"Machine translation technology has made major progress over the past decade," said Jing Zheng, Ph.D., leader of SRI's BOLT initiative and program director in SRI's Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory.

NTT Docomo will conduct a second trial of an experimental cloud-based service for real-time interpretation between Japanese and other languages via mobile devices. The trial is scheduled to take place from 1 June to 30 September.

According to the UNESCO Index Translation, Arabic translation has been so low to the extent that, out of top 50 languages it is the 17th language being translated to other languages, and 29th target language (translations to Arabic).

The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards (BTBA) for fiction and poetry were announced during a ceremony held on May 4 at McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

The last few years have seen a growing demand for language interpreting services, driven partly by an increase in immigration to the U.S. over the last few decades, but also because of a recent boom in international business transactions with countries such as China, Japan, India and South Korea. In fact, more than 2,600 translation and interpreting companies now make up what is estimated to be a $3-billion industry, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

We recently reported that Translators without Borders, the U.S.-based charitable organization that facilitates the transfer of knowledge to those in need, had received a $10,000 donation to further its work in fighting language discrimination. Now the non-profit organization has announced the opening of its first Healthcare Translation Center to improve access to knowledge for millions of people.

Using the new feature, when a Gmail user receives an email in a foreign language, the recipient can easily translate the unknown language into their native tongue with a single click. By selecting the Translate message option in the header of the email, an English-speaking user can easily read an email that was sent in Japanese, for example.

Voci™ Technologies Inc. has announced that it has been selected by the United States Army to develop a prototype system to perform language identification of six target languages in real time, and in a single pass. The languages include Arabic, English, Farsi, Iraqi Arabic, Pashto, and Urdu.

Mireya Maria Averado, 65, was shot and killed during a robbery of her food truck early Sunday morning around 2 a.m. on 5021 East Colonial Drive, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

Six years ago Google first announced their approach to statistical machine translation and the company has since focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. Today Google can translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.

The Los Angeles area is home to the largest population of Armenians living in the United States. So it seems appropriate that the city’s election materials should be translated into Armenian. At least this is the view expressed by two members of the city council, one of whom happens to be of Armenian descent.

Bogdan Wilk, a 54-year-old resident of Preston, was being detained at a police station following his arrest on suspicion of assault. But what the police did not know at the time was that Mr. Wilk, who apparently did not speak English, suffered from a serious heart condition and had undergone two operations since surviving a heart attack in 2007.

UNESCO chose April 23 to celebrate World Book and Copyright Day as it also marks the day in 1616 that Britain’s William Shakespeare, Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes and the Peruvian writer “El Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega all died. The prominent writers Vladimir Nabokov, Halldór Laxness, Josep Pla, Maurice Druon and Manuel Mejía Vallejo were also either born or died on this day.

The study, conducted at two pediatric ERs and published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, found that mistakes which could have "clinical consequences," like giving the wrong dose of medication, were about twice as likely if there were no medical interpreters or if the translator was an amateur.

Amazon has just announced an update to its Amazon Kindle Touch 5.1 OS. The new firmware allows you to quickly and easily transition between portrait and landscape mode in books and PDFs, making it much easier to read maps, graphs and tables.

The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is a yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation campaign on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers and system descriptions are presented. The workshop will take place this year in Hong Kong on December 6-7, 2012.

With the increasing popularity and accessibility of web-based machine translation tools, some have begun to question if human translators are indeed essential for the language translation process. In short, can the work of human translators be better accomplished by a machine?

If you’re a frequent international traveler you may find this interesting and useful. Let’s say you’re at a restaurant in a foreign country and you’re having trouble with the menu. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just whip out your iPhone or iPad and scan the menu for an instant translation – even if the restaurant had no Wi-Fi?

Translators without Borders, a U.S.-based charitable organization that facilitates the transfer of knowledge to those in need, has announced its first Platinum Sponsor. Elanex, a global translation technology and services provider, has donated $10,000 to the non-profit organization which is dedicated to fighting language discrimination.

As the United States and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical. While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops.

Jèrriais is the traditional language spoken on the Channel Island of Jersey, a crown dependency located off the French coast of Normandy. A variety of the ancient Norman language, Jèrriais has been the dominant language of Jersey, but the past century has seen a steady decline in its use. The two official languages of Jersey are English and French.