WordLo

Ability to be agile in letting go of old rules and learning new ones.

This neologism really mirrors our times: "learning to unlearn" when everything is changing and at the fastest pace.

Leading companies, governmental entities, institutions and non-profits are adopting change management as an organizational competency. Successful people are nowadays those who are ready to unlearn outdated methods and to adopt and adapt to the new ones.
I found this neologism on the article: Is What You (Think You) Know Holding You Back? Adapting To An Accelerated World by Margie Warrell on Forbes.
I tweeted half of it to share with you what I enjoyed the most. If you don't have time to read the long article, just take a look at the tweets below.

The book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, provides an overview of big data, what big data is and how it is being applied. It is a topic I’m starting to be passionate about and this book really satisfied my curiosity.

Translation will be more and more a big data issue

There is an enormous amount of potential value in the examination of big data and one of the most interesting examples is how translation software has been developed.
As we know, rather than using a team of translators, an enormous amount of documents, already been translated from one language to another, was used to build the models used in translation. This has been so effective that there is a joke that the efficiency of the translation software is greater when the linguists are not involved.

I don’t know if there could be any copyright issues, but since I read the Kindle ebook, I wanted to share with you my highlights. I gathered them u…

The “multilinguality” of Web content provides opportunities for users to directly access and use previously incomprehensible sources of Web information. 

Monolingual search engines only allow users to enter a search query in one language. This restriction clearly limits the amount and type of information that an individual user can access. In a global community, users are looking for online information access systems or services that can help them find and use information presented in native or non–native languages.

A Cross–Language Search Engine enables web users to access information that could not be accessible before.

By performing a cross-language search, users just need to write the query in their native language, then just select the target language for the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and get the result.

Practical example of Cross-Language search? I will tell you my personal experience.

I needed a solution for a problem with my smartphone concerning a terrible battery draining…

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, a lot of people are questioning if we should refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? This is visible from the queries of the readers that access my blog. The most visited post ever is indeed “Differenza tra football e soccer” and since we are in the World Cup craze I think this topic is worth a post.

According to a paper published in May by the University of Michigan and written by the sport economist Stefan Szymanski, "soccer" is a not a semantically bizarre American invention but a British import.

Soccer comes from "association football" and the term was used in the UK to distinguish it from rugby football. In countries with other forms of football (USA, Australia) soccer became more generic, basically a synonym for 'football' in the international sense, to distinguish it from their domestic game.

If the word "soccer" originated in England, why did it f…

(Multilingual) terminology management is no more a mere creation of lists of terms and their management and updating. A terminologist today has to know how to use terminology software tools to effectively carry out terminology management.  
Extraction, selection, collection of terms, editing and management of data, updating, integration with cat tools, mono and bilingual terminology extraction, interoperability (data exchange with other systems), those actions can be properly performed only by using specific software which prove to be really time-saving and allow to process big amount of data. 
A "tech-savvy" terminologist has to be able to deal with the different software available today: software to be installed, web based, stored on a server, or on a cloud. 
Here some of the terminology tools that every "tech-savvy" terminologistshould know":TerminologyManagement Systems.

Thanks to everyone who voted for me in @babla 's Top 25 Language Twitterers competition.


It is so exciting to be in this list with such great colleagues!
It is actually on Twitter that I am more active. I use this blog as a secondary platform to store content and ideas. Twitter actually takes less time, just a sentence or a retweet and it is done. And what I like the most it’s that it enables more engagement with other Tweeps. The blog is my online home but I’m always serendipitously wandering around on Twitter finding yummy terminology cherries.

What this competition reveals, at last from my point of view, is that actually terminology is becoming more and more popular. Look at the results: @TermCoord no.4 and @Terminologia n.6 in blog section and @WordLo in top 25 Twitterers!
Once known as a boring subject confined by the walls of academia, terminology is now starting to be considered more interesting and sometimes even funny.
Three years ago Termcoord found out that a great amoun…

Tweets and cherries from the TAUS-TaaS workshop at Localization World 2014.

I promise I will stop speaking about this amazing conference saying how much happy I was for having been invited as a speaker etc etc. But.. before doing that I just want to share with you what I learnt from the TAUS-TaaS Workshop at Localization World Dublin:

1. If you try to search on Google “What does a terminologist do”, THIS is what you get:
#TAUSDublin what does a #terminologist do? Try to search on Google images for weird results...@AndrejsVas#TAUSTaaSpic.twitter.com/S71xdEFcY1
— Maria Pia Montoro (@WordLo) 4 Giugno 2014

I enjoyed so much the TAUS-TaaS Workshop: the presentations were so interesting as well as the debate animated by the brilliant questions by Tex Texin. I met the Tilde team: Indra Samite and Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Uwe Muegge, Luigi Muzii, Jaap Van Der Meer and the lovely Anne-Maj.
I'm just grieving over one thing: I didn’t meet Catherine Christaki! We were both there and we both didn’t know! Arrrgh! :)
At Localization World Dublin 2014, I spoke on “Latest trends in terminology”.
The presentation was entitled: “If Content is King, Terminology is Queen” and took place on the 4 th of June at The Convention Centre, Dublin.

Speakers at the conference included representatives from Adobe Systems, eBay, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and other notable companies. The conference is held by MultiLingual
Computing, Inc. and The Localization Institute.
Attendees could choose from nine tracks during the main conference: Global Business,
Web/Mobile, Content Strategy, Translation Automation (TAUS),…

I’m so thrilled I will be speaking at TAUS-TaaS Workshop at Localization World on the 4th of Jun in Dublin! I will be among the VIPs of terminology, all those I follow on social media and reading every single post end essay they write!
Well, what will I talk about? Simply about terminology from my point of view: as a blogger, as a passionate, as someone who simply enjoys this subject.  “Calling it a hobby isn’t sufficient, but calling it professional makes it seem like it is work”. I will show the terminology trends and share some examples from my experience as a blogger: Communicating about terminology by using social networks;Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms;Websites are made of content and terminology is the critical part of the user experience ( I already wrote about this topic here);Managing and sharing terminological data: cloud based, collaborative and social platforms;The su…

I am so excited to announce that my Twitter account “@WordLo” and this blog have been nominated for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2014 competition hosted by bab.la language portal and Lexiophiles language blog!

I’m honored to be among so many talented language lovers. Thank you to those who supported my nomination and to those who will vote for me!

Voting has just started,from 20th  of May to the 9th  of June.The winners will be announced on the 12th of June. 
Please, click on the following banners to vote!

The subject field of terminology is so overwhelming that it is easy to get infoxicated (lost with so much information).
To prevent spending nights on searching on the internet, more and more institutions, researches, companies  and simply passionate people, are taking the initiative to develop websites and blogs applying, in the words of Google, the “I’m feeling lucky” approach: to find the information that you are looking for in one-stop shop website. (Hi Patricia! I stole this expression from your blog, I really love it!).

So, look no further and enjoy using those resources that best embody, in my opinion, the “feeling lucky” approach.
Terminology Forum: Terminology Forum is a global non-profit information forum for freely available terminological information online. The Forum, maintained by Anita Nuopponen with the help of her students at the Dept. of Communication Studies, University of Vaasa, Finland, provides information on terminological activities including terminology work, res…