Tak Fujii made his name on the Internet last month with an incomprehensibly bad English-language presentation at Konami’s E3 press conference. Tak is a manager and producer in Konami, and has previously worked as an audio director and specialized in localizing games in different languages. One of us. Not sure if I’ve even met him or […]

“Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines that look at them and understand them,” says Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft’s research laboratory in a recent interview with the New York Times on speech recognition and medicine. Horvitz has been working on a medical avatar project […]

Lena Meyer-Landrut, a 19-year-old amateur singer, won the Eurovision Song Contest over the weekend. More than 100 million viewers across Europe watched Lena’s improbable triumph Saturday night as her catchy love song “Satellite” beat out the 24 other finalists in the singing competition. From the Hollywood Report: “While most of the acts competing were professionals, […]

Thanks to you guys, Translation Guy is the people’s choice in the Lexiophiles Top 100 Language Blogs competition. So we came third, even though none of the other blogs came even close in terms of response from readers. The judges counted popularity as only 50% of the final score in order to control a selection process that best suited […]

It’s a story as old as gas-lit Broadway. Opening night, the diva takes a dive, but the show must go on. What to do? The producer is pulling his hair out. The sponsors are as pale as ghosts. But there’s a young hoofer from the sticks, pulled from the chorus line. Can she stand in? Sure, […]

On St. Patrick’s Day, it gets scary, because today we’re all Irish, which many seem to think involves getting drunk ― and such a lot of drunken brutes you’ve never seen, unless you were here the year before.  This includes my wife, Yoko, who plans to spend the afternoon on 5th Avenue at a party of […]

The Best Foreign Language Film Award at the Oscars went to the Argentine film, “El secreto de sus ojos.” In his acceptance speech, Juan José Campanella said, “It is on behalf of a crew and cast that comprise mostly of people that I love and that are very close to my heart that I want to […]

Why is it always “Lost in Translation?” is the headline? That’s the headline for BBC Scotland sports reporter Jim Spence interview with Dundee United’s new Slovakian goalkeeper, Dusan Pernis. Pernis’ English is pretty basic, and Spences is pretty Scott, and the interview is so funny that it’s become an internet hit. Things started going south […]

Avatar, James Cameron’s latest alien epic (this time the aliens are the good guys), hits the theaters this weekend. And what’s a new blockbuster without a new language? USC Linguistic professor Paul Frommer wrote up a new language from scratch suitable for the 10-foot-tall blue humanoids who inhabit a jungle world about to be eminent […]

Critics say that the World Bank translation policy obscures public transparency of bank policy. Even though the World Bank Translation Framework is one of the largest and most sophisticated translation efforts on the planet, it is still not enough. The Bank Information Center, in a meeting with the World Bank on disclosure policy, argued that […]