WordLo

Translating Europe Forum 2016 took place in the wonderful location of the European Commission in Brussels from 27th to 28th October. The discussion was centred around the translation tools and technologies, with a particular focus on the point of view of the end users - the translators themselves.
Taking into consideration that the vast majority of translators tend to be apprehensive of language technologies and machine translation, the speakers of the conference reassured us by saying that the human factor is still the crucial element of the translation process. As stressed by Jost Zetzsche, interviewed by the Director-General Rytis Martikonis himself: technology is driven by humans. As language professionals, translators need to be the leaders of technological change in the field of translation, simply for the sake of ensuring that they themselves are content with the accessible software.

Since translators are quite literally the main source of income for companies dealing in transla…

Terminology work has never been a solitary activity: terminologists need subject matter experts while subject matter experts often need the input from language specialists.Collaborative platforms can bring researches and experts closer together in a common strategy.

I found my presentation I submitted for my ECQA certification in terminology management. In that presentation (see below) I proposed the idea for a collaborative platform to improve terminology collaboration.

Since then, nothing particularly impressive has been created, Most translators, terminologists, content creators do not store terminology in a database. Instead, the tools of choice (or necessity) are either spreadsheets or tables. Terminology management from a content creation perspective is most often a manual process. The terms are gathered manually. The terms are entered into the spreadsheet or table manually. The terms are maintained manually. And the terms are looked up manually.
These manual processes are extrem…

Networking, personal learning, and crowdsourcing of terminology work, are among the most effective usages of social media for terminology.
1) Networking: "Do what you love, love what you do... And then SHARE"
Apart from expanding contacts and networking, terminologists can use social networks to get established as professionals who solve terminology problems. They can, for example, research and ask questions to followers and establishing their expertise by answering questions. Social networks make it also easier to improve collaboration with experts to validate terminology and getting feedback and contribution to the terminology work.
Social media and blogs enable us to easily focus on the latest news and trends on terminology, providing us with regular updates.
Social networks, if properly used, can be effectively used to find terminological resources.Blogs are useful to provide own opinions, reflections and for being an optimal environment for discussing different point of v…

BabelNetis the dictionary of the future, it provides the meanings of words with illustrations - and will soon come with videos and animation. It includes entities as well as words, so a search for apple produces results that contain a picture of fruit as well as the famous corporate logo. 
His creator, RobertoNavigli, a computer scientist and associate professor at Sapienza University in Rome, calls it BabelNet after the biblical tower and the technology he believes can bridge the world’s languages. 
“The idea is to put a lot of resources together, all the resources that people usually access separately,” he says in an interview published on Times. BabelNet, with 14 million entries and information in 271 languages, is the largest multilingual encyclopedic dictionary and semantic network created by means of the integration of the largest multilingual Web encyclopedia - i.e., Wikipedia - with the most popular computational lexicon of English - i.e., WordNet, and other lexical resources su…

The User eXperience (UX) describes the interaction of a user with a website. It refers to the communication between the visual and textual data represented on the screen of the computer and the user. One could say that the UX is ‘the smell of a website’.

How quickly a user can make decisions and how efficient he/she can ‘navigate’ a website depends on various factors which are studied by the developers of the website. The developers’ aim is to create a friendly and easy environment for their consumers by paying attention not only to the images, colours, templates or other attracting visual features of their website but also to the textual representation. That means that UX is about the interface between graphic and content. A user is firstly attracted by the colours, the visual representations and the general sense of the website but to the next and most important level he/she needs to take some information, complete a task and interact with the website. If we imagine a website consist…

Ho ricevuto molti commenti relativi all'ultimo post relativo all'integrazione del fattore della ricerca terminologica nella tariffa del traduttore. Tra tutti, il contributo di Elisa Farina mi è piaciuto particolarmente e ho deciso che valeva la pena trasformarlo in un post (previa autorizzazione di Elisa ovviamente!).
Secondo Elisa, sarebbe forse più efficace integrare il fattore della ricerca terminologica nella tariffa a parola. Come ho scritto in uno dei miei commenti su Google+, a volte si investe un'ora nella ricerca del giusto termine equivalente, e questa è una situazione in cui in molti ci ritroviamo spessissimo.


L'ingente dispendio di tempo per le ricerche terminologiche è senza dubbio un handicap per chi calcola il proprio compenso a parola.
Come fare, però, ad inserire questo aspetto nella fattura? Come voce a parte, in linea con quanto proposto da Debora? Ma in che modo? Aggiungendo una tariffa oraria basata su una stima del tempo che si prevede di dedicare…