Dear all,

Large parts of Babylon, including the accounting department, will be on vacation between 11-19th of December.

Therefor we will have the Mid-December (usually scheduled for 15th of December) already on 10, December 2009. All invoices and withdrawal requests reaching us later will enter the End-December round.

Don’t forget: We need both an invoice by email (to: ursula@babylon.com) and a withdrawal request through the website.

Regards - Ursula

Hi all,

I will close translator accounts with email addresses that are reported as undeliverable.
These entries in the database are only a burden to the system and delay sending the job notifications to those colleagues who are waiting for a job.

Translators with closed accounts will not be able to log in to their account. If you have reasons to believe that I closed you account on wrong reasons mistake - send me an email (ursula[at]babylon.com]

Regards,
Ursula

Hi all,

my second computer is still busy with sending the emails, crashing the computer every 15 minutes.
So I would like to use this opportunity to start a new category:
Translator of the Week.

There are always great translations done by you, and there are more colleagues I actually can mention, but once a week I would like to say a personal thanks to one of you. So this one goes to:

Vrinda, K. from Mumbai
Vrinda did an outstanding translation of poems of Eduard Mörike (1804 – 1875) from German to English!
I closely monitored her work on this challenging task - and she translated the eight poems with such charm! Well done.

Dear team,
while writing this, the latest email update is still being sent to you.

Please notice the following change concerning your comments on the blog. Each day a huge amount of Spam comments (placed here for gaining links) are added. I therefore changed the settings and your comments will only appear after I approved them. I apologize to everyone on team, in case I deleted a “real” comment by mistake.

Sorry for this inconvenience. I wished we already would have a secure, password protected forum on our site. Until then, this public blog will do the job.

Thanks for your understanding,
Ursula

Hi all,

please when sending us an invoice per email, make sure that you also request the withdrawal of the same amount at the website: My Profile -> My Transaction -> lower part of the page.

Only like this your payment request gets document by our system.

Thanks for your attention,
Ursula

Hi all,
from the reactions I get I fear that my email wasn’t clear enough.
YES - English IS NOT an option in the online form I sent.
WHY - because this is all about language pairs that are NOT connected to English (e.g. German to French, Spanish to Hungarian).

If you want to update me on additional English related language pairs fell free to send me an email.

With best regards,
Ursula

Hi all,

we have a very nice customer who doesn’t know the source language of the text she needs to have translated. I placed the text in all language identifiers known to me, but always got “Language Unknown” as an answer. I believe that the text is in some way distorted or full of grammar/spelling mistakes.
Maybe someone of you has enough fantasy to figure out the language?

Here’s the text:
etsi einai enas amerikanos sta de3ia s panta xreiazete
etsi eine elli m en international t Tomer mas oh re gmt leipoun oi rwssides kai o arabhs
giati tin gallida pou tin afises ayrio mia sina3i gia fotografisi

Thanks!

Dear team members,

please pay attention that with the change of the URLs from LingoZ to BHT (Babylon Human Translation) also the no-reply sender of the job offers changed to: noreply@translator.babylon.com.

Make sure that this sender: noreply@translator.babylon.com is added to your approved sender list.

With best regards,
Ursula

Hi all,
In answer to a question placed by Anna M. please notice that I have no possibility to make a job available to a translator again after “Decline job” was clicked.

Actually (tell me if you think otherwise) I am about to instruct our programmers to remove this function completely. It seems more a source for misunderstanding than to data input I can work with. If - after looking at a job - you don’t want to take it out of a very specific reason (e.g. wrong language has been enter by the customer, word count seems to be wrong) - just don’t accept it and send me an email about the problem.

Best regards,
Ursula

Hi all,

we temporarily had to close the language pairs Japanese to English due to a wrong word count.
We corrected and implemented the same word count algorithm used by MS Word, which is a benchmark in the industry.

Thanks for your attention,
Ursula