English for Specific Purposes - Issues in English for tourism and hospitality

Get your own - Open publication

This is an extended paper I prepared on my last year at University (it was a five-year diploma). I choose this theme because this particular area of English-language teaching needs a strong impulse in Portugal (and elsewhere, for my own experience... even in English-speaking countries).

The first impression set on the minds of tourists and potential investors is made by those who deal closely with them at the hospitality industry.

We can not afford to have "Manuels" jeopardising hotel receptions! (You'll need to read the beginning to grasp this...)

Are you interested in computer-assisted language learning (CALL)? How about needs analysis? Yes?!!! Then I recommend reading the last chapter.

A tourist information project "kindly brought to you by the paying advertisers"!

Get your own - Open publication

Sometimes I get requests for material about Águeda including the translation into English. Control over final product sometimes is little if any, however this example is not so bad as one might think because the company even accepted to include credits for the translation (and the original material was mine too...). In any case the final print turned out fairly OK with high-glossy paper. The only drawback was the impossibility to fit the map of the municipality which I had put into English. Soon I'll be able to bring you another set of high-quality tourist material so then you'll get a nice overview of this map and nice local oddities, such as the roasted piglet and the egg and almond sweet pastry! EhEhEhEh!!!

The company who produced the brochure is available here.

European Comission has selected the Best Young Portuguese Translator

The winner was Luís Filipe Machado Costa.

You can check his work right here.

Go here to know more about this initiative by the European Commission.

Anycount 7.0 will be available in the Portuguese language

It's "almost" official! The Advanced International Translations (AIT) crew is about to release the seventh remake of AnyCount, the best word, line, character and page count software there is.

AnyCount produces automatic word, character, line, and page counts for all common file formats. It supports .RTF, .DOC, .WPD, .XLS, .PPT, .PPS, .PDF, .CSV, .HTM, .HTML, .XML, .MIF, .TXT, .ZIP, .ODT, .SDW, .SXW, .ODS, .SDC, .SXC, .ODP, .SDD, .SXI, .HLP, .CHM formats, counting characters with or without spaces.

Release 6.0 of AnyCount included 23 languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian versions.

AnyCount 7.0 will introduce a number of enhancements... which will be known pretty soon though...

I've been cooperating with AIT since 4.0 version and it's been impressive how far this piece of software has been taken: the improvements seem unstoppable. Even the way localisation is being managed is great as it has been "workflowed" with Sisulizer, so the translator can always tell the status of every code-line before him/her.

For the moment fully-functional 30-day evaluation copies of AnyCount 6.0 are available for download at http://www.anycount.com


Also, these are some other localisation projects I was involved in:
http://www.quickim.com/pt/
http://www.mironto.sk/localization/

Localisation ventures in Portugal target the African market (and elsewhere!)

Diversify! That's the word of order and that means new market, and new markets often mean adapting to reality and local needs. This Portuguese software house has a growing presence in foreign markets, especially in Portuguese-speaking African countries, such as Angola. From the position they have in the regional market they can target new countries with the established partners. It doesn't take long to understand localisation is part of the process. In this case the software was worked into the French language so the French-speaking Sub-Saharan countries could be approached successfully.

Generally speaking the user prefers to deal with software in his/her native language, and quite frankly no one can blame people for escaping the intellectual exercise of living in-between languages, homeless in a off-the-hook lifestyle. Who has the time to endure academia and semantic discussions when the boss is waiting the monthly report?

So, whether you believe or not that your software solution is the best just localise it or no one will be there to let you know about the ups and downs of... the help file. How many times will have I have to say that help files are vital for the user? Don't be lame; do the help file or get the blame!