What's your favourite word?
posted Fri, 2012-03-09 12:02 by
They’re the building blocks of language, and are constantly being invented in every living language. Last year, around 400 new words were added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. And that’s not to count old words that take on new meanings, such as "follower" and "tweet".
Here at Lingo24, we're a little bit geeky about languages! We love finding new and unusual words, including ones that can be tricky to translate. If all languages had exact literal equivalents for words, then translation might be easier, but it’d be a lot more boring.
tags: favourite word, languages, Translation
Celebrating world languages
posted Tue, 2012-02-21 12:31 by
It might be overshadowed by Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations this year, but today is International Mother Language Day. Founded by UNESCO, it’s a day to celebrate the roughly 7000 different world languages, and promote the benefits of multilingualism.
Here at Lingo24, our slogan is “love your language” whether that’s Romanian, Tagalog or English! We’re passionate about languages, and believe they’re more than just a way of communicating.
tags: international mother language day, Translation, world languages
Where are the best global web marketing opportunities in 2012?
posted Wed, 2012-01-25 17:25 by
The latest International Monetary Fund predictions on world growth were little cause for celebration in the UK or the Eurozone. But one eye-catching figure is they expect 80 per cent of this year’s growth to be fuelled by emerging markets.
Emerging markets represent around 50 per cent of the world’s GDP, but they’re growing much faster than developed economies. This means greater opportunities for British companies to reach out through global web marketing.
tags: Foreign Language Internet, global web marketing, Localisation, Translation
Translation services, Scotland: What are the most popular languages?
posted Thu, 2011-07-21 16:02 by
When you think of translation services, Scotland isn’t exactly the first place to come to mind. And yes, we hear the jokes that some of those below the border could do with a Scottish-English translator more times than you would care to imagine.
For such a small country, there’s a surprisingly large export of goods from our chilly borders, which means there’s a necessity for translation services in Scotland.
But just what kind of languages do Scottish businesses translate into?
Google Translate introduces five new languages
posted Wed, 2011-06-22 16:49 by
Google has announced the launch of five new Indic languages on Google Translate.
It’s been a long time in the making for Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu to join the fold, not least because they all involve unique scripts that users will need to download to their computers.
tags: machine translation, Translation, translation technology
Lost in business translation
posted Wed, 2011-06-15 11:18 by
Tales of translations gone wrong never fail to amuse, so we put together our ten favourite business translation blunders. And it seems they went down a storm on the web, as they got picked up by:
The English invasion: a threat to the German and Chinese languages?
posted Wed, 2011-01-05 18:30 by
The Chinese and German governments have each recently made separate moves to protect the ‘purity’ of their languages from the infiltration of English words and phrases.
The Chinese government’s General Administration of Press and Publication announced a new rule on Monday 20 December to protect the Chinese language by banning the use of all English words and abbreviations in Chinese media.
tags: Chinglish, Denglish, native translators, protectionism, Translation
Is Scotland the eCommerce ‘Zimbabwe’? Or a growth industry?
posted Thu, 2010-11-18 19:28 by
A recent article in the Herald Scotland, ‘eCommerce is a global treasure trove … but Scotland’s more serious about belly dancing’, questions why Scottish government and businesses have yet to take advantage of the enormous opportunities presented by eCommerce.
While the article makes a strong point that much more could be done to promote Ecommerce as a business opportunity in Scotland, it is perhaps unfair to claim that Scotland is ‘the Zimbabwe of the globalised eCommerce marketplace’, as specialist Peter Mowforth puts it.
tags: eCommerce, Edinburgh, Foreign Language Internet, internet marketing, Lingo24, Scotland, Translation
EU’s Multilingual Web project gets the Lingo24 touch
posted Fri, 2010-06-04 11:52 by
Lingo24’s CTO Andrzej Zydron recently returned from a week in Bucharest, Romania, where he was contributing to the EU-funded Multilingual Web project.
Organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Multilingual Web project is a two year collaboration between 22 institutes and companies in the vanguard of the web’s internationalisation.
The aim of the project is to improve the accessibility of the internet for people of all languages by developing technology and establishing multilingual standards.
tags: Lingo24, multilingual web, Translation, W3C
Rating the web’s translation engines
posted Tue, 2010-05-25 18:23 by
A recent survey into the three major online translation engines – Google Translate, Microsoft’s Bing Translator and Yahoo! Babelfish – yielded some interesting results.
Reviews from more than 1000 participants found Google Translate to be superior for long text passages, while Bing and Babelfish were competitive for shorter passages, with Bing excelling in German and Italian and Babelfish superior in Chinese.
tags: Babelfish, Bing, Google Translate, statistical machine translation, Translation, translation engine
