SDL, one of the big three in the language biz, paid $42.5 M for Language Weaver a few weeks ago.
Language Weaver, a statistical machine translation provider, is funded with spook money and is a creature of big defense spending on language automation. It is a money loser. As a business plan, this seems to work fine when funded by US taxpayers, but even the patience of defense spenders wears thin, and these guys have been losing money for a long time.
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results,” said Dr. Ray Stantz of Ghostbusters fame.
The guys at Language Weaver [...]

“If you’re not a monkey, stop working for peanuts!” say the guys at No Peanuts! for Translators, which provides “support and resources to professional translators and interpreters in demanding and receiving a living wage for their work.”
“No Peanuts! means refusing to believe that translators are powerless. No Peanuts! means rejecting the notion that translators must kowtow to so-called ‘market demand’ as if we had no ability to create our own markets. No Peanuts! means insisting that we need not live in fear or accept exploitation in exchange for the right to earn a living in our chosen field.”
Translators of the world unite!  Standing up against the machines, against the mega-agencies like TransPerfect, who “have helped turn the client-provider relationship inside out.  Many clients have followed their lead and now assume they have the [...]

Jeronimo Ramirez Martinez is accused of stabbing and dismembering his roommates with a grape knife in Madera, California earlier this year. But for reasons of language, any conviction could be easily challenged, according to Legal Analyst Tony Capozzi. Martinez speaks Trique, a Mixtecan language spoken by about 15,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico. During proceedings, a Trique interpreter was required to interpret into Spanish, so that the Spanish court interpreter could interpret into English.
Capozzi says that could present serious problems. “With the two interpreters it will slow the trial. The other problem is if he’s convicted he has a wonderful ground for an appeal to have this case reversed by making the allegation that what [he] thought was going on in court [was] not what really happened.”
As Mexican migration to the US has increased [...]

A few weeks ago, Lionbridge, the biggest LSP in the business, signed a multi-year software technology exclusive to offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based, text-to-text language automation  solutions to commercial clients based on IBM’s Real Time Translation Service (RTTS) technology.
The press is that it’s a game-changer. “The strategic agreement is expected to produce a real-time multilingual communication solution that can increase the efficiency of global business operations, and help organizations become more interconnected by enabling rapid exchange and understanding of critical information.  The offering also will enable clients to access and take action on data and information that presently is unavailable due to language barriers.  Unlike free-ware translation applications, the combined solution can be customized using each client organization’s existing content and configured for specific business processes to increase translation quality and availability.”
That smells like [...]

In the translation struggle between man and machine, it is love that will conquer, proclaimed Z, the translator formerly known as Jost Zetzsche, at the keynote speech of the American Translators Association Translation Company Division (ATA-TCD), held in Phoenix the weekend before last.
Jost, I mean Z, is the author of the Tool Kit, an online newsletter that is a must-read for any translator or language service provider concerned about the interface between translation technology and their paycheck. And while I’m plugging this guy, also check out Translator Training, a handy summary of available technology. When you do, my advice is to place a window over that GIF of a swinging Jeromobot to avoid hypnosis-driven purchases of translation technology tools.
Which was kind of the point of Z’s presentation. Machine translation to [...]

Machine translation technology is available for free on the Internet.
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all provide free translation of any text using their computer-based translation technology.
Google has announced that documents stored in Google Docs can now be translated and shared with others. Microsoft also announced that you can integrate its translation technology into Office 2007 to translate entire documents.
We used to offer free translation at 1-800-Translate but stopped years ago. I’m thinking of starting again. With all these new solutions available, I’m sure people are using it differently than they used to. I’m trying to figure out how. Tell me what you are looking for and I’ll see if I can come up with the machine translation field of your dreams.
How do you use MT? What do you want to use [...]