Translation Service Ohio

Localization, LLC Translation Services is a full service translation company providing comprehensive translation, localization and multimedia services in over 50 languages. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio and with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, D.C., we at Localization, LLC Translation Services are much honored to provide language services to our clients in Cleveland, Chicago, Washington D.C., San-Francisco, Boston, London, Moscow and Paris to name a few.
Our goal is to provide affordable translation services and stay committed to quality, customer service and detailed process. We strive to make ourselves available to our clients 24/7 making sure that they are well-informed of every step of the project progress from cost estimation to its completion.

Translation Service Cleveland Ohio | Chicago IL | Washington DC

Lost in Translation: Nokia Lumia, and The 5 Worst Name Oversights

By Dave Smith | October 26, 2011 7:40 PM EDT
Source: The International Business Times

Nokia unveiled its first-ever Windows Phones at the Nokia World conference in London Wednesday, the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710. Unfortunately, Nokia learned too late that Lumia actually means “prostitute” in Spanish. Oops.

Coors invented a mascot called BeerWolf to market its beers during the Halloween season. That year, the company erected statues of its cartoon werewolf in bars and supermarkets, and at the time relied heavily on its slogan “Turn it Loose!” Management wasn’t happy when they learned the phrase in Spanish meant, “Suffer from Diarrhea.” Soon after, the company changed the slogan to “You bring out the beast in me.” Coors retired BeerWolf, but still uses werewolf imagery to this day, calling its beers “The Silver Bullet.”
Ford Pinto: In 1971, Ford introduced its two-door subcompact car, the Pinto. The name is derived from the pinto horse, which is a horse with a coat consisting of patches of white and any other color. Folks in Brazil didn’t see it that way, however, probably because “pinto” is Brazilian slang for “male genitals.”
Chevy Nova: In 1969, Chevy replaced the name of its Chevy II compact car with a new name, the Nova. Until March 2011, it was widely believed that the Chevy Nova didn’t sell well in South America because the name Nova literally means, “it doesn’t go.” Snopes has since debunked this rumor, stating that the Nova actually “sold well in both its primary Spanish-language markets, Mexico and Venezula.” On the contrary, Venezuelan sales actually surpassed GM’s expectations.
Clairol Mist Stick: In 2006, hair products company Clairol introduced a curling iron to the world called the “Mist Stick.” The Mist Stick didn’t sell too well in Germany, mainly because “mist” in German translates to “manure,” or “excrement.”
Sega: Tokyo-based game developer Sega is actually an abbreviation of the company’s original name. The company started developing games in 1940 under the name Standard Games, which was renamed to Service Games when it moved its headquarters from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Tokyo in 1951. When Service Games merged with Rosen Enterprises, the company decided to rename itself once again, taking the first two letters of Service Games to create “Sega.” Unfortunately, Sega in Italian is a widely-used slang term for male masturbation. Even today, the company still alters the pronunciation of its name to “see-ga” in all of its advertisements.
Besides Nokia, these other companies didn’t have Google search at the time to cross-reference their names with possible meanings or translations. Nokia, however, has no excuse.
Nokia’s will reportedly sell its “prostitute” 800 model for about $584, and the “prostitute” 710 model for roughly $376. Both phones will be available in the U.S. in “early 2012.”

Translation Service Cleveland Ohio | Chicago IL | Washington DC

Latest News in Translation

Modern Algorithms Crack 18th Century Secret Code

• By Wired UK

By Mark Brown, Wired UK
Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort of which that are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year old secret message.

The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. It’s since been kept in a private collection, and the 105-page, slightly yellowed tome has withheld its secrets ever since.
But this year, University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering computer scientist Kevin Knight — an expert in translation, not so much in cryptography — and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, tracked down the document, transcribed a machine-readable version and set to work cracking the centuries-old code.

The book’s pages — bound in gold and green brocade paper — contained about 75,000 characters in very neat handwriting. Outside of two words — an owner’s mark (“Philipp 1866″) and a note in the end of the last page (“Copiales 3″) — the rest was encoded.
Some of the letters were obviously Roman and others were plainly Greek, while the rest were abstract symbols and doodles.
At first, Knight and his team isolated the Roman and Greek characters, figuring that they might be the real message, and attacked it with a home-made translation project. 80 different languages, and many hours later, and nothing happened. “It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure,” said Knight in a press release.
The team realised that the known characters were just there to mislead. So they booted them out and looked at the symbols. They theorised that abstract symbols with similar shapes might represent the same letter, or groups of letters. They tested this with different languages and when German was used, some meaningful words emerged — “Ceremonies of Initiation”, followed by “Secret Section”.
A little computation later and a good chunk of the book had been decoded and transcribed. The document revealed the rituals and political leanings of a German secret society, and one that had a strange obsession with eyeballs, plucking eyebrows, eye surgery and ophthalmology. You can read the entire, weird, manifesto in English here.
Buoyant from his success, Knight is now planning on using his techniques and programs to tackle other codes including ones from the Zodiac Killer, a Northern Californian serial murderer from the 60s; “Kryptos,” an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters; and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.
Source: Wired UK
Image: Copiale cipher. (University of Southern California and Uppsala University)

Translation Service Cleveland Ohio | Chicago IL | Washington DC

Latest News in Linguistics

How translation software helped crack ‘unbreakable’ code in 1866 secret society manuscript

By Rob Waugh
Source: Daily Mail, UK
Last updated at 3:19 PM on 25th October 2011

• Code reveals ‘secret teachings’ of mysterious society
• Technique should ‘bring hope’ to researchers struggling with codes such as Zodiac killer cipher

The Copiale Cipher was found in an archive in Berlin – and has never been decoded. The team who cracked it using translation software think their techniques could be used on other ‘unbreakable’ ciphers

The Copiale cipher is an 105-page coded document found in an East German archive, and dated to 1866 – but the code used to shield its mysteries has remained unbroken, until now.
The international team that cracked the cipher this year found that automated translation techniques – familiar to most of us from the often-wonky Google Translate – can help to crack encrypted documents by ‘guessing’ their contents.
It works even when they use a cipher as baffling as the Copiale’s 90 symbols, and the original language is unknown.
The team, led by computer scientist Kevin Knight of USC, aims to use their technique on other encrypted texts.
Their work also unearthed a fascinating document that may shed light on the secret societies of the nineteenth century. The Copiale Cipher proved to be about induction into a secret society – speaking of ‘secret teachings for apprentices’ and a bizarre initiation rite for disciples.
The team has only translated 16 pages so far.
It has been hailed by cryptography fans as a significant achievement.

The researchers revealed that the document was a manual for initiation into a mysterious German secret society

British code site Cipher Mysteries said, ‘Here’s a nice story that should bring heart to researchers struggling with uncracked homophonic ciphers such as the Zodiac killer ciphers.
‘Kevin Knight, who Voynich Manuscript researchers may remember from various posts here, has now co-authored a paper on how they cracked a hitherto unknown 105-page ciphertext.’
The text is a mix of letters and obscure symbols in both upper and lower case – the only ‘clues’ being two unenciphered words, ‘Phillipp 1866′ and Copiales 3′. It was discovered in an the archive of the East Berlin Academy, and has baffled researchers ever since.
Not only were researchers unable to crack the code, the weird mix of symbols and letters meant they did not know what language the original had been written in.

The researchers used translation software to look ‘within’ the text for potential words in 40 languages – and found a meaning, despite a complex cipher involving double-coded letters and even coded spaces

This year, Knight’s team of computer scientists finally unravelled the message – using machine translation, and a great deal of patience.
‘It remains to transcribe the rest of the manuscript,’ said the paper, ‘The document may contain further encoded information – and, given the amount of work it represents, we believe there may be other documents using the same or similar schemes.’
The team transcribed 16 pages of the 105-page manuscript, breaking down the letters into 90 symbols.
The team then scanned for the frequency each symbol was used, to try and work out what alphabet was being used, or even if some symbols were ‘dummy’ symbols.
The teams first two ‘attacks’ on the cipher – using a computer to ‘brute force’ a translation using the ideas that some letters might be dummies, or that several letters might be used for one sound – both failed.
The researchers found fragmented results from German – better than their results for any other language – and used an automatic translation programme to crack the code further.
Some of the symbols were used as spaces – mostly the roman letters. The ‘gibberish’ symbols carried most of the information in the cipher, the researchers found.
By discounting ‘space’ letters and re-translating, the researchers were able to find a translation, describing an initiation rite into a secret society.
Even within the decoded text, there are still ‘coded’ symbols – referring to members of the society, such as a leader and the new ‘candidate’ for apprenticeship.
The document describes an initiation ritual involving plucking eyebrows – and a ‘master of ceremonies’ inducting a ‘candidate’.

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

Translation Company Ohio

Localization, LLC Translation Services has capabilities to translate documents such as product manuals, labels, contracts, marketing materials, corporate policies, birth certificates or school transcripts. And we do it in over 50 languages. Quality, speed and accuracy are critical components in the translation project and we ensure that we execute them flawlessly. If you’re like most of our clients, whatever your project, whatever your industry, things need to happen quickly and we are confident you will appreciate our timeliness, customized approach and quality. Technical aspects of translation industry have changed drastically in the past 10 years. New software and applications allow translation projects to be completed faster and more accurately. Some things don’t change though. And that is human touch. We utilize the latest technology to help our translation team and never vise-versa. So, next time your business needs a 100 page manual translated into Khmer, or you are interested in an article in French version of Newsweek, please, give us a call, Localization, LLC Translation Services will deliver.

We offer translation and other language services in the following language combinations*

English <> Afrikaans • English <> Ainu • English <> Arabic • English <> Azeri
English <> Bosnian • English <> Bulgarian • English <> Burmese • English <> Buryat
English <> Cantonese • English <> Cham • English <> Chin languages • English <> Croatian
English <> Czech • English <> Danish • English <> Dutch • English <> Dzongkha
English <> English • English <> Estonian • English <> Farsi • English <> Finnish
English <> French • English <> Gan Hakka • English <> German • English <> Greek
English <> Hebrew • English <> Hungarian • English <> Indonesian • English <> Irish
English <> Italian • English <> Japanese • English <> Japonic • English <> Javanese
English <> Jingpho • English <> Karen • English <> Kazakh • English <> Khasi
English <> Khmer • English <> Korean • English <> Kuy • English <> Kyrgyz
English <> Lao • English <> Latvian • English <> Lithuanian • English <> Malay
English <> Maltese • English <> Mandarin • English <> Mandarin • English <> Mon
English <> Mongolian • English <> Mongolic • English <> Nicobarese • English <> Norwegian
English <> Nyaw • English <> Polish • English <> Portuguese • English <> Romanian
English <> Russian • English <> Serbian • English <> Slovak • English <> Slovene
English <> Somali • English <> Spanish • English <> Sundanese • English <> Tagalog
English <> Tamil • English <> Tatar • English <> Tetum • English <> Thai • English <> Turkic
English <> Turkish • English <> Turkmen • English <> Ukrainian • English <> Uyghur
English <> Uzbek • English <> Vietnamese *Please contact us if your language is not on the list.

Translation Services Ohio | Illinois | DC

Twitter and Facebook guidelines: Tweet in both official languages, report tells N.B. civil servants

Source: National Post
Postmedia News  Oct 21, 2011 – 8:47 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 21, 2011 10:47 AM ET
By Shawn Berry
FREDERICTON — New Brunswick’s official languages commissioner says the provincial government needs to establish clear guidelines to help civil servants and even members of legislature figure out when bilingual messages are warranted on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
In an annual report released Thursday, Michel Carrier says he has recommended to Premier David Alward that public agencies be given direction on their requirements under the Official Languages Act when using social media.
The act requires government to offer services in both English and French, but it was drafted in 2002, before the age of social media sites.
Still, Mr. Carrier says the requirement for government departments and employees to issue advisories in both official languages is clear.
“Whatever you communicate as a representative of the government must be done in both official languages if you’re going to distribute it to the general public and in equal quality.”
The same is true for government ministers, he said.
But Mr. Carrier said there’s still a considerable grey area that needs to be mapped out.
He says there’s a fine line for members of legislature to walk, noting that at times their online messages could be construed as government announcements.
“There are two aspects to communications: When you’re replying to someone, you reply in the language of their choice. When you’re communicating on behalf of the government, you have to do it in both official languages,” Mr. Carrier said.
“For blogs and Twitter accounts, the same policy applies,” he said.
Mr. Carrier said his office received a handful of requests for information on how to use social media properly under the act.
The requests included questions about the proper use of personal Twitter accounts by government employees, the use of bilingual public forums and unilingual forums and the use of third parties in the management or moderation of government public forums.
“If you write to your MLA in English, he or she replies to you in English. You choose the language.”
But he said the law doesn’t necessarily apply to everything a legislature member may write.
“It doesn’t mean everything they write on Twitter has to be bilingual. But if you’re making a general announcement that there’s going to be a flood all along the St. John River, you need to do it in both languages and tell everyone.”
Mr. Carrier noted that Premier Alward has two official Twitter accounts — one English, one French.
Mr. Carrier’s comments left at least one member of the legislature who makes a habit of using social media wondering where things stand.
Jack Carr said he plans to touch base with the commissioner to find out more about the matter but has no plans to stop using social media.
“I’m very active in social media to reach my constituents. That’s my role as an MLA, to reach out to constituents.”
Mr. Carr, who noted that the fastest growing population segment in his riding is francophone, said he is working to improve his command of the French language.
“I am anglophone, I am not bilingual, I am striving. . . . I’m continuously trying to reach out, trying to include members of the francophone community.”
Mr. Carrier is also welcoming the province’s move to reopen the debate on early French immersion.
“I like it. I think that it’s a positive step,” Mr. Carrier said Thursday as he released his report for 2010-2011.
The province has announced that it has established a panel to review the French immersion policy. In 2008, the Liberal government caused a furor when it sought to eliminate French immersion starting in Grade 1. A compromise saw the program start in Grade 3.
Mr. Carrier noted that at the time, his office said the immersion program didn’t need to be changed.
He said he continues to maintain that there needs to be more access outside the classroom.
“My experience in exchanging with immersion students is that they are very well trained, however, they don’t always have the opportunity to continue using it.”
The commissioner’s office received 200 complaints last year. Of the 133 complaints ruled to be founded, 23 of the complaints were withdrawn.
The report comes as a legislative committee prepares to review the province’s official languages legislation before year’s end. The commissioner has made 13 recommendations for improving the act.

Translation Service Cleveland Ohio | Chicago IL | Washington DC

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Latest News

June 25, 2010, 10 a.m.

The Wikipedia of news translation: Yeeyan.org’s volunteer community

By Jonathan Stray

Source: The Nieman Journalism Lab

BEIJING — Yeeyan.org has 150,000 registered users, who collectively translate 50 to 100 news articles every day from English to Chinese. Since its inception in 2006, the site has grown into a key gateway for Chinese speakers who want to follow international news. It has been so successful that it has attracted the attention of major news sources like The Guardian and ReadWriteWeb — and also the Chinese government, which abruptly shut Yeeyan down last year for several months.
But this is not a story about China. I believe that Yeeyan is pioneering cost-effective solutions to a major global problem: the ghettoization of information by language. This is a change with potentially far-reaching implications for journalism. I met Kitty Wang, the vice general manager, and Walter Wang, Yeeyan’s community manager (no relation), in a Beijing cafe and asked them to explain to me how Yeeyan works, from technological, social, and business perspectives.
The name Yeeyan derives from the Chinese characters 译 (yi) and 言 (yan), which together mean something like “translate the information,” and Kitty and Walter told me that the site’s primary aim is to increase the flow of information between cultures. Yeeyan.org looks like a news site, with headlining photos and editor-selected hot stories on the front page. (English readers can check out the Google translation.) Stories are arranged into typical sections such as business, sports, technology, and life. The difference is that all of the Chinese-language material on the site has been translated from English sources by members of the Yeeyan community, almost always for free.
The success of the site in producing a continual stream of translations — over 60,000 so far — is the result of careful community management and well-designed social features. And it’s a model that seems like it could be replicated for other languages.

Putting the community to work

Aside from reading stories, users can perform two basic actions: recommend a story or a URL for translation, or translate a recommended story. All visitors to the site are readers, many are recommenders, and only a few thousand — a couple percent — actually create translations. That turns out to be enough, but Yeeyan’s existence depends on getting people to translate.
The site’s design encourages participation in a number of different ways. The front page prominently displays a staff-curated selection of recommended but as-yet-untranslated articles. Users can create “projects,” collections of articles around a specific topic, such as “foreign affairs,” “film lovers,” or “Toyota recall,” and active topics are featured on the front page. Each user has a profile which shows a history of their recommendations and completed translations, and a number of typical social networking features are supported, such as comments on articles and messages between users.
Yeeyan has also recently adopted a badge system, to encourage both participation and quality. There are automatically awarded badges for things like “most translations this week” and “most comments this week,” as well as a series of overall “levels” that users can attain by translating and commenting. Kitty says participation has shot up since the introduction of these incentives.
“Amazing ah?” says Kitty. “Even this little thing can intrigue passion.” As Napoleon once said, a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
But clever software can never replace the involvement of human community managers. Yeeyan’s staff must read each translation before it is posted to ensure that it does not violate government taboos on reporting. (Since reopening in January, Yeeyan has dropped its “current events” category and now avoids all overtly political news, including stories from erstwhile partner The Guardian.) All websites in China are required to self-censor in this manner, but Yeeyan also takes this opportunity to interact with its translators.
“We are the first readers, so we comment first, we encourage users first, we proofread first,” says Kitty. “Those are all important to build up [the] community phenomenon.”

Participation over quality

Kitty told me that there had been much early discussion over whether the site should publish only “good” translations, but in the end they decided that “the gate should be opened to everyone.” Part of their strategy is to encourage readers to become translators. Beginning translators tend to produce rough texts and make many mistakes, says Kitty, but “it is cruel if we don’t even provide a chance.” The policy occasionally drives good translators away from the site, but the Yeeyan team sees translator training as an important part of their social mission.
Nonetheless, Yeeyan has recently debuted a proofreading feature. The original text and a user translation are displayed side by side, and the proofreader can comment on each paragraph. Participation is encouraged by awarding badges for proofreading.

Copyright and the business

Under international law, permission from the copyright holder is generally required to create or publish a translation. By publishing user-supplied translations of arbitrary news material, Yeeyan creates a public good in a legally dubious fashion. But it’s worth remembering that many of the vital information services we now take for granted began on similarly vague principles. The web search engine could not exist without wholesale duplication of the entire web onto local servers, a move which was by no means obviously legal when the first commercial search engines appeared — and which some news organizations still aren’t sure about. The legality of Google scanning books is similarly being challenged.
Even so, Yeeyan is actively seeking agreements with copyright holders to create and publish translations of their work. “We do not want to use content for business illegally, but how to get authorization is a big problem,” Kitty said. “That’s why we are trying to talk to [copyright holders] to have win-win-win business model.”
The three parties in “win-win-win” are the content producer, Yeeyan, and the translator. Yeeyan has just such an agreement with ReadWriteWeb. All RWW articles are translated by a paid freelancer and posted on rwwchina.com, with the ad revenue split between Yeeyan and RWW.
Yeeyan is reluctant to put too much advertising on the main site, both because of the legal questions raised by commercial use of translations and for fear of alienating its all-volunteer community. But there’s money to be made offline if you have access to a huge pool of translation talent, and connections to publishers on both sides of the language divide. Yeeyan hopes to make its money out of brokering translations for foreign firms eager to enter the Chinese market, both online and offline. The company already handles the Chinese language versions of Men’s Health and several other magazines and has brokered more than 20 book deals. Translators are drawn from the best of Yeeyan’s volunteer talent pool. As an incentive to reach professional proficiency, translators who have earned the “Level 4″ badge can apply to be Yeeyan partners. If approved, these skilled translators get the “Partner” badge, plus 3 RMB for every 1,000 views of their translated articles — and possibly a translation job offer later.

Journalism in an era of cheap translation

Yeeyan’s success raises broader questions for journalists and journalism. First, could the model be replicated? Could, say, the Associated Press cultivate a community that actively translated their reporting into other languages? I don’t see why not, though any organization that tried this would need a deep understanding of “community” and everything that implies — and deliver such an obvious public good that thousands of people would be willing to volunteer their time. The business model might also be different, but I can think of a number of ways to monetize a pool of translators and an audience eager for foreign-language news.
But suppose that a news organization was able to deliver a substantial amount of content to foreign-language audiences for very little cost, through communities like Yeeyan, or machine translation, or a combination of the two as in the hybrid World Wide Lexicon project. Such translations would not be up to professional quality initially — if ever — and publishers may be hesitant to endorse error-prone representations of their work. But asking about absolute accuracy and brand dilution misses the point — it’s like critiquing Wikipedia for its (improving) accuracy without discussing the net benefit to humanity. How would cheap translation change foreign reporting, and the very concept of international news? It’s a question which will soon be forced upon the profession by rising technological tides.
For the curious, and because I have repeatedly advocated that reporters make available their full source material, here’s a transcript of my followup IM chats with Kitty. In it we discuss further details of the site’s origin and operations, and their experience with the Chinese censors.

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Localization, LLC Translation Services
Latest News
Source: Daily Herald
Advertising could be coming to the Aurora Borealis if the city council approves a three-year contract for publishing the city’s quarterly newsletter.
Under a proposed $30,936 contract with The Strathmore Company of Geneva, the company would handle all aspects of selling, designing and invoicing ads, while the city would receive a percentage of advertising revenues, city spokesman Dan Ferrelli said.

Advertisement

But what kind of advertisements would be allowed in the newsletter was a question on the minds of many aldermen, including Lynda Elmore.
Political ads wouldn’t be appropriate, Alderman Rick Lawrence said. And Alderman John “Whitey” Peters said he doesn’t see ads for Naperville’s Ribfest or tattoo parlors as appropriate for Aurora’s city-sponsored publication.
An advertising policy that would govern what type of promotions the Borealis would accept is being developed, Ferrelli said.
During the council’s first discussions of the contract Tuesday, aldermen also discussed the possibility of printing the newsletter in Spanish as well as English. Alderman Stephanie Kifowit said printing the newsletter only in English may be “disingenuous” to the 41 percent of Aurora residents who are Hispanic, according to the 2010 census.
But Lawrence said it’s possible many of those Hispanic residents read and speak English.
“We’re assuming they don’t speak English,” Lawrence said. “That assumption is stereotypical.”
Even if many Hispanic residents are competent or fluent in English, there remains a percentage of Aurora’s Hispanic population that only speaks Spanish, Alderman Juany Garza said.
Garza said she and Kifowit make an effort to provide translated information to Spanish-speaking residents of their wards.
“We understand not everyone reads English,” Garza said. “I also understand it would cost more money” to translate the Aurora Borealis into Spanish, she said.
Aldermen could contribute some of their ward funds to the help with translation costs, Garza suggested. Or, translations could be posted online.
Aldermen will vote on the printing contract Oct. 25.

Translation Service Ohio

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Localization LLC Translation Services

Translation is our bread and butter. It’s what we do best. No job is too large or small. Localization, LLC Translation Services has capabilities to translate documents such as product manuals, labels, contracts, marketing materials, corporate policies, birth certificates or school transcripts. And we do it in over 50 languages. Quality, speed and accuracy are critical components in the translation project and we ensure that we execute them flawlessly. If you’re like most of our clients, whatever your project, whatever your industry, things need to happen quickly and we are confident you will appreciate our timeliness, customized approach and quality. Technical aspects of translation industry have changed drastically in the past 10 years. New software and applications allow translation projects to be completed faster and more accurately. Some things don’t change though. And that is human touch. We utilize the latest technology to help our translation team and never vise-versa. So, next time your business needs a 100 page manual translated into Khmer, or you are interested in an article in French version of Newsweek, please, give us a call, Localization, LLC Translation Services will deliver.

We offer translation and other language services in the following language combinations*

English <> Afrikaans • English <> Ainu • English <> Arabic • English <> Azeri
English <> Bosnian • English <> Bulgarian • English <> Burmese • English <> Buryat
English <> Cantonese • English <> Cham • English <> Chin languages • English <> Croatian
English <> Czech • English <> Danish • English <> Dutch • English <> Dzongkha
English <> English • English <> Estonian • English <> Farsi • English <> Finnish
English <> French • English <> Gan Hakka • English <> German • English <> Greek
English <> Hebrew • English <> Hungarian • English <> Indonesian • English <> Irish
English <> Italian • English <> Japanese • English <> Japonic • English <> Javanese
English <> Jingpho • English <> Karen • English <> Kazakh • English <> Khasi
English <> Khmer • English <> Korean • English <> Kuy • English <> Kyrgyz
English <> Lao • English <> Latvian • English <> Lithuanian • English <> Malay
English <> Maltese • English <> Mandarin • English <> Mandarin • English <> Mon
English <> Mongolian • English <> Mongolic • English <> Nicobarese • English <> Norwegian
English <> Nyaw • English <> Polish • English <> Portuguese • English <> Romanian
English <> Russian • English <> Serbian • English <> Slovak • English <> Slovene
English <> Somali • English <> Spanish • English <> Sundanese • English <> Tagalog
English <> Tamil • English <> Tatar • English <> Tetum • English <> Thai • English <> Turkic
English <> Turkish • English <> Turkmen • English <> Ukrainian • English <> Uyghur
English <> Uzbek • English <> Vietnamese *Please contact us if your language is not on the list.

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

Translation Company Ohio

Localization LLC Translation Services

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Bilingual ballot design causes confusion in Cuyahoga County

Published: Monday, October 17, 2011, 6:00 AM     Updated: Monday, October 17, 2011, 9:33 AM

By Harlan Spector, The Plain Dealer

Source: Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Nov. 8 ballot asks Cuyahoga County voters whether they wish to approve three state issues. But some who are voting early are wondering where to mark their votes. The confusion will be the same for those who go to the polls on Election Day.
The “yes” and “no” ovals that normally are under the wording for an issue appear to be missing for the state issues. The ovals aren’t under the English version of the questions. They only are under the Spanish translations.
This is the first election in which bilingual ballots will be distributed countywide. The ballot design is particularly hard to follow because two of the three state issues are spread over two columns — leaving no place to vote in the column with the English-language wording.
Anissa Smith, a high school government teacher from Cleveland Heights, said she had trouble navigating her absentee ballot. She fears the absence of ovals under the English version of the questions will hurt the chances of overturning Senate Bill 5, the collective bargaining overhaul that appears as Issue 2. Teachers’ unions and other public employees oppose the issue.

“This is bad,” Smith said. “What if people are confused and they don’t know what to do, and they don’t vote on that issue?”
County elections director Jane Platten acknowledged the ovals are in an odd location, but the ballot design was unavoidable due to the length of the issues and the requirement that the county provide bilingual ballots. The county agreed last year to print ballots in English and Spanish, after the U.S. Department of Justice threatened to sue.
“A lot of people are not used to seeing Spanish,” Platten said of early voters. “There’s confusion on why they got a bilingual ballot in the first place.”

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The ballots going to early voters are identical to what voters will get at the polls. The bilingual ballots have added to what is turning out to be a bewildering election season for many voters.
The elections board no longer mails absentee ballot applications unless voters request one (Secretary of State John Husted in August forbid unsolicited mailings). The state also forbid elections boards from paying return postage on completed applications and on absentee ballots.
That was part of Republican-backed legislation restricting early-voting opportunities, which was put on hold after Democrats and voting-rights groups led a referendum effort. But the postage requirement stands for now, costing voters 64 cents to mail their ballots.
Cleveland Heights resident Russell Baron bristled at the postage, which is 20 cents higher than a first-class stamp.
“Who has a 20-cent stamp around the house?” he wrote in an e-mail. “How many voters will go to the nearest postal sub station to buy a 20-cent stamp or use the postage computer dispenser?”
The board is fielding many complaints about the postage and bilingual ballots, Platten said.
Separately, the federal government this week identified 248 locales in 25 states that must provide bilingual ballots. The mandate is based on the Voting Rights Act. It applies to counties and other political subdivisions where more than 5 percent of the voting-age citizens are members of a single-language minority group and have limited English skills.
Cuyahoga County does not fall under that requirement, according to the 2010 census, though some officials expected it would. The county’s Hispanic population was 4.8 percent, according to the census.
In pressing its case for bilingual ballots in Cuyahoga and Lorain counties, though, the Justice Department cited a separate provision of federal law that says jurisdictions must provide the ballots to Puerto Rican voters with limited English skills.
Cuyahoga voters who need help with ballots can call an elections board hotline at 216-443-3298.

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Google Translate: Real-Time Speech Translation in 14 Languages

By Jeff Bertolucci, PCWorld    Oct 13, 2011 2:44 PM
Source: PC World

Phrase books and botched pronunciations may soon be a thing of the past--well, for smartphone users, anyway. Google Translate for Android makes it easier for world travelers to ask for directions in foreign lands without embarrassing themselves or creating an international incident.
Translate's Conversation Mode, which Google unveiled in January, allows Android users to translate speech between languages in real time.
The initial version supported only two languages, English and Spanish. But the new and improved edition is a multilingual powerhouse that works with 12 additional languages, including French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Czech, Turkish, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, and Polish.
The video below shows how Conversation Mode works:
Google calls Conversation Mode an "experimental feature," which suggests the speech-to-speech translations are far from perfect. No surprise there, actually, as voice recognition technology is notoriously tricky.
Even Apple, which seldom ships features before they're finely polished, has called the new Siri voice-control tool in its iPhone 4S "beta" software, a label that tells users to dampen their expectations a bit.
Here's MacWorld editorial director Jason Snell having a meaningful conversation with Siri:
Contact Jeff Bertolucci at Today@PCWorld, Twitter (@jbertolucci) or jbertolucci.blogspot.com.

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Translator Mitchell reads from ‘Iliad’ version with contemporary slang

By Jonathan Dec
Senior Writer

Source: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/10/13/29038/

Published: Thursday, October 13th, 2011

On Wednesday night in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts, author and translator Stephen Mitchell read excerpts from his new translation of Homer’s “Iliad,” released on Oct. 11.Mitchell read three passages from his text — Hector’s final conversation with his wife Andromache, the shield of Achilles and the ransom of Hector’s body. “ ‘And when they had had enough of eating and drinking, Priam gazed at Achilles in wonder, how tall he was and how handsome, like one of the blessed gods. And Achilles gazed at Priam in wonder, admiring his noble face and the brave words that he had spoken,’ ” Mitchell read.
Mitchell is the first author to base his translation on a new Greek text of Homer’s epic, prepared by scholar Martin L. West, who went through the original source material and identified a number of passages — including chapter 10 in its entirety — added to Homer’s work after it was first written down. In addition to cutting these interpolations (about 1,100 in total), Mitchell also updated Homer’s language, leaving out many of the epithets and using contemporary slang such as “sissy” and “son of a bitch.”
For example, when confronting Agamemnon in Book One, Achilles says in Mitchell’s translation, “We followed you here for your sake, not for our own; we all came to win back Menelaus’s honor and yours too, dog-face.”
In the question-and-answer period following the reading, Mitchell spoke about his motivation, his stylistic choices and his translation process.
“I think everybody who deeply cares about Homer and who is enchanted with these great masterpieces has his or her own music — internal music — and basically that’s what you want to do. You want to listen to the Greek so deeply that your listening creates what you want to hear,” he said.
Creating what he wanted to hear, though, was an involved process. “The process of finding the right balance between faithfulness to the actual Greek words and faithfulness to the music of the original is a process of finding what freedom means,” he said.
Mitchell said he was pleased with the way the text read without the later interpolations added after Homer completed his work. “The amount of increased tension and drama and just pure beauty in leaving those verses out is just stunning. So that’s what I did.”
He added, though, that his work will not be without detractors.
“It probably will be controversial among some of the stuffier circles of Greek scholarship, but that’s OK,” he said.
Mitchell graduated from Amherst College, the University of Paris and Yale University. He has written, edited, translated and adapted over 30 books, for both children and adults, in a wide variety of fields, ranging from the Book of Job to the Tao Te Ching.
Mitchell is currently working on a translation of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

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State agencies will provide translated forms, interpretation for non-native New Yorkers

By Daniel McDonough

Source: The Legislative Gazette

October 11, 2011

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an Executive Order last week mandating that state agencies must provide free translation and interpretation services to help more New Yorkers fill out necessary forms, read instructions and obtain aid and other social services. The order was signed to help the two and a half million New Yorkers who do not speak English as their primary language. Translation and interpretation will be offered in the six primary non-English languages spoken in New York state: Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, French and French Creole.
At the signing, Cuomo greeted the press with “Bonjourno,” to laughter from the audience. In addition to introducing the Executive Order, the governor announced that his website will also be translated into other languages.
“The message today was amazingly simple … the acknowledgement that sometimes it takes government so long to accomplish an obvious purpose and to remedy an obvious injustice,” said Cuomo. “Government works for the people, it’s paid for by the people, it’s powered by the people. It needs to communicate with the people. These are vital services by definition, the essence of what we do, whether its health services, whether its food stamps, whether its income benefits, flood (relief).

“Whether or not they can access government and understand the services could be the difference between life and death,” he added. “For many years we assumed in New York State government that it was up to the person to figure out how to communicate with the government…the roles are reversed. It’s government’s responsibility to figure out how to communicate with the person.” Cuomo’s Deputy Secretary for Civil Rights Alphonso David will work with the agencies to help them put the Executive Order into effect. Participating state agencies include, but are not limited to: the Office of Children & Family Services; Department of Labor; Department of Motor Vehicles; Division of State Police; Department of Education; and Division of Housing & Community Renewal. Seventeen other agencies are slated to implement language access services.
The provisions will be installed on a rolling basis, with a year timetable for each agency to make the changes. Each participating agency has received a bulk discount to pay for translation and interpretation services, which will help make the implementation of the services affordable and efficient.
“This is a really historical moment for all the people of the state from Buffalo all the way down to Long Island,” said Assembly Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn. “They are seeing a real change” to “ensure that they can have access to resources in our state government…It is important that we remove all barriers to all those who will want to live and do business here.
“It is about time we have leadership that will take charge to make sure that New Yorkers will recognize the importance of languages in our state.”
Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, also spoke at the signing event.
“This policy is a really important one that helps not only immigrants, but it will be good for all of us. Millions of people will have better access to the wonderful and critical services that New York state has to offer…we’re so proud because this policy, if you compare to what’s going on in the rest of the country, is a comprehensive policy in scope of what it covers and it has a timetable and it has an implementation plan. So it’s a very strong policy that immigrant communities are happy to back and support.”
Cuomo closed the conference by asking members of his cabinet and state lawmakers to join him in the front of the room while he signed the Executive Order.
“It truly is my honor as governor of the state of New York to sign an executive order that will have vital services provided by this state government translated by 27 agencies into six languages to make sure we’re serving the people. It’s our fundamental obligation,” Cuomo said.

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Angela’s Ashes gets Irish translation

Frank McCourt’s autobiography has been translated into over 25 languages, to which an Irish version will soon be added.

An Irish language translation of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Angela’s Ashes will finally be released in Ireland on October 10, followed by a US release in New York on November 15.
Angela’s Ashes has been translated into more than 25 languages in 30 countries but has remarkably never seen an Irish version, until now. Luaithreach Angela, the book’s Gaelic title, will be a limited edition release of McCourt’s classic. The translation was commissioned by The Limerick Writers’ Centre and painstakingly put together by Irish actor, performer, writer and television producer Padraic Breathnach.
Minister for the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan TD will launch the book at the Frank McCourt Museum in Limerick, some fifteen years after it was originally released. The New York launch will take place at the city’s Irish Consulate.
With the Limerick Writers’ Centre hoping that Luaithreach Angela will influence more people to read books in the Irish language, Dominic Taylor, project editor, spoke about why Angela’s Ashes is finally being translated into our native tongue.
“The publication in the Irish language is a tribute to Frank McCourt’s Irish roots,” he said. “On the occasion of Frank’s untimely passing in 2009, the Limerick Writers’ Centre made a decision to honor our famous author in a significant way and after much deliberation we decided that it would be appropriate for us to publish an Irish edition of Angela’s Ashes, the book that put Limerick on the literary map.”

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Working on Windows and Apple Macintosh computers, our team is fully equipped with a large collection of multilingual fonts, page-makeup and graphics software. Our management and DTP resources ensure that we can deliver projects in the format that you need, reducing your time and cost to market. Localization, LLC Translation Services delivers translated technical documentation designed for both on-line and off-line publishing utilizing SGML, XML and PDF formats. The applications include Adobe FrameMaker, PageMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Interleaf,CorelDraw, and Microsoft Office Suite tools.
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Thom Craver, October 6, 2011
Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2115354/Facebook-Launches-Bing-Powered-Translation-Service

Facebook users have a new option for reading foreign fan pages. Through Microsoft’s Bing Translator technology, Facebook users will be able to click a link to translate Facebook pages not written in their language without leaving Facebook.
Announced yesterday via the Facebook Pages wall, the move comes weeks after Microsoft’s announcement for the new Microsoft Translator API.
“Bing is excited that its friends at Facebook have now implemented the API to enhance their site with real-time, in-place translation,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Search Engine Watch. “Bing had nothing new to report about any integration partnerships with Facebook.”
This is, however, another win for Bing on multiple fronts. It is one more commitment from a social network into their service. It’s also another major player to use their translation API.
Many companies will be forced to decide what to do about translation, since Google decided to make their Translate API a paid service only, effectively shutting down the free translate API as of December 1, 2011.
The translation doesn’t happen automagically. Translation is provided via an app that users must install (give permission to) in order to translate Facebook pages into their own language.
When you click on a translate button, Bing Translator will provide the translation to your language in a popout window. In addition to the translation, users will also have the opportunity to correct the translation and submit it. In true social fashion, if a user-submitted translation receives enough support, it will replace the Bing translation automatically each time future users click the translate button for that individual post.
Facebook page admins can select to allow translations submitted by the community, only by Microsoft or their own supplied translations. There are also options to turn the translation ability off altogether.

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What is Localization?
Localization, LLC Translation Services
By Ray Michaels

The process of localization is a lot like translation only a bit more technical. The process of localization is used when translating such material as websites, software applications and computer programs. Localization involves programmers, linguists, and marketing specialists working together to ensure that a product or service is translated accurately for a specific region or target audience. Once your product is localized, your marketing efforts in new markets should go much smoother and more effective generating a better ROI. There is a reason why we are called Localization. It sums up what we do and what we love to do. We have the best team of programmers, linguists and marketing specialists working together to make sure your project is completed accurately to be most effective for its target region. The process of localization addresses such issues as preserving the original thought that may require altering the images, colors and layout of your original document. Example: “Raining Cats and Dogs” is an idiom that would just sound silly in other languages. Other expressions may even be offensive. Yellow flowers in Russia for instance, represent death. A failure to accurately express your idea in foreign culture can have dire effects, as you can see. That’s why our specialists will perform more than just a simple translation ensuring that your message is effective in the market you are trying to penetrate.

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

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Ph : 216.785.5252
Chicago
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Washington D.C.
Ph: 202.407.9092     

Email: info@localizationllc.com

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Hey Apple, Give Us a Call Next Time, We’ll Do the Research!

New iPhone feature is butt of Japanese joke

The name of the voice-command app Siri translates into hilarity.

By InvestorPlace on Wed, Oct 5, 2011 11:42 AM

By Anthony John Agnello, InvestorPlace.com

Apple (AAPL) might have disappointed the hordes dying to get their hands on an iPhone 5 when it announced the new iPhone 4S on Tuesday, but the company still managed to impress them with new apps.
Particularly impressive is Siri, Apple’s new voice-command app that lets you talk to your iPhone. Need to know how bad traffic is in your area? Just ask the phone and Siri will give you real-time data on traffic outside.
However, Apple forgot the cardinal rule of language-based technology: If you build it, your audience is going to make lewd jokes with it. And Apple’s new app made it all too easy for people to turn it into a joke, considering what Siri sounds like in Japanese. Here’s a hint: The iPhone 4S almost certainly will be Sir Mix-a-Lot’s favorite smartphone.

To the Japanese, the name Siri sounds almost identical to 尻, pronounced shiri. Shiri is a colloquialism for — in the politest possible sense — buttocks. Its proper usage, however, is crude. As Yoree Koh of The Wall Street Journal put it, the comparable term in English rhymes with “crass.” Compliments for Apple’s major new technology, likely to be the focus of marketing campaigns across the world, will make the speaker sound like a cat-calling construction worker in Japan.

Shortly after Siri was announced, both “Siri” and “shiri” became trending topics on Twitter in Japan. Google Japan searches for Apple’s new voice-recognition software had the search engine asking users if they actually were looking for “shiri,” and it isn’t difficult to imagine what the image search returned on those queries.
Given Apple’s flair for branding, it’s surprising that the company didn’t know about this potential gaffe before announcing Siri to the world. Japan is, after all, a major market for the company.

The iPhone itself was the first major smartphone success in the country, capturing 72% of the Japanese market by the middle of 2010. Although Google (GOOG) Android phones have narrowed the gap in 2011, diminishing Apple’s market share to 38%, Japan is still a major market for Apple. The Cupertino, Calif., company shipped 3.23 million iPhones in the country in the last fiscal year.

When your biggest mobile operating system competitor has crushed your lead in less than 12 months, it probably isn’t the best idea to name a major new feature of iOS after butts. This is Apple, though. The iPhone 4S and Siri should prove as popular as previous Apple mobile products, named after someone’s rear or not.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.

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Localization, LLC Translation Services has capabilities to translate documents such as product manuals, labels, contracts, marketing materials, corporate policies, birth certificates or school transcripts. And we do it in over 50 languages. Quality, speed and accuracy are critical components in the translation project and we ensure that we execute them flawlessly. If you’re like most of our clients, whatever your project, whatever your industry, things need to happen quickly and we are confident you will appreciate our timeliness, customized approach and quality. Technical aspects of translation industry have changed drastically in the past 10 years. New software and applications allow translation projects to be completed faster and more accurately. Some things don’t change though. And that is human touch. We utilize the latest technology to help our translation team and never vise-versa. So, next time your business needs a 100 page manual translated into Khmer, or you are interested in an article in French version of Newsweek, please, give us a call, Localization, LLC Translation Services will deliver.

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4807 Rockside Rd Suite 400
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Contact us:

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Ph : 216.785.5252
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Ph: 202.407.9092

Email: info@localizationllc.com

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What are CAT-Tools

?

CAT means "Computer Aided Translation", referring not to machine translation, but to translation done with specialized software providing functions to increase workflow while providing quality assurance, glossaries and other assistance.

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Video and Translation of Knox’s Statement in Italian Court

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/video-and-translation-of-knoxs-statement-in-italian-court/