The Voice of LingoTech
President Obama’s ‘State of the Union’ Gets Crowdsourced
Jan 26th
The recent Presidential State of the Union received special attention this week from one company, NewsHour. NewsHour asked its viewers and web followers to utilize Universal Subtitles, a free video subtitling tool on the web to translate the President’s speech in almost real time.
Tuesday night’s effort marked the beginning of “NewsHour Open Election Community 2012,” a project in partnership with Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has provided NewsHour with a $420,000 grant for the project, and Mozilla and PCF are matching that with a $260,000 investment.
The goal of the crowdsourced translations is to make news videos more accessible. Traditionally, video has been a completely static form of entertainment and news; You simply watch what is presented to you. Now, with this technology, it gives people ways to interact with videos that they traditionally couldn’t.
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Video Translation Service for Hospital Patients
Jan 25th
As we all know (besides the lucky few who haven’t had the pleasure), hospital visits can be a stressful and frustrating experience. This is true even more so for patients who do not speak the native language, and must rely on either a family member who knows the native language or a helpful staff member if they happen to be available. Sometimes patients can bring a translator with them to scheduled appointments, but during emergency visits, this scenario isn’t always an option.
At Southlake Regional Health Center in Canada, they have begun using a video translation service geared towards hospitals and health care facilities called, VICKI. VICKI is a real-time video interpreting service from Able Translations Ltd., that helps patients who come into the hospital who do not speak the native language of the doctors. The ability for patients and health care professionals to communicate and understand each other is key to a positive patient experience and receiving the right treatment.
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eBay Offers a Translation App For Your Listings
Jan 18th
In an effort to expand the reach for its sellers globally, eBay is now incorporating an third party translation app for its listings. The app lets sellers translate item listings and descriptions on eBay for use on several of its associated national sites.
The site offers two translation options, machine and human. The more basic machine translation is a computer generated translation, similar to Google Translate. However, this more often than not, will provide a translation that is not 100% perfect, hence the lower cost.
For a higher rate, sellers can choose to go with the more expensive option which uses human translator services to provide a professional and grammatically correct translation. While this costs more, it may be more beneficial in the long run since many people may feel apprehensive about purchasing from a seller with a poorly translated item, as they may fear it is not a trustworthy source.
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Starting a start-up
Jan 14th
But if you want to build a feature that pretends to be a product that pretends to be a “startup” and you want to raise a bunch of cash from douchebags in order to flip it to Google or whomever in 18 months— then the valley is the only place to do that. - Jessica Darko“
It’s New York, baby. Everyone is here if full of crap. Fake people, searching fake opportunities, making fake friends, earning fake living.
What is happening since 2007?
I think Amazon Web Services has done more damage to the tech industry, than any other technology altogether. On top of it, all these Android and iOS app have sparked such a huge demand of IT, that companies no longer can outsource it to India and have to scramble to find local talents. Big companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook all opened up offices in Manhattan. The NYC despite being a huge city has become a desert when it comes for the search of talent. Clueless, would-be, so-called programmers ask for 100K starting salaries. They can’t program. They just want the money.
Year 2012.
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Text to Speech Goes Social with The Social Radio
Jan 13th
The new startup company, The Social Radio, brings the functionality of text to speech to Twitter, allowing you to listen to your twitter feed as if it was a radio broadcast. Right now, The Social Radio is available only as a free Android app, with iOS and Blackberry apps in the works.
The app can be used when you’re at work, jogging, or what I think is most important, while driving in your car. Since the social networking world has taken over our interests and attention, it’s become increasingly dangerous for smart phones in the car for people who can’t bear to miss out on anything happening online. With this app, you can listen to your Twitter updates without having to take your eyes off the road.
Currently the website is in private Beta, so you must go to their website and enter your email to be invited to use their service. All you need to do is download it and sign in with your Twitter account. The Social Radio will start reading your tweets aloud, with a few seconds delay compared to your timeline. In between tweets, you can also listen to music from your own library. If you’re in the US, you can also stream tracks from Google Music.
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East Coast vs. West Coast 2.0
Jan 12th
In the 90′s we had Notorious B.I.G. vs. Tupac leading the East versus West feud. In today’s tech culture, we have website companies duking it out in the Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley feud.
Staff at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School have summed up the promising new companies coming from each location in the graphic above.
Silicon Alley (New York) is the newcomer to the country’s technological petri dish, but it is gaining momentum fast. Although it is the underdog at this point compared to California, New York stands to become on par with Silicon Valley as one of the nation’s leading areas for entrepreneurs in tech innovation.
In the last year, New York has increased its digital groundwork substantially by welcoming prestigious startup accelerator TechStars, opening new offices for Twitter and Facebook and announcing plans for a 2.1-million-square-foot Cornell tech campus.
According to New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, “We understand that we will not catch up to Silicon Valley overnight,” he said in a speech to the business community. “Building a state-of-the-art campus will take years, and attracting a critical mass of technology entrepreneurs will take even longer. But — as with everything we have done — we are taking the long view.”
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Google Mistranslates the Malaysian Government’s Website
Jan 11th
Malaysia’s defense ministry has recently used Google Translate’s free translation tool to translate their official website from Malaysian to English. As a result (of course) many of the words were mistranslated, often humorously, much to the chagrin of Malaysian officials.
Defense minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi admitted the inaccurate translations caused much embarrassment to the ministry, Malaysia’s The Star reported. “We have corrected the mistakes and translations are no longer done that way. “It is now done manually,” Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said here yesterday.
But not before many of the more humorous translations made it around Facebook and Twitter.
One such example was the phrase “pakaian yang menjolok mata,” which means revealing clothes in Bahasa Malaysia, which was translated as “clothes that poke eye.”
‘Sign’ of the Times
Jan 10th
At a recent developers event in Tel Aviv, a concept gadget was introduced that could help the hearing impaired communicate with those unfamiliar with sign language.
Three developers, Oleg Imanilov, Zvika Markfield, and Tomer Daniel, have come up with a glove that interprets sign language and turns it into text using a custom Android app.
Sensors inside the glove pick up on the natural movements of the wearer’s hand when he or she is performing sign language. These movements are sent to the application, where it is then translated into text on the screen, allowing other people to read what the wearer is signing in written text.
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Translating the Web Through Education
Jan 9th
As we know, countries all over the world are now joining the web in mass numbers. While this is good for access to diversity of content and perspective, it lends itself to the difficult problem of language. As it stands, over half of the content on the web is in English. This leaves only a minimal amount of content to split among a dozen other languages. Conversely, English speaking users are left out of the new content added by foreign language users. The attempt to solve this language problem on the web is at the forefront of businesses, web developers and translation experts alike.
One new company believes they have found a way to help solve this issue, by combining education with translation. Founding their product on the principle that there are over one billion people worldwide that are learning a foreign language, with millions doing so using computer programs, Duolingo allows people to learn a foreign language while simultaneously translating web content.
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So, How Much Your Tiny Translation Business You Said Is Worth?
Dec 24th
The year is over and the most important question is not how much new technology you have developed. The main question is not how many emails or phone calls you have answered. The main question is not even how many Fortune 500 clients you have signed up. The main question is how much money your little translation company has made! It all boils down to cash, people. So, how our neglected translation industry stacks up among the US companies based on INC 500/5000 list? Take a look.
| 1283 | G3 Translate | 225% | $2.8 million |
| 1474 | Global Language Solutions | 190% | $9.9 million |
| 1517 | SignTalk | 183% | $4.1 million |
| 1886 | Language Services Associates | 137% | $26.8 million |
| 2230 | CyraCom International | 111% | $37.4 million |
| 2328 | Welocalize | 104% | $59.6 million |
| 3117 | CETRA Language Solutions | 64% | $3.8 million |
| 3202 | Universal Language Service | 61% | $5 million |
| 3216 | TransPerfect | 61% | $251.2 million |
| 3338 | ProTranslating | 55% | $11.1 million |
| 3548 | U.S. Translation | 48% | $2.2 million |
| 3771 | Para-Plus Translations | 39% | $2.3 million |
| 3935 | Geneva Worldwide | 34% | $7.5 million |
| 4003 | Dynamic Language Center | 32% | $6.8 million |
| 4412 | Fluent Language Solutions | 21% | $5.9 million |
So, the average company is making like 29 million dollars in revenue. All these self-proclaimed analysts that say that Translation Industry is 30 billion worth are delusional. Really? Yep. Seem like so!
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