Language as an art, and language as a science are facing imminent cybernetic convergence. The clock is ticking for the obsolete ways of Gutenberg, Taylorism, and Web 1.0.
The drawbacks of MT are now being converged into a new continuous quality enhancing mix within the Google Translation Center, which is in an imminent rollout:
Statistical Machine Translation + Crowdsourcing + Web 2.0 Translation Memory
Check for development updates and cutting-edge benchmarks under:
Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information -- from videos to presentations -- and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.
Google Sites makes it easy for anyone to create and manage simple, secure group websites. You can create and publish new pages with the click of a button, edit web pages like documents, and move content and pages around as you please. Information is stored securely online, and you decide who can edit or view the site. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website.
Feel free to build along in the Table of Contents, and to contribute your information to this endeavor. As soon as some significant body of structural knowledge and case studies have unfolded, the contributions will be imported into an appropriate Wiki framework for further road-mapping and content delivery.
Audio transcription technology has made a jump in quality, but it is not cheap. The language translator community is getting into this now, and webcasting interfaces with this technology.
The multilingual version of Dragon includes English voice recognition as well as an option. You just need to create a new profile and set its second language.
In practical terms, when you want to switch from French to English, you will just need to right-click the Dragon icon next to the clock and select (let's say) "Sheila français" instead of "Sheila English".
However, it will be seen by the system as a completely separate user and will not share data and terminology with the other. Actually, it will even have to be trained from scratch as if it was different person.
It will also take a bit of time, as it saves the previous profile data before opening the new one. I wouldn't really recommend to switch back and forth.
To sum up:
Q: Does it produce high-quality UK English
A: I would say so. It come with British/US/Australian/SEAAsian tailored dictionary files, and I guess these languages are really their core business...
Q: Is dictating in both English and French possible in the same document?
A: It is possible if you switch profile, but not practical due to save/load time.
Q: Put in simple, non-computer expert terms, what are the advantages of the preferred version over the standard? Is it worth the extra 100€?
A: Dragon is available in a number of versions. The Standard edition ($100) has the same accuracy as the others, but it’s just for bare-bones dictation. To get the more advanced goodies described in this review — the natural-language commands, Bluetooth mikes and recorders — you need the Preferred edition ($200). It also lets you set up voice macros that type out boilerplate text. For example, you can say, “Buzz off,” and it will type: “Thanks for thinking of me! Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m unable to accept your kind offer at this time.”
4. Various other tips and services towards "wav-to-text" transcription, video search and administration, and shownote taking are reported within the following link list too:
A new social networking platform has been established for collaboratively-minded translators in order to explore opportunities, ideas, best practices, and implementations for win/win collaborative translation relationships.
I am a US citizen and German-trained in Mechanical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing. Energy Technology) & National Economics (Vordiplom), German Business Administration (German Banking, German Tax Administration, German Corporate Law), and US Business Administration (General & Information Management).
I have been living in southern Germany since 1970, and I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.
Since the year 1988, I have been affiliated with the EU Commission as an information consultant, and I readily perform projects as a top-level document author, technical & business writer, translator, proofreader, e-learning tutor, or interpreter.
Bilingual and cross-cultural adult education as trainer and coach is also a strength that you can expect from me.
US citizen living in Germany doing cross-cultural consulting & training, translations DE - EN-US. Engineering - Economics - Law. Webcasting. Second Life. Product Scout. Promotional Help. james.oreilly@web.de, Skype: eurominuteman URL: www.proz.com/profile/64003/
