IMUG Past Events Archive

Date

Speaker / Affiliation

Topic

1/16/92

(No meeting,)

2/20/92

Alice Peck and Tim Hussey
American Translators International (now SimulTrans, Inc.)

Localization — A Technical Introduction

3/19/92

Karen Milne
Insignia Solutions, Inc.

DOS Compatibility on the Mac

4/16/92

Ping Huey
Adobe Systems, Inc.

Japanese PostScript Fonts and ATM-J

5/21/92

Ken Lunde
Adobe Systems, Inc.

The History of the Japanese Character Set and its Encoding

6/18/92

Gordon Holt, Jr.
Business Development Consultant

Independent Software Development and Marketing

7/16/92

Peter Weissman
BayWare, Inc.

Multimedia-based Education:
Is it Really a Good Medium for Teaching?

8/20/92

Joe Becker, XSOFT / Xerox
Lee Collins, Taligent, Inc.

Unicode Update

Unicode is a standard international character code for multilingual information processing. Like the ASCII character code, it defines simple, unambiguous, fixed width character codes. Since ASCII's 7-bit character size is inadequate to handle multilingual text, Unicode adopts a 16-bit architecture that can uniquely specify any character in any language worldwide that is currently used or is likely to be used in the foreseeable future. Unicode is being developed by the Unicode Consortium, whose membership includes companies such as Apple, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Taligent, and Xerox. Recently, Unicode has been merged with ISO international standard 10646.

9/17/92

Ari Davidow
Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Co. (a subsidiary of Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.)

Non-Latin Type Issues:
Hebrew and Cyrillic

Ari Davidow will discuss multilingual type issues with a focus on Hebrew and Cyrillic. Among the important points will be proper typeface selection when working with different languages, what makes a multilingual, or multi-alphabet combination most comprehensible and aesthetic, and the importance of =avoiding= 'look-alike' faces (such as Times and Times Cyrillic) in most cases.

10/15/92

Bob Jung
Apple Computer, Inc.

Internationalization in the Unix Environment

An overview of the services available on UNIX systems to program language- independant applications. The presentation will concentrate on standardized interfaces, namely those defined in POSIX.1 (I.E.E.E. standard 1003.1-1990), ANSI-C (ANSI X3.159-1988), and XPG3 (X/Open Portability Guide, issue 3). These standards all define a set of C language functions for writing internationalized applications. These standards have a strong European language bias; most of the current work in this area is concentrating on defining Asian language support to these interfaces.

An overview of the general functionality, and descriptions of the C language routines will be presented. Current work by the ISO C work group, and character codeset representations will also be discussed. There will be time for a question/answer session.

11/19/92

Merle Tenney
Claris Corp.

Computer-assisted Translation

Machine Translation (MT) is a term that refers to the automatic translation of human languages. It has a long, if not distinguished, history among the branches of computer science, going back over forty years. Over time, the goal of fully automatic, high-quality MT began giving way to the nearer-term goal of Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT), where humans and computers cooperate-to varying degrees and at various places-to achieve the desired translations. MT and CAT are not disjoint concepts: MT is merely the most fully automated of the approaches comprised by CAT.

The CAT field can be divided into distinct approaches using criteria such as whether the source text is available online, whether the translation is affected at the term level or the sentence level, whether a human translator interacts with the translation tool during the translation process, etc. Mr. Tenney will discuss the inherent differences between the different approaches, the state of the art in each area, and the major players in the field today. He will also discuss the implications of CAT for international software-both in adding functionality to text-based or educational applications and in localizing software and documentation for applications in general.

Mr. Tenney has been involved in CAT since the early seventies. He worked on the Interactive Translation System developed at Brigham Young University. He also worked for two commercial developers of CAT-Weidner and Automated Language Processing Systems. More recently, he has worked on various proofing and reference tools at Lexpertise and Microlytics. He is currently serving as the Manager of International Engineering at Claris, with responsibilities for localization support and implementing linguistic technologies into Claris products.

12/17/92

Kristen Klaus,Gregory Niemeyer
American Translators International (now SimulTrans, Inc.)

Preparing Documents for the Global Market

The speakers will share their experience as members of the desktop publishing department of an internationally operating translation company, and discuss all aspects of document preparation for the global market. Contrasting the different solutions needed for European languages and Japanese, they will cover the following topics:

- the computer systems and software applications that can be used for word processing, page layout, and graphics creation
- the process of desktop publishing, going from text input and graphics creation, via formatting, table of content creation, indexing, and reviewing to the final steps of imagesetting and printing
- the problems of international communication, both from a technical and a human perspective