Nova Translation joined the panel titled “The Future of Translation” and the provided some very valuable information specific to industry.

On Wendesday at the Haliç Congress Center in İstanbul, the prime minister publicly announced the details of his long-anticipated crazy project, saying the government would create a new Bosporus in İstanbul. The new project, called Kanal İstanbul, seeks to fortify the city against natural disasters.

The prime minister said this was the project of the century. “İstanbul is the summary of Turkey. It is the heart not only of Turkey with its beauty, but of the entire world. Every service you take to İstanbul is a service done to Anatolia and Thrace and to humanity. Today, we are sharing the excitement of giving a new service to this amazing city.”

He said he has had the project in mind even before he served as mayor of the city. Erdoğan recalled that İstanbul had experienced a major catastrophe when the vessel M/T Independenta, a Romanian oil tanker, collided with a freighter in 1979 at the southern entrance of the Bosporus and exploded. The wreck of the Independenta burned for weeks, causing colossal air and marine pollution in İstanbul. Erdoğan said some past residents of İstanbul had dreamt of the project centuries ago. “I always wondered what we’d do if we had to face such a disaster again. The fire [on Independenta] burned for months. After I became prime minister, we toured the area from the air in helicopters with the transportation minister and mayor. We decided that Turkey had the power to carry out such a project. We have no problem whatsoever in terms of financing. We said Turkey deserves to enter 2023 [which will be the country's 100th anniversary] with such a major, crazy and wonderful project, and we took the step for this.”

He said the project was multi-dimensional, incorporating a variety of areas ranging from energy, transportation, urban planning, employment and even education. “This is an urban planning project, a family project, a housing project. Most importantly, this is an environmental project. It is a project to preserve İstanbul and its environs, its nature, sea and water resources, its green areas and its animal and plant life.”

Erdoğan stressed that the project has been on the table for a long time, adding that he and his team had worked on it meticulously. “To prevent any possible act of unfair practices, I will continue to keep the project’s exact location and its cost secret. I will not announce those details today.”

The prime minister said the location and the cost estimates for the project were more or less certain. “The surveying phase alone will take two years. It is only natural that such a gigantic project will be subject to geographic and cost changes during the process.”

“There are countless cities in the world where rivers pass through. But the only city in the world with a sea through it is İstanbul. With our project, İstanbul is now turning into a city with two seas through it. With this project, two peninsulas and one island will be formed. The Anatolian side is already a peninsula. But now there will be an island, and another peninsula. We are building a canal of approximately 45-50 kilometers in the west of İstanbul between the Black Sea and the Marmara.”

He said the water level of the canal would be about 25 meters, while the width of the water service will be around 150 meters. “The largest vessels of the world will be able to pass through. Land and rail transportation will not be interrupted in any way thanks to bridges we will build over the canal.” He said the earth and rubble from the construction would amount to millions of cubic meters, saying the excavated earth will be used in the construction of a large sea port and airport, adding that working mines near the project site were likely to be shut down. “This project greatly concerns İstanbul, our country and the entire world.”

Erdoğan said that the project will put an end to oil spills and other environmentally damaging accidents in the straits. “Accidents that occur from time to time have turned the Bosporus into hell. We are saving İstanbul, which accounts for 40 percent of Turkey’s national income from such a huge threat, and taking steps to ensure the safety of İstanbul residents and preserve our cultural assets. We are ending commercial traffic in the strait completely with Kanal İstanbul.”

He said 150 vessels on average will pass through the new canal, and the Bosporus will return to its glory as a natural center for water sports and for the city’s internal transportation.

Erdoğan said they also intended to open congress, festival, exhibition centers and sport facilities as well as new housing units. He also gave details on the planned airport, saying they were aiming to establish a new airport with a capacity of handling 60 million flights a year. “The canal area will be an attraction center for tourists, and the project will also turn the Bosporus into a center of attraction. The canal’s water won’t be still water. Kanal İstanbul will not damage İstanbul’s underground or aboveground resources. It will not in any way cause a water shortage problem in İstanbul.”

He also stated that the funding for the project had been secured. “There is absolutely no problem in financing the canal. A large number of scientists and experts from architects to engineers and archeologists will work in the survey phase in the first two years. We will be open to every constructive proposal during this phase. We will work together with our civil society organizations and universities.” Erdoğan said the government will mostly use land owned by the Treasury during the construction of the canal.
CHP response to project

Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu asked, “How is this a new project?” in his initial comments on the prime minister’s revelation. Kılıçdaroğlu said the idea of opening a canal that will connect the Marmara to the Black Sea to bypass the Bosporus strait has been a dream of many since the Ottoman times. “Compare our projects to those of the AK Party [Justice and Development Party]. The human is at the heart of our projects. The happiness of people. We want an order in which not even a single child has to go to bed hungry. Their projects are concerned with how to make their supporters richer, how to win contracts for them.” He said the CHP and the AK Party were as different as black and white in their way of thinking. “We hold the people of our country to be above anything else. This is who we are.” He said he hadn’t had the opportunity to get an aerial tour of the area, but reiterated that the human element cannot be found in any AK Party project. “If there was the human element, two-and-a-half month old Kübra wouldn’t have died of hunger in the arms of her mother. He says he’ll open a canal. First find a solution for Kübra. A two-and-a-half month old child died under their government. He [Erdoğan] could at least apologize. He won’t even do that; go ahead and announce your crazy project. We don’t need crazy men, we need thinking men in this country.”

“Istanbul will be one of the cultural capitals of the world with its assets, historical heritage and spirituality, which inspired our civilization based on tolerance and affection,” Turkish State Minister and Chief European Union Negotiator Egemen Bağış said.

He said the world had rediscovered Istanbul with the project, which began Jan. 16.

“It is unfair to define Istanbul as only the cultural capital of 2010,” Bağış said, noting the city’s other wealth of cultural assets. “This is not just a city. It is the identity of Turkey and a unique source of inspiration for peace, brotherhood, tranquility and tolerance.”

Bağış also noted that the U2 concert, which was organized as part of the Istanbul 2010 events in September, was a great opportunity to show Turkey’s new face and modern vision to the whole world.

Also speaking at the ceremony, Turkish State Minister Hayati Yazıcı said the main target of the events was to leave a mark on Istanbul’s culture and art life and make the projects sustainable in this aspect.

“The projects contributed to the international dignity of Istanbul and Turkey and provided opportunity for interaction among cultures,” the minister said.

He said the events were important for cultural economy and the promotion of Istanbul and Turkey and added that more than 600 projects had been undertaken as part of the events.

The Istanbul 2010 project was led by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Istanbul Governor’s Office and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and coordinated by the Istanbul 2010 Agency. Throughout 2010, many local and international artists and cultural groups have been guests of Istanbul for cultural events, exhibitions, concerts, visual arts, and etc.

Tallinn (Estonia) and Turku (Finland) will be the capitals of culture in 2011.

Source: hurriyetdailynews.com

Speaking to the Anatolia news agency, Professor Nevzat Gözaydın, the TDK’s Project Assessment Board head, said the society has decided to translate all works by foreign Turkologists into Turkish regardless of the original language they were written in. Stating that they have monthly meetings with TDK President Professor Şükrü Akalın and Professor Cengiz Tosun from Çankaya University to examine these works, Gözaydın said the project is being carried out by the TDK and financial support is being provided by the State Planning Organization (DPT).

Noting that they are working with experts experienced in the area of Turkology and who are proficient in both the language of the foreign sources and Turkish, he said they currently have draft translations and completed works in their hands. “Many scholars who are interested in Turkology, in particular those from Germany, England, Russia, France, Italy and other European countries, have conducted much research on Turkish and have published their work in their own languages. It is a must to publish them in Turkish as well. However, for years these works were left untranslated for various reasons. We will understand the value of these works only after they are translated into Turkish,” he said. In accordance with the project, the Project Assessment Board decides who will translate the works based on their experience and proficiency. After a trial translation, the board officially assigns the task to the translator if they are found to be proficient.

Source: www.todayszaman.com

Now linguistic diversity can be found in translation.

We live in a global village, and its name is Babel.

As information and communication technologies unite the world into a global village, so the diversity of our global linguistic landscape creates new barriers.

The smaller the world becomes the larger the language barrier looms.

Europe is an excellent example in microcosm. Political and social cooperation draw the diverse peoples of Europe ever-closer together, but language often separates them. Fully one half of the European population is incapable of conversing in a second language.

The issue is even starker on the World Wide Web, where English has become the lingua franca. But that status quo is under threat as China and India ramp up their scientific and engineering expertise and simultaneously produce more and more essential information in their native languages. How can we help people communicate now, and how can we overcome the emerging language barriers of the future?

Smart answers

The SMART project believes it has the answer. SMART stands for Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation, and the project sought to make statistical methods a viable alternative to current paradigms. In just three years the project has made the technology a robust alternative.

Machine translation is not new. In fact it is one of the oldest problems in computer science. “It was one of the first problems tackled, with work starting in the 1950s,” notes Nicola Cancedda, researcher with Xerox and coordinator of the SMART project.

“Trained bilingual linguists would encode the rules of given languages into a computer program, and the software would use these rules to offer a best-guess at a particular translation.”

Statistical machine translation is not new either. It began in the early 1990s and lets a machine ‘learn’ translation between two languages by looking at thousands of real translations. SMART took that work further by producing robust technology that can match the state of the art in traditional methods. But their platform has not yet had the ‘fine-tuning’ applied to traditional techniques, and so SMART has opened the way to a very promising research path in statistical machine translation.

Inspirational in a network

Their work was inspired in large part by the efforts of the Pascal Network of Excellence (NoE), which sought to develop cooperative ties among Europe’s leading players in pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning.

“Seven out of our ten partners come from the PASCAL NoE,” reveals Cancedda, “And the impetus for the SMART project came from PASCAL’s work. We sought to develop more effective statistical learning methods, apply them to machine translation, and then prove the platform through rigorously measured case studies.”

Those case studies focused on computer-aided translation (CAT) and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Computer-aided translation is used by professional translators, with the software suggesting possible translations for individual sentences in the target language.

“In our case study, the SMART platform increased words per hour by 5 to 40 percent. Most interestingly, the greatest improvement was seen among the slowest translators,” stresses Cancedda.

Enormous boost

This result alone represents an enormous boost in productivity and justifies the project’s work. But SMART went much, much further.

While CAT might have the largest commercial potential, the project’s work on CLIR will probably have the widest societal impact. CLIR takes place where people try to acquire information from a foreign language document. In the SMART case study, Slovene students, with varying competence in French, sought to extract information from the French Wikipedia.

In the project’s subsequent tests, students using SMART’s CLIR system could answer a significantly higher number of questions accurately than those students using currently available tools.

Another allied work effort saw SMART develop confidence estimation to accompany the statistical machine translation. The confidence estimate indicates the likely appropriateness of the translation.

“This is an essential element,” emphasises Cancedda, “Because software providing inaccurate translations is worse than no translation. A translator is better off working alone with his or her dictionary than reading and correcting inaccurate suggestions.”

What makes this work even more valuable is that it could be applied to existing software to make that software even more accurate. Confidence estimation was also an important, and exciting, technical challenge in itself. How do you teach a machine to assess itself?

Back to statistical methods

Again, statistical methods are applied, and the relevance and power of SMART’s confidence estimation varies enormously between different texts. The questions of context and specialist knowledge play a huge role.

Although these are early days in the technology’s development, it can already achieve up to 90 percent estimated confidence in some cases – nine out of ten machine translated sentences are relevant.

In any case, SMART also advanced new research to tackle the problem of context. “Imagine you have a million sentences on one topic, say software. In this case, you can easily use statistical machine learning to create a statistical machine translation software for that topic,” argues Cancedda.

But what if you only have several thousand sentences on another topic, for example airport computer security systems? “In this case, it is difficult to do statistical machine learning. You do not have a sufficiently large sample,” says Cancedda.

“So we developed a tool that can learn the bulk of its translation from one set of documents, and then be specialised to a particular topic with another, much smaller, set of documents. It is not perfect yet but early work shows that this approach could be very promising.”

Real-time learning

And finally, SMART’s last contribution to statistical machine translation is perhaps the most valuable, particularly in cases where only a small set of initial translations exists. SMART developed real-time learning tools that can ‘teach’ software new terms and translations.

“Normally, software is developed and that is the way it will stay for months or years. We have developed tools where the software learns all the time, so it becomes much, much better over time, and so much more valuable,” states Cancedda.

It is a packet of results for a three-year project with just a €3.5 million budget, €2.3 of it from the EU, but it illustrates the kind of focused research that can emerge from a Network of Excellence.

Now, elements of the SMART software will begin appearing in commercial products, notably those supplied by SMART partners Xerox and Amebis. Two open source machine translation systems developed in the STREP – the Sinuhe and the Max-Margin Based Translation (MMBT) systems – were released to the research community and are available for download from the project website.

In all, it means that our global village will be found, rather than lost, in translation.

The SMART (STREP) project received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

“GALA 2009: The Language of Business. The Business of Language.” is our association’s first step towards creating a new “must do” industry-wide event. GALA is moving to emulate that which works well for the vast majority of successful trade associations. It is our goal to create an umbrella event that invites all segments of our industry into “the tent” so that we can learn and share and network with one another.

Our industry must move away from the current glut of far too many small overlapping and often repetitive meetings. Great meetings offer a broad palette of workshops, education, services and networking opportunities. Great meetings include the large and small players in the industry, and by their nature they bring larger and more diverse audiences to all of those partners in the industry.

It is ironic that our first step simply creates another meeting in an already overcrowded field; some observers have focused on that apparent contradiction. The simple truth is that you cannot get to step two without taking step one. I expect the GALA annual meeting will attract thousands of attendees several years down the road but you don’t just snap your fingers and put on a great event. You build it.

It is important to remember that this “new” event is the result of a long and involved survey and planning process on the part of GALA’s membership that came together in a 2007 document called the 2010 Plan. That document outlined core actions that our member companies determined were necessary for our association and our industry to grow. At the base of that plan is a belief that “a rising tide raises all ships” along with a desire from our membership to develop and manage our own industry events. We all know that we are still a low-visibility industry. We know that many thousands of potential end users would benefit from our products and services but they don’t know who we are or what we do. Great meetings not only allow us to communicate with each other, they allow us to tell our story to the world.

Our program committee of Aki Ito, Kim Harris, Hans Fenstermacher and Kevin Fountoukidis is focused solely on developing great workshops for this event. Our board and program committee are currently reviewing a remarkable group of potential keynote speakers. We recognize that modern associations address the needs of the entire person and we have made this meeting both user friendly and family friendly. It is a good thing for great meetings to also be fun. It is smart to be family friendly. And it is smart to be in a beautiful location that encourages networking and communication.

We are building something new here and I invite all of you to join us. I want you to be a participant but I hope you will also be an architect as you contribute your ideas as to how we will make GALA 2010 better, bigger and even more valuable to you individually. I hope to see you in Cancun.

Please visit our event Web site at www.language-of-business.org.

Best regards,

James F. Hollan III, CAE
Executive Director
Globalization and Localization Association

GALA is pleased to announce the dates for its first annual conference and exhibition.

GALA 2009: The language of business. The business of language.
14 – 16 September 2009
J. W. Marriott
Cancun, Mexico

We hope that you and your colleagues will plan to join us for GALA’s first major event.

Location: Cancun, Mexico
More Information: www.language-of-business.org

The new center is part of IBM’s strategy to set up similar centers in Europe and Asia that will offer document translation in multiple languages, an IBM spokeswoman said on Monday.

Besides having staff translate documents, such as e-mail messages, Web pages, and contracts, the center in Pune will also use technology developed by IBM’s research lab in India, and tools available in the market, to automate some of this translation work, she added.

The center will be part of IBM’s fourth delivery center for application services and consulting in Pune, inaugurated Monday. The new Pune center is spread over 180,000 square feet and will house close to 2,000 employees once fully staffed, IBM said.

IBM has been expanding fast in India, and at the end of December it had 73,000 staff in the country.

The IMTT Conference has become the most innovative training event in Latin America, offering the opportunity to share knowledge, network, and learn in an environment of collaboration.

Participate actively in our next meeting and join the industry experts for an enriching debate and take advantage of the best business and networking opportunities. This is your chance to get to know your future clients and vendors, promote your company, reinforce sales and increase your business. Get involved.

http://www.imtt.com.ar