Website localization with Translation Proxy

Posted by 40dots / Did you know…, Tools & Equipment

The reason why the traditional way of website translation is so cumbersome is that the sites are not static HTML files any more, but generated dynamically from bits stored in databases and CMSs (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc.). This setup makes the extraction of content rather problematic and labor-intensive for the clients.

Giving a quick word count is problematic for dynamically built websites. The Easyling proxy makes this a lot easier since it works like a crawler, automatically scans pages while it is also capable of excluding unnecessary content from the word count. The crawling also provides a repetition count, which can be as high as 60%, or even 90% for e-commerce websites.

Online EN-DE-EL Dictionary of Linguistics Terms

Posted by 40dots / Tools & Equipment

The School of German Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has developed an online trilingual (English-German-Greek) dictionary of linguistic terms in order to provide linguists around the world with specialized resources.

Link to dictionary…

dictionary of linguistics

14
Nov

Online multilingual hyphenator

Posted by 40dots / Did you know…, Tools & Equipment

Hyphenate it! is a very useful tool that helps you hyphenate any word in 40 languages.

Access the tool…

hyphenation translation tools

14
Nov

Bored by, of, or with?

Posted by 40dots / Usage

Which of these expressions should you use: is one of them less acceptable than the others?

1) Do you ever get bored with eating out all the time?

2) Delegates were bored by the lectures.

3) He grew bored of his day job.

The first two constructions are the standard ones. The third one is more recent than the other two and it’s become extremely common. In fact, the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of bored of than bored by. It represents a perfectly logical development of the language, and was probably formed on the pattern of expressions such as tired of or weary of. Nevertheless, some people dislike it and it’s not fully accepted in standard English. It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.

more than vs. over

Posted by 40dots / Usage

The old rule

“More than” was used to refer to countable items. For example, it would have been grammatically accurate to tell your friends that you ate more than 10 bananas in one day but grammatically inaccurate to say that you ate over 10 bananas in one day.

The new rule

The new rule makes it acceptable to use “more than” and “over” interchangeably when referring to numerical quantities, such as dollars or years. For example, “my pet turtle is more than 80 years old” is now synonymous with “my pet turtle is over 80 years old,” and “I earned less than a million dollars this year” is now synonymous with “I earned under a million dollars last year.”

Dirty Little Secrets for Translators