Linguistic transcription is the act of converting audio or video speech into text. However, it is a lot more than just listening and typing it down. The recording needs to…
Category: Languages of Asia
The Golden Week in Japan
From the 29th of April to the 5th of May each year, Japan and its citizens celebrate “Golden Week”. This period of festivities includes four very special holidays, which we…
The Issues With Machine Dubbing For Asian Languages
Although dubbing in film and television has been around since the 1950s, machine dubbing is a much more recent phenomenon. There’s been a massive proliferation of video content all around…
Vietnamese in the US
The Vietnamese community is the fourth-largest Asian community in the US. The countries share a rich history but there are also several important linguistic considerations to keep in mind. Vietnamese…
Word Count for Japanese for Project Managers
For three years in the translation industry, I learned a trick or two on the peculiarities of working with Asian languages. Sometimes my quest for searching interesting and professional topics…
NLP for Burmese and Machine Translation Difficulties
The necessity of machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP) for Burmese grew several decades ago as Myanmar was voted and expected to be a rising star in terms…
Itadakimasu – the Japanese Way to Live Life With Gratitude
There’s a Japanese saying that goes like this: “Seven Gods live in one grain of rice.” And what this means is that when one eats food, one should not waste…
Top 7 Challenges when translating English to Chinese
There are over 50,000 Chinese characters, 20,000 words in use, and if you know about 500 Chinese characters, you’ll know about 80% of the language. While this may seem encouraging…