Language jobs: the website linguistic tester

Linguistic testing is a language quality assurance (QA) step.

This language-specific testing must occur before the final website is released preventing thus to costly remediate to undetected errors.

Linguistic Testing

• To verify translations throughout the website - front-end and back-end - and resolve linguistic issues which can occur during the localization process;
• Compare the translated files in each target language to the original source language;
• Verify that translations are consistent with the glossary and the style guide;
• Check that translations appear in the appropriate context;
• Verify that all pages are free of missing translations;
• Check content for typographical and grammatical errors;
• Ensure that each page is displayed in the correct language;
• Proofreading;
• Detection of duplication; 
• Problems raised by out-of-context translation process; 
• Typos; 
• Terminology inconsistencies; 
• Grammar errors; 
• Chunks of untranslated text. 

Functionality Testing

The functional testing process includes complete code validation as well as usability testing:

• Complete cross-browser validation: website testing using different browsers including Internet Explorer, FireFox (Mozilla) and Safari (Macintosh), Google Chrome, Opera
• Provide engineering solutions to enable reporting and corrective action
• Website standards code validation (W3C)
• Dead link management and control
• Usability testing (from a user point of view)
• Development solutions for all engineering issues found
• Verify each HTML file contains the appropriate character set meta tag for the target language
• Check the layout to ensure no formatting issues are present (such as wrong fonts, incorrect type style and erroneous text wrapping, etc.)

Professor David Crystal on new communication technologies

Professor David Crystal, one of the world's leading linguistic experts, challenges the myth that new communication technologies are destroying language

Linguistics: How, Why, How and What with David Crystal

Erin McKean redefines the dictionary | Video on TED.com

The Age of the Dictionary or the definition of a hopeless task

Sneakernet

Sneakernet is a term used to describe the physical transfer of electronic information, especially computer files.

The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to sneakers, as this way of moving information relies on a courier and removable media such as USB drive and compact discs.

Source: Osama bin Laden’s use of Technology, GeekwithLaptop

Online term extractors: Terminology Extraction by Translated

Terminology Extraction by Translated uses Poisson statistics, the Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Inverse Document Frequency between the frequency of words in a given document and a generic corpus of 100 million words per language. It uses a probabilistic part of speech tagger to take into account the probability that a particular sequence could be a term. It creates n-grams of words by minimizing the relative entropy.

Terminology Extraction by Translated can be also used to improve search results in traditional search engines (es. Google) by giving a better estimation of how much a keyword is relevant to a document.

Texts may only be submitted for analysis through entering the text to analyze into the text window.

Languages supported: English, Italian, French.

Website: Translated