For the past month or so, translators in the blogosphere and Twitter have been eerily silent as everyone deals with eleventh-hour translation projects before the holidays. Although we hate to add fuel to the fire, we’d still like to throw this out there:

If your company has any urgent translation requests, feel free to send them CSOFT’s way. There are three reasons why you should:

• CSOFT always delivers translation quotes within 24 hours.

• CSOFT does not charge rush fees for urgent requests.

• CSOFT’s client services teams, as well as our professional localization engineers, DTP artists, in-country translators and quality management teams, work in multiple shifts to give our clients 24/7/365 service—even over holidays!

Do you have any urgent translation needs?

There are quite a few ways to contact us for urgent translation requests.

• If you’re based in Europe, please feel free to call us at +46-31-799-0110, or shoot an e-mail to europe@csoftintl.com

• If you’re based in the States, feel free to call us +1-408-320-5106, or shoot an e-mail to northamerica@csoftintl.com

• Alternatively, you can sign up for a call-back at this URL: http://csoftintl.com/call-back/

Regardless of which method you use to contact us, we will get back with you right away.

We hope everyone out there as an amazingly warm and relaxing holiday (as well as a Joyous Chanunzaamas!), and we’ll see you back here on T for Translation after the New Year.

Thanks for stopping by, and take care!

Guest blog entry by Elena McCoy, Executive Director of Communications at CSOFT

Last Thursday, I had the privilege to hang out with the Women in Localization at their holiday party co-sponsored by CSOFT. During the event, we took time to talk about our profession, but also to dish about life, job changes, home relocations, our pets, our kids (and what’s best for them), our futures, and even the movie TRON. It’s the kind of group you want to get to know, because you can always count on meeting an interesting person from which you can surely learn a lot. It’s also about the only place in our field where current, potential and past competitors can come together and share drinks, laughs and knowledge, and embrace a solid sense of togetherness. That’s because this non-profit group’s founders created it with one common goal in mind: to foster the growth of the localization profession by creating a stage for mentoring and networking among professional women.

In celebration of her 56th birthday, today’s Monday Morning Quote is from Sandra Cisneros, a prominent, award-winning author of Chicana Literature (or literature written by Mexican-American women) in America.

I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman; I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don’t respect. - Sandra Cisneros Author, Poet, Teacher

Sandra Cisneros’ work typically deals with the trials and tribulations, as well as social position of Latina women in America. The themes in her work focus on self-worth and challenging the identity that is forced on Mexican-American women who are often torn between cultures, the patriarchal standards of both Mexican and American society, and the deeply-rooted Madonna-whore incongruities to which female sexuality is often reduced in today’s world.

As a bilingual author, Cisneros artfully combines Spanish and English in her writing, articulating culturally specific concepts in Spanish in a way that is contextually clear to monoglot English readers. If you’re interested in checking out some of her work, try starting with some of her more well-known books, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. They’re both excellent reads!

And with that, we hope you have a great Monday. Feel free to join us in a resounding feliz cumpleaños for Miss Sandra Cisneros!

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Welcome back for Issue Eleven of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

Keep up with Terminus and his multilingual shenanigans by subscribing to our RSS feed!

This has been an exciting month for language technology folks, first with the initial beta release of the My Glossary feature at TermWiki.com, which is a free online tool that enables freelance translators, technical writers and other glossary owners to store, translate, develop, share, and perfect their own personal glossaries online—all in a real-time, collaborative environment.

This month also brought TermWiki’s first Galaxy Pad Contest to an official close. In the contest, translators, technical writers, and other developers of multilingual content were invited to enter terms and translations into TermWiki’s master termbase, and the person who entered the most terms would win a free Samsung Galaxy Pad. After a fierce competition, Cristina Fernández—a professional translator from Spain—ended up taking the prize after entering and translating over 10,000 terms!

The cool thing was, Cristina didn’t even know there was a contest going on—she just entered 10,000 terms of her own accord. What possessed Cristina to manage her glossaries like a crazed logophile? Check out this exclusive interview with the winner of the 2010 TermWiki Galaxy Pad Contest to find out! (And congratulations, Cristina!)

It’s the day after Monday, which means we’re back for more Tuesday Tips on localization and translation from different members of the CSOFT family.

Today, CSOFT’s Chief Architect and content management guru, Sam, will share with everyone some suggestions on how to become better equipped to manage terminology and multilingual glossaries more efficiently.

During the long, cold weekend in Beijing, I was curled up on the couch reading through an old copy of The Hobbit when I came across a perfect Monday Morning Quote to help you cleverly stave off all the good mornings from your colleagues before that first cup of oh-so-welcome coffee. Straight from the mouth of Gandalf the Grey in response to the morning salutations of his friend Bilbo Baggins:

‘What do you mean,’ he said. ‘Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?’ - J.R.R. Tolkien via Gandalf in The Hobbit

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Coming up next week, the folks at CSOFT are co-sponsoring a holiday party for the Women in Localization group based in Northern California. This esteemed group aims to create a forum for women to develop their careers in localization and share industry experience, and they have recently opened up their doors for global membership. The three co-founders (pictured below), Anna Schlegel, Eva Klaudinyova, Silvia Avary-Silveira, recently honored us with an interview to discuss the history of their group and its rapidly expanding global presence. They were a pleasure to talk to, so we hope you enjoy!

We woke up feeling especially wacky today. So we put socks on our hands, gloves on our feet and, as it turns out, today just so happens to be Wacky Word Wednesday, a weekly celebration of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world!

For your wack-tacular reading pleasure, today’s word is: meldrop.

The definition of meldrop from TermWiki.com:

mel·drop [mell-drawp] -noun a drop of mucus hanging from the tip of one’s nose

This word may not conjure up the most pleasant of images, but if you bear with us, we’ll make lemons into lemonade as we shed some light on how awesome the human body is.

To start of with, the etymology of this word comes from an Old Norse term, which means “a drop of foam from a horse’s mouth.”  Used during the Viking Age, the former meaning of meldrop is referred to as lipstick during modern day dressage (or horse training) events. Another way to describe equine mouth-foam, according to the United States Dressage Federation, is “whipped cream lips.” Yum. According to this organization, such a display around the horse’s mouth should be taken positively because it indicates that the horse is relaxed but still attentive.

Last week we kicked-off Tuesday Tips with three great localization pointers from Donna, a senior project manager here at CSOFT. Moving forward, on every other Tuesday we’d like to follow up with our biweekly Straight from the Source series, where we pose a question to various members of the CSOFT family in order to give our readers a more intimate perspective on how we define ourselves individually within our organization.

This week’s question: How do you define a successful localization project? (All our readers out there, please feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts as well!)