Thursday, November 13, 2008

Amo, But Not A Mass,...

I’m a regular reader of DCU (an establishment that localization folks should know well) President Ferdinand Von Prondzynski’s blog “A University Blog: The diary of a university president.” It’s the best “catch-all” blog coming out of Ireland, in my opinion. Perhaps I am biased, as the author is a former lecturer of mine from my Trinity College Dublin days and I always enjoyed not only his teaching, but his opinions on all manner of subjects. It’s so refreshing to come across a blog writer who can actually write.

Today, the blog posting laments the loss of the Latin language as a taught subject in schools and other educational establishments. I totally agree. I would love to see it restored. A knowledge of Latin (I studied it in high school) helped me to understand the origin of many words in many languages, encouraged me to read more widely, and to develop my writing ability.

For a while, it looked like the success of the book “Amo, Amas, Amat...”, reinforced by the utterances of “brainy” celebs such as Stephen Fry, might spearhead a revival of interest and use of the language amongst the populace, but that promise now seems to have disappeared.

In Ireland ‘though, usage of Latin on a small scale remains popular with Roman Catholic mass-goers, and I regularly see large numbers of devotees attending Latin mass around the corner from me in Dublin. There is even an Irish Latin Mass web site. However, on the whole, the language is dead in Ireland and other countries as far as the majority are concerned.

Perhaps other readers of Blogos have an opinion?

Posted by Ultan on 11/13 at 07:39 PM

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Google Reader: Blogs in Any Language

The Google Reader team have announce a feature whereby you can easily translate any subscribed blog into your language.

MAKE has more information.

So, now you have no excuse for missing that all-important news item, opinion, or comment anywhere!

Posted by Ultan on 11/12 at 06:50 PM

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Saturday, November 08, 2008

South Asia Languages Resource

South Asian languages your thing? Then check out the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia Project.

About:


The Digital Dictionaries of South Asia Project is a collaborative effort to widen access to South Asian Language Dictionaries. Established dictionaries for each of the twenty-six modern literary languages of South Asia will be mounted on the web for free and open access.

Hat tip: Daniela.

Posted by Ultan on 11/08 at 12:24 AM

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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

iPhone International Features and Apps: IMUG

According to Larry Ellison’s expectations (never wrong), mobile devices will be the next major computing platform. So, As I am in the Bay Area, and the subject is a popular one on I18n and L10n blogs like this one, I thought I push the forthcoming related event at IMUG: iPhone International Features and Apps.

Lee Collins, Deborah Goldsmith, and Chuck Soper will present on multilingual support for the iPhone, the development perspective on such support, and getting localized apps onto the App Store.

Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Date: 20-November-2008

Not to be missed.

Posted by Ultan on 11/05 at 02:11 PM

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Friday, October 31, 2008

I am not in the office at the moment...

Several people have now sent me this daft story from Wales about the officials who asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign by e-mail and then thought the reply - in Welsh - was what they needed. They promptly put up the sign. In fact, the reply was an automated out-of-office e-mail message.

So, instead of a sign warning heavy goods vehicle drivers about a residential road, the public was treated to a large display of “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated” in Welsh.

You can read more about the story here.

That’s what you get when you welsh on the translation budget (groan).

Posted by Ultan on 10/31 at 03:09 PM

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

TXT+100%+ Expansion: A Question

Perhaps some of you can help me. I read recently about a Swedish student, My Svensson, who won a competition by taking only 61 seconds to type a 141-character SMS message.

Apparently, her winning text was:

Ok, skriv fort nu. Fortare! D1a går för långsamt. Stavas långsamt så? confused Hinner inte titta, måste bli klar. Snart, bara 1 ord till. rasberry Klar!

I’m no expert, but that doesn’t look very text-speak to me (I can’t imagine any Irish teenager SMS texting 141 characters in one message - for any reason).  Is it? In Swedish?

How much longer is that phrase than the equivalent text-speak localization into English? Do other languages have text-speak or is it largely used for “imported” English words?

No. There’s no prize for the answer.

Posted by Ultan on 09/24 at 01:19 PM

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Back to School Time! Here's Some Reading...

With a timely release for the oncoming academic year and conference season (though you can enjoy it regardless of whether you’re an MBA student or not) me old mate from Silicon Valley, Dr. E. S. Wibbeke (whom some of you might remember as the Eileen from Web of Culture) has just published a timely new book called Global Business Leadership.

The book is now available from Amazon.com, and like all the best it has an accompanying web site: http://www.globalbusinessleadership.com

No less a culture expert than Geert Hofstede says about the book:

One of the pernicious problems of globalization is that leadership exists only in the eyes of the followers - and followers are always local. Dr. Wibbeke undertakes the immensely important task of preparing American businesspersons for their culture shocks in trying to lead abroad.

It’s brilliant to see yet another person you know in the industry striking out like this, doing what they love with such passion, and then seeing their efforts come to fruition in material form. I’m looking forward to reading this (I’d better since I took part in the research survey).

An inspiration to us all, I must get around to writing my own book shortly (ahem).

Posted by Ultan on 09/24 at 12:28 PM

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Kraftwerk: No Localization Needed

I went to see Kraftwerk perform in Dublin a few days ago. A brilliant event. Four middle-aged German guys with Sony VAIO laptops making the most amazing music, accompanied by a fantastic video show. Perfect. However, I doubt that any other modern band could do what Kraftwerk do so well, moving seamlessly across borders with the same show.

Now if you’ve ever been to a rock concert in Ireland, you’ll know the visiting band usually attempts some form of cultural customization, whether its “Hello, Dublin”, “Ireland, You’re Great” banter, the waving of tricolors, dancing of hokey Irish gigs, sometimes unfortunate references to the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland, sequed performances into “Danny Boy”, and a bunch of other stuff that would make Darby O’Gill and the Little People look like the paragon of cultural sophistication.

Not Kraftwerk. They came on, played for nearly two hours. And left. Passed not one comment. Did “Tour de France” include images of Irish cyclists Seán Kelly or Stephen Roche? Was there an explicit campaign comment made about Sellafield (British nuclear plant polluting the Irish Sea) during “Radioactivity”? No. Nothing. Were the robots painted green? Come on.

Ralf Hütter (and the Kling-Klang technology) “sang” songs in English and German. They showed English, German, Japanese and French language on screen, and a host of global images the same way they would in Asia, Europe, or America. And the lack of “a bit of Irish” detracted not in in the least from the power of their sound and vision. In fact, it was better without it.

And that’s the way it should be. Perhaps it’s the nature of the Kraftwerk sound and image to be culturally agnostic (’though nobody is in any doubt that they’re German), but I can’t help feeling that when you’ve such a brilliant presence and offering that works worldwide, then leave it alone - whatever the rest of them do.

Posted by Ultan on 09/17 at 09:31 AM

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Monday, September 15, 2008

Invading Italian

Nick Squires in Rome reports for Telegraph.co.uk that Italians are using—and stressing—about the growing incursion of Anglo-Saxon words and phrases into everyday use.

From ‘il weekend’ to ‘lo stress’ and ‘le leadership’, Italians increasingly sprinkle their conversations with English terms, some of them comically mangled and bizarre sounding to a native English speaker.

‘Baby parking’, for example, is a child care center or nursery.

A ‘baby gang’, on the other hand, means a group of young criminals or hoodlums.

As with the French and their use of Franglais, Italians sometimes throw in English words to appear worldly and cosmopolitan, and at other times to describe things slightly alien to the Italian mindset, from ‘il fitness’ to ‘il full immersion training’.

But now a cultural guardian of the Italian language is saying ‘basta!’ – enough.

The Dante Alighieri Society, a less strident equivalent of France’s Academie Francaise which promotes Italian culture and language around the world, has called on Italians to reject Anglo-Saxon linguistic imports, ‘Anglitaliano’, and return to the true lingua italiana.

Over the last four months the society, named after the Florentine poet Dante, author of The Divine Comedy and regarded as the father of the Italian language, asked visitors to its website to nominate their least favorite Anglicisms.

The results judge the ugliest imports to be ‘weekend’, ‘welfare’ and ‘OK’, followed by ‘briefing’, ‘mission’, ‘know how’, ‘shampoo’ and ‘cool’.

The worlds of business and politics contributed alien words from ‘question time’ to ‘premier’ and ‘bipartisan’.

Some English words that escaped the wrath of the society’s correspondents include ‘sexy’ and ‘webmaster’—but ‘water’, short for water closet or lavatory would give me pause.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2712197/Italians-vote-for-ugliest-English-words.html

So, will you take that as a problem in grande or venti?

Posted by Laurel on 09/15 at 11:16 PM

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Saturday, September 06, 2008

Commonsense 2.0 in Poland

Those of you who cringe at those sad people so keen to embarrass themselves in New York, San Francisco, Dublin, or London by being shown in the media as a “first” iPhone purchaser after waiting outside the store for a significant percentage of their life to buy the thing will be heartened by this bite of reality from Poland.

Seems like Orange in Poland (the carrier for the iPhone there) has had to hire professional actors to stand in the queues outside stores before the launch.

Now this could be due to a number of reasons: economic conditions/marketing mismatch in trying to position the “Jesus“ phone in a country that takes its religion seriously/difficulty in finding somebody in Poland who doesn’t have a job/life/partner/clue what a “pub” is…

Speaking of those who walk on water, I haven’t enjoyed a story so much since the collapse of U2 sales in Dublin. The guilt!

Posted by Ultan on 09/06 at 08:28 AM

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Thursday, September 04, 2008

And Now For Something Completely Different ... Comic Books

Google have released their new Chrome browser. Nice and simple, ‘though I won’t be switching to it as my main browser for a while yet. I’ll be sticking with Firefox.

That said, I was intrigued by the documentation that comes with it.

See for yourself at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/#size=small&page=4

I really like the approach at getting the message across and challenging the accepted notions of user assistance that comes with these kind of products. Good job.

But I wonder how it will fare in translation? Can it be exported to SVG? XLIFF? Can SDL Worldserver do it?  Or “volunteers”? Or will there be a different version for the international versions (there should be an alternative version for accessibility anyway)?

How novel (groan)...

Posted by Ultan on 09/04 at 01:47 PM

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

What’s lost? Who will even know? (comment on botkin entry)

Of all that is being lost in turmoil and conflict in the Caucasus right now, this has to break a linguist’s heart. Is there hope that someone somewhere has been working with this? Or the other 40-plus languages of the region?
Once again thanks to The New York Times and John Freivalds () August 24, 2008
The World:  Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic By ELLEN BARRY:  To understand the conflict in Georgia, listen to how people speak in the Caucasus. 

“A language is the prime indication of the existence of a people,” said George Hewitt, a University of London scholar of Abkhaz, the language spoken in Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia. “If a language dies, the culture dies as well. The people will become assimilated.”

One more question to be answered in the calm that comes after the end of fighting: Caucasian expert Dr. Anna V. Dybo at the Russian Academy of Sciences has yet to hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled over the course of many years. It’s a single manuscript, never transferred to a computer.

She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up on Aug. 8.

“She is not sure. . . .”

Posted by Laurel on 09/02 at 06:34 PM

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