Senthil Nathan. India Today (Living Media India) Feb March 1999

Transcription

1 Senthil Nathan zsenthil@gmail.com Phone : Address: C 9/6, TNBH Quarters, Near Andaman House, Anna Nagar West Exnt, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, Chennai Summary Why me? 20 years of translation: English to Tamil and Tamil to English Core Expertise: Medical/Clinical Trial, IT, Business, Legal/Immigration, Apps, Software Localization, Educational, Literary and Media Major LSPs worked for: SDL, Lionbridge, BGS, Tek Translation, Multilinguist, ilen Technologies, CLS Communication, Transperfect, Applied Language Solutions Major Clients: Microsoft, Facebook, Caterpillar, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson Major Projects: 200,000+ words: Caterpillar (Company Manuals) 200,000+ words: Clinical Trial (through various agencies) 300,000 words: Microsoft Research Labs's Machine Translation Project (Planning, editing and management): Parallel Corpus that required 100 percent accuracy. 150,000 words: Nokia (2 years): GUI 50,000+ words: Facebook (Editing) Hundreds of press releases and media translation Worked as Chief Copy Editor of India Today (Tamil) to edit fifty pages per week of translation and original content for almost two years. Editor with Aazhi Publishers, 2008-Till Now: Translating and editing translated books. Work experience India Today (Living Media India) Feb March 1999 Sub Editor The great experience in learning translation, editing and project management skills as the weekly magazine demanded high quality output at the pace of media events. The primary task was translating India Today (English) stories of various domains into Tamil. Freelance May 1999 May 2001 Freelance Translator and Journalist In 1999 I made a move towards translation industry as a freelancer, and headed part-time as an editor of a computer magazine in Tamil. It was the start of the dot.com era and I was one of thousands of entrepreneurs who tried the luck. I contributed to various dot.com ventures and finally decided to start a boutique translation services firm for Tamil and other south Indian languages. Joined Proz.com as early as 1999, I have started my services for Tamil, later expanded to other languages. I worked with major and medium LSPs from US/UK and learnt the professional basics of the industry. Se nthil Nathan 1

2 I was almost in all major localization projects of the time. Many software localization and mobile localization projects were handled by me through global agencies like SDL, Lionbridge, Tek Translation and others. Slangsoft Inc June 2001 Dec 2001 Linguistic Engineer In an short assignment with Slangsoft Inc, a language technology company which was later acquired by Research In Motion in 2002, I worked as a linguistic engineer in their R&D division that developed Unicode fonts for handheld devices. I was in charge of developing ligature rules for 10 major Indian languages (Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Kannada and Malayalam). My assignment was to create data (by research) for font development. The data include all characters, glyphs, ligature forms and special characters for each language and their Unicode representation. It was extremely complex and demanding task. I took it a challenge and developed the resource-base and presented it as ready-to-code rules in the Unicode values. I also provided the keyboard layout mapping, assigning and sequencing details. I had to provide font metrics and aesthetical suggestions to the font designer who was not an Indian. My task included QA with 10 different testers. I was single person handled all those tasks and I had to work in the Jerusalem Time Zone (where their development team worked from) from India. I also copresented a paper on behalf of the company in an international Tamil computing meet at Malaysia. I also contributed to their business development. In Slangsoft, I learnt the issues related to fonts and encoding, Unicode solutions and special aspects of programming for low footprint handheld devices. Though it is not a translation job, this short time contract job gave me a good standing in language technologies and an exposure to work with global team of professionals. In 2001, developing technologies for mobile devices were still a fantasy, I had a great opportunity to work with some of the best minds in language and mobile industries. All this were complemented by other activities related to Tamil computing. Globalingo Jan 2002 Aug 2007 Co-founder and Head, Project and Client Management Under the business name of Globalingo, one of the first agencies in South India that I co-founded, I have done projects for both global and national agencies and end customers as well. My earlier clients includes MLVs like TransPerfect, LionBridge, Bowne Global Solutions, and CLS Communication and direct clients like Caterpillar, NIIT, Maruti Udyog, Komatsu, ELGI Software etc. I have learned the basics of business development, project management and translation technologies in this period. During this period, I have handled more than 80 languages and thousands of projects from hundreds of companies. The professional skills acquired: Developing Translation Process Management System. Client account management Customer service Freelancers management Temp staff acquiring/recruiting and managing. In-house project process management Managing different requirements for the translators, programmers and non-programming professionals like DTP designers. Deadline adherence. QA development Working under intranet/extranet environments The domain expertise acquired: Language Markets: Understanding Asian and European markets from localization and linguistic-demographic point of view G11N/L10N: Understanding internationalization pre-requisites and localization special requirements Linguistics: Grasping of knowledge on language variants and dialects, Unicode and other font issues Se nthil Nathan 2

3 Multicultural: Having global outlook in managing freelancers and agencies with diverse work cultures. Special Attention to Ethnic Minorities Languages I am always fascinated in working with ethnic languages. Some of the languages I worked with in the last ten years are from the nooks and corners of all five continents. Examples: Inuktitut (from Greenland), Kara kalpak, Nahuatl, Shona, Oromo, Samoan, etc Some Major Projects: 1. A big 2 years-long mobile localization project (50,000 words plus) for a leading mobile manufacturer of the world. Later we had worked projects from all major mobile set manufacturers. All these are done through major LSPs like BGS (now LB) and SDL. I have been invited to Finland to attend Indic Localization project training by Nokia for two weeks. My presentation on Indian languages, not just on Tamil for which I was invited, were valued very useful by Nokia R&D. 2. Translation and editing/qc/xml conversion of 500,000 words news articles from English to Tamil to create a bilingual corpus for a Machine Translation project, for Microsoft Research Labs. This linguistic project won by us by showing expertise in both translation and news media. 3. Translating 20 books in 4 south Indian languages for a New Delhi based book publishing company. Supporting Services: We provided language training services for companies for Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Korean. Clients included: ABN-AMRO, HCL and Carborundum. Applied Language Solutions Sep March 2008 Project and Account Manager and Team Leader Applied Language Solutions, an UK based LSP, now acquired by another company. In its Chennai office, I worked for a short time as its project head. Headed a team and handled large Accounts and Projects Contributed increasing the number of Indian languages freelancers to get paneled. ALS enhances my career in a significant way as I was working thorugh a world class project management tools and with more variety of customers, big and small. Got global professional exposure as I co-ordinated my team with a multi-local team that spreads from UK, Bulgaria to India. Langscape Senior Consultant April 2008 Present Langscape is fledged Indic LSP where I have managed mostly translators, in-house or freelance. I translate, edit or manage Tamil projects on my own and manage other languages with a team of translators. Aazhi Publishers Publisher Being a media professional, I continue editing a news magazine in Tamil, Thamizh Aazhi and writing books for Aazhi Publishers. With Aazhi, I have secured the skills for the entire value chain of book publishing and digital publishing, including language editing, publishing and pre-press management, printing, ebooks creation, online promotion, social media marketing, event and exhibition management and more. Qualifications IT SKILL SET Se nthil Nathan 3

4 Productive Applications MS Office (Word, Excel (string functions included), PowerPoint, Access, and Front Page) Typing of all major Indian languages using Inscript type-writing layout (which is supported by Windows XP and Leap Office from CDAC, India) TM tools: Logoport, Trados, Wordfast Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress - latest versions. Adobe Photoshop Translation Office Other regular utilities Programming Related Skills Web: HTML 5 Content Management Tools: Drupal Concepts: OOPs, Mobile Computing, Unicode. G11N/L10N, Indic computing Project Management Concepts. Concepts: Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics Languages known: Tamil and English Languages currently learning: Chinese Education M.A (Mass Communication) Dept. of Journalism, University of Madras, Chennai Basics of print media, electronic media, advertising, public relations, popular media, entertainment, mass culture, media management and media laws. B Sc (Physics) Govt. Arts College, Cheyyar, University of Madras. Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, English and Tamil Published Books Dragon: Published by Aazhi Publishers, a book on China, in 512 pages, presents the entire history of the new super power, with more emphasis given to its last thirty years. The book published in 2008 has seen three editions since then and one of the well received books in both intellectual and mass market. I wrote it in three years with extensive research. Obama: The biography of US President Barack Obama, a best seller since The Heaven of Ten Thousand Worries (Translation of Tang Poetry): Currently serialized in yaavarum.com, a literary website, this is a collection of poems written by famous Tang era poets like Du Fu or Li Bai. To be published in print shortly. Se nthil Nathan 4

5 Community Involvement Contributed Projects: Apr 1997 Apr 1998: Editorial Coordinator (Volunteer), Kanian Tamil News. It was one of the first Tamil Internet projects, launched by Prof. Naa. Govindaswamy, under the Internet Research and Development Unit, National University of Singapore, Singapore. In this project, I have coordinated publishers and editors of various Tamil magazines who shared their contents to publish online free of cost to promote the cause of Tamil online. It was a big hit among the Tamil Diaspora. I compiled the content and uploaded them week after week for one year. I was in charge of web-design also. I presented a paper on online journalism in the first international conference on Tamil computing and internet, TamilNet 97, held in Singapore on May May 1999-March 2000: Editor, Kanimozhi, a computer magazine in Tamil.I was the part time editor for Kanimozhi, one of the leading computer magazines in Tamil then, now defunct. The magazine was known for its widest coverage of Information Technology and the modern language style it used. It heavily depended upon translation of computer tutorials, how-to articles, help and tips etc.community Involvement and Language Computing In late nineties and early this decade, I actively involved in terminology, encoding and keyboard layout standardization initiatives for Tamil. I was a general council member of INFITT (International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil) and Kanithamizh Sangam (Association of Tamil Computing) and panels/workgroups formed by the Government of Tamil Nadu and INFITT. I was also one of the founding members of Multilingual Internet Names Consortium ( an international body associated with ICANN, active in the area of internationalization of domain names in all languages. Conferences/Seminars: Participated in the International Symposium of Dravidian Linguistics and National Seminar on Machine Translation, held on Sep 96, at Dravidian University, Kuppam, India. Participated in the National Seminar on Computational Linguistics at Chennai, Dec Participated and submitted a paper on online journalism in Tamil at the Tamil Net 97, the first international conference on Tamil computing held at National University of Singapore, Singapore. Participated and submit a paper on Tamil Alphabet reforms in the Tamil Net 99, the second international conference of Tamil computing held in Chennai on Feb Presented a paper on Tamil Alphabet reforms and IPA at Tamil Internet 2000 held in Singapore on July 22-24, Presented a paper, jointly with a representative of Slangsoft, Tamil over the mobile phones and PDAs, at the Tamil Internet 2001 held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A well-received paper. Actively involved during the annual editions of Tamil Internet conferences as volunteer since then. Writing on computing: Contributed more than a dozen articles on Tamil computing, information technologies, translation and language development in various magazines and ezines. Interests Poetry Historical Linguisitcs Ancient History Classical Music Classical and Modern Literature Cuisine Cricket Se nthil Nathan 5

6 Zen Buddhism References References available upon request. Se nthil Nathan 6