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?