Thursday, May 1, 2008

U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, is urging the federal government to offer Asian language translation videos to international tourists arriving at Honolulu International Airport.

...Akaka noted that more than 1.3 million Japanese tourists flew to Hawaii in 2007. More than 100,000 came from China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

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By Park Si-soo

A group of professional interpreters and translators launched Thursday the nation's first association to help upgrade interpretation and translation work and services.

The Korean Association of Translation and Interpretation (KATI) held an inaugural ceremony at the Korea Press Center in central Seoul with the 100 selected members present. KATI is the first officially recognized organization in the field.

``I have frequently received complaints from the government and foreign clients about poor interpretation and translation services. It is because they used less skilled and unqualified interpreters and translators. In other words, there was no institute offering information about competent, high-experienced and qualified language experts,'' Kim Ji-myung, chief director of KATI, told The Korea Times.

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By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, October 12th, 2006 09:08 AM (PDT)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United States on Thursday introduced a new draft resolution in the Security Council to punish North Korea for its reported nuclear test and said it wants a vote on Friday.

Russia urged the United States not to rush the vote, saying Moscow still had differences and the U.S. should wait for the results of a flurry of high-level diplomacy. China backed Russia's call, saying Beijing would welcome more talks so the Security Council can send a united and forceful message to Pyongyang condemning the test.

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Policy of engagement comes under scrutiny as a poll finds that 65 percent of Koreans now support a nuclear program.

By Donald Kirk | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
SEOUL – On a sparkling morning in a villa high above the broad Han River in Seoul, Hyundai Automotive Vice Chairman Kim Dong Jin marvels over his company's new luxury utility vehicle - and weighs the possible impact of North Korea's nuclear blast on sales.

"Do you notice any scare?" he asks. "Koreans are very calm. They regard this situation as they did past North Korean scare tactics."

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Published 14th June 2006

IronMail Enhancements Include Innovative Features to Check Outgoing E-Mail for Proprietary Content, Assuring Compliance with Internal Policies and Government Regulations as well as extensive multi-lingual capability...

Hong Kong, 14 June, 2006.
CipherTrust Inc, the global market leader in messaging security, today announced new features within IronMail, the company's award-winning messaging security appliance, that can identify specific content in outgoing e-mail, according to customer parameters. With the enhancements, IronMail goes way beyond dictionary or key word checks on outgoing e-mail, providing a comprehensive solution to lock down sensitive corporate information and help ensure compliance with regulations regarding close control over enterprise content.

Included in IronMail are CipherTrust-engineered methods for matching outgoing e-mail text with existing corporate documents. These techniques satisfy a pressing need within companies, which is to stop sensitive and vital information from passing corporate electronic walls. Beyond trying to preserve the integrity of sensitive information, industry and government regulations dictate that companies exercise close control over many type of electronic data.

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David A. Utter
Staff Writer
The blog search engine and the largest independent PR agency in the world will team up to offer blog tools in several languages.

Analytic tools from Technorati have been available for some time in English and Japanese. The partnership with Edelman will expand that offering to more languages, starting with French in July of this year.

Through early 2007, Edelman will roll out the Technorati tools in Chinese, German, Italian, and Korean languages. CEO and president Richard Edelman blogged about why he thinks the deal is important:

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By Ian Tan
May 22, 2006

ARE dictionaries and encyclopaedias destined for the trash bin?

With more traditional reference texts going electronic, there seems to be little need for those heavy books that generations have lugged around grudgingly.
Click to see larger image

Modern electronic dictionaries are small but feature-packed and online websites like Wikipedia are literally bursting with the world's knowledge.

Here is a quick take on what they can and cannot do.

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Human Rights Initiative provides legal representation and social services to victims of human rights abuses. It needs Amharic, Arabic, Farsi, French, Korean, Nepalese, Spanish and Vietnamese language translators. You'll be helping with oral or written translation for victims of torture, human trafficking or domestic violence. A confidentiality agreement and criminal background check are required. Minimum age is 18.

Time: flexible

Location: 2501 Oak Lawn Ave., Suite 850, Dallas 75219, or at a Dallas law firm office

Volunteers needed: 20

Contact info: Patricia Melton at 214-273-4334 or pmelton@hrionline.org

Web site: www.hrionline.org

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April 23, 2006

(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)WASHINGTON, April 22_(Kyodo) _ The kin and supporters of both Japanese and South Korean citizens abducted by North Korea issued an appeal Saturday for ordinary U.S. citizens and President George W. Bush to provide help to rescue the abductees, at a rally in front of the White House.

"Citizens of the United States, please join forces with our struggle," said Kenichi Ichikawa, elder brother of Shuichi Ichikawa, who vanished from a Kagoshima Prefecture beach in 1978 at age 23 along with his girlfriend Rumiko Masumoto, then 24.

By Kim Ki-tae
Staff Reporter, Korea Times

Park Sang-ik, author of ``Is Translator Traitor?'' warns that the Korean language may lose its competitiveness within a century if Koreans leave their mother tongue out in the cold. Seen is a Korean student reading a Korean book in the country's pavilion at the 57th Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany last year.

Since the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, Japan systematically focused on translations of a series of Western classics. The state project soon flooded the then burgeoning society with books of Western greats like Montesquieu, Shakespeare and Adam Smith.

What Japan gained from the massive cross-cultural project was not only thousands of books in their own language but an influx of Western civilization that served as a super fertilizer for its cultural ground. Accordingly, Japanese scholars Maruyama Masao and Kato Shuichi in their book assert that the translations played a pivotal role in Japan's modernization.