The response to our presentation has been really positive, with many people wanting to learn more or see the slides again, so we decided to take our little 2 person roadshow online for the big wide world to see. We are now pleased to unveil a stripped down, re-recorded version of our presentation available at Slideshare.net. You can view the show within this post (below) or by following this link to Slideshare if you have problems hearing or viewing the embed.

My age group straddles Generation Y and Generation X, and I often find myself caught between these two rather different mindsets. On the one hand, I blog, and use Facebook fairly extensively, I use RSS feeds to manage information, and I share bookmarks. On the other hand, I’m still quite new to all this, only having had a Facebook account for just over a year, and a blog for roughly the same length of time. I’m still struggling with Twitter, not really fully understanding the term ‘micro-blogging’, not to mention what on earth Twitterific is. And all this on the day I find out that even the Beeb has a Twitterer (is that the term?) for my favourite breakfast radio programme, Radio 4’s Today programme.

Nonetheless, I think the important thing is that I’m willing to learn, and although I don’t fully understand some aspects of social media as much as I’d like to, I am totally wowed by the possibilities it offers. I want to be part of it, and like any good Generation Yer I am learning how to use these tools more or less instinctively.

The same cannot be said of Radio 4, though. Despite their impressive forward-thinking with Twitter, I was disappointed with how Radio 4 reported the Queen’s visit to Google this morning. They broadcast a ‘comedy’ piece called ‘The Queen’s Blog’, in which someone imitated the Queen emailing and accepting friends on Facebook (yeah, like, totally not the same as blogging). Listen again here and weep. I felt like this was a misguided send-up of social media (rather than of the Queen), and as always I look disapprovingly on those to dismiss it so readily.

Long live social media! Once I get my head round it that is…

I actually feel like I’ve been blogging for longer than just 1 year, in a good way. It’s hard to imagine how I engaged in any self-reflection or tracked what I was learning and discovering in my career before I had a blog, or read blogs; blogging is so diverse (and time-consuming) that it has ended up being a major part of my job/life.  I guess the self-reflection and learning and discovery activities happened before somehow, but being able to share them and contextualise them in the form of a a blog makes the learning and opinon-forming process a lot more tangible.

Having ideas for my blog is not difficult, I think of them all the time. What’s harder is to express them in a coherent and meaningful way so that others might be able to relate to or comment on them. I really have to discipline myself to do this. But this is another part of the learning process, and what’s great about blogging is that you can learn from other bloggers.

I’m particularly struck by the fact that my original reasons for starting a blog have held true. Rather than being self-indulgent diary writing, blogging should be a way to offer something positive, your own viewpoint on a particular topic that is important to you. This is particularly relevant in terms of your career, especially when you are freelance like me and don’t have in-house colleagues to bounce ideas off.  This was my raison d’être in my first ever post:

With this in mind, and self-consciously trying to avoid being guilty of any ‘narcissistic shrieks’, I hope to be able to use for the following purposes:

a) express and invite opinion about developments in translation and linguistics
b) recommend authoritative links on other translation bloggers‘ sites, particularly with translation students in mind.

c) learn from others’ blogs
d) raise of the profile of translating and interpreting as a career
e) most importantly: publicize my profile as a freelance translator and seek opportunities

I recently read this article on Freelance Switch about blogging that reminded me why it’s all worth it, and this one and this one on Young Go Getter.

I’ve made some good progress within these quite general objectives. In particular, I’m flattered to report that my blog was recently listed in the Top 100 Language Blogs. Here’s to a good first year, and to the next year!

This is a step in a new direction for the mighty Google, which is fast completing utter dominance of the  internet and follows their foray into machine translation with ‘Google Translate’. Google Translate received a fairly good reception when it was released, as being ‘not too bad’ as far as machine translation goes, if you need to get a very rough approximation of isolated sentences. It does surprise me that they’re now attempting to diversify into human translation, though. Perhaps they’ve seen the success of collaborative translation on open-source projects (by volunteer translators), and of subscription translator community sites such as ProZ and want a piece of the action.

But then, Google Translation Center doesn’t look like a translator community site, nor is there any mention of money changing hands, so I can’t help wondering what’s in it for them? Their stated aim is: “Google Translation Center is part of our effort to make information universally accessible through translation”, but surely, as a company as powerful and successful as theirs must have a profit-driven or market dominance-driven motive lurking behind everything it does, right?

According to Stephen Shankland:

“[...]the company also has technology called Cross Language Information Retrieval  (CLIR)  that builds            translation into its search engine.”

And:

“Google’s translation system uses a statistical model that works better the more it can compare the same text in two different languages. And Google evidently will track translation work in its database; according to the center’s introduction for translators, “our translation search feature matches your current translation with previous translations, so you don’t have to translate over and over again.”

Google is fervently interested in better machine translation. With it, it can use its search technology to link people with data around the world, regardless of language barriers, making its search engine significantly more powerful.”

Interesting stuff that may further enhance the way we search for information, not to mention the possibilities for a gigantic global translation memory. You can read Google’s own full explanation of what it’s all about here.

Although I am a reasonably competent internet user I’m afraid this problem was not something I’d encountered before or knew how to deal with. Luckily there’s always someone who does have the know-how, and I was subsequently advised by my learned friend at Pagespank.com that some horrid hacker had ‘injected’ an ‘iframe virus’ into my site. It was invisible, apparently, but the nasty little blighter ended up bringing my whole site down after Google and my domain hoster decided I was a ‘dangerous’ website. For a more technical explanation of how this happened go to Pagespank.com, but rest assured that this is still a healthy, virus-free, clean-living little blog.