Of course the AMPP user interface is multi-lingual, multi-brand and multi-device (they call it "device agnostic") but the 20,000 m-apps are not all multilingual. Any bestsellers that have not been localized are potential opportunities... More Information...

Multilingual Multimedia Content Management

The team: (1) Equilibrium: a leader in developing automated imaging solutions (2) Magenic, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and (3) SDL. The technology: (1) Equilibrium Media Rich, a server-based image processing engine that automates image production and enables just-in-time delivery of images to virtually any device (2) Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) and (3) SDL Enterprise Translation Server (ETS), a machine translation server.

By integrating these three products, the resulting system allows text within CMS to be automatically translated using ETS, while MediaRich automatically converts the text (source and translations) to graphics and generates all the site navigation into different languages on the fly. A smart application of MT in a specific domain of discontinuous discourse; a glimpse at the holy grail: multilingual multimedia content management. More Information...

Practiline Releases PractiCount & Invoice 1.0

"PractiCount & Invoice" is the name of a single product that counts words, lines, and pages in office documents and can produce a quick invoice. I downloaded the free 30-day evaluation and compared it to Word 2000 word count tool. PractiCount can correctly count words in headers which the Word 2000 user interface does not allow; it also handles words inside tables. PractiCount can be configured to count text in headers and footers, footnotes and endnotes, text boxes and can also exclude numerals.

PractiCount does not actually count lines or pages; it simply performs a conversion from characters to lines or to pages. For example, if pages are defined as 55 lines, a 5 page document with 10 lines per page will still come up as 1 page long. As far as invoicing is concerned, the tool provides a single cost per word independent of the file type (i.e. regular .txt or .doc or .ppt are all at the same cost per word) which limits its usefulness. Other minor problems are: 1) it does not un-install completely 2) the settings menu uses checkboxes rather than radio buttons for exclusive choices. More Information...

RoboHelp Now Supports Asian languages

eHelp Corporation, announced five new Asian Editions of RoboHelp 2002 that will allow creation of professional Help systems in Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. The Japanese edition is available fully localized into Japanese, including the user interface, online Help system and printed user manual, or with an English user interface and English documentation. eHelp will release Asian Editions of three products in the RoboHelp family: RoboHelp Office, RoboHelp for Word, and RoboHelp HTML. More Information...

Alldomains.com Introduces BrandWatch

Alldomains.com, a leader in corporate domain registration and management, has launched BrandWatch™, a powerful brand intelligence service that scans all currently registered domains and monitors daily registration activity of new ones containing the selected brands. Discovery of infringements or brand dilution issues are obvious reasons to use the service. Furthermore, viewing the Web sites of the found domains often reveals various illegal activities, such as impersonation scams to gather credit cards, passwords and counterfeiting operations, or unauthorized selling of the user's products. One of the features is Slanderlert™ which automatically filters domains through a comprehensive list of slanderous words. For example, many companies with a URL like xxyy.com, will also register xxyy.sucks (and such) in order to prevent others from using it! Imagine now the number of domain name abuses possible with multilingual domain names... BrandWatch has room for future growth! More Information...

SALT Forum Offers Language Tag Specification To W3C

The Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) Forum was founded by Cisco, Comverse, Intel, Microsoft, Philips and Speechworks and they now have about 50 contributors. The SALT Forum is committed to developing a royalty-free, platform-independent standard that will allow the creation of multimodal (voice and data) applications and Web services accessible from PCs, tablet PCs, PDAs and phones (in this latter case, the applications are no longer multimodal; they are referred to simply as voice or telephony applications). The SALT Forum has just published version 1.0 of the SALT specification and offered it as a royalty-free contribution to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The intent is to promote the language industry; the development of standards is a crucial first step to enable the widespread adoption of language technology and applications.

The SALT specification is a 112-page PDF document; I suggest you first start with a picture of the SALT architecture and then move up to a 6-page white paper. SALT consists of a small set of XML elements; the three main top-level elements are which performs speech recognition, which performs speech synthesis and which recognizes dial tones (if you think about it, you'll see that this is all that is really needed, except for parameter setting and other peripheral functions). The SALT elements are XML objects in the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page which means that they can easily be used from Javascript code in an HTML page. An example of just such a case is provided on page 5 of the white paper and helps make things much clearer. More Information...

PowerGlot version 2.0 Released

PowerGlot is a localization tool designed for the development of Macintosh applications in various languages. The new version ships with OS X support, expanded automation features, translation memory import and automated translation using the Internet BabelFish translation engine. PowerGlot enables developers to make their products available worldwide in the language of their choice, including Asian languages. PowerGlot knows how to read data files and resources, and extracts the localizable text items from them. It supports Mac OS X resources, Metrowerks PowerPlant resources as well a Palm OS resources. PowerGlot not only deals with text strings but also supports object resizing. With its "New Version" mechanism, PowerGlot goes beyond translation memory and provides a "localization memory" (see Generic Internationalization): all text translation and object resizing is transferred from one version to the newer version. PowerGlot 2.0 is available for US$199.00. More Information...

Electronic Library Adds Spanish Books

ebrary is a provider of electronic libraries i.e. Web sites that allow subscribers to access and read a selection of books online. They have just added more than 1000 Spanish books to their online collection spanning academic subject areas including business & economics, political science and sociology as well as important documents related to U.S. citizenship.

ebrary offer a unique technology that streams PDF documents, very significantly reducing wait time. As you are reading, you can highlight any expression, right-click and use a variety of commands: "Define" will pop open the expression's definition found in Merriam-Webster online, "Explain" will pop open an Encyclopedia Britannica window, there are "Map" and "Bio" commands applicable to places and people, and more.

You can register and try ebrarian for one month and set up your own electronic library or you can very easily download the free ebrary Reader and try it out . Once installed, you can browse their 13,000 title collection at http://shop.ebrary.com. While I did not find my favorite books in their Computer section, I did find a lot of books in the Language Arts & Disciplines section, most by John Benjamins Publishing Company (including Bert's book on localization). More Information...

Pierre Cadieux (pcadieux@i18n.ca) is president of i18N Inc. (www.i18n.ca), a firm specializing in internationalization training and consulting for Web sites and Globalization Management Systems, shrink-wrap software and embedded systems. Pierre is Technology Editor for the LISA Newsletter. He has been Director of Localization Technology at Bowne Global Solutions, where he published the first generic model of Web globalization, and VP Technology at Alis Technologies, where he pioneered the transparent handling of Arabic and Hebrew languages and created the core bidirectional technology licensed by Microsoft. Pierre also regularly presents workshops at LISA events.