Metaglossia: The Translation World

In the not-too-distant future, consumers may no longer need to view Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) password support page, which explains the various ways that users can adjust their login settings.

This article is a great little tool to use, to judge whether your blog is scaring readers away. Each numbered item contains a number of criticisms that a person reading your blog may make.
Read each paragraph and pay attention to each comment made in each sentence, and ask yourself, “Could someone make this comment about my blog?” Some paragraphs may only have one comment/sentence that you think applies to your blog, where other paragraphs may be stuffed with criticisms that may apply to your blog.

THE biennial conference of Africa Broadcasters tagged Africast will open tomorrow in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. Being the ninth edition in the series, the conference, which was instituted in 1996 by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), will run till Thursday, October 25, at the Abuja Sheraton Hotel and Towers.

With Content Rules as theme, the three-day assembly is expected to reinvigorate Nigeria’s digital migration plan, which stakeholders in broadcasting industry believe, has been dormant since June 29, 2009.

At the pre-event briefing in Abuja, last Tuesday, the Director-General of NBC, Mr. Yomi Bolarinwa underscored the correlation between the theme of the conference and digitization, which he stressed, “throws up the need for more quality content; we all know that in broadcasting Content is King.“

He explained further, “This year’s edition is the ninth since 1996 when it debuted and it is coming at a time when the country is working assiduously towards the final switch over from analogue to digital terrestrial television broadcasting, which informed the theme for Africast 2012, Content Rules.“

As a global phenomenon, the resolution on digitization was reached in Geneva, Switzerland on June 16, 2006 at an international conference organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Time sure does fly. It seems like yesterday that we were debating whether the world really needed another translation (and interpreting) blog, and here we are. We've had a lot of fun throughout the years, and it's been a pleasure to share the (useful) stuff that we know with colleagues, clients and friends.

We've never (at least not yet) run out of ideas to share, and it's been really enjoyable to start thinking like bloggers and to keep our blog in mind when learning new information. We are always asking ourselves: would this be useful for our readers? How can we present it in a concise, easy-to-read way? Granted, it's quite a bit of work, but it's worth it.

Here's a brief overview of the Translation Times adventure:
4 years (launched in September 2008)
389 posts (some not published yet)
1,515 comments
312,218 page views
Winner, Top Languages Professional Blog, 2011
Most popular blog posts: The True Spirit of Christmas: Helping a Colleague Recover (3,581 page views), Your Courtroom Ally (2,991 page views) and What Interpreters Really Do (1,683 page views)
Spam comments by people who want to promote their own products: too many too count
Hours spent writing posts and managing the blog: roughly 1-2 hours/week
Size of our team: 3. Thomas Gruber is our tech guru and he's constantly finding and testing new software for us to share with our readers
Companies who ask to do guest posts under the pretense of selling their services: too many to count
Most important achievement: raising $11,000 for a colleague in need with the help of all our readers. We'd like to once again thank you, from the bottom of our hearts!
We look forward to many more years of blogging. Will you help us celebrate? Leave a comment if you like our blog! Is there anything else you would like us to write about? We are happy to oblige. Just let us know.

The ability to translate your Joomla multilingual web site without the need for a third-party add-on — a feature first introduced in Joomla 1.6 — is w...

Have You Ever Considered Working Online?Sidone Nounkeu from Douala never thought that she would, until curiosity got the best of her and she filled out a simple online form. Before she knew it, she discovered her secret to beating the recession, and being able to provide for her family while at home with her three children.I read Sidone's blog last month and decided to feature her story in our local job report. In our phone interview she told me her amazing story. "I basically make about $7,000-$8,000 a month online. It's enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 10-13 hours a week from home.

Build a global audience on YouTube by translating your captions
Growing a global audience on YouTube means having your videos reach many people, speaking many languages. So today we’ve made it easier for you to translate YouTube video captions into more than 300 languages. See more details in the help center, or follow the step-by-step instructions below:

Getting started
You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here. Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.

A list of the top 100 people on Twitter that tweet about translation and/or being a translator.

Looking for tweets on translation or by translation people? Look no further. We've got 100 of the best to get you on your way...

Note that this list is not a league table, i.e. no. 1 isn't the best and no. 100 isn't the worst. They are all good and well worth checking out. Oh and dont forget our translation tweets at @_translation

The fifth annual E Tourism Africa Summit will take place on September 13 & 14, 2012 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Coordinated by E Tourism Frontiers, the E Tourism Africa Summit is hosted in partnership with South African Tourism and Cape Town Tourism.

The event is a two-day tourism conference on global online trends and developments in digital marketing relevant to tourism. This year, the event will focus specifically on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube for use in tourism campaigning, mobile travel apps, and the use of social media to leverage online bookings.

The E Tourism Africa Summit will again bring together experts in the online tourism arena such as Trip Advisor, Wanderfly, Expedia, Facebook, and more. The first day will be a full day of presentations by international speakers, and the second day will offer a selection of seminars and workshops on different topics that attendants can choose from.

Heralded as an advocate for digital marketing and its use of social media, Cape Town Tourism has recently garnered much success with an online iAmbassador campaign across Twitter and the wider web. Said CEO, Mariëtte du Toit-Helmbold: “The world has changed fundamentally. Travelers share their experiences honestly and instantly and travel decisions are influenced by the opinions and recommendations of friends and fellow travelers. The authentic and innovative use of digital marketing and, in particular social media, is essential to stay relevant in today’s marketplace. As a destination marketing organization, we see our role as leading and stimulating positive conversation about Cape Town, providing platforms for the world to connect with citizens and fans of Cape Town. The people of Cape Town are our greatest ambassadors, and they are the ones that would-be visitors believe, trust, and listen to. Personal testimonials and recommendations now count for more than the opinions of guide books, brochures, and tourism boards.”

A Portuguese - English Platform of Anthologies of Literature in Translation visa a criação de uma plataforma online de apoio pedagógico ao ensino da tradução literária, oferecendo textos literários para prática de tradução, pensados como corpora de antologias traduzidas colaborativamente, que contribuam para uma abertura do sistema literário de chegada e possam despertar o interesse de editores generalistas, proporcionando aos alunos um primeiro contacto com o mundo profissional da tradução literária.
Numa primeira fase, o grupo de trabalho, aliando problemáticas contemporâneas das literaturas de diáspora com as de tradução, dará especial enfoque aos trânsitos dessas literaturas implicando contactos entre as línguas inglesa e portuguesa, propondo-se apresentar como resultado uma antologia de literatura luso-norte-americana, bem como acções pontuais de disseminação dessa literatura em publicações académicas e literárias nacionais.

Quelles langues utilisent les internautes européens pour surfer sur Internet ? Une étude 2011 publiée par la Commission Européenne et l’institution Gallup traite de la préférence linguistique des utilisateurs d’Internet dans toute l’Europe.

Quelles langues utilisent les internautes européens pour surfer sur Internet ?
Une étude 2011 publiée par la Commission Européenne et l’institution Gallup traite de la préférence linguistique des utilisateurs d’Internet dans toute l’Europe. Sorte de baromètre Flash et menée au téléphone, l’étude vise à recueillir les pratiques des internautes lors de leur navigation sur Internet.

Je suis sûr que tout responsable du développement, responsable international ou internationalisation ou encore, fondateur d’une e-entreprise ou créateur de start-up sera intéressé par les résultats de cette enquête.

Vous pouvez télécharger l’enquête en cliquant ici « Préférences linguistiques des internautes » ou sur le site de la Commission Européenne.

Quelques informations glanées dans ce document :

55 % des internautes européens ayant répondu disent avoir utilisé une autre langue que leur langue maternelle pour lire ou visionner du contenu sur Internet et 35 % ont utilisé une autre langue pour écrire, envoyer ou poster du contenu sur Internet. Dans certains pays, cette proportion peut atteindre 90 % (comme la Grèce, et la Slovénie par exemple).
L’anglais sans surprise est mentionné par plus d’un internaute européen sur 2 pour lire ou visionner du contenu et un peu moins d’un internaute sur trois en ce qui concerne l’écrit.
Autre activité principale des internautes, la recherche d’informations. Plus de 80% des répondants disent utiliser parfois une autre langue dans cette recherche d’informations. Environ 4 sur 10 pensent que de nombreuses informations leur échappent du fait de leur non-disponibilité dans une langue qu’ils maîtrisent.
Pourtant, 90% des internautes privilégient leur langue maternelle pour parcourir un site Internet. Ils sont aussi nombreux à penser qu’un site Internet local doit être proposé dans la langue locale.

Au-delà de ces quelques chiffres, l’enquête informe sur les préférences des internautes pays par pays mais aussi sur leurs pratiques. Il peut être intéressant pour un responsable internationalisation d’un site internet (de e-commerce ou pas) de prendre connaissance des langues maîtrisées dans un pays, celles utilisées pour lire ou pour écrire/diffuser du contenu, etc. Le choix d’une traduction voire d’une localisation peut en dépendre. Le niveau de maîtrise de l’anglais par les internautes locaux est un autre critère qui peut avoir son importance (pour limiter l’investissement financier par exemple…). Un autre résultat que l’on peut trouver : la fréquence d’utilisation d’une langue autre que la langue maternelle pour acheter des produits ou services sur Internet. Et en fonction des pays, les pratiques varient grandement…

With more than 644 million estimated active websites on the internet today and growing, businesses need to work harder to get noticed online. For small businesses that don’t already have an established market presence this means finding ways to do more with less – and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.

SEO is about making a company’s website as visible as possible when related information is requested through different search methods such as engines like Google or Bing. Most large, well-established and tech savvy companies have the advantage of prominence and often more budget to put into creating brand recognition.

If smaller businesses are looking for budget-friendly ways to maximize their chances of being found through search and attracting more traffic to their website, there are a few SEO-related tactics they can employ themselves with their website to help with that.

Whether a business is in the process of building a website in-house or working with an external developer and wanting to understand or speak their language here are seven tips for businesses to improve their site’s search rankings:

Secure Links – For SEO this means reaching out to industry associations, loyal clients and other complimentary businesses to encourage them to link to your site from areas like their blogs and resource pages. This is a signal that search engines, such as Google use in their rankings algorithms and will help to improve a website’s rankings.

Update content regularly – Ensuring content is unique, compelling and fresh is key to keeping the attention of website visitors. Consider blog posts, videos, images, webinars, eBooks, widgets, infographics, and primary research as ways to renew content on a regular basis.

Variety in content – A Forrester study found that pages containing a mixture of text and video are 50 times more likely to rank higher in search results. Make sure to include more than one type of content sharing per web page.

Ensure the site is “social media optimized” – With the growing influence that social media has on a company’s relationship with potential and existing customers, it’s vital to ensure all website pages have the company’s social profile icons (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest). These icons encourage and make it easy to share the information and increase the chance of it being found in a search.

Blogging is an important consideration for businesses and entrepreneurs today. Without a blog, you lack a key tool for generating more interest in your company or your offerings. Of course, a blog isn’t quite the same as a website. You’ll find that using Wordpress themes is part of the equation here, but it goes far beyond that. You need more than excellent functionality and a good aesthetic if you want to ramp up interest and garner more interaction through your blog.

Why Does Interaction Matter?
First, let’s address a concern that some people hold. That is, there’s a misconception that the blog has outlived its usefulness. With the rise of social media, it’s easy to see how that misunderstanding arose, but it’s not the case. In fact, having a blog is more vital today than ever before. Why is this?
Your website should be your business hub – it’s where your customers come to find your products, make a purchase and learn more about your company as a whole. Your blog also needs to act as a hub, but of a different sort. Your blog should be the hub for all of your social marketing activities, and it needs to garner interaction in order to provide better traction in the online world.

Is it better to market by e-mail or on paper?
August 15, 2012 by Corinne McKay
Over the past six months or so, I’ve been experimenting (sometimes with my translation partner and sometimes on my own) with cold-marketing to potential direct clients. Because a great deal of our work is in a very targeted subject area (international development), it’s not hard to find potential clients but it’s often hard to know how to contact them. Here are some thoughts on whether you’re better off making the initial contact by e-mail or on paper; I’m not even going to touch cold-calling because I am the worst phone salesperson ever. Ever. Really. But if you’re interested in low-stress cold calling, The Freelancery has some excellent scripts that you can work from.

The great thing about e-mail marketing is that:

It’s fast. If you’re reading a business news article and see a tidbit that shouts “potential client” to you, you can fire off the e-mail right there.
It’s less formal. You can get away with “Just wanted to tell you that I loved staying at your inn this summer; if you’re ever inclined to translate your website/marketing brochure/menu into English, I’d love to talk,” whereas it would seem a little weird (at least to me) to print out a paper letter with that sentence and pop it in the mail.
The recipient can easily forward the message. I’d say that at least half the time I cold-contact, I don’t hit the right person on the first try. Especially with larger entities, it can be hard to tell who hires freelancers for the kind of work we do. But your prospect can quickly forward your message to the right person.
It’s cheap. If you’re looking at a paper marketing campaign to a few hundred prospects, the paper, envelopes, business cards, stamps, etc. add up over time.

Starting soon if your site is hit by numerous DMCA takedown notices it may affect your listing in google search. Google stated in their post
“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our ranking: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”

There are some problems with this new policy. First Google determines what is a valid DMCA takedown. A valid takedown simply means that there was a complaint against the site, the correct paperwork was filled out and there was no counter-claim filed. It doesn’t mean the takedown has gone through any legal process and has been found valid by a court of law. Critics complain that if someone has a beef against a site they could use this to issue false claims to punish the site.
As stated by the EFF

“Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners can be liable for bad-faith accusations). Demoting search results – effectively telling the searcher that these are not the websites you’re looking for – based on accusations alone gives copyright owners one more bit of control over what we see, hear, and read.”

Google has stated that sites may appeal if they believe they have been falsely accused. However it is not clear what number would be considered numerous and if the sites themselves will be notified of the reason they are being demoted in search.
Sites are still listed under Google Search, but most likely will not show up on the first page of search, which means people who are search ninjas, will have no trouble finding these sites, however most normal people searches stop at the first page. Which means for all practical purposes the punish sites will not exist for most people. This will clearly hurt BitTorrent sites who are used to share both legitimate files, but also pirated media and games

I admit that this is another trivial post. However, I couldn’t help but blog about this as I found it to be fascinating.

I’m an expat living in a country where the national language is not the English I speak. Although almost everyone speaks English here, there are occasions where I find some of the websites (especially government websites) written in the national language. Having said that, I only visit government websites when my income tax is due or when I’m in some sort of trouble. However, I do use the local version of Yahoo.com as my home page as it keeps me up-to-date on all the latest news foreign and domestic. Up until now I managed to ignore the news articles written in the local language as “not relevant” (I admit that I was naive) but today there was an article about the new iPhone 5 which, as a techi, I just had to read. Being a Mozilla Firefox (FF) user, the only option I had was to copy the text and paste it in Google translate. This is when I decided that it’s time to change the way I browse the net.

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Primary Email Vs Website Marketing Part 1 - Identifying Immediate Mail...

There are several marketers out there who believe that direct mail isn’t the effective type of advertising that it once was at least when compared with the more affordable retailers available through the internet. The reality is that various advertising media may all be made effective when the message, positioning and targeting are done correctly.First of all, let us start this search by defining what direct mail is. In short, any type of marketing that is done by providing an actual item (letter or package) using the Usa Postal Service, a service such as UPS or FedEx, or a courier service could be defined as direct mail.Yes, you read that correctly direct mail doesn’t always need to feel the postal service. Theoretically, any supply approach to a product that is “dropped off” could be defined as direct mail. You may have a place deliver a pizza along with your marketing message, when you had like. (Please note that, if you do-it-yourself with the purpose of getting in to see somebody on the place, that is a revenue cal!. )Although many people think of direct mail as those messages that go to thousands, if not tens of thousands of addresses simultaneously, that does not have to be the case.

These tools will help communicators monitor websites, keep track of pitches, set reminders, and more.

You have to love free online tools, especially if they aren’t for critical projects. I hesitate to use free tools for essential items, but these are pretty darn good. You should tinker with them if you have some elbow room.

You just want to translate your website. It should be simple, right?

Unfortunately, localizing your company’s website is much more than translating text. Sure, you can adopt a free website application and crank out a thirty-language website in no time. But if you want to ensure quality language translation, brand consistency and a website that is fit for each of your end users, you may want to put a little more localization thought into it.

Whether you’re just starting to think about translating your website or you already have multilingual webpage experience, here are a few things to consider when planning your next website localization project.

Kansas City was selected by Google to test a fast new fiber-optic Internet service.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Google Inc. revealed Thursday what it will charge for its long-awaited, ultra-fast Internet service in Kansas City: $70 per month.

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Google wired Kansas City for its new 'gigabit' Internet service.
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Google wired Kansas City for its new 'gigabit' Internet service.
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The service is intended as a showcase for what's technically possible and as a testbed for the development of new ways to use the Internet. Bypassing the local cable and phone companies, Google has spent months and an unknown amount of money pulling its own optical fiber through the two-state Kansas City region.
After vetting many contenders, Google announced last year that the Kansas City metro area would be the first to get its "Fiber for Communities" broadband service.
Some cities had used gimmicks to get the company's attention. Topeka informally renamed itself "Google, Kansas." A group in Baltimore launched a website that used Google's mapping service to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and give their reasons for wanting the service. Hundreds of groups on Facebook implored Google to come to their cities.
The $70 monthly fee will pay for "gigabit" Internet service, about 100 times faster than a basic cable modem. For another $50 per month, Google will provide cable-TV-like service over the fiber, too, and a tablet computer that works as a remote.

Google is planning an announcement in Kansas City about its ultra-high-speed Internet network.