Just a short note to say a big thank you to our readers, and to all the clients and suppliers we’ve worked with this year.

2009 has been a great year for Web-Translations, and we hope to make 2010 even better.

Opening Hours during the Christmas period

We are open as usual until the end of the day on December 23rd, the office will be closed on 25th, 28th and 29th.

On the 24th, 30th & 31st December we will be operating a skeleton staff, so please plan early if you know of anything you will need on those days. Our hardworking translators like to take a break at this time of year too, so it can take longer than usual for work to be done.

Happy Holidays!

Windows 7 includes over 40 new fonts which expand the script and language support the system can offer. Far from simply being a means of displaying text, different fonts can change the way we read text, and even how we feel about what we are reading.

For example:

As well as allowing much more versatility for people using languages already supported by Windows, such as Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil and other Indic languages, the new fonts also expand the flexibility of the system for languages such as Khmer, Vai (a Mande language of Liberia) and Lao, giving users more options for those languages.

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The latest version of Click4Translation is now online, and we’re inviting you to test it - please sign up at www.click4translation.com and get a quote for any translation project by uploading your documents, or submitting a website URL - it’s as simple as that!

Click4translation makes it quick and easy to get a quote for your translation work, with a simple 5 stage process that takes about 2 minutes to get a price.

• There’s no new software to learn or install
• The website can be accessed anywhere at any time, making it easy to buy translation wherever you are
• Instant and easy – no waiting to receive your quote
• Best of all, using Click4translation is free!

We’re asking you to explore the system, try it out for yourselves and report back on any problems you encounter - all feedback helps us improve click4translation and make into the ideal instant quote system.

Help us to hone our new tool and have your say on features you’d like to see - please address all comments and suggestions to: click4translation@web-translations.co.uk

The ‘Tele Scouter’, a recent invention from NEC due to launch in 2010, is a pair of glasses attached to a headset and mouthpiece, with a small projector that can transmit messages onto the retina of the user. It is intended for use in a customer service environment, allowing employees access to information regarding the client they are talking to.

Once the product is launched, NEC are intending to introduce a further function for the glasses, allowing instantaneous translation. During a multilingual conversation, both voices will be picked up, the dialogue translated, and sent back to the headset and projector. The messages will be shown in the user’s peripheral vision, allowing them to maintain eye contact with the person with whom they are having a conversation.
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The Basque language, known to natives as Euskera, is the only language isolate in Western Europe, meaning that it is the only existing language that has no known living ‘relatives’: it is unique!  Linguists and historians alike have attempted to discover a link between Basque and other languages, but, despite trying to connect it to languages such as Egyptian, as well as languages of Asia and North America, no connection has been found.

The ancestral form of Basque was introduced into Western Europe several thousand years ago, whereas the majority of the languages spoken today arrived much later.  The first written records of the Basque language can be traced back to the first century BC.

Basque has been a co-official language in the three Basque regions of Vizcaya, Alava and Guipuzcoa since 1979.  However, it has no official status in France.  In 2006, it was recorded that Basque was spoken by just over 1 million people from the south-western French town of Bayonne to the Spanish city Bilbao, stretching from the coast and reaching 30 miles inland. 

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Twitter is the latest company to use crowdsourcing to localise their website and interface - about time they localised it too, as in the arena of social networking, Twitter has been lagging behind other sites such as Facebook when it comes to reaching a multilingual audience…

So what is crowdsourcing exactly?

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A recent article in New Scientist reports on the imminent release of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from U.S. national control. ICANN is responsible for maintaining the various technical standards that make the Internet possible on a low level.

Under an Affirmation agreement with the U.S. department of commerce ICANN will not be coordinated by any specific government, allowing representatives from many countries to take part. The likely offshoot is that Internet standards will become more inclusive of Internet users outside America. For instance, the article reports that we might reasonably expect domain names to be available in Chinese and Arabic characters in little more than a year. They also report that current browsers cannot access domain names written in these scripts, which is quite right, but a reasonably small change I cannot see any major browser manufacturer delaying in releasing to their customers.

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Latest EU regulations demand that all packaging and instruction leaflets for pharmaceutical products and medical devices are translated into the official language of the country they are being exported to.

American companies in this sector who intend to export their products to Europe must comply with these regulations, and indeed should embrace multilingual packaging in order to compete with their European counterparts.

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I’ve been helping a client manage their PPC spend recently by training one of their team members. I don’t normally do this; it was just a favour to one of our best clients which happens to be a local company.

It took me back; I remembered the very early days when you’d pay 0.05$ per keyword word and could expect to be in the top 5 results. For most industries, those days are long gone. Read the rest of this entry »

International eMarketing12th November, 13.00 - 17.00

The Source, Meadowhall, Sheffield (£35)

Learn about ebusiness strategies to promote your business in non-English markets using the Internet.

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