05 November 2012

The LTi News Roundup - 5th November 2012 (part 1)


Weekly news round-up prepared by the Editorial Staff of LangTechNews for LT-Innovate, the Forum for Europe’s Language Technology Industry.

LT-Innovate: October European News Round-up

Introducing a new LT-Innovate service - a monthly update up of must-have news about events impacting the European LT industry from our dedicated site.
October traditionally marks the start of Q4 for businesses, a massive global conference season, product launches (in the consumer run-up to Christmas), and much strategizing and predicting about the coming year. Which means plenty of news flowing around the LT sector.

Big Content Publishing

Pearson and Bertelsmann have agreed to merge Penguin and Random House book publishers to build the world's largest consumer (popular and educational) publishing house with an eye on the still-emerging e-book or e-reader market. For the LT sector, a global player will mean large language resources for testing and expanding language technologies. E-books will draw on voice synthesis, and literary and educational content will need translating quickly when best-sellers hit the global markets. Digital convergence of text, video, and sound technologies should also drive development in innovative new 'cultural' products. 
Meanwhile technical publishers are further honing the usability of their wares. Elsevier has announced that chapters will now be a natural unit of online information for the technical publishing market, and will add chapter-specific metadata to help users search for the precise content they need. And Wolters Kluwer has acquired the company Health Language to boost the searchability of its point-of-care content by incorporating high quality medical terminology into its search technology. 
Film buffs and subtitle technology suppliers should note that the British Film Institute is planning to digitise 10,000 films over the next five years, possibly providing a vast store of spoken language data and a very long tail of speech translation opportunities.
A handy content generation aid (aka authoring) comes from the Norwegian firm iFinger which offers word/term search on or offline from leading content providers (Collins, Ernst Klett Verlag and Cappelen Forlag).and Wikipedia in all languages.

No comments:

Post a Comment