Another example is the development of instantaneous language translation devices, which Kurzweil predicted will be common on cellular telephones by the end of the decade.

“Within a few years, we will be able to talk to anyone, regardless of language,” he said.

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Hat tip: Language Technology Business

It took a chance online encounter between a software engineer from Shanghai and a teacher in a remote province of China to start shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.

In August 2002, Isaac Mao, who worked at the Shanghai office of the chip maker Intel, was one of only a handful of people in China who had heard the word “blog”. A regular web surfer, he was fascinated by the freedom these online journals gave to ordinary people to publish both their own and their readers’ views online.

Surfing the US website blogger.com, Mao was thrilled to find Zheng Yunsheng, a teacher at a technical school in Fujian province. He left a message on Zheng’s blog, and two weeks later Mao and Zheng started CNBlog.org, China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology and culture.

They soon gathered a small but devoted group of participants, many of whom went on to develop the technology that makes blogging possible for China’s half-a-million bloggers.

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Hat tip: Going Global

Churchill quipped that the US and the UK were two countries divided by a common language. Despite a two-way stream of mass media products and mutual exchanges, this divide is still a constant operational issue for readers, writers and translators.

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Among the unanswered questions of 9-11 is the part played by the FBI in handling the various tips and information pouring through its translation section at the Washington, D.C., field office. It is in this division that certified language specialists with top secret security clearances handle the most sensitive information, from wiretaps to face-to-face interview translations between an investigating agent and a suspect. The translators often have inordinate power. Because of their expertise (or rather, the limited number of languages spoken by their bosses), translators often make the decisions on which cases to fully translate and which not to bother with. Errors can creep in: Translators may misunderstand a dialect and thus lose the meaning or context of information. On occasion, some translators’ grasp of English is so poor that they cannot convey nuances of the speakers.

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Hat tip: Blogos

After wooing North America, Europe and South Africa, Bollywood stars are now headed for Hong Kong for the concert that is seen as an important milestone in internationalization of Bollywood.

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China’s economy is expected to maintain stable and rapid growth in 2005, said Zheng Jingping, spokesman of National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Zheng made the prediction when addressing the 2004 Annual Economic Conference of China IT Industry that opened Friday in Beijing.

China’s economic development has ushered in a rapid growth period, which is expected toe continue in 2005, according to Zheng.

Contributors for the vibrant momentum are the urbanization trend that comes with fast economic growth, the increasingly thriving chemical industry, and the burgeoning IT industry that serves as an impetus to upgrading traditional industries and trades, Zheng explained.

China is actively involved in international co-operation, and its concentrated efforts on industry internationalization have also contributed to economic success, Zheng said.

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It’s no secret that the Hispanic population boom has gotten our attention. There are 39.9 million Hispanics in the United States. Census officials estimate that this figure will rise to fifty million by 2007.

According to the The Selig Center for Economic Growth, Hispanic buying power for 2002 was totaled at 580 billion with a predicted compound annual growth rate of 8.7 (The standard rate of growth for non-Hispanics is 4.8 percent). The center’s study predicts that by the year 2007, Hispanics dollar power will rise to 926.1 billion. Why are so many tax preparers and accountants are missing the boat when it comes to this market segment?

To understand the answer to that question, look to the statistics. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that more than half of all adult Hispanics living in the United States today are immigrants, and another fifth are the U.S born children of immigrants. The number of foreign- born Hispanics in the U.S has more than tripled in the last two decades. A recent study by Strategic Research Corporation forecasts that by 2020, one of every five U.S. residents will be of Hispanic origin.

The Hispanic population boom is a fairly recent phenomen. Accordingly, there is a lack of both experience and information about culture, language, and marketing issues specific to what is now the largest minority group in the U.S. While accoutants are interested in growing their Hispanic client base, many lack the knowledge of how to do so effectively.

The Hispanic market is actually broken into four separate categories.

1. The new immigrant: Less than five years in the U.S with little or no English skills.
2. The transisitional immigrant: Less than ten years, still Spanish dominant but more acclimated and speaks better English.
3. The acclimated Hispanic: ten plus years in the U.S.
4. U.S born Hispanic/second or third generation.
Hispanics that fall into category three and four are usually served by the standard marketing strategies employed by most companies. Categories one and two however, remain incredibly underserved. The reason is that most companies who want to market to Hispanics typically have their media materials translated into Spanish. Unfortunately, this tactic will not work in to reach Hispanics in the first two categories.

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Hispanic consumers are the fastest growing ethnic group, with over 10 million Hispanic households in the United States today. Companies have recognized the influence of this growing market and Simmons, an Experian Company, is providing a way to understand the unique characteristics of these consumers by announcing the release of its Hispanic Cohorts(tm), the first Hispanic household-based segmentation system available.

Now available in the spring 2004 National Hispanic Consumer Survey (NHSC), Hispanic Cohorts(tm) identifies 19 distinctive and diverse consumer segments within the American Hispanic community. Hispanic Cohorts(tm) collectively offers marketers, agencies and advertisers the ability to understand the demographics, lifestyles, attitudes and behavioral characteristics of the Hispanic consumer.

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With the increasing use of RSS on blogs and other sites, feed aggregators are gaining in popularity. That’s why Bloglines has gone international, it announced Wednesday.

The Redwood City, Calif., company now includes language-specific versions of its Web site in order to accommodate the millions of bloggers and readers around the world who use RSS (define) feeds or search online for the latest news and opinions in the blogosphere.

Six languages are currently hosted on Bloglines.com — traditional Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Founder and CEO Mark Fletcher said Italian and several other languages will soon make an appearance.

According to the Computer Industry Almanac, there are nearly 935 million Internet users. The predominantly English-speaking counties make up little more than one-quarter of the total Internet user population. For the rest of the world, countries like China (10.68 percent), Japan (8.35 percent) and Germany (4.48 percent), English isn’t the native tongue.

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Note: Bloglines is my RSS aggregator of choice.

By outward investment appearances, the purchase by Spanish financial giant BBVA of Texas-based Laredo National Bancshares for $850 million this year was a typical bank acquisition.

Financially, the deal weighed in at about three times book value and 16 times earnings. But strategically the transaction represented much more. With the purchase, BBVA gained 35 branches in South Texas and 110,000 new customers – more than 93,000 of whom are Hispanic. And that connection to a historically under-served market, which experts project will have growing influence and affluence, was just the latest in a string of deals by global financial giants all seeking to get a foothold in the market.

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Impressed by the financial success of films such as Frida and A Day Without a Mexican, a growing number of U.S. production companies and distributors are gearing their efforts toward English-speaking Hispanics.

The potential market is enormous: The nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority makes up 40 percent of opening-weekend moviegoers, according to Arenas Entertainment, a leading Hispanic film producer and distributor in Los Angeles.

More attractive still is the market’s high proportion of English-speaking youth. Independent film companies believe they can target this segment of the Hispanic audience without losing the mainstream market.

“We found that 55 percent, almost 60 percent, of what is considered the Hispanic market consumes American TV in English. That’s a huge number because, in the end, that’s the young audience and the audience that really carries the money,” says Alvaro Garnica, film division director at Plural Entertainment, a Miami-based entertainment production subsidiary of Spanish media giant Prisa.

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Industry figures vary, but HispanTelligence® estimates Hispanics spent nearly $35 billion in 2002 on new and used vehicles and repairs, accounting for nearly 8 percent of the market. J.D. Power and Associates has estimated that by 2020, fueled by growing purchasing power, Hispanics’ share of the auto market could grow to 13 percent.

That potential has a growing number of automakers stepping up efforts in everything from marketing to dealer diversity. “Hispanic Americans can no longer be considered a niche market,” says Lonnie Miller, director of analytical solutions for auto industry consulting firm R. L. Polk & Co. “Hispanics are growing, both in numbers and consumer influence. Automotive manufacturers are taking notice and delivering products that appeal in all the traditional ways – design, price, performance and utility.”

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