Bowne Global Solutions (BGS), an official supplier to the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games, will be providing translation and interpretation services in more than 10 languages for the games taking place in Dublin, Ireland, June 16-29, 2003.

BGS will be translating documents, conducting simultaneous interpretations for Head of Delegation Conferences and maintaining the Special Olympics World Summer Games web site (http://www.2003specialolympics.com) in the games' six official languages - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Simplified Chinese - as well as German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Gaelic. Special Olympics selected the 10 languages based on the languages most commonly spoken among the 7,000 + athletes competing from over 160 international delegations.

BGS also announced that it will provide translation and interpretation services to clients of all Berlitz' Language Centers worldwide. Under the terms of the 3-year global agreement, Berlitz' clients in the United States and Canada will have access to BGS services beginning in June 2003, via a dedicated toll-free hotline. The services will be extended to clients of Berlitz Europe beginning in the 3rd quarter of 2003. In addition to the language centers, the Berlitz corporate sales force will also be able to offer these services.

Several healthcare-related organisations have recently called on viaLanguage, a global translation and editing company, to provide on-line translation services. With a growing number of non-English speaking patients and clients, organisations such as HIPPA, PKIDs, Planned Parenthood, Oregon Health & Science University, wired.MD and SAIF have chosen viaLanguage to help bridge the communication gap and prevent potential mistakes.

viaLanguage Online Translation provides the efficiencies of on-line submission with the accuracy of human translation for such important documents as policy updates, public announcements, education assessments and general correspondence. Organisations can internally centralise their translation processes. Projects are submitted through an easy-to-use, secure Web interface and routed automatically to translators who specialise in specific languages and/or document styles.

Researchers at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and collaborators nationwide have built a system to translate Hindi text into English and query Hindi databases using English questions. The effort was part of the "Surprise Language" project, a test of the computer science community's ability to quickly create translation tools for previously unresearched languages. Teams at 11 different sites across the US and one in the UK participated, producing an impressive array of information processing tools for Hindi, including information retrieval, machine translation, entity identification and question answering.

The exercise was sponsored by the Defense Advance Research Project Agency and ended July 1, 2003. In addition to USC/ISI, other participating institutions included the University of Maryland, College Park; the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, Carnegie-Mellon University; the University of California, Berkeley; New York University; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Sheffield (UK); the MITRE Corporation; BBN Technologies; and the Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 

Tony O'Dowd, CEO and president of Alchemy Software Development, has been invited by the Department of Taoiseach to take part in the European Knowledge Society Foresight Commission. The commission is being setup and funded by the Irish government to explore how government policy should be shaped in encouraging a knowledge-based society and ways in which Ireland can improve its competitiveness.