Web Technos and Translation

Microsoft Translator Hub, where automatic translation helps endangered languages

2012-02-29T21:06:00.000+01:00

Beyond finely-tuned marketing slogans (“Where language meets the world”, “Bridging languages, cultures and technology”) and laudable intentions (“Microsoft Translator Hub is helping smaller languages thrive by putting the power to build machine translation systems in the hands of local communities”), What could be Microsoft's and its new Translator Hub's goals?

Kurrently, social search engine

2012-02-26T10:57:00.001+01:00

If the big search engines try to put their hand in the social search cookie jar, it is still quite difficult to keep an eye on what is said and what is done on social networks.

How to translate idioms

2012-02-19T11:49:00.000+01:00

Translating idioms is an exercise that cannot be improvised. A word-by-word translation is in the best case unsavory, and most of the time a complete nonsense.

For example, how can you translate the idiom to have a frog in one's throat?

Meet Volunia, a new search engine

2012-02-08T22:19:00.000+01:00

Launched yesterday (on February 7) in its test phase, Volunia, the new search engine which is a true hybrid of social network and search engine, brings some fresh air and innovative concepts in the world of on-line search.

Seet & Meek, or a Power User experience feedback in a connected mode.

Star Wars languages

2012-02-04T11:44:00.000+01:00

The Star Wars linguistic universe counts many languages, either original or pidgins, most of them developed by Ben Burtt, sound designer for the Star Wars movies, from real languages recordings (English, Quechua, Tibetan, Zulu). Thus we find Bocce, Ewokese, Gunganese, Huttese, Jawaese, Neimoidian, and Shyriiwook. Mandalorian, or Mando’a, is an exception as it has a real grammar developed by the author Karen Traviss, as well as a writing system.

French numerical idiomatic expressions

2012-01-29T20:13:00.000+01:00

Idiomatic expressions are locutions specific to a language, often colorful, and sometimes with the value of a popular saying. Most of the time, they cannot be translated word by word, but remain a good way to measure the cultural proximity of two languages. Besides, knowing the most used idiomatics of a language is a funny and interesting stage of its learning, as they tell a lot about its popular culture and its history rooted in a given time and place.

The evolution of web browsers

2012-01-22T10:06:00.000+01:00

This dynamic visualization shows on the same timeline the apparition of each main web browser and their different versions, highlighting the technologies they support (flash, CSS, ajax…) and the current acceleration of the HTML5 tags support. We can even see how the browsers interfaces looked like in the past.

Code-switching between English and Spanish

2012-01-14T18:16:00.000+01:00

Bilinguals, and multilinguals alike, often tend to switch between languages when the opportunity arises. While sometimes this phenomenon comes from an uneasiness in a specific situation when one language better fits the needs, it is always a sheer pleasure to speak in that intermingling mode with someone else who knows the involved languages. You can directly translate idiomatics which would not make any sense in the word-by-word translation but are a genuine word game you have to decipher in real-time. Most of the time, otherwise, multilinguals have to put strict barriers between each language, thus they kill this way that freedom of speaking in tongues which can be so joyful.

Advanced jQuery Form validation (4): Display error message for grouped fields

2012-01-08T12:08:00.000+01:00

After having discovered conditional triggers and learnt more about where to display error messages, we are going to display an error message for a group of fields.

In that example, two fields are related and at least one of them is required. In other words, each of those two fields is required if the other is empty. These two fields can be of any type, but we'll focus here on an input text and a textarea. Of course, we could have used a radio button to indicate that specific behavior, but we would like to keep it simple on the interface and limit the number of form elements.

Star Trek languages

2011-12-18T13:40:00.001+01:00

The linguistic richness of the Star Trek universe is particularly important, with three main languages: Klingon (designed by the linguist Marc Okrand), Romulan (or Rihannsu invented by the author Diane Duane), and Vulcan (developped by Mark R. Gardner). Those three artlangs have their own writing system, combining beauty and strangeness.

Check a chromosome region with jQuery validator

2011-12-10T20:20:00.001+01:00

A chromosome region is the part of a chromosome defined either by anatomical details, especially by banding, or by its linkage groups, and divided in bands and subbands. In other words, these regions have been defined to talk about the location of a gene. The regions p and q are respectivelly used for the short arm and the long arm of the chromosome.

Here are some examples of chromosomal regions: 13q14, 1p12, 1p12.3

1p12.3 means on the short arm (p) of the chromosome 1, region 1, band 2, subband 3.

Hyphenation on the web

2011-12-04T12:49:00.001+01:00

Basically, hyphenation is the splitting of words with dashes at the end of text lines. By using it, the text displayed on the screen can by gracefully justified or lined-wrapped, and shown in a neat column.

Up to now, there were two ways to get them: either setting soft hyphens in HTML from the server side (telling the browser where it can cut words by inserting the  character) or using a javascript library to hyphenate your text on the client side. You can now do it directly with CSS3 styling.

Multilingual text alignment with Linguee

2011-11-27T11:42:00.001+01:00

Multilingual text alignment consists in putting face to face two texts in different languages. By text, we mean here any equivalent unity like a paragraph, a sentence, an expression or a word. This technique is used for automatic translation and gives its best results when the corpus is wide (to cover the maximum number of use cases, as it is a statistical approach) and the vocabulary reduced.

Advanced jQuery Form validation (3): Add conditional requirement rule for a set of checkboxes

2011-11-19T16:13:00.001+01:00

The third article of that series about advanced jQuery Form validation deals with conditional triggers. In that particular case, we have a conditional trigger displayed as a radio button that makes a set of checkboxes required when activated, and optional when not activated.

All the checkboxes share the same name checkBoxesName[]. Note the square brackets, as we handle them with PHP on the server side, and the grouping has to be done this way.

To apply a validation rule to the set of checkboxes, the square brackets have to be used, hence the simple quotes used to delimitate their name in form validator set of rules.

Counting in Salishan languages

2011-10-30T10:28:00.001+01:00

Spoken in southern British Columbia (Canada) and in the north of Washington, in Oregon, Idaho and Montana states in the U.S., the Salishan languages form a continuum of about thirty languages. If the situation is worrying for many of them, others are supported by their communities and are at different levels of use, education and revitalization.

Among them, we find the Comox (400 speakers), Halkomelem (200 speakers), Saanich (about twenty speakers), Squamish (about fifteen speakers) and Klallam (about ten speakers) languages.

Client experience and translation follow-up

2011-10-16T12:23:00.000+02:00

A translation project does not limit itself to an input text and an output translation. Even if the translation freelance offers on the web are only fighting over the price of the translated word, a real client experience needs to go further and to follow the project after its delivery.

In translation as in any other field, a satisfied client will think about us when new needs arise, or when one of their contacts ask for a good translator. Beyond that mere marketing point of view, a client is not a revenue source but a partner with whom we do business in an interdependent relationship. If they need us, we need them even more, as they can find other contractors a click away.

Advanced jQuery Form validation (2): Validate a date

2011-10-09T10:49:00.000+02:00

After checking a phone number against its international format, we will now check if a date entered as a string is valid.

We can of course use a date picker such as jQueryUI Datepicker to ease the user experience and with a nicer look and feel, but the aim of this example is to show you some advanced jQuery Form validation so we will use a very simple example. As a matter of fact, even with the aformentioned date picker, this control is still useful as your users can enter the date manually in your text input field.

Counting in Kanak languages

2011-10-01T11:30:00.000+02:00

Spoken in the New-Caledonia archipelago, the 28 Kanak languages belong to the Austronesian languages family. Among them, we find Nengone, Paicî and Nêlêmwa, which respectively count 9,000, 7,000 and 1,000 speakers older than 14 years.

Work for free

2011-09-25T11:15:00.002+02:00

Work for free of for a full price but never cheap.

Feelings localization in news perception

2011-09-15T21:22:00.000+02:00

Yahoo Canada is taking into account the sentiments its readers feel when they read their news.

The section entitled What do you feel about this article? invites the readers to categorize it into the following categories: happy, informative, odd, boring, angry, interesting, sad, and worried. Each feeling is illustrated with a Smiley and clarified by one word. The readers can fill their opinion and share it on the social medias (Facebook and Twitter), then browse the news according to the shared feelings.

Advanced jQuery Form validation (1): check a phone number format

2011-09-11T17:35:00.000+02:00

The jQuery Validation plugin is a very powerful plugin aimed at form validation.

Among its main features, you can create your own validating methods. In that example, we will check a French phone number against the international format.

French phone numbers are made of ten digits, starting with 0 (zero), grouped by two and usually separated by dots or spaces (e.g.: 01 23 45 67 89). In the international format, the country code for France (33) prefixes the actual phone number, and the first digit is set between parenthesis. For a better readability, we use the space character as separator (e.g.: 33 (0)1 23 45 67 89).

Automatic translation APIs and web forms

2011-09-03T17:45:00.000+02:00

With the Google translate API closing down as a free service on December 1, 2011 and its version 2 already implemented as a paid service, it is a good time to check what the concurrence has to propose.

Here is a list of automatic translation tools available at the moment:
Read more »

Poetic SEO

2011-08-27T17:58:00.000+02:00

Global thought of a local action, website promotion is an everlasting working process, each time thought again, never the same but always similar, with no fixed recipe but with adapted advices, a pinch of this, two drops of that, let it stew until it gets the consistence of a gravy, with no duration set beforehand.

Domain name with .fr extension

2011-08-23T19:35:00.000+02:00

So you want to buy a domain name with the extension .fr?

Everything is not allowed, as this extension is only available under conditions. In fact, to make up for cybersquatting and to allow a better representation of the French cities and communes, they are entitled to buy them first.