Electronic meetings, e.g., chat rooms and bulletin boards, can be more efficient and effective than traditional, oral discussions, but until only recently, online groups speaking many languages could not benefit from machine translation (MT). Although it is possible for linguists to provide translations for the group members as they read comments during a multilingual discussion, this is not feasible for large groups and many languages. As a solution, we propose a fully automated multilingual meeting system, and an example of its use in a meeting with comments typed in English translated to Dutch and Russian illustrates its potential to reduce many multinational communication barriers.

"What is Machine Translation? Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful in a number of specific domains." A definition from the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), "an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology."

Me Translate Pretty One Day - Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (December 2006; Issue 14.12). "Jaime Carbonell, chief science officer of Meaningful Machines, hunches over his laptop in the company's midtown Manhattan offices, waiting for it to decode a message from the perpetrators of a grisly terrorist attack. Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell's machine -- or rather, the server farm it's connected to a few miles away -- is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scientists for half a century. The message isn't encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. It's simply written in Spanish:.... Language translation is a tricky problem, not only for a piece of software but also for the human mind."

• After you read the article, be sure to visit Meaningful Machines, The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and The Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) at Columbia University.

There are numerous ways to get your freelance translation business up and running, or revive it when you’ve taken time off or haven’t had much work. These range from the unexciting but effective (i.e. applying to every agency in the ATA or a similar association) to the creative and pricey (i.e. preparing slick marketing materials and attending trade fairs for your target industries).

So far (I always feel obligated to write that in case the bottom falls out of the industry at some point!) the global economic meltdown seems to have left most freelance translators relatively unaffected. At the ATA conference, many people I spoke with commented that they have never been busier. But, let’s say that you really want to ramp up your marketing efforts; I’ll offer a few suggestions and I’m sure that other people have great tips too.

With SDL's announcement not to honor promotion-priced upgrades for versions of Trados 6.5 and earlier come April 2008, many Trados users see themselves faced with tough decisions in these last days of March. Should you pay for an upgrade simply to avoid falling out of the upgrade cycle, or should you start to consider one of the competing products?

There's no better time than now to take a look at the competing TEnT (Translation Environment Tool) products and ask two questions: 1. How do they measure up? 2. Perhaps just as important, how compatible are they with Trados input and output formats that we receive from clients? To answer the first question, a partner and I have recently created a website at www.translatorstraining.com where we compare all the available tools in the form of short video tutorials. This article attempts to answer the second question.

The "prison of language is only temporary…someday a merciful guard ? the perfect translator ? will come along with his keys and let us out," Wendy Lesser wrote in an article, "The Mysteries of Translation," in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002. The following questions remain, however: Who is this translator? What does he do? And what skills should he possess?

1. They cost too much.
If a company has its translations done by just anyone in order to save money, it runs the risk of ending up with an unprofessional translation as well as wasting valuable time. Having the translation redone afterwards can only cost more money and take even longer. No wonder translation seems so expensive!