraction of a second, you don’t need connection to the Internet and it won’t empty your battery.”
The system even warns people when certain ingredients or nutrients are contained in a dish. When there is doubt about an ingredient’s safety, a warning symbol is displayed next to the dish and the device suggests questions and answers, written in both languages, so the user and the restaurant staff can discuss the content of the dish and possible alternatives.
The researchers developed “lightweight algorithms” that operate quickly, have low-energy consumption and require low memory. The real-time translation is nine-hundreds of a second on average, and the application has a memory size of 9.56 megabytes, including its multimedia database, compared to several gigabytes for conventional translation systems, Boutin said.
“People who must follow a medical diet are often reluctant to travel for fear of putting their health at risk,” Boutin said.
“The problem with menus is that even if you know the language you may still have to ask questions to clarify what a dish contains. For example, in German, ‘Schinken’ means ham, but it can be raw ham or cooked ham. If you are going to eat the ham, you might want to know which.”

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

Various Interesting Facts About Translation and Linguistics
Source: Wikipedia
Reference re Manitoba Language Rights [1985] 1 S.C.R. 721 was a reference question posed to the Supreme Court of Canada regarding provisions in the Manitoba Act stipulating the provision of French language services in the province of Manitoba. The Court heard the appeal in June 1984, and gave its ruling a year later, on June 13, 1985.
Four questions were asked:
  1. Are sections 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867 and 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870, requiring laws be in both French and English, mandatory in Manitoba, Quebec, and Parliament?
  2. If so, are those Manitoban laws not printed in both languages invalid under section 23 of the Manitoba Act?
  3. If so, do the laws have any force and effect, and if so to what extent?
  4. Are any of the provisions of An Act Respecting the Operation of Section 23 of the Manitoba Act in Regard to Statutes inconsistent with section 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870, and if so are the provisions invalid and of no legal force and effect?
The Court found that the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Manitoba Act, 1870 did require both languages and that those laws that were not in both languages were of no force and effect; however, they were be deemed temporarily valid for a time until translations can be re-enacted in order to avoid a legal vacuum in Manitoba and to ensure the continuity of the rule of law.
This reference was the first time that the courts in Canada had used the remedy of a delayed declaration of invalidity. Despite its exceptional origins, this remedy has grown to become a preferred one in Canadian public law.[1]

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Translation Services Washington DC

Facebook Likely to Add “Translate” Button to Its Pages

By IB Times Staff Reporter | September 5, 2011 6:54 AM EDT
Source: IB Times
Always kept wondering what your friends from other countries are gossiping about on their walls in a language you do not understand? Well, this could be the end of the problem. Rumor has it that Facebook may be testing a translation feature to add in its social networking domain.
This move could overcome the language barrier faced by many users on the network.
The translation tool reportedly is for comments. A new Translate button at the bottom of comments (only on Pages) and next to the Like button will be seen, according to Inside Facebook.
Clicking on the Translate button will translate the comment to the language that your account page is set to see. Once the translation is done, an Original button would appear, by clicking which, you can get the text back in the language it originally was.
As of now, it is unclear as to how many languages the translator supports. Although so far, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, and Chinese appear to be on the list.
Must Read
The system is not perfect and it does not always translate all the words. At times it shows error that reads, “There is no translation available for this story at the moment,” zdnet.com reports.
The feature may particularly be useful for Page owners who have to rely on a third-party translation service in order to understand what their fans are commenting and posting. Also, it could benefit game and app users who want to interact with other gamers who do not speak the same language. And of course, this will be an excellent tool for people who want to interact with people from other countries speaking other languages, but cannot because of the language barrier, the report says.
This feature could bring about a considerable change in the way people interact in the world’s largest and most popular networking site. More details are expected to be out soon in this regard.

Translation Services Washington DC

Facebook Likely to Add “Translate” Button to Its Pages

By IB Times Staff Reporter | September 5, 2011 6:54 AM EDT
Source: IB Times
Always kept wondering what your friends from other countries are gossiping about on their walls in a language you do not understand? Well, this could be the end of the problem. Rumor has it that Facebook may be testing a translation feature to add in its social networking domain.
This move could overcome the language barrier faced by many users on the network.
The translation tool reportedly is for comments. A new Translate button at the bottom of comments (only on Pages) and next to the Like button will be seen, according to Inside Facebook.
Clicking on the Translate button will translate the comment to the language that your account page is set to see. Once the translation is done, an Original button would appear, by clicking which, you can get the text back in the language it originally was.
As of now, it is unclear as to how many languages the translator supports. Although so far, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, and Chinese appear to be on the list.
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The system is not perfect and it does not always translate all the words. At times it shows error that reads, “There is no translation available for this story at the moment,” zdnet.com reports.
The feature may particularly be useful for Page owners who have to rely on a third-party translation service in order to understand what their fans are commenting and posting. Also, it could benefit game and app users who want to interact with other gamers who do not speak the same language. And of course, this will be an excellent tool for people who want to interact with people from other countries speaking other languages, but cannot because of the language barrier, the report says.
This feature could bring about a considerable change in the way people interact in the world’s largest and most popular networking site. More details are expected to be out soon in this regard.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Translation Services Ohio

America’s De Facto Foreign Language

September 2, 2011
By AJ Ortiz
In 1787, the people of the United States created a Constitution in order to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty …” Little did they imagine, however, that one of the biggest challenges to the new document was not related to any of these objectives, but rather the meaning of “we the people.” Throughout U.S. history, the answer to the question ‘who is an American?’ has changed. The Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement and mass immigration are among the events that have drastically altered de facto and de jure properties related to the American population.
For instance, the Hispanic population in the United States — which refers to persons who trace their origin to Spanish-speaking cultures — has grown from less than 0.5 percent of the nation’s population reported in the 1900 Census, to 16.3 percent in 2010. The significant growth, largely attributed to the less-restrictive policies on immigration Congress passed in 1965, has made Hispanics the largest minority group in the country. This demographic alteration in American society has brought with it several effects. As typical in most inclusive democracies, population numbers are directly proportional to political power. For this reason, it is not surprising to see that an increase in power has provided Hispanics with opportunities to expand their rights and privileges as American citizens. Among these opportunities, the wave of support to officially declare Spanish as the United States’ second national language outshines many others.
This Wednesday, Frank Gómez  — a former foreign service officer and current member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language — criticized a study about Hispanic media in the U.S. because it labeled  Spanish as a “foreign language.” Gómez argues that Spanish “is not ‘foreign’ because it is part of American society — omnipresent, palpable, visible and felt daily in countless ways.” As radical as this may seem,  it would be ignorant to claim that Gómez’s views do not have any factual foundation. For instance, the Spanish-speaking population in the United States — about 12 percent of the total population — is the fifth largest in the world. The only countries that exceed the United States’ concentration of Spanish speakers are Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Spain. Additionally, even though English is the  de facto language of our private and public sectors, “corporations use Spanish outside the boardroom, courts provide Spanish language interpretation and the General Services Administration [utilizes resources in promoting the use of Spanish in federal agencies].”
However, although these realities seem to strengthen Gómez’s case, the truth is that his argument fails to convince that Spanish is indeed “our ‘second language.’” First, the fact that Spanish is involved daily in many aspects of American society does not guarantee that it is not an alien language anymore. This is just like arguing that if a prosthesis has become omnipresent in a person’s life, then the prosthesis is not foreign to that individual’s body. Although it is true that, contrary to human anatomy, a society is capable of fluid change, it is truer that this is yet to be the case for Spanish in the United States. As mentioned before, Spanish began its notable expansion in America after 1965. English, on the other hand, has taken a central role in the United States’ history since the 17th century. Forty-six years of development compared to four centuries of tradition. To me, it is pretty clear that Spanish still has a long road to travel before it is worthy of being considered, along with English, a national language.
Second, even as a member of the Hispanic community, I think recognizing Spanish as the United States’ second national language is both likely unattainable and undesirable — even if it is eventually not considered  alien to American society. The United States — at the federal level — does not even have an official national language. If campaigns like the “English-only” movement have failed to make the language  — which is spoken by 83 percent of the population — the de jure official language of the United States, then it is very sensible to expect a minority language such as Spanish to fail as well.
Additionally, our constitutional values seem to go against the idea of making Spanish a second national language. Since our nation’s inception, there has been a strong focus on unification rather than on separation. Our founding fathers decided to sacrifice a significant level of autonomy at the state level in order to create “a more perfect union.” By making Spanish an official language, the government would be institutionalizing a cultural “disunion” that will harm the “American nationality” that Teddy Roosevelt thought so important for the political, social and economic development of the United States. The fact is that this decision has nothing to do with embracing diversity. America has always been the land of opportunity for people around the globe, regardless of religion, race or culture. This is really about what is the best for the United States as a whole. And pragmatism tells us that in order to comply with this purpose, it is essential — while respecting individual liberties — to have an universal binder that will unite us all as “we the people.” English, which has always been part of the American identity, can offer us just that. Spanish, on the other hand, cannot.
Abdiel Ortiz-Carrasquillo is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at aortiz@cornellsun.com. I Respectfully Dissent appears alternate Fridays this semester.

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Cleveland, OH 44131

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Chicago
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Thursday, September 1, 2011

Translation Services Washington DC

Technical Translations by Localization, LLC

Supporting documentation of a product reflects its quality and reputation of the company that produces it. Furthermore, it may also be an issue of liability. Professional translation is essential for a success and acceptance of any product. At Localization, LLC Translation Services our project management team is able to coordinate hundreds of pages of manuals, labels and packaging designs that often require translation into multiple languages at the same time. We will also ensure that translation for your product manuals and packaging is produced quickly and accurately and that it complies with all the necessary requirements. 

Localization LLC Translation Services
4807 Rockside Rd Suite 400
Cleveland, OH 44131


Contact us:




Cleveland
Ph : 216.785.5252

Chicago
Ph: 773.279.5949

Washington D.C.
Ph: 202.407.9092

Email: info@localizationllc.com


www.localizationllc.com