Technology

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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/

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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.
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:
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Free and Open Source Translation Management System

As a follow-up to my presentations
1) LT-4: Free and Open Source Software for Translators
and
2) LSP-5: Manage Like a Pro: Translation Management

at the 2008 ATA Conference here is a note on a Free and Open Source Translation Management System:

As I mentioned during my talks there is a new enterprise class Translation Management System (TMS) about to be released under an open source license. If you are interested in this topic and/or software at all I encourage you to attend the GlobalSight Introductory Webinar on Nov. 24th at 4 PM GMT. This will give you a chance to view a demo and participate in a discussion on what is needed to make this open source TMS a success. They would love to get more participation from translators. The best way for you to get involved right now is to sign up on the website (http://www.globalsight.com/participate.html), so you can receive the latest news and updates. A more interactive website with discussion forums, blogs, etc. will be launched in December.

Another key event is the European GlobalSight Community Meeting, held at the LISA Forum Europe in Dublin on Thursday, December 11th starting at 9 AM GMT. Although LISA is helping promote this meeting, participants are not required to register (and pay) for the LISA conference if you want to just attend the meeting.

And lastly, I’m sure you are interested in downloading the application. I’m happy to tell you that the product will be available for download on January 5, 2009.

Thank you for your time.

P.S. I have no affiliation with Welocalize or GlobalSight other than as a supporter of Free and Open Source Software projects.