Sunday, November 23, 2008

Internet Translation Services

Svetlana questions Grigori ’s terminology  in  a report he is writing.

...

Svetlana:  I wonder if you are actually writing a report on “Machine Translation?”

Grigori: Hmm?

Svetlana: I mean, you are analyzing results of translations done by Excite, Babel Fish, Google and so on, but these are what we might call Internet Translation Services.

Grigori: Not MT?

Svetlana: MT is a mashup of hardware and software. Internet Translation Service is, on the other hand, a kind of user interface. You just type something in and translate it into another language. See, if you google it, you get all these references for ITS: Excite, Babel Fish are there but also Systran, Dictionary.com, Applied Language, WorldLingo, these names they come up with…

Grigori: Interesting what other services are tied to these translation sites. Here’s one advertising castles for sale in eastern Europe. And another one advertizing second passports.

Svetlana: Translation is a gateway. Reminds me of a nice homespun site that used to carry notices of upcoming conferences on language and linguistics. Run by a character called Roy. Nice chap, and he added a link to Russian aircraft for sale. We all have another string to our bow.

Grigori: We all have something else we’d rather be doing.

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3 Comments:

At November 25, 2008 at 5:53 PM , Blogger Zen said...

I wonder how valid the conclusions were, but Gallup did a poll a while that showed that 70-plus percent of the American workforce felt 'disengaged' at work. In Japan, the poll showed 90-plus percent. I think that work-environment and culture produces feelings of dissatisfaction and disengagement; but individuals can also produce that on their own.

Assuming that the world is an interesting place - even assuming that it always was interesting - one might ask how can people be made to see interest in their lives and their contribution to the life? In short, how can people become more engaged?

 
At November 25, 2008 at 5:56 PM , Blogger Zen said...

Although typos aren't interesting, I often do find that my own typos are rather consistent with the grammatical errors that are typical of native Japanese users of English. Significant, insignificant, maybe even interesting.

 
At November 25, 2008 at 10:54 PM , Blogger Barry Natusch said...

I saw a report recently on a company where employees were allowed to access their email and social networking sites freely during working hours. Claim was that the employees were more engaged and more productive than if these avenues were blocked off. I think the point was that work performance (eg sales) can be enhanced by contact outside the office.

 

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