Monday 11 February 2008

internship

Dear all,
We have recently received the following offer of an internship at the European Central Bank, which may be of interest to some of you. Linda is a Portsmouth graduate and this looks as though it could be an exciting opportunity. All enquiries to the contact details below, please.
Carol

Good afternoon,

On behalf of the Terminology/Language Technology (TLT) Unit in the Language Services Division of the European Central Bank, I should like to inform you that we are currently advertising an internship opportunity in the Terminology/Language Technology Unit.

The details have been posted on the ECB's website and can be accessed by following the direct link for job applicants (www.ecb.europa.eu / "Working for Europe" / Business Area: Secretariat & Language Services). The internship advertised for the TLT Unit has reference number ECB/TR/010/08 and the closing date will be 29 February.

We should be most grateful if you could arrange for details of the vacancy to be circulated among any of your students you feel could have an interest in submitting an application.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions regarding the internship.

Kind regards,

Linda Quattrucci
Senior Terminology/Language Technology Assistant
________________________
Linda Quattrucci
EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK
Language Services Division
Terminology / Language Technology Unit
Tel: 0049 (0) 69 1344 7124
Fax: 0049 (0) 69 1344 7366
linda_ann.quattrucci@ecb.europa.eu

Tuesday 5 February 2008

volunteer translation opportunity

We have just received the following call for volunteer translators from a South African organisation, which may be of interest to some graduates.
Carol

I'm the project leader for a localisation effort by Translate.org.za tohelp translate opensource programs into various languages of the world. I was hoping that you might tell your students and staff about our project, and invite them to contact me if they want to get involved in volunteer software translation. We hope to help volunteer translators translate ten computers programs in the year 2008, using our web-based translation tools. Because there are ten applications, we call this year's project "Decathlon". Our goal is to help translators organise themselves into language communities that translate a variety of programs into their language, thereby promoting more languages and empowering their speakers. Professional and non-professional volunteer translators are often overwhelmed by the technical aspects of software translations, and sadly many translators work in closed groups without sharing their newly learned expertise with other volunteers. The Decathlon hopes to solvesome of these problems. For that, we need translators to join our effort. There is no minimum commitment, and any native speaker with good spelling may join in. Weare hoping that volunteers will enjoy software translation so much that they continue to promote software in their languages long after theDecathlon project is complete.The Decathlon is not meant to replace any existing localisation efforts,and if people are already involved in volunteer software translation, we would love them to join our teams also.

A brief background

Translate.org.za has been involved with opensource software translation since 2001. Over the years we've developed translation tools to convert complex localisation formats into simpler formats that are easy to translate, such as Gettext PO and XLIFF. Our tools also help automate various quality control checks, thereby reducing the risk that volunteer translators “break” the software with their translations. It has always been our dream that volunteer translators should be able to translate without having to learn complicated tasks that programmers take for granted. That is why we developed a web-based translation system, called Pootle, which enables amateur translators to translate software in their web browsers, while giving professional translators and power users the ability to use specialised third-party tools if they prefer. Pootle is ideal for teams of volunteers, because several translators can translate a single file simultaneously.We have used our tools successfully to help translators translate OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird into the ten official African languages of South Africa. With the Decathlon project, we'd like to help translators from all over the world translate other software as well. I look forward to your responses. You can read more about the Decathlonproject at http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/decathlon/mainpage.
Sincerely
Samuel Murray
Decathlon project leader
samuel@translate.org.za