Archive for Languages

Matthew Connaughton | August 10, 2009
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For the grade A, B, C or D, answer A, B, C or D…

Interesting story in The Telegraph about a school not too far away from Applied Language Solutions Head Office (no connection!), that has suspended five teachers for helping pupils to pass language examinations.

The language specialist high-school in Little Lever, near Bolton, will also withhold results for papers submitted for French, German and Spanish examinations.

Encouraged? Cheating pupils reportedly aided by teachers!

Nothing to do with us: ALS does NOT condone cheating, even when copying Martin Prince!

James Stangroom, Applied Language Solutions Director of Interpreting Services, had this to say about the reports:

“Anyone who works with languages will know just how important self-development is for those who eventually come to make a living from their language skills. It’s interesting that these reports are about a specialist language school, so it would be a shame if they had any truth in them.”

Applied language offers professional language courses and has over 14,000 linguists based worldwide who provide translation and interpreting.

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Category: Languages | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Matthew Connaughton | August 7, 2009
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Gaelic translation for Scottish Parliament, via India

Just seen a report that Scottish Parly chiefs have gone and outsourced a Gaelic Translation project to a company based in India – via a UK based company (!) – only to use locally sourced linguists (local to Scotland) for the job. This is despite Holyrood employing two in-house Gaelic speakers, of course, prompting the Sun to cover the story.

Applied Language Solutions founder and CEO, Gavin Wheeldon gave his reaction;

“Even we have an office in India, but you can source linguists from anywhere in the world. You would have thought a domestic company would have the capacity to finish such a job without farming it out.” He goes on to add..

Scotland, India: (Very) close ties

Scotland, India: Very close ties

“With regards the cost, I would suggest this is an attempt just to get the business – so you might want to question the quality of a translation at that price. That said, there is quite a myth around the costs involved in translation in that it can actually be very cheap if you know how to find the right linguists – but you certainly don’t have to go halfway round the world to do it.”

Applied Language Solutions has over 14,000 in-country linguists. Amongst the 150 + languages they cover include the Irish, Scottish and Manx variants of Gaelic.

See the full story in The Sun

Category: Languages, Translation Mistakes | Tags: , , , , ,
Matthew Connaughton | August 3, 2009
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A sad day indeed as spammers go multilingual…

Whilst the boundless choice of language from spammers may be annoying/offensive/hilarious (or all three), reports over the weekend claim that spammers are now using machine translations to bolster sales. So, quite serious then…

Due to the rise in popularity of machine translation, it has at last found its way onto the workflow of the spammer – making emails for all things “extra inches” a truly universal gripe – with major European countries reporting a 95% spam rate!

Universal gripe - multiningual spam

Universal gripe: Multilingual spam

In response to the news, John Dixon, Translation Service Delivery Director at Applied Language says: “Machine translation gives you about 75% accuracy, but it can’t recognise context, so this has the potential to be a really worthless move for spammers.  Of course, with some of the reported margins involved in spamming, translating mass mailers was always a no-brainer. You can’t help but wonder then, why they haven’t employed a professional translation company for marketing translation – or even post editing machine translation.”

Indeed! Though it’s very useful for individual word references, machine translation has yielded some examples you really couldn’t make up.  Amongst the few recent spams we’ve heard of so far (please feel free to add any others in the comments section), the viagra pill that “leaves you nothing to hope for!” was one of the funniest – and most honest!

Read the full story here.

Category: Languages, Machine Translation, Translation Mistakes | Tags: , , ,
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