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The cast of the musical Hairspray were not the only ones to step into the spotlight when The Shaftesbury Theatre, London (in collaboration with Cambridge Consultants – the technologies and innovation group) launched AirScript™ – a pioneering handheld translating tool which allows audiences to receive live subtitles on a wireless handset. Following the success of…

Automatic language tools are always a hot topic and when news broke of an automatic marking system for English examinations, the debate was open for discussion once more. We are referring to the recent launch of the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic), which is to be used by English-speaking educational establishments and companies…

Automatic translation tools receive somewhat of a battering, and that’s not just the sound of the keys being pounded! Even though these translations have significantly improved in recent years, wandering blind into the world of an unfamiliar foreign language is a path fraught with pitfalls and probable misunderstandings. So when search engine giant Google announced…

‘One world. One Internet. Everyone connected’. Language matters are hitting the headlines once more with the news of a move which will open up the Internet to millions of users worldwide. Presently, internationalized domain names (IDNs) are only available in 37 Latin characters – the letters A to Z, numbers 0 to 9 and the…

Collins – the dictionary giant – has recently been on a quest to save endangered dialect words for possible inclusion in future editions of their English language dictionaries. Any living language is a constantly evolving entity, which inevitably means that some words fall by the wayside, replaced by new arrivals on the lexical scene. Enter…

Tweeting has never been so popular and this month, Twitter – the ‘microblogging’ site which took the world by storm – unveiled its Spanish-language version. Back in October, Twitter invited Spanish speakers to translate their website and thanks to the flurry of eager translators (working hard over a period of just one month) the site…

First there were extreme sports, now it seems that extreme localisation is pouring over into the world of translation. We are referring to the story reported last week that Spar, the food retail giant, have decided to pilot a scheme in which local slang is being used on the descriptive labels of certain bottles of…