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McElroy’s Mission Statement McElroy Translation provides translation and localization services in all languages to business and government clientele enhancing their ability to compete in global markets.
“Good business leaders create destiny by defining and sharing a vision. To know it, to feel it, and to live it is to achieve success.”
Serving the medical industry introduces unique considerations to the translation and localization process. We could say it’s a horse of a different color. One notable difference is the way that the quality assurance (QA) process is designed for medical industry clients. This article discusses some quality considerations of the medical/pharmaceutical translation market and offers QA process information tailored to the specialized needs of pharmaceutical and medical-device clients, especially in relation to back translation and clinical trials.
Website localization is a dynamic process and an ongoing commitment. That can be intimidating but planning for that realization ensures success. This article is a good read on the topic. Several McElroy clients use Leepfrog Technologies to manage web content. Leepfrog is a very worthy niche player with products that take the mystery and the surprises out of website content management and lower web maintenance and localization costs.
New York, USA (BtoB): It's a given fact that the Web makes it easier to take your business global. Why, then, according to JupiterResearch senior analyst W. Gregory Dowling, do many companies end up going back to their local default design after 12 to 18 months? The cost and risks of creating an internationally targeted site-especially one in a different language-may outweigh the benefits for many.
In the February issue of E-Buzz, McElroy's monthly e-mail newsletter, I wrote about Web 2.0 from a localization perspective, and speculated on when popular networking and application websites would go global and localize their sites for users in other countries or cultures. Some of the big ones are starting to pay attention to the rest of the world, including MySpace and Technorati.
What these companies seem to be realizing, as in the case of MySpace, is that businesses outside of the U.S. are rapidly and quite successfully creating similar web business models of their own that better serve local audiences. Who will be the first business to come out of the gate with the U.I.s of the entire website and accompanying applications in both English and Chinese?
MySpace, the Web site that has become the A-list online hangout spot with 61 million members, plans to expand aggressively beyond the United States, perhaps even to China.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chris DeWolfe, speaking at an Internet conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, said its big plan for the year is to expand in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
"We need to prove ourselves internationally," DeWolfe said before investors at the Thomas Weisel Partners Internet & Telecom Conference. MySpace, based in Santa Monica, has already taken off in the United Kingdom, he continued, and it is "taking a hard look at China."
Hello, and welcome to readers of the monthly e-newsletter, The Translation E-Buzz. We have created a complimentary website where more immediate issues pertaining to translation, languages and global business are posted almost daily. I have been working hard the past month or so to build up an array of articles that will hopefully be springboards for fruitful discussion, or at the very least, provide you with new information you may not have come across in your daily newspaper.
Each columnist's and commenter’s views and ideas are his and her own, and every effort will be made to keep discourse civil and constructive where opinions differ. If you would like to comment on an existing posting, please click on the hyperlinked title to read and comment on the individual posting. If you wish to become a guest columnist to E-Buzz, please
and include what areas of interest you will write about in your blogs.
Better technology could yield more fruit from an age-old idea of how language learning takes place. Everyone from shepherds to robots have been utilized through history in attempts to understand this. The MIT project relies on our ever-increasing access to processing power and memory to collect early language learning data and analyze it.
Most people have heard of the story told by Herodotus of Psammetichus, a Pharoah of Egypt from 664 – 610 BC, who sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people. When one of the children cried “becos” with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was Phrygian because that was the sound of Phyrgian word for “bread.” Thus, they concluded that the Phyrgian were an older people than the Egyptians. Whether or not the Herodotus story is true is not known.
E-Buzz columns
