STAR TS Translation Services Blog

Visual Information can be amazingly informative and interesting. The other day I got to see this incredible video from Hal Rosling as part of the Joy of Stats BBC series.

It shows visually how 200 countries evolved in economic terms over the last 200 years. Interestingly the world is getting richer through globalisation but there are still some gaps between regions Asia/Europe and Middle East.  There are even some interesting differences between regions in the same country.

For people interested in global economics and how the world is changing this is a must see video. Another great job by the BBC.

This week I came across a little comma in the middle of a linguistic polemic.  It is amazing how many niche areas the English language can take you into. I thought I’d share this one as I found it interesting. Hope you do to.

The serial comma, also known as the Oxford Comma is the comma used before a coordinating conjunction which preceeds the last word of an enumeration (list, e.g: France, Spain and, Italy).

This punctuation rule, specific of the English language, is not used and accepted by all the English-speaking world. While it has become very common in the American and Canadian English and has been recognized by the Oxford University Press, it is still critized by purists.

In fact the main function of the oxford comma is a question of stylistics. It would improve the rhythm of the sentence and would resolve any possible ambiguity in the understanding of the sentance. However from a grammar point of view the coordinating conjunctions like “and” or “or”are precisely used to indicate the logical separation between words, and to mark the rhythm in the sentence. Thus the Serial Comma would be considered as redundant and useless. Moreover the journalist world is absolutly against making the comma redundant as they are constantly looking for an economy of space.

In short, it is interesting to see, that, a small comma that we might not have noticed, can emphazise the difficulty of the evolutions of a language as wide spread as English .

What do you think?

After attending The Docklands Business Forum social networking event last night for the first time I can say that positivity is ‘INFECTIOUS’.  And yes spot the new guy as I arrived 20 minutes early.

The Dockland Business Forum is a group full of like minded business people working together to promote a thriving business community across Dublin´s Docklands.

Guest speaker at the networking event, Bobby Kerr Chairman of Insomnia Coffee, presents ‘Down to Business’ a Sunday Business Breakfast show on Newstalk and is a ‘Dragon’ on RTE’s Dragons’ Den exudes positivity and charm and he transferred this positivity to each and every one of us at the event.

With his top 10 tips for success including be positive (surround yourself with positive people), have a plan, stick with it as it will get better, have a product or service that people want and will buy and get a mentor.

But for me ‘Stick with it as it will get better’ really stood out. It is this type of positivity that reassures businesses that sticking with it and face these hard times head on will eventually lead to better times and that you don’t have to do it alone as communities like the Docklands Business Forum allow all us to share and promote positivity. Successful business is all about community and people buy from people they like so positive networking encourages more open business.

Docklands Business Forum is always looking for new members. Get in touch at www.docklandsbusinessforum.ie and come along to the next networking event.

Dominick Branigan

STAR Translation Services

Business Development Executive

This month our newsletter focuses on services that can help you grow an international business. As a translation provider we are often asked for advice on a number of different areas from how to establish an overseas office to sourcing products in China.  Whilst our core focus is translation services we work with a variety of companies in many sectors.

This month we highlight two of them for you.

Doing global business…

Localization World Silicon Valley promises to be an exciting conference with great networking and business opportunities and many informative sessions.

As per previous years there will be  have a diverse program complete with lively social events and plenty of business opportunities. To relax the location lends itself to easy side trips along the California coast and points inland such as Napa Valley.

For more information on the event visit: Localization World.

The Hatton, London, 17th and 18th November 2011

Translating and the Computer 33 Conference Provisional Programme

The programme content has just been published for the ASLIB conference:

A new machine translation service for the European Commission
Spiridon Pilos, European Commission

Automatic translation tools at WIPO
Bruno Pouliquen, WIPO

NATO Terminology Programme and NATOTerm
Ian Jones, Chairman of NATO Translation & Terminology Systems Advisory Group (NTTS AG) and Chairman of Terminology Sub-Group of the NATO Standardization Staff Group

An introduction to Internationization Activity at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and its Working Groups, in particular with regards to HTML5 and its proposed changes to the markup used for internationalization
Richard Ishida, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Using seed terms for crawling bilingual terminology list from the Web: Analysing and diagnosing the system performance
Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo and Takeshi Abekawa, National Institute of Informatics

Machine Translation between Uncommon Language Pairs via a Third Common Language: The Case of Patents
Benjamin K. Tsou and Bin Lu, The Hong Kong Institute of Education

An effective Model for Insertion of Translation Technologies into US Government Translation Environments
Carol Van Ess-Dykema, National Virtual Translation Centre & John S. White, MITRE Corporation

And much more…

For more information on attending the conference contact Helen Evans at ASLIB.

Google recently announced it will shutoff its free translation API in favor of a paid version.

The information was quietly released on its API website:

Important: Google Translate API v2 is now available as a paid service. The courtesy limit for existing Translate API v2 projects created prior to August 24, 2011 will be reduced to zero on December 1, 2011. In addition, the number of requests your application can make per day will be limited. Google Translate API v1 will be shut off completely on the same date (December 1, 2011); it was officially deprecated on May 26, 2011.

Interestingly Google cited substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse for the decision. For website translations, they encourage you to use the Google Website Translator gadget.