Meet Maurice van Zutphen, our new Vice President of Operations and Project Management!

Meet Maurice van Zutphen!

Maurice was born in the Netherlands, where he spent his early childhood years. Later on, he moved with his family to Belgium (the French-speaking part), to nestle in the beautiful and historic Ardennes. As a bilingual native speaker, languages are deeply rooted in his persona.

After graduating high school, Maurice went on an adventure as an exchange student to the United States and spent time… In rural Utah, of all places! His experience was such that he would return to the United States to pursue his college education at Utah State University, pursuing and excelling in Business Management.

In 1993, during his early college days, he officially initiated his career in localization and globalization starting out as a freelance translator, translating technical fitness equipment user manuals for the world's largest fitness equipment manufacturer. He progressed and was retained to consult on the European market requirements, cultural integration and language quality. He was also given the task to develop and establish an internal translation department responsible for vetting talent, coordinating foreign product production requirements and producing the necessary appropriate localized product literature.

After college graduation, Maurice was recruited by a localization and globalization firm in Salt Lake City to function as project manager for large Fortune 500 companies. With hard work and his natural ability in languages, he quickly ascended to Senior Account Manager, coaching a team of project managers with a multi-million dollar portfolio.

In 2001, Maurice transitioned to erect and operate his own successful company, pursuing another of his passions, photography. His managed projects and operations background served him well and sold his equity after seven years of hard and dedicated work.

But Maurice is not a person who sits still, and could not turn his back on his language heritage. While being an entrepreneur he also put his expertise to work in the government sector. He fulfilled responsibilities in project management and linguistics providing support to government agencies.

Maurice and his family in late 2013.

Maurice crossed paths with inWhatLanguage and built a relationship with Cody Broderick and his great staff.  All sides shared a passion and dedication for languages, as well as the desire to help companies with their localization and internationalization needs. Maurice started consulting with iWL in project management best practices and evaluating operational processes. This role evolved into joining now the organization full-time directing our project management efforts and effective operations. 

Maurice is thrilled to be able to put his 20 years of experience to serve our clients and contribute to iWL's global vision!

Maurice is very fortunate to have by his side Sharon, his wife for over two decades. Together they have three children. 

When not working, Maurice loves the outdoors by competing in marathon races. He also enjoys the beauties of Utah, avidly exploring Utah's five National Parks.

iWL is simply overjoyed to have such a talented new member in our little family!!

Happy Easter with inWhatLanguage!

Happy Easter to all!

In many parts of the world, these days are days of celebration – most of them, with a heavy religious meaning. In Christian culture, it is a holiday that  celebrates the resurrection of Christ from the dead; it is also the time for the Jewish festival of Passover, that commemorates the  story of the Exodus as described in the Hebrew Bible especially in the Book of Exodus, in which the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt.

The original Hebrew word for Passover, “Pessach”, is the root of the name of these celebrations in most European countries: Pâques in France, Pasqua in Italian, Pascua in Spanish, Pasen in Dutch, Påske in Danish or Paskha Russian – as we can learn in this article from the Language Portal of Canada.

This, however, raises the question: why is the word “Easter” so different? And if we keep on reading the article mentioned above, we can eventually find out that the answer is that “Easter” doesn’t refer so much to the religious meaning of these days, but rather to the arrival of the Spring season:

The most popular theory is reflected in the entry for Easter in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary: the Old English word eastre came "apparently from Eostre, a goddess associated with spring."

Spring is a wonderful season to broaden one’s horizons and see the world, and to do so you can count on one of the best translation and interpretation agencies out there: inWhatLanguage. Our services are available any time, any place – we are just one phone call or email away. Our linguist are qualified, flexible and always ready to accommodate to your demands.

Trust us with your translation and transcription needs, take that big load off your shoulders and indulge yourself with a well-deserved Spring break – we will take care of the rest.

And just in case you decide to travel abroad during Easter, here is a little useful lesson: a video where you will learn how to say “Happy Easter” in ten languages!

Character limitation in software translation: quite the toughie!

In the world of video captioning, website and software translation, the concept of literal translation is definitely obsolete.

Since its origins, quality translation has been focusing more on juggling words and cracking grammar in both the source and target languages to make the resulting text comprehensible, coherent and easy to read. An ideally translated text must be fluid, and the reader should not even notice that it is not in fact the originally written text. In order to achieve this, a translator must oftentimes sacrifice literalness in favor of legibility.

Nowadays, technology has introduced a further complication into the matter: character limitation. Especially when it comes to video subtitles and website translation, this issue can become a big problem when we are translating from certain languages. “English and Chinese text is typically very compact, and text translated from these languages will typically be longer in the translation than the original – sometimes to an alarming degree,” explains this article on W3C Internationalization. The article goes on to show how a simple translation from English to Italian, for instance, can reach a size 300% bigger than the original text.

This, of course, gets even more complicated when we throw more requisites into the mix, like localization. iWL linguist Josh Gonzalez has experience in this matter. Among the projects he has in his portfolio there is one that had to deal with a video game translation. Definitely a fun project for Gonzalez, who proclaims that gaming is one of his “personal passions”. But also quite the experience: the translation included tight character limitations and localization requisites that applied to all Spanish-speaking Latin-American countries.  “It required extra neutrality, since it was directed at many countries. The biggest challenge was, however, the character limitation,” explains Gonzalez. “Due to programming barriers, I couldn’t focus as much on localization as I did on adjusting to the maximum amount of words I could fit on screen.”

Josh Gonzalez compares this challenge to that of video captioning, in the sense that in this service, a translator must also be able to fit a certain number of characters on a screen. But in this case, that limitation can be sorted out by simply dividing the text into several parts, always trying to make it as easy to read as possible.

The fact that neutrality was a very important factor for this particular translation made the job all the more complicated for Josh Gonzalez: “I had to be careful with rephrasing the text, since a word that sounds natural to me could not be understood in other Latin-American countries.  The screen space was so limited that I had to use abbreviations every now and then. While definitely not an ideal option, the client understood that there was simply no other option”.

But Josh Gonzalez was up to the task. Thanks to his friends from all over South America, who helped him come up with a final version that could be easily understood throughout the region despite language differences, he managed to overcome the difficulties. “I’m happy that I had the chance to live through that experience. Nowadays it helps me when I have to do a subtitling project and I have to make sure that everything fits perfectly on a screen”.

There is definitely no ultimate formula to deal with character limitation in software translation, but there are some key factors that we can extract from the case of Josh Gonzalez: careful deliberation, in-depth research and communication with the client are essential. Only through such a process can we come up with a high-quality translation that will feel natural to the readers (and gamers!).

And even though translation is definitely no game, there is no harm in having fun on the job!

inWhatLanguage helps improve the lives of orphan children in Haiti

For more than a year, inWhatLanguage has shown on many occasions its willingness to help people in need with many initiatives, such as the Rubber Ducky Derby, our investment in bilingual schools or our past Christmas Campaign. We feel extremely blessed to have a company that grows daily and where people are immensely capable and hard-working, and we are excited to use our growth as launch pad and an opportunity to make other’s lives also a little better through any means necessary.

So much so, that from now on we want to make charity initiatives a regular feature of our activity schedule! You can check up on our latest actions here, in the inWhatLanguage blog, of course, but you can also subscribe to our monthly inWhatLanguage Cares Newsletter and always be up to date. We are also open to suggestions and we hope to hear from you via Facebook, Twitter or Google+!

To kick things off, this month the iWL team went shopping. On the 23rd of March we went out and got all sorts of diverse stuff, from clothes to basic toiletries, in order to put it all in a big suitcase and send it to an orphanage in Haiti! Lots of kids there will be able to benefit from the things we got, and also the team had a great time – clearly, it’s a win-win situation.

“This shopping trip for the orphanage in Haiti was an incredible experience for us,” says iWL Office Manager Erin Millet. “The entire iWL core team was up for it. The shopping trip was very humble. It was pretty amazing to look at things that we take for granted, like shampoo, and realize that it is not a necessity for the kids in Haiti. They will use a bar of soap from their head down to their toes - shampoo is a luxury for them.”

The team entrusted the suitcase with all the purchased items to Liz, an experienced organizer of trade missions to Haiti. “The details Liz was able to share with us about the trade missions was exciting for us to hear,” Erin continues. “They teach the Haitian people how to build and provide water for themselves among other skills. That, to me, is the basis of service - providing knowledge instead of doing it for them.”

Communication, and the sharing of knowledge, is key for inWhatLanguage. That is, after all, the ultimate goal of a translation: to be able to communicate messages across borders, and share notions and ideas to make them universal. Hopefully, the idea of sharing wealth and helping those in need will also become universal little by little – and we plan to make our contribution as often as possible.

It is certainly a plus the fact that the iWL team not only goes out of its way to help others, but also has a really fun time during these occasions, according to Erin: “We went to lunch as a team and we were able to talk through our experience with one other and also get to know each other a little better. We, as a team, have such a wide variety of skills that work well together. It is so exciting to be part of the iWL family!”

Here are some pictures of the day:

The team, ready to go! From left to right: Erin Millet, Ty Palmer, Brian Palmer, Cody Broderick, Richard Bennett, Veronica Johnson, Maurice van Zutphen.	Discussing what to get... Front left to right: Erin Millet, Richard Bennett, Brian Palmer,Veronica Johnson, Ty Palmer and Maurice van Zutphen.
The shopping's done! Left to right: Erin Millet, Richard Bennett, Maurice van Zutphen, Vanessa Broderick, Cody Broderick, Veronica Johnson, Natalie Herrera, Brian Palmer and Ty Palmer.	Everything must be properly wrapped! From left to right, Richard Bennett, Maurice van Zutphen and Brian Palmer.
A suitcase put to good use! There are toothbrushes and sweets (an "oxymoron", according to our dear Office Manager Erin Millet), among many other things.	After the shopping trip, the team took advantage of the occasion to take a break and get to know each other better. From left to right: Brian Palmer, Vanessa Broderick, Erin Millet, Veronica Johnson, Ty Palmer, Richard Bennett and Maurice van Zutphen.