With the sun shining out here as Beijing springs into warmer weather, we thought it appropriate to feature our lovely Chiara for this week’s CSOFT Story. With her ebullient personality and beaming smile brightening up the CSOFT office, Italian native Chiara Conte has much to say regarding the future of translation, personal growth, and keeping a sunny disposition as the pressure begins to mount. Read on for more!

Beginning next Monday, CSOFT will be attending the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference in Providence, Rhode Island. We’re excited to be attending this event and you should be too. Here’s why:

CMS/DITA is a gathering of some of the biggest names in content management, including Adobe and CIDM. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘content management,’ according to TermWiki, it is the “process of managing, organizing, storing, tracking ownership of, and distributing information.” Given today’s technological advances, when people refer to content management they generally mean online and digital content. CSOFT will be there to promote our multilingual content and terminology management services, as well as our localization and globalization capabilities.

This week’s blog entry on T for Translation makes a general case for how some of the standard service offerings of a localization provider can be beneficial to globalizing company brands. Whether you’re familiar with the localization industry or not, this piece should provide some food for thought, especially when considering current global trends.

We live in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. With so many different avenues for advertising and so many diverse audiences to capture, maintaining a strong and consistent brand image and message has become progressively more difficult. As the game has changed, businesses looking to achieve international marketing success should consider adapting their strategies to meet these new challenges.

It all begins with understanding international markets, or trusting a company that does, such as a localization provider. A company that specializes in localization can help you make your brand internationally viable, because that is namely what they do: adapt products to be culturally and linguistically appropriate to specific target locales. Beyond that, however, localization companies can offer you a lot more to make your brand message stick. Here’s how:

Last week we introduced the first part of a two-part series on automatic terminology extraction, where translation tools expert and terminologist, Uwe Muegge, broke down terminology extraction and its role in the careful management of terminology. In this post, you’ll find suggestions regarding methods and tools for automating terminology extraction. Read on to see what tips Uwe has to give.

Welcome to Part One of a two-part series on automatic terminology extraction! Written by Uwe Muegge, CSOFT’s very own terminology management wizard, the five points in this post will supply readers with practical observations about and aspects of automatic terminology extraction. Don’t forget to stay tuned for next week’s Part Two, which will suggest different tools and methods to better manage terminology extraction.

It is probably safe to say that many, if not most, commercial translation and localization projects today are carried out without a comprehensive, project-specific, up-to-date glossary in place. I suspect that one of the primary reasons for this inefficient state of affairs is the fact that many participants involved in these projects are not familiar with the tools and processes that enable linguists to create monolingual and multilingual glossaries quickly and efficiently. Below are five valuable insights for linguists who wish to give automatic terminology extraction a/nother try.

Last month, CSOFT International launched TermWiki Widget, an innovative new tool that allows anyone who runs a blog or website to give their readers access to domain-specific terms and definitions by displaying relevant entries from TermWiki’s vast, multilingual database. Best of all: To implement this powerful and completely free glossary solution only takes six easy steps.

Every year after the Summit, CSOFTers look around and ask each other how we’ll manage to top this year’s event next time, and this year wasn’t any different. An extraordinary week of fantastic presentations, lively discussions and stimulating energy, CSOFT’s 9th Annual World Summit blew us away! Our 2012 Summit blog series is underway, starting with a recap of Day One of the agenda, focused on “The World of Localization.”

Thought-provoking highlights from “The World of Localization” track:

• In her welcoming speech, our President and CEO, Shunee Yee set the tone for the day, sharing the quote “Culture is the foundation for any successful enterprise…” She demonstrated this phrase’s applicability to the localization industry by discussing how the work we do combines both culturally founded artistic elements and technological elements. She applied the Chinese cultural conception of yin and yang, necessary opposites that complete a harmonious whole, to CSOFT, stating that it is the “marriage of technology and culture” that makes our services not only possible, but the best that they can be.

• Michael Anobile’s presentation on “The History, Evolution, and Future of the Localization Business” provided the perfect follow-up to Shunee’s opening speech, as he clearly articulated the progression of localization from its origins, primarily in technology, to its current conceptualization as a tool of both culture and technology. Michael argued that the future development of the localization industry will be grounded in technological innovation, specifically mobile and internet technology, manufacturing and R&D; however, the most important factor in successful localization companies will be relationships.

The TermWiki bee has been busily buzzing around this summer, working hard to provide users with new and improved additions to the world’s fastest growing social learning network. Below is a recap of what’s new at TermWiki:

1. TermWiki speaks with the pronunciation feature available in 20 languages

As a social learning network, one TermWiki’s long-terms goals is to provide users with access to a variety of learning tools. We understand that everyone has different approaches to learning and work hard to demonstrate our understanding of this. The pronunciation feature offers additional support to learners by allowing users to hear how a term is pronounce in twenty different languages, including major world languages, such as English, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

2. The Wall is a one-stop shop that makes it easy for users to see all of the latest updates on TermWiki.

Recent visitors to TermWiki may have noticed the website’s welcome page was recently restructured to include the TermWiki Wall. The Wall allows visitors to see the latest updates to the site via a real-time feed, including term and translation contributions, new questions or answers to AnswerBea, the latest forum post, announcements, new additions to the community, etc.

TermWiki’s extended functionality and intuitive user interface have been designed from the ground up to facilitate quick integration into a variety of different workflows (including casual browsing). That said, we would like to take this opportunity to make sure that you understand how you can personally make the most of TermWiki.

For this entry, we’ll focus on three different types of users (you can click on the links below to skip to each individual section):

• General Users

• Translators

• Corporations

And if you have any specific questions about how TermWiki.com might appeal to other types of users, please feel free and ask in the comments section below!

It’s funny how a-ha moments strike when you are least expecting it. A fun fact about TermWiki that you might not know is that it was conceived in a downtown bar in Beijing! The live music band that was onstage that night was supposedly playing with such gusto that the beat of the drum and the strums of the guitar were enough to pulsate to life the beginning wisps of what would soon turn into TermWiki.

A few weeks later, the TermWiki concept began unraveling, synthetic bricks being laid down to form the foundation of an idea that would change how countless companies, individuals, and translators from all around the world would approach social learning and terminology management.

It is hard to believe that a year has already gone by. The entire journey has been a great adventure and experience, and the hard work of many around the world made every moment worthwhile. To all of our supporters, contributors, and believers, many thanks…This day goes out to you!

The timeline below will take you through TermWiki’s first year—our achievements, the addition of new features, and the result of ongoing collaboration with all of our supporters.