Every year in March, French people all over the world, as well as people who study French, celebrate French Language Week (“La Semaine de la Franchophonie” or “La Semaine de la Langue Française”). During this celebration, French institutes, universities, theaters and cinemas hold French film and play festivals, food and wine tastings, and French language workshops.

Following traditions and customs different countries start their week on different days, some do on Monday other on Sunday, due to that variance the festivity starts on March 8 and ends on March 24. Additionally, the International French Day is celebrated on March 20^th. Furthermore, UNESCO also set this day as the UN French Language Day because it coincided, in 2010, with the 40th anniversary of the International Organization of La Francophonie.

JR Language team joins the celebration with a special recognition to our French translators from France, Canada, Africa, and from all over the world. We thank them for their hard work, professionalism, and expertise, which allow us to deliver high-quality French translations to our clients every day of the year! Their wide range of subject matter expertise make us the first translation option for business clients and individuals for their legal, marketing, and technical translation needs.

Let’s celebrate together with the 200 million French speakers worldwide. Let’s promote the francophone culture and the beautiful language of Camus, Voltaire, Hugo, Dumas and many others great writers, artists and, of course our outstanding, professional French Translators!

On International Women’s Day, JR Language wants to take the opportunity to highlight the professional and valuable contribution of the women working for our translation agency. Founded by a woman, JR Language always looks for ways to recognize the women in our community and around the globe. Today we celebrate the success and achievements of the women in our team and of the many women translators and interpreters around the world.

As we all know, women are from Venus and men are from Mars; two different planets with very distinct characteristics. Humans are the same; gender somehow predisposes us and provides us with a set of skills and characteristics that makes us more inclined for certain tasks.  According to statistics from studentscholarships.org, 71% of translators, interpreters and terminologists in Canada are women. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find gender-related information for the United States or other nations but, we are convinced that this is the rule around the world given the proportion of women that we find in our team and the colleagues that we have met within the localization world.

There are many organizations dedicated to help and empower women. In the language industry we could mention Found in Translation, a Massachusetts-based program which helps low-income and homeless multilingual women become professional medical interpreters. This program was also founded by a woman, Nobel Prize nominee Kip Tiernan, a fierce advocate for social justice and we can’t stress enough about the amazing and noble job they are doing and the enormous difference they represent in the lives of all the women they have helped.

Whether it is because we are natural multitaskers or because we like to communicate (aka talk, now accredited to a gene), the truth is we love and enjoy helping others (and apparently language-related careers) and we excel at it!

Happy International Women’s Day to all our friends and colleagues!

JR Language will attend GALA’s 5^th annual conference at the end of March 2013. GALA’s acronym stands for Globalization and Localization Association.

We are looking forward to this conference after the fantastic experience we had last year. From Monaco 2012 we got new partners and providers, as well as a myriad of new ideas for the growth and development of JR Language in 2012. Overall we came back energized, and with new technologies to improve quality and the specialization of our translation services.

After checking the conference schedule, we are looking forward to get more insight on the maturity and new developments in Machine Translation; we have big plans for this technology in 2013. We are especially interested in post-editing techniques and measurements for TM.

GALA brings together a diverse and interesting group of people from all areas of the translation industry, among them: language technology developers, translation agencies, localization providers, consultants, and clients. Presentations will continue to focus on the tag line of the organization: “The language of business and the business of language”. This year the keynote speaker is stressing the importance of embracing technology, in general but, particularly in localization and translation services.

We are also interest in the updates on localization standards and connectivity between applications and translation tools.

Stay tuned for JRL’s summary of this important conference, which gathers representatives and players from all industries and countries of the world.

For anyone who’s in one way or the other involved in the translation industry and especially for those who speak Arabic, December 18^th is a day to celebrate. In 2010, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established this day as the UN Arabic Language Day. The goal: “to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the organization”. They chose this date to commemorate when Arabic was incorporated, in 1973, as one of the six official languages. The other five official UN languages are: Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian and English.

At JR Language, we celebrate with the world this Arabic Language Day and, we want to take this moment to thank all of our hard-working, professional Arabic translators and interpreters throughout the U.S. and the world, who always deliver reliable and timely translations and, interpretation services, in a wide variety of subject matters ranging from marketing, legal, medical, to governmental material. Their professionalism and expertise are a great asset to our translation agency.

We hope we will continue working together for many years to come!

Next week JR Language Translation Services will have a display at the exhibition of the 21^st Annual Trade Banquet. The event will be hosted by the International Business Council of Rochester, in Upstate New York.

Members of our team will showcase our translation and localization services to companies looking to succeed in global trade and international business. From website translation to legal translation, we can help businesses communicate in the international arena.

According to the information shared by the U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, Rochester has increased its exporting activities in the last four years, and the top trading partners are: Canada, China, Mexico and Germany. New York State has ranked third among top exporting states, and with the majority of the global market residing outside of the U.S., the opportunities for American companies to enter new market are endless. The mentioned exposition will have available resources that support companies’ efforts to reach foreign markets.

Marilynne Locke, Director of Trade Finance from Harris RF Communications will be the keynote speaker. She will reinforce the evening theme with her speech “The Real World of International Business”

We look forward to the networking opportunities that this important event brings. Please stop by the JR Language display to talk about your particular market, products, and services. We welcome the opportunity to help you reach or strength your presence in international markets.

JR Language attended Monaco 2012 for the GALA’s 4^th annual conference. GALA stands for Globalization and Localization Association.

Needless to say we had a great time and had fantastic exchange with people from all over the world in a great setting. It was a good opportunity for attendees to sense trends in technology supporting the translation industry, clients’ needs and how some companies like Dell, Paypal, and Lego are handling their multilingual content.

There were representatives from different sectors within the translation industry, namely: language technology developers, translation agencies, localization providers, consultants, and clients. Presentations focused on “the language of business and the business of language”, the slogan of the conference.

Machine translation was an important topic of discussion and the theme of several presentations. The evolution of machine translation and technology was tackled from the point of view of:  providers, users, and researchers. There was a lot of concern regarding quality, turnaround time, and language combinations. JR Language will be evaluating providers of this technology in the upcoming months.

Another highlight of the conference was the importance of Localization Standards for the industry and all its players. There were several relevant initiatives that were discussed that are worth mentioning:

• Gala Standard Initiative is focusing its approach in two core projects:

(1)Lingoport (The Language Interoperability Portfolio)which is defining standards for sending and receiving translation material to help overcome the fragmentation in which each tool has its own packaging format and, (2) model service elements and continues activities to educate about key standards bodies.

• W3c Multilingual Web founded by the European Commission to best practices and standards that are aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.
• ASTM f43 – Consensus Standard for the language Industry and products link to http://www.astm.org/COMMIT/COMMITTEE/F43.htm

The conference gave us a boost in creative fuel that will improve the strategies and priorities of JR Language Translation Services as an industry leader in 2012 and 2013.

JR Language just launched their website in Spanish in an effort to provide better services to the Spanish speaking community.

We care about all of our clients; we want to effectively communicate our message and help as many people as we can.

We would like to hear about what you think we can do to serve you better.

Thank you!

After careful consideration of various business management systems we decided on buying Plunet. This system will let us better organize and have a more in sync business management process. It will help us combine processes that, until now, were separated, making the PM and the administrative phases run smoother.

It is JR Language’s 5th anniversary. We want to thank our loyal clientele who has put their trust in us with their translation and localization needs.

We hope we can continue growing and successfully helping our clients in their translation needs for years to come. Thank you!

We have the pleasure of welcoming Yuisa González to the JR Language Translation’s team. She is from Puerto Rico, has a Master in Translation and a Bachelor in Foreign Languages. She is a native Spanish speaker who also speaks English, Italian, Portuguese and French. Her working language pairs are: English-Spanish; Italian, Portuguese and French into Spanish. Yuisa started in the world of translation after she decided not to pursue a career in International Law.