Apparently, four of the individuals who have been detained in connection with the 887.24 carat gems that were stolenfrom a recent jewelry show in India speak Spanish. Since Spanish<>Marathi interpreters cannot exactly be found on every street corner in Mumbai, investigators are using a process known as relay interpretation, in which one person interprets from Spanish into English, and then another interpreter renders the information from English into Marathi.

While this addresses the language barrier for purposes of taking the statements from the alleged diamond thieves, more language services will inevitably be needed as the case proceeds forward and justice is sought for all, including the rightful owners of the diamonds, Israeli firm Dalumi Group. Will the language pairs evolve to include Hebrew<>Marathi?

While diamond heists are often the themes of  Bollywood and Hollywood films, the very real and growing demand for less common language combinations only stands to increase as globalization continues. In today’s world, all people —including criminals — are more connected than ever before, making language services an essential component of battling international crime.

See: Global Watchtower™

According to TAUS Data Association Blog everyone has already started sharing their translations.

In this age of unlimited connectivity and cloud computing that translation memories find their way into the cloud. This raises lots of questions, especially about ownership and legality. Mining the web, aligning translations, and sharing translation memories are quickly becoming common practice. We all need to be really practical and responsible about this new reality.

TAUS Data Association has launched a TM sharing platform with a contracts based legal framework for sharing high quality language data. Read more.

See: TAUS Data Association Blog

Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet and translator, died aged 90. He was a poet who demonstrated a complete mastery of form and an amazingly wide sweep of subject matter. A subtle humorist with a sometimes tragic air, he was also a superb translator from several European languages.

Although well-known for its lightness of touch, and its sheer enthusiasm for the trivial and miraculous phenomena of the 20th century, Morgan’s poetry was often found to depend for its celebratory nature on catching a moment before it had gone forever — and so pointing up, first of all, the moment’s imminent passing.

Morgan was announced as Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate in autumn 1999, and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000.

By the end of his career he was to have translated from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian among other languages; the authors included Yevtushenko, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Montale, Quasimodo, Lorca and Brecht. In 2001 he won the Weidenfeld Prize for Translation.

His Beowulf (1952) became a standard translation in America, while his Scots version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1992) was staged in a highly-acclaimed touring production by the Communicado company.

See: Telegraph.co.uk

A survey from the Associated Press-GfK earlier this year shows that Vietnam’s economy is on the rise. What do providers of language and globalization services need to know now in order to get ready?

* Spending power is steadily growing. The top three growth sectors in Vietnam today are oil and gas, IT, and banking and financial services.
* More than a quarter of Vietnam is online. Out of 89.5 million people in Vietnam, 24 million are reported to be on the internet.
* It’s becoming easier to do business.
* Most of the population is young.  Vietnam’s Gen-X has had the freedom to reinvent its culture and language.

Now, what about the language, and the language services industry?  Here are a few points that we gleaned from our conversation with Manh Nguyen Duc, CEO of Wise-Concetti Ltd:

* The Vietnamese language is rapidly evolving. Linguistically, young people continue to be very open and motivated to adopt whatever words make the most sense to express what they want to say, regardless of linguistic origin.
* A Roman script narrows the language gap. During French colonial rule, the Vietnamese language moved from a traditional Chinese script to one based on the Roman alphabet. This also presents fewer challenges for some parts of the localization process.
* Dialects should be taken into account.
* Competition is alive and well.  Pricing currently averages around US$ 0.22 for English to Vietnamese, and US$ 0.25 for Vietnamese to English, according to pricing data released in July.
* Diaspora communities are not the best source for reviewers. One common mistake that U.S. companies make – especially when localizing high-tech content into Vietnamese – is to engage reviewers among the expatriate community in the U.S.

Certainly, the country holds tremendous opportunity for language service providers with operations there.

See: Global Watchtower™

A determined group of international bloggers who discuss the Amanda Knox case on a message board run by a Seattle woman has published an English translation of the 397-page sentencing report handed down by an Italian court last December.

The translation of the sentencing document is a cyber watermark in a high-profile murder case that has taken on an unusually large international Internet following.

The 12 “unpaid volunteers” who translated the Massei report into English live on four different continents and include translators, lawyers, a medical doctor and a molecular biologist.

While most prefer the anonymity of their online aliases, many of them have formed friendships behind the scenes as regular posters on the Perugia Murder File message board, which generally supports the thesis that Knox is guilty as charged but has long hosted heated exchanges on even the most minute details of the case.

The 12-member team worked on the document for five months before releasing it publicly Sunday.

See: Seattlepi.com

Businesses up and down Britain are bracing for a drop-off in demand from important clients across Whitehall and local councils. Some are already reporting lucrative state contracts have been cancelled, according to the Markit/CIPS UK services PMI survey.

In a recent British Chambers of Commerce survey two-thirds of companies said they expected spending cuts already announced would hit their profitability for a variety of reasons. A fifth of companies expected a hit because of lost public sector contracts.

Some companies found a silver lining from Britain’s downturn which has translated into a pick-up in private sector work. With the way things are in the economy many businesses have been looking to sell goods and services overseas. So there are people going on trade missions who need their brochures translated or telephone interpreters to set up meetings. There’s a big drive by people to do business in China, India, Brazil and Russia.

See: The Guardian

A tribal linguist has determined the translation used for the past century for the town of Sequim (in Washington State, USA) – long believed by many to mean “quiet waters” – is wrong.

The correct translation, it turns out, is a “place for going to shoot,” a reference to the Sequim-Dungeness Valley’s once great elk and waterfowl hunting, said Timothy Montler, an expert in the study of dying languages.

The “quiet waters” reference is ingrained in Sequim history, with references in regional visitor guides and historical publications and on websites.

The executive director of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce said there are plans to update brochures and a website to reflect the change – as soon as time and budgets allow.

See: Seattle Times

Pranksters have managed to replace popular Facebook system messages in Turkish with offensive language yesterday. The attack leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to vote the automatic approval of rogue changes.

Facebook provides an application called “Translations” for people to translate the thousands of system messages and alerts into their native language. Through a submission voting system the app also allows the community to improve on the existent translations.

Unfortunately, a group of Turkish pranksters realized that if they could get enough votes to back up a proposed translation, the change would be accepted automatically. Therefore, they asked all members of a forum to help poison popular Facebook messages in Turkish with offensive terms for fun.

The vote flooding and translation poisoning went on for a while, until Facebook staff caught on to it and reverted all rogue changes. The translation application was also disabled temporarily for multiple languages. It’s not yet clear if this decision was prompted by similar attacks performed by other groups who wanted to imitate the Turkish pranksters.

See: Softpedia

Timothy A. Bennett, chair of the foreign languages and literatures department at Wittenberg University, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Ohio, strives toward a new vision for the foreign language department.

Wittenberg’s language department has revised its own intermediate-level language classes — making them more interdisciplinary in nature — and has spread outward across the university in the form of a new “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum” (CLAC) program. In making these recent changes — with the help of a two-year, $179,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education— Wittenberg’s foreign language faculty were responding both to a charge to “internationalize” the curriculum and to a growing sense that student interests were changing.

Wittenberg threw out the traditional model in which skills —composition and conversation —are the organizing principle. Instead the college teaches language through interdisciplinary study. After one year of college language — the French, German, Russian or Spanish 1 and 2 sequence —students can now elect to take a variety of half-semester, two-credit intermediate-level language courses in topics in history, the environment, film, national identity, and translation, for example.

See: USA Today

Nicky Hayden has shrugged off reports that wrongly claimed he was heavily critical of Casey Stoner’s departure from Ducati to Honda for 2011.

The story was translated as saying Hayden had declared it ‘shameful’ and picked up by several news sources around the world. What Hayden had actually said was it is a ‘shame’ that the 24-year-old Australian had been lured away to HRC next season.

Nicky Hayden thinks that the journalist might be looking to sell a few magazines or that it might have been an error in the translation.

See: Motorcycle News