Forvo is a site where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. At this time Forvo boasts of "2.609 words 2.516 pronunciations,  177 languages."

Caveat: since dialects vary widely, and any user may submit a recording, you may not get a "standard" pronunciation.

The Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators (TAHIT) will hold its annual symposium in Dallas on April 25-26.

The Interpreter Special Interest Group meeting scheduled for Saturday, April 5, has been canceled due to a conflict with the Spanish-English contrastive grammar workshop.

In his article “Computing’s Final Frontiers”, PC guru John C. Dvorak takes a critical look at several technologies (among them machine translation and voice recognition) that, in his opninion, have not and will not fulfill the great expectations associated with them. My favorite quote:

A few gizmos out there can say “Hello, where is the train station?” or “I have a blue pencil” in 40 different languages. But we’re still yearning for a real translation system. Most written translations I see of memos, newspapers, books, and magazines are a joke. Sometimes it is a miracle if you can even get the gist of the text [….] It’s laughable. And this is with the written word, which should be easy to understand. The final frontier with this technology is the gadget that translates what you say and speaks it in a foreign language. I am certain that the smart money has long since bailed out of these types of projects.

The New York Times reports the death of Robert Fagles, translator of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.

The IAEA Safety Glossary defines and explains technical terms used in International Atomic Energy Agency safety standards and other safety-related IAEA publications, and it provides information on their usage.

PDFs of the 2007 edition are available in five of the agency’s six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Russian. The Spanish version is still being translated. The English version is monolingual; the others give English equivalents along with same-language definitions.

Thanks to Hank Phillips for the tip.

I finally broke down and bought a laptop with the Windows Vista operating system preinstalled. The reason was that my 5-year-old laptop running Windows XP was simply no longer fast enough for the programs I needed to use.

I specifically chose a machine with Vista Ultimate. Here are the reasons why:

• Vista Ultimate allows you to download and install language packs that change the interface language (menus, buttons, messages, etc.) of Windows. This is an enormous advantage for translators who often translate computer manuals or localize software. In the past, you could download Microsoft glossaries to find the official translations, but recently Microsoft replaced the complete glossaries with a limited version. Therefore, Vista Ultimate is really useful when you have to translate sentences such as "Click on Start, then Settings, then on Control Panel" into Spanish, or French or German or any of the other 36 supported languages (see a list of features of various Vista versions here).
    
• You can switch between interface languages or associates languages with specific user accounts, which is nice in a multilingual household.
    
• Another advantage of Vista Ultimate is Ready Boost, a technology that allows you to use a (sufficiently fast) USB stick as "extra RAM".

So far, my Vista Ultimate experience was better than expected. The laptop recognized my wireless network and connected to the internet without any problems. By default, the operating system is a bit overcautious, constantly asking whether you really want to do this or that…

Of course I still do most of my work on an XP desktop and have not tried to hook up older peripherals to the Vista machine. Yet sooner or later, Vista will be unavoidable, and when you select your next computer, you might want to consider Vista Ultimate for its multilingual features.

Only a few places remain in the English-Spanish contrastive grammar workshop, to be presented by Xosé Castro on April 5th. If you’ve been intending to register, but haven’t done so, don’t delay! Contact Laura Vlasman to find out whether there is still room in the workshop.