Critics say that the World Bank translation policy obscures public transparency of bank policy. Even though the World Bank Translation Framework is one of the largest and most sophisticated translation efforts on the planet, it is still not enough.
See translation.framework.supplemental.note.pdf for more information
The Bank Information Center, in a meeting with the World Bank on disclosure policy, argued that lack of translation blocked the view of Bank activities for non-English speakers.
…access to information in-country is often blocked by language barriers. When addressing the World Bank panel on Saturday, one Mexican colleague insisted that “it is inexcusable to claim that the cost of translation is the problem when the World Bank is loaning millions per project!” This sentiment was further underscored by a civil society colleague working on the [...]

Asian and Roman Character Sets struggle for orthographic dominance in East Asian Capital
Chinese, as written in China, was supposed to be as easy as “ABC” after the proletariats had seized control of the organs of state education and culture. From Mao on down, the Reds wanted to ditch old feudal Chinese characters and replace them with a modern scientific script, à la Romana.
But they ran out of shoe leather on this linguistic “Long March” that was never completed. Instead of making the Pin-Yin Romanization system the official script, the Party settled for a simplified set of Chinese characters, “Simplified” Chinese, as opposed to the “Traditional” script still used in Hong-Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere.
After years of back-and-forth, Jianhuazi zong biao, “Complete List of Simplified Characters” was settled in 1986. [...]

What is the nature of the bimodal bilingual brain? That’s the question at The Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience at San Diego State University, California. They are currently conducting research on the cognitive process of bilinguals who are working as interpreters.
As someone whose worked (and married) amongst these bilingual interpreter types for some two decades, I’ve sometimes come to question the very existence of “cognitive process.” Hopefully science will be able to settle this issue once and for all.
Below is a link that will allow interpreters to take a short online survey designed to provide new perspectives about the role of language direction in interpreters‘ work — specifically in experiences with interpreting between a native language and a target language.
Send an e-mail address to Brenda Nicodemus to receive [...]

How do you say that in Lenape? Lenape? You know, the language people spoke around New York for thousands of years before the Euros trashed it.
When 1-800-Translate was at the dining-room table stage of the business plan, we were working for a group of monument designers who had a commission to do a piece at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. We worked with Conwill DePace and Majozo who did these awesomely intricate sculptures with plenty of multilingual text, in this case, “Let Freedom Ring” in forty languages.
Of those forty languages, it turns out there was one language with two names, so we had a hole for another one, and not one on that long list originated in the Western Hemisphere. I suggested Mayan, with those horror-show glyphs (my favorites), [...]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13672-neanderthals-speak-out-after-30000-years.html
In the museum dioramas that instruct our collective imagination, the Neanderthals are big, hairy and mute. Well, if not mute, grunting. (Actually, I’m thinking of Rae Dawn Chong running circles around those hapless furwearers in Quest for Fire )
Okay, none of these guys would have made it into Harvard other than as legacies, but they were no slouches either, bringing home the Eohippus bacon every day back when tooth and claw really meant tooth and claw.
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice with a computer synthesizer. The size and shape of the Neanderthal larynx was inferred by a series of skull measurements.
“They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn’t have [...]

Some British scientists have programmed a computer to figure out what languages people are speaking by the movement of their lips. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090421205226.htm
Kind of useless at this point, but there are some interesting implications here.
Automatic lip reading, also known as automatic speech reading, is a growing branch of speech recognition technology. By monitoring a speaker’s lip movements and other related elements, software can interpret verbal messages when cross-talk or background noise interferes with listening comprehension.
Even when audio is good, visual data is a really important part of the communication agenda, and often telephone interpreters are left in the dark.
While computers can produce useful translations of written content, automated translation for audio interpretation has a long way to go. The applications I’ve seen start with voice recognition, transferring [...]

We are super-proud and super-serious about being the top rated language service provider for customer satisfaction.
And it’s not just good business: it’s good sanity. Because when you’re in the customer service business, customer satisfaction is very satisfying. And an unhappy client can really spoil your day.
Accordingly, we survey each client after every job, as part of our ISO 9001 process of continuous quality improvement. If we get a score lower than 7 out of 10, we automatically begin an ISO investigation. Cut to that time-honored stock footage of hook and ladder trucks squealing around corners, squad cars racing down the street, regular workflow pulled to the side of the street. Theatrical? Yes. But a great way to remind everyone what we are trying to accomplish and what is [...]