Guest blog entry by Uwe Muegge, Chief Terminologist and Co-Director of MedL10N at CSOFT

In my opinion, one key characteristic of a mature industry is the availability of a comprehensive set of established best practices, typically in the form of national or international standards.

Since its beginning in 1898, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has been a leading provider of standards in a wide array of industries. ASTM’s standards development process is founded on a full-consensus system that invites discussion, collaboration, and a commitment to quality; members from around the world collectively develop and maintain standards in their respective areas of expertise.

Last year, ASTM formed the ASTM Committee F43 to focus on standards specific to language services and products. The current 39 members of the committee will work together to support existing standards for interpretation, translation, language instruction and language proficiency as needed. This also includes modifying performance standards to better adapt to health care and court environments, and focusing on the cultural and language needs of employees in foreign countries. At the same time, the committee also intends to develop standards for language training, foreign language proficiency among students, and performance testing.

Strap on your favorite running shoes, flex those typing fingers, and tune into the Language Race hosted by TermWiki.com!

To briefly summarize for those who are unfamiliar with it, TermWiki is a cloud-based terminology management and multilingual social learning platform. Launched just last year, it is the localization industry’s first online collaborative terminology management and translation system, allowing users to import, export, edit, translate, and track terms, definitions, and translations—all in more than 100 languages. All the terms in TermWiki are human-inputted and human-reviewed, providing users with a community checks and balances system. The more terms you enter, the more your name is circulated around the site, but be aware that inappropriate or irrelevant contributions will be targeted by moderators and other users to ensure that the quality of data in TermWiki is maintained.

The translation and interpretation services industry has witnessed great development and growth in recent years. With an ever-growing focus on globalization in the business world, Common Sense Advisory, a independent US-based research firm, has calculated that the language services market has increased by an average annual rate of 13.15%, for a total spend of over $23 billion USD in 2009 alone. (You can read more about the size and condition of the language services market in their report, “The Language Services Market: 2010″.)

In particular, this focus can be observed in newly designed translation and interpretation programs at universities and colleges worldwide, including the recent commencement of a Middlebury-Monterey Institute of International Studies partnership. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 22 percent employment increase for translators and interpreters between 2008 and 2018. In October of 2010, tcworld also highlighted advantages of translation and interpretation careers and provided solid reasons on how the overall language services industry is becoming more vital in both business and everyday exchanges.

Understanding this, we would like to take the opportunity to extend our congratulations to those hardworking, linguistically-motivated student winners of the 2010 Juvenes Translatores (‘Young Translators’) Contest.

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.

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!)

At CSOFT, we are well acquainted with two of biggest pain points in the translation process: local regional review and the final approval of translated documents. In a perfect world, third-party reviewers would be dedicated senior staff with strong technical skills who sit around waiting for translated material to judiciously proofread and validate. Ideally, these localization experts would have the appropriate domain knowledge and linguistic skills to suggest the right terminology and a style that best suits their local market.

The reality is, though, that the third-party review and validation process in our industry is broken. As facilitators, there are two scenarios that we regularly come across.

It’s next to impossible to write the first post in a blog. Especially on Mondays. Especially-squared on a Monday directly following MTV’s Movie Awards (did you see Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lopez?!) and the Celtics owning the Lakers in the NBA Finals. But here we are, back in the office—and it’s time for localization again. I’ve got quite a bit of pressure to keep this thing interesting.

So to commemorate our very first post on T for Translation, I’d like to share with you another significant “first” for CSOFT.