General
Chinese Translations are First
I've been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I'd actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program.... »
Civilization Five
All is right with the world. Sid Meier is putting out a new update of the classic game. We've handled the localization of one of the Civilization variants in the past. With luck, we'll get to touch on something of this one as well. There was a poll last year that ranked games not by how many people bought a copy,... »
Avatar Reviews from China
The blockbuster of the Holiday Season was Avatar. It opened two weeks later in China, and has accumulated a number of reviews. The main link is here, but I'll extract a few key observations. —The Na’vi’s system of hereditary rule proves that democracy is not universally applicable. —Dr. Grace Augustine shows the weaknesses ... »
Photo of our CEO – 22 years ago
This is a photo recently rescued of me in India. I lived outside of the United States for about ten years, and this was the biggest adventure in many ways. This photo has been lost for over 20 years and just came back to me. The story is... »
China’s Empty City
So, China has made $600 billion in infrastructure investment? Where has it gone? Is this one of the answers? Click here for the video - the report starts at 1:15 minutes... »
Translation Party
This is a fun exercise in the utility and accuracy of mechanical translation. Go to Translation Party and input a random sentence. I used the opening of Lincoln's Gettysburg address. The script then does an automatic translation of the English into Japanese. Then it translates the Japanese to English, then back again. It will keep doing this until the English... »
Heineken’s Modest Proposal
The late Freddy Heineken, of Dutch beer fame, proposed splitting Europe into small countries as a political and economic solution for many ills that plague the continent. Employing two historians, he created the map to the left. It's certainly interesting food for thought, though I don't take it very seriously. Smaller countries and cultures, like Mr. Heineken's own Holland, have always... »
Google Language Tools for the Industry
Google Language Tools have been around for a long time now, along with other machine translation tools. Are they useful to the translation industry? The answer is indisputably, "Yes!", though possibly not in the way you'd think. First of all, the tools are essentially useless for production level text. The kind of gibberish they produce can glean basic information of what the... »
Truly Awful Chinese
Some translated works should never, ever see the light of day. No matter who does them, they are just too awful to mention. I'm an American football fan, and my favorite player is Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts. Imagine my surprise to see him speaking Chinese in a TV commercial! Thank God, there were subtitles! I did not recognize a... »
