Sailing in 78 languages – Sail-World.com spreads the news world-wide

by Rob Kothe and the Sail-World Team on 24 Dec 2013 Whether it’s the Rolex Sydney to Hobart race, the Volvo Ocean Race, the America’s Cup, Olympic class or Optimist regattas, sailing news can now be read in 78 languages and with the benefit of modern technology the quality of the translations is improving rapidly.

The World leader in these use of this technology is Sail-World, the largest sailing news network in the world, which by the end of 2014 will have grown to more than 20 sites world-wide.

Over the last 16 years it has published over 120,000 stories, every one of those is still in the Sail-World indexed and searchable archives and each month it now publishes around 2000 articles across its titles world-wide.

For decades computerised translations have been getting better and better, but they stumble over technical terms, particularly those which have more general meanings and this can turn a marine news report into gibberish. Some classical marine examples are travellers, sheets, cars, booms.

Sail-World’s solution is a carefully translated cross indexed technical glossary of words and phrases and so far these have been painstakingly produced in Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Currently being translated and then verified are Arabic, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indonesian, Hungarian, Malaysian, and Russian.

These 23 languages will allow over 95% of the world’s marine community to read sailing news in their first language and over time the glossary of words and phrases, currently standing at 1300 will expand, ever improving the quality of the translations.

If your initial sailing career was in one of these languages but now you have been sailing for a long time with English and you feel you can, with some authority, verify or correct our current data sets, and you would like to help us spread the word, please write to us outlining your qualifications so that we can ensure we have the most accurate possible glossaries.

And the languages for which we have yet found an appropriate sailor expert, with the time to work on this project, so we are looking for all the help we can get.

Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, , Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Georgian, Gujarati, Haitian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Icelandic, , Irish, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian ,Macedonian, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, , Persian, , Punjabi, Romanian, , Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu.

If you feel you are able to help us please contact Jedda Murphy, TetraMedia’s Group Manager, who initiated this project two years ago and who continues to lead it on jedda.murphy@tetra-media.com