Incentive to incorporate

Ever thought of incorporating? I thought I’d pass this on in the spirit of stimulating the economy. Note that through this promotion MyCorporation waives the US$149 service fee for filing all the paperwork (researching what and how to file, checking the company name for availability, providing customized and editable internal operating documents, providing customized stock or membership certificates) you need to found your new company (LLC or corporation) – I have no affiliation with the company:

Form a Free Corporation or Free LLC

MyCorporation.com, the leader in online incorporation, is offering its filing services free of charge when you form a corporation or limited liability company at their website between December 1 – 5, 2008. Now that’s economic stimulus! Bookmark this web site so you won’t miss out.

P.S. Please check out the Thoughts on Translations blog post on incorporating at http://thoughtsontranslation.com/2008/09/26/some-thoughts-on-incorporating/

Automatic message translation in Gmail

Well, it’s finally here: Automatic message translation in Gmail.

History
After having had automatic translation of instant messages in Google Talk since December of 2007, and automatic translation of news feeds in Google Reader since November of 2008, Google today introduced automatic translation of email messages in Gmail.

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-30

TinEye

At first blush, a site like TinEye may seem like a frivolous waste of time. TinEye is Idée’s image identification-based web search engine, currently in beta. It allows you to upload an image from your local hard drive or point to a remote image using its URL address. After a second or two

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-23

Fun with Machine Translation: Instant Messaging with Instant Translation

As their website proclaims, “MeGlobe™ is fun and easy to use”. While employing machine translation may be fun to use in an instant messaging environment to talk to friends or acquaintances around the globe, it may also turn into funny which is why it made today’s column Frivolous Friday Fun.

Value Proposition

Over time this IM clients will get smarter and their value proposition can no longer be ignored. You can “just type in your own language and MeGlobe™ instantly translates your message into the language of your chat buddy!” One can only hope that with MeGlobe™ you don’t get ‘lost in translation.’

Try it out yourself

If you want to try out IM Chat with Language Translation, check it out at:
http://meglobe.com/

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-09

Connotation analysis

While reading about the new Palm Pre which runs on Palm’s new operating system WebOS, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday I came across a posting “Palm’s new OS and the importance of connotation assessments” on ProZ.com by contributor Claudia Alvis.

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-02

Happy New Year! Let’s start the year off right with some humor – in case you have never visited Engrish.com, do yourself a favor now and check it out!

http://engrish.com

P.S. Some may not be safe for work (NSFW), so caveat emptor.

Mobile Wikipedia

Wikipedia Goes Mobile

The Wikimedia Foundation has released a mobile version of the Wikipedia encyclopedia or Mobile Wikipedia at http://mobile.wikipedia.com .

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2008-12-19

What do you call Crowdsourcing in Germany?

Europeana reopened

Reopening

While this may already be old news to some, I have not seen any articles at least this side of the Atlantic about the reopening of one of the most ambitious digitization projects in history: the Europeana.

The origin of the Europeana is truly unifying: “The idea for Europeana came from a letter to the Presidency of Council and to the Commission on 28 April 2005. Six Heads of State and Government suggested the creation of a virtual European library, aiming to make Europe’s cultural and scientific resources accessible for all.” Not only is this new resource a great information resource portal, but one of its lofty goals is the enablement of new business models: “The European Commission’s goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. It will build on Europe’s rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.” The types of long-term benefits of the project, of course, remain to be seen. Given how long the current poor economic climate lasts we should cross our fingers for continued funding of this and other projects like it.

History

According to press reports, the Europeana had been opened about a month ago on Nov. 20, 2008, amid great fanfare, announcing a new open source library. It promptly crashed due to the high demand on its servers: 10 million hits per hour. What is of great interest to translators as well as other language enthusiasts and what makes this project even more ambitious is the fact that at the time of this writing it is available in 25 languages, as there are:

Frivolous Friday Fun: 2008-12-12

Check out this clever ad (requires the latest Adobe Flash plugin):
http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii
which promptly got imitated – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery:
http://games.yahoo.com

Enjoy your Friday.