Web-Translations is pleased to be part of the Goldman Sachs Business Growth programme. This unique business education scheme has been organised by Goldman Sachs to support small businesses throughout Yorkshire and the Humber. It is run by the Business Schools of Leeds and Oxford Universities, who also devised the programme.

Our founder and managing director, Daniel Rajkumar, is one of the 25 entrepreneurs selected from 150 applicants to be invited to attend business management courses and receive mentoring and support from a senior member at Goldman Sachs.

The idea behind the project is to help small businesses in the region achieve their maximum potential, and also to help create job opportunities, in order to alleviate the effects of the current economic crisis. As the main focus of the programme, the entrepreneurs will undertake a four-month business and management course which will have an emphasis on real-life practical experience, allowing the participants to implement the ideas and strategies they learn as they go.

Daniel says of the scheme: “The Business Growth Programme has been excellent so far. The topics covered have given me a better strategic understanding and practical skills to aid the decisions I make in the business. I’m learning to step back from the day-to-day activities of running the business, which allows me to work on my overall business vision and direction. I’ve had the chance to learn from the experience of 24 other successful entrepreneurs, and have met inspirational leaders and been taught by some leading business lecturers. I would recommend it to other business owners.”

We all look forward to seeing Web-Translations expand and flourish thanks to the support of Goldman Sachs.

We at Web-Translations are experts in the language industry.

Regular readers of this blog may remember our proud announcement that we had become members of the Association of Translation Companies back in March of this year.

We’ve also won an impressive collection of prestigious awards, right from the beginning of the company… (more…)

Web-Translations has moved to Leeds!

You can now find us at:

20 Queen Square

Leeds

LS2 8AF

T: 0113 815 0460

All email and web addresses remain the same.

We look forward to meeting, networking, socialising and working with lots more local people now that we’re here, so give us a call or drop us an email to get in touch!

Now, before I get shot down by a flurry of irate translators, hear me out.

There’s been an increase recently in the use of post-edited machine translation for some projects where the volume of content is so huge, and the time window so short that human translation, and then proofreading and subsequent editing of the text, would just not be practical. We at Web-Translations are observing this trend with great interest. (more…)

SEO is just as important for your foreign language sites as for your English one. Simply translating content and putting it online unfortunately does not mean that any of your potential customers will find the pages you have created for their benefit.

As Nataly Kelly of the Common Sense Advisory says:

“It just doesn’t work to assume that a target audience who has been linguistically underserved in the past will miraculously show up at your site in the months following the launch of your new content. [...] you need to publicize your new content and drive your target audience to the new site. Just as with your source language website, expect the traffic to build over time.” (more…)

International sporting events always generate lots of opportunities for work in all sectors, from supply of equipment to provision of accommodation and entertainment during any competition or tournament. There are usually plenty of opportunities for language service providers too, but this year’s World Cup in South Africa has created more work than ever in this arena…sadly none for Web-Translations. Oh well, maybe next time…

Written translations are needed for not only the 11 official South African languages, but then of course the 22 standard official languages of the 31 nations whose teams have qualified, before even taking into account regional variations of some of these, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Swiss German or Mexican Spanish.

In addition to this, there have been other barriers besides language to overcome. This is almost certainly the first World Cup where regulations have prohibited not only motorcycle helmets and umbrellas inside the stadium, but also Zulu spears and shields!

We look forward to an exciting, multinational and multilingual competition. Good luck everyone!

Or should I say: Geluk!

We did it again! Thanks to your eager voting, we were ranked in the Top 100 Language Blogs this year for the second year running!

See the full list…

Thanks to all of you who voted for us, we really appreciate your support!

qTranslate is a plugin for WordPress that makes the job of managing multilingual content easy – so you can concentrate on creating great content.

Reach more visitors and show that you care about them by displaying your blog posts in their language. qTranslate makes the creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language.

Check out some of the features:

• Quick & Easy Installation – No need to manually search and upload database files
• One-Click-Switching between languages
• Choose from Professional or automated machine translation

• user-friendly Configuration Page makes it easy to add any language you want

Many languages come as standard – English, German, Simplified Chinese…

• Date & Time automatically translated into the local format
• Multilingual Text in Templates
• Choose from 3 Modes to make your URLs SEO-friendly
• One language per URL – easy for viewers to navigate & also benefits your SEO

How do I get started?

To get a self-maintaining multilingual blog, simply:

1. Download & activate the WordPress plugin qTranslate from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/qtranslate/
2. Configure the plugin for the languages of your choice
3. Register your account with Web-Translations
4. Login to your Web-Translations account and buy pay-as-you-go wordcount credit
5. Make a note of your user ID and password
6. Within the admin area of your WordPress plugin, input your username & password
7. You are now ready to submit posts for translation, simply click the professional button
8. Make a contribution to Qian as a thanks for writing the plugin

If you need any help, just give us a call on +44 (0) 1924 360460.

When foreigners learn Chinese, they often struggle getting to grips with writing the characters. There are around 50,000 characters in modern written Chinese, but in order to be considered literate, an adult needs to know only 3,000-4,000 (a 1,000-2,000 character vocabulary would allow you to comfortably read a Chinese newspaper).

However, more and more Chinese citizens feel they are losing the ability to write by hand, and many are signing up for exams to try and combat this.

The HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi – literally Mandarin level exam) test was originally aimed at foreigners learning Chinese, but was introduced for Chinese nationals in several cities and provinces in 2007. Because so many people use computers in their work and hardly ever pick up a pen, their written literacy skills are in decline – this is true all over the world, not just in China.

When typing Chinese characters rather than writing them by hand, a person types the sound of the character (a bit like spelling a word out) then the computer suggests possible characters for that sound from which they choose the appropriate one:

It’s a bit like multiple choice, whereas if you were writing the same word by hand, you would have to think of the character yourself.

The Shanghai Language Commission conducted a survey among university students, which found that while many know what the characters should look like, they are unable to handwrite them.

 Here’s a link that we were sent earlier this week that we thought we’d share: 84 Fun, Useful and Ridiculous Online Dictionaries  –

  http://paralegalschoolsonline.org/84-fun-useful-and-ridiculous-online-dictionaries/

One of my favourites is the “The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form“, which gives definitions of English words as limericks. Here’s Peter Sheil’s definition of automatic translation: