City election officials seek to minimize confusion caused by Chinese language ballot errorHere’s an example of how an error in translation can have an impact on our daily lives, in this case in the democratic process of voting. Arcadia, Californi…

Breakthrough software application converts sign language into textWe recently reported on the development of space-age machine translation technology that allows you to talk and translate automatically. Then there was another innovative application tha…

Machine translation provides access to about 90% of all European patents…The European Patent Office (EPO) in cooperation with Google has launched a new machine translation service in an important step to improve access to patent documents in multiple…

…so just try to understand what they are saying on Twitter by using automatic translation tools.A funny blog post got me playing around with online translation again. In “Facebook and Twitter try to translate — but we still can’t un…

…the only state that has given its native language “official language” status.Amidst the debate about the role of Spanish in the US, many people don’t realize that one state already has two official languages. Can you name it? I’ll …

…or the latest example of how two countries can be divided by the same language.Even English-speakers can misinterpret English. According to numerous sources, two young British tourists were prevented entry onto US turf due to a few awkward, but misi…

A grant will provide medical interpretation training for 6 women who speak indigenous Mexican languages.The Natividad Medical Foundation has received a $25,000 grant from the Community Foundation for Monterey County’s Women’s Fund in order …

Volunteers for the Twitter Translation Center are working to get the social network site ready for Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu.In another example of crowd-sourced translation efforts, Twitter is opening up to languages that read right-to-left. Volun…

Deciding on one binding language for international business contracts is essential.In international business, companies typically sign their contracts in one language only. When a language is set as the contractual language, the version of the contract…

A story from India shows us how even local elected officials can find themselves in need of language services.India is one of the world’s most complex linguistic patchworks. According to the 2001 census, 30 languages are spoken by more than a mil…