This year marks AATIA’s first online election for the 2009 Board of Directors, candidates for which were profiled earlier.

Members eligible to vote (Active members) should receive an email on Wednesday, September 10, from Elections Online with an assigned one-time  username and password allowing access to the online ballot, along with the link to the ballot. The ballot will accommodate write-in votes.

To be counted, ballots must be received by September 30, 2008.

Results of the election will be announced at the general membership meeting on November 8, 2008 and here on the AATIA blog. The term of office runs from January through December 2009.

Languagehat reports on the online availability of French lexicographic materials, including the Dictionnaire Littré de la langue francaise.

On the encyclopedia front, www.Larousse.fr has been revamped to allow contributions from readers, a la Wikipedia,but these are clearly identified by a different colour from the official contents of 150,000 articles and 10,000 illustrations or animations, which are verified and updated regularly.

The New York Moon, an Internet-based publication, is a collection of experimental, reflective, and imaginative projects that unfold in any medium. The just-released April 2008 issue focuses on translation.

Translation is usually considered a practical activity. Someone who speaks one language needs to understand something in another language. But in our polyglot world and city, it can also be a challenge, a game — the intersection of a dozen cultures. In this edition of the Moon, our correspondents approached the theme from widely different vantages, but each showed that there is a hidden movement to “translation.” After all, the Latin word, translatus, means “carried over.”

Submissions are now being accepted for TransLit Volume 8, a special themed issue titled “Poetry and Short Stories of the Americas” that will be published in spring 2009 by the Literary Translation Collective of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta (ATIA) in cooperation with the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC).

Interested translators may submit a short (<2500 words) translation to or from one of the four main languages of the Americas (English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese) or any indigenous language along with the original text. The original or translation must be in English or French. The submission should include brief biographies of the translator and the author, permission to publish from the author and publisher, and bibliographical data for the original.

Send submissions by July 1, 2008 to:

Editors, TransLit Volume 8
School of Translation and Interpretation
University of Ottawa
Arts Building, 4th Floor
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA K1N 6N5

Contact editors Marc Charron or Luise von Flotow for more information.

XE.com offers many online foreign exchange tools, including a convenient table of cross rates, e.g., the ratios of one currency to another, for frequently consulted currencies. Live mid-market rates are refreshed once a minute. You can also create cross rate tables based in currencies of your choice (even obsolete currencies) using current or historical rates.

The site has a quick currency converter, but you can access a "full" version of the Universal Currency Converter, which contains every known world currency: over 180 currencies in over 250 geographical locations.

We all use Google, sometimes Yahoo! or MSN to search the web, but there are other search engines out there. A new alternative is Red Zee, which not only sports a cute red zebra as its mascot, but also lets you drag thumbnails of the search results in an arc (you have to see it to know what I mean). Maybe not particularly practical, but unusual and snazzy.

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.