Global Translations Weblog

Beolingus.de is a leading German <> English free online dictionary. Established in 1995, Beolingus is the brain child of an elite team at the Chemnitz University of Technology (http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/en/). GTS has recently collaborated with Beolingus to provide a new German-English dictionary of telecommunications terms. You can see this dictionary on http://beolingus.de/de-en/lists/telco.html.

The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery has recently chosen GTS to translate a series of medical articles on a wide range of ophthalmology studies in areas such as photorefractive Keratectomy (PRK) and in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). Articles were translated from German, Chinese, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Hungarian and Czech into English. All translations were done by subject matter experts with experience in medical translation and in translation of Ophthalmology materials. The company has experience in this field, including a project for a Carl Zeiss-affiliated company that develops computerized ophthalmic diagnostic devices.

The Iraq Analysis Group had a write-up on the use of automatic machine translation software for Iraqi media analysis. You can find it on http://www.iraqanalysis.org/info/449.

GTS has added a new language identification tool to our website. The free tool can be found on http://www.gts-translation.com/language_identification.asp. All you need to do is paste in your foreign language text, such as an email message or web content, and the tool tells you which language the text is written in. The tool also returns other valuable information such as the recognition accuracy and other languages in the same language family.

Following the release of its online translation system in September 2007, Microsoft has now released a translation tool that allows you to translate your web pages into different languages for free. You can obtain the free code for the tool by going to http://translator.live.com/AddIn.aspx. After testing and evaluating Microsoft's tool, one might ask how a company like Microsoft could release such an inferior, sub par product. It not only features a highly flawed design concept, it is riddled with bugs as well. Once you install the tool, it provides a pulldown menu with the phrase "translate this site" in each native language. Since the initial language displayed is Arabic, it appears unclear how anyone besides Arabic readers will know what to do. Additionally, translating a page is a cumbersome 2-step process: you need to first select the language and then click a small arrow icon. And since the tool offers no instructions or intuitive ...

Oceanside California-based Chatstat has launched a live chat service in over 16 languages, using technology by LEC. Using this tool, which combines instant messaging with machine translation, websites and virtual stores can provide live service and support to clients in another language even if they do not speak it. The support desk can enter their response in English and have it sent translated to the client. The client's response will then arrive translated into English back at the help desk. For more information on this tool, visit http://www.chatstat.com.

AOL announced that it will be expanding by launching Hindi and Tamil language versions of its Indian portal in an attempt to increase its market share with India's rapidly growing online audience. According to CEO Randy Falco, AOL is extending its reach into seven new countries this year while globalizing product development efforts. By the end of next year, AOL will have a presence in 30 countries. India is seen as one of the fastest growing Internet communities, and the Indian government has made broadband penetration a high-priority. Industry experts say that it could surpass the U.S. by 2009.