I was in attendance at the Houston Interpreters and Translators Association quarterly meeting this morning. Presentations were given on improving one’s memory and on the ethics of interpretation.

Legal mumbo jumbo is hard to grasp in any language. But when it’s in Japanese translated poorly into English, overseas business opportunities are lost, lawsuits are filed and justice is not served.

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Lost in Arabic translation

The federal government’s lack of Arabic translators and the insufficient understanding – and consequent poor translation – of the language by the translators it does have may mean more Arab-Americans, immigrants, and foreigners could find themselves caught up in the government’s dragnet.

A Curry County woman says misuse of Spanish grammar on the state absentee ballots’ inner envelope causes confusion as to whether the vote will be counted.

In English, directions printed on inner envelopes state, “This envelope shall remain sealed until counting of ballots begins.” Beneath the English version, the Spanish version states the envelope will stay closed until “El recuento de boletas de votacion” (The recount of the voting ballots).

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The Localization Industry Standards Association Forum Europe will go beyond the usual discourse about multilingual content management challenges and solutions to address the practicality of international products delivery, applications, and costs as well as how a larger Europe and companies wanting access to its markets can best manage business practices like emerging collaborative systems, outsourcing management, and open standards deployment.

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Translation companies are a hot commodity as businesses reach out to the Hispanic market according to HISPANICTrends.com. Hat tip: Common Sense Advisory.

The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) has announced its support for upcoming special events to focus attention on localization and globalization efforts in South America. “We see big opportunities for Latin American translation agencies to take on a bigger role in the worldwide language services business,” says Don DePalma, GALA board member and president of market analyst firm Common Sense Advisory. “An educated work force, European language expertise, and time-zone proximity should make many U.S. companies look southward for translation.”

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The ATA 45th Annual Conference in Toronto is coming up November 14-16. I’ll be there. Will you?

Please submit your resume to hr@linguisticsolutions.com.

Japanese electronics firm NEC has developed a handheld device that enables a user to chat in another language without memorising any words or phrases themselves, and it is likely to be launched in Japan in the next few months.

The system consists of three components – a speech recognition engine, translation software and a voice generator, and is about the same size of a normal mobile and converts spoken Japanese to English and vice versa.

Spoken English or Japanese is recognised and converted into text by the speech recognition engine. The text is then converted from Japanese to English or the other way by translation software and the resulting text is vocalised by a voice synthesiser, and the entire process takes about one second.

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With machine translation, Google is bringing to bear its formidable Web index—which at last count included 6 billion documents, images and items—as well as its computing resources. Google is well-known for having one of the largest clusters of Linux-based servers, which number in the thousands.

Google already provides a Web-page translation feature, but Norvig said it is based on technology from a third party. Its research project is based on homegrown technology that eventually could translate Web pages and links more automatically, he said.

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…a classified report that says since Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has failed to translate hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretap and audio recordings from terrorism and espionage work.

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