January – February 1988

ltew5.pdf

Table of contents

• Put your lips together and blow: The Techno-story behind dubbing and subtitling movies.
  Double trouble putting a film into a foreign language.by Andrew Joscelyne.
  Double trouble putting a film into a foreign language. Have you ever wondered how Lauren Bacall speaks French? Or how all those little words made their way to the bottom of your TV screen? Wonder no more.
  Double Dutch by Jeffrey S. Mann.
  Subtitling on Dutch television.
  No flashy mouse-driven, bit-mapped work stations with lots of sexy lookup functions or artificial intelligence aids here; just reliable klunkers for churning out chunks of text which appear at the correct time on television screens from Groningen to Maastricht.
• Interactive screenplays by Jim Gasperini.
  New medium or newspeak?
• The great glossary sweepstakes by Alex Gross.
  Is there a language bomb ticking?
• Maghi King on machine translation by Geoff Pogson.
  For the past thirteen years, Margaret (known to all in MT land as Maghi) King has headed Geneva’s Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies (ISSCO), an independent research establishment founded by Italian business-philanthropist Dalle Molle and dedicated to furthering the cause of “human ecology”.
• Fontographer. High Fashion Type by Peter Rutten.
  Work but don’t get dirty, stand out in the crowd, create art, get rich quick … and count Paul Rand among your customers. Reasons aplenty to start using the program that seems to be raising wall-to-wall smiles of satisfaction in the trend world of graphics design.
• Philip’s Rosetta Machine Translation. A question of semantics by Peter Rutten
  It’s been called the most elegant machine translator currently in development. But can it solve the ambiguities of language without artificial intelligence and real world knowledge?
• Machines that Read – absolute state of the art
  Kurzweil’s first product was not an OCR product for the publishing or office market, but a reading machine for the visually impaired. (…)
  Today, the set-up, operating overhead, and price liabilities of OCR systems make re-keying a viable alternative in many environments. In short, they’re more work than they’re worth, and most people simply don’t have enough reason to put up with the cost or inconvenience – it’s easier to hire a typist when needed.
• A network of minds. The online phenomenon by Susan J. Shepard
  "Knowledge is of two kinds," wrote Samuel Johnson in 1775. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Two centuries later, the observation "find information upon it" has taken on a dimension even Johnson’s extraordinary mind could not possibly have comprehended. (…)
  One of the problems of the videotex industry has been overly ambitious expectations. It’s not as much a technological innovation. It’s a behavior change, for example getting information from a terminal rather than from a newspaper.

News

• Eurotra The Pannenborg Report is in.
• MTS by TOVNA MT system for Sun-level workstations.
• HICATS/JE Hitachi machine translation system.
• Minitel tries to penetrate the US market.
• Interleaf Two new "distributed publishing" products for the Macintosh and AT.
• RSI Compupak Custom packaging for disks and other computer products.
• BSO DLT machine translation project.
• Hypertext IBM France buys rights to Owls’s Guide.
• Toshiba Automatic Translation Typing Phone (ATTP).
• Interword 3.0 Multilingual word processor for PS/2.
• Electronic newspaper for the blind in Sweden.
• LAPS Language analysis project for 24 obscure languages.
• Wizard Electronic Mail Release 6.0 sells for $5,000, including source and object code.
• TransWord commercial correspondence translation package for PCs.
• ICL working on automatic telex translation system for phone companies.
• SYSTRAN Gachot keeps Systran in the family
• Tian Ma Chinese text conversion package from Canada.
• PC/Focus gets natural language front-end.
• Aerospatial taps SYSTRAN.
• ARIES Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems, at University of Saskatchewan.

Technoid

• IBM’s first PS/2 operating system shipped December, ahead of schedule. Presentation Manager, PS/2’s Mac-like interface, isn’t expected until mid to late 1988.
• Silicon Graphics develops Quick Response CAD system for fashion designers
• Rank Cintel – telecine machine cleans old movies
• US plans to accelerate development of parallel processing

Reviews

• Thoughtline, from Xpercom reviewed by Peter Rutten
  Electronic ghostwriter or electronic inquisitor?
• RightWriter, from RightSoft reviewed by Peter Rutten
  RightWriter treats the passive as if it were verbal AIDS – to be isolated and avoided at all costs.
• Marquardt’s new ergonomic IBM keyboard reviewed by Sabine Rieger
  Them ergonomic blues.
• "The making of McPaper" by Peter Prichard reviewed by Jeffrey S. Mann
  USA TODAY – Fastfood journalism. Should a country the size of the United States have a "national newspaper", particularly one like this, which trims the news down to tiny morsels with the absolute minimum of news?

Introduction

“Language Technology/Electric Word” was a magazine founded in the late 1980s by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who went on to create Wired magazine some years later.

Unlike Wired, “Language Technology/Electric Word” was a creature of the pre-internet era. In fact, the word “internet” was unknown to the vast majority of computer users (and there weren’t many of them).

Translators were early adopters of personal computers (Apple, IBM-compatible and other offerings, such as the venerable “green” Amstrad, whose box doubled as a desk — you just cut along the dotted line to make room to get your knees in). Computer usage took on a new dimension with online services such as Compuserve.

At the same time, hardware and software companies were having to face the problems of translating their products and manuals into a variety of languages. It was out of this “primeval soup” that a Dutch translation company, INK International (now part of LionBridge), decided to create a magazine.

Here’s how Louis Rossetto tells it:

Language Technology begat Electric Word begat Wired
Louis Rossetto

Jane and I started and published Language Technology/ Electric Word in Amsterdam before we were shut down by our then publisher Media Nederland. At the time we thought it a tragedy, but in fact it liberated us to move to San Francisco to start Wired.

Language Technology/Electric Word was a formative learning experience for Jane and me, as well as a vehicle for discovery. Originally, Language Technology was started by a translation firm that worked for personal computer hardware and software companies. They had a small research operation to produce translation tools. They wanted to market them, and decided that magazine advertising was the way. Since there was no suitable magazine available, they decided to start their own. I tried to talk them out of it, suggesting that instead of losing money on a magazine they hire two salespeople and have them contact every translator and translation company directly. They rejected my advice and appointed me editor. Jane soon joined me in Amsterdam from Paris, where she had been a marketing director at a fashion house. Dutch fashion being an oxymoron at the time, she ended up becoming our Marketing Director. There were only two of us, but we didn’t care, we were in love.

We launched Language Technology in the mid-1980s, as the personal computer revolution started by Apple and IBM began to have real impact, and as global data networks started to grow. I didn’t know anything about language or technology, and LT/EW offered me the opportunity to personally meet programmers, researchers, developers, and marketers on the cutting edge of technological change. In doing so, I was struck with the power of their ideas, and by how many were idealists who felt their work would cause revolutions in business, education, communication, and civil society. It was this exposure and discovery which inspired Jane and me to start Wired later.

Meanwhile, we had fun with Electric Word, as we ultimately re-christened it. Naturally, the translation company ran into financial difficulty, and jettisoned the magazine since it wasn’t part of their core business. We were acquired by a start up company called Media Nederland, which had ambitions to put together the Dutch equivalent of the media empires Murdoch and Maxwell were then putting together. They wanted us because we were using the latest publishing technologies — desktop publishing and networks. They felt they could leverage that knowledge in other publications. Later, they would draft me to be launch editor-in-chief of their glossy, Esquire-wannabe men’s magazine O, but that’s a whole other story.

Under Media Nederland, our staff grew to eight, and we beavered away in the basement of a townhouse near Amsterdam’s Vondel Park putting it out every other month. At press time, I would disappear into the office for round-the-clock sessions copyediting and laying out the front and back sections of the magazine, when I wasn’t pedaling around town in the dead of night on my bike to check on the progress of the cover and middle sections being put together by our art directors, first Max Kisman, then Henri Lucas in their studios.

I believe we were the first European magazine to be published on DTP — I carried the copy of Ready Set Go back from Macworld where I had scored a review copy and used it to produce the first issue. We switched to Pagemaker for the second issue, immediately after Aldus finally released it. Another first was the last issue; I had carried a copy of PhotoShop back from the TED conference in Monterey and put Ricky Wurman on the cover in some psychedelic hallucination — which was not intended but a complete mistake because we simply didn’t understand how to use the new program. I believe that may have been the first use of Photoshop in any magazine.

We never had more than 15,000 subscribers, but they were an eclectic collection that ran from translators to 80 of the premier tech research centers and labs around the world. We were thrilled when Kevin Kelly at Whole Earth Review discovered the magazine on his own and wrote a review calling it “The Least Boring Computer Magazine in the World”. Naturally, that became our cover tagline.

Jane and I can truthfully say that we learned the nuts and bolts of magazine publishing from the ground up at LT/EW (and also what not to do from watching the slow motion implosion of our parent Media Nederland, whose grand ambitions ultimately drove them to bankruptcy, owing Jane and me and other contributors thousands of dollars). We wrote the business plan for Wired while we there, complete with five years of spreadsheet projections which had 5,000 calculations and 120 variables. It took an hour to recalc on our second generation Apple Macintosh in our living room. We made dinner while we waited.

Electric Word was scruffy fun, training wheels for Wired. It was the post-post graduate course in editing and publishing we needed to do Wired. We honored that experience by calling the opening news section of Wired “Electric Word”. I will always have fond memories of that time, and for the people who knew us through it then.

Unlike Wired, LTEW has not been available online … until now. Since I believe that the magazine was way before its time, and that people should be able to access it, I have decided to scan each issue and put it online as a PDF. OCRing the content is too time-consuming right now, but I plan to type up the full table of contents of each issue. Below is the list of issues that are available online. More will be added Just click to see a table of contents and a link to download a PDF.

September-October 1987

Download the full magazine as a PDF

Table of contents

• Localizing Software by Peter E. Tik. Americans are past masters at coining short, to-the-point words. But just try translating “marketing” into any other language with just one word.
• The Japanese have a word for it: “suriyawase.” It means “rubbing the bottoms of two teacups together.” For, as every dutiful Japanese housewife knows, putting an unrubbed porcelain teacup onto a bare tabletop can cause one highly dishonorable scratch–since the rim at the bottom is unglazed. …
• A Poetics of Interactivity by Ronald Martínez and Jim Gasperini.
  Someday, a definitive critical work will appear which recognizes the structures that appear and reappear in the work of interactive narrative writing. At the moment, the evolution of technique is, in all things computer, rapid; so rapid that any description of them may be obsolete by the time it hits the street. My advice is, read this fast.
• An Engineeer and his Word by Peter Rutten
  The engineer is Andy Heermans. His word is “Insomniac.” A few months ago he yelled it into a mike at Steve Friedman’s Digital Music Center, a New York recording studio. Wanna hear it? It’s on Carlos Alomar’s (David Bowie’s guitar player) debut album “Dream Generator.”
• The Filofax of Life
  Quick, if your house was on fire, what’s the first thing you’d save? For an increasing number of young professionals, the answer is their filofax.
• Get Smart! Industrial Strength Language Processing from Smart Communications. by Jeffrey S. Mann
  Every year multinational corporations around the world put out hundreds of millions of words designed to instruct, inform, warn and convince. The ability to achieve each of these goals effectively can mean the difference between chapter eleven and Easy Street.
• How to Talk to a Plane. Crouzet’s Speechtech by Andrew Joscelyne
  A peek into the cockpit of the Rafale, the first fighter being designed around a voice interactive system.
• Does Steak Love Lettuce? by Susan J. Shephard
  If a computer could tell us what it dreams, what would it tell us? The question is less theoretical than it used to be. INRAC’s progeny is the most highly developed artificial writer in the field of prose synthesis today.
• How a modern newspaper is really put together – The Independent by Louis Rossetto
  Neither “Front Page” nor “Lou Grant”. The Independent is the first national quality newspaper launched in Britain this century. By all measures The Independent is a success. Critics like it, its target yups are buying it, and nine months after its launch, it’s just 30,000 copies short of breakeven circulation of 360,000.

Reviews

• Bookshelf–First Shot in the Desktop Information Revolution by Eric Alderman
  Microsoft Bookshelf, scheduled for fall release, is nothing less than amazing.
• PC-MOS 386 –What DOS should have been. by Susan J. Shephard
  PC-MOS/386 (MOS) is a fast, multi-tasking/multi-user operating system, designed top to bottom for microcomputers running the Intel 80386 32-bit processor.
• Handwriting Recognition – Anatex’s Personal Writer by Emmanuel Rabier
  More than a gimmick, but less than what it will be when it can read the way you really write.
• Amnesia. The first computerised novel. reviewed by Peter Stenhuijs
  Amnesia, by Thomas M. Disch, published by Electronic Arts, for IBMs and clones. US$44.95
• Machine Translation. A Technology Assessment. by Richard W. Balfour reviewed by Tony Whitecomb
  Publishers BMT Consultants claim this report can help current and potential MT users make their cost-effective utmost of a technology through which “hundreds of companies are already doubling the productivity of their translation departments.”

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