Articles (General)

October 2011 Ivan Obolensky The subject of language is fascinating and complex. Working in the language translation field, I often find myself wondering about the whole subject of language. There are so many. Too many for one person to know although the illustrious Emil Krebs of the late nineteenth century seems to have learned to speak and write 68 languages …

September 2011 Ivan Obolensky I was asked by several friends to write about what I think is currently happening with the markets, so here are a few thoughts: The US markets have been in a long-term trading range. The S&P 500 (an index made up of 500 medium-to-large companies) hit a high in 2000-2001 at 1600, fell to around 800 …

September 2011 Ivan Obolensky Machine Translation is a branch of Computational Linguistics and is loosely categorized under Artificial Intelligence. It has an interesting history. The first recorded instance of machine translation occurred in 1954 in what has been called the Georgetown-IBM experiment. This experiment involved the completely automatic Russian to English translation of some sixty sentences in the field of …

August, 2011 Ivan Obolensky Medellin International Airport is situated at a much higher altitude than the city of Medellin which is located in a river valley about an hour’s drive away by car. As the plane was preparing to land, I could see that the country appeared hilly with interspersed patches of trees and open spaces. The higher plateau, where …

July, 2011 Ivan Obolensky Colombia was one of the three countries that emerged after the collapse of Spanish-ruled Gran Colombia in 1830. The other two were Venezuela and Ecuador. Overall the country is almost twice the size of Texas and ranks 30th in terms of world population. Median or midpoint age range is approximately 28 years old with 75% of …

July 2011 Ivan Obolensky One of the business decisions that most business owners have wrestled with recently is whether to go with social media as a means of potentially increasing business. When our web designer mentioned that we ought to open a Twitter account, get on Facebook, and get a blog going on our website, I must admit I asked …

June 2011 Ivan Obolensky By equating the spread of ideas with that of the contagion of disease and examining their similarities and differences, one can gain a better understanding of how ideas permeate through society, and how one can get one’s own ideas across to others more effectively and to more people. Certainly ideas can be infectious. A fad, for …

May 2011 Ivan Obolensky Frankly I do not think translations should be free, but then I am biased. I work for a company that specializes in translation. Digital content seems to be trending in the “free translation” direction. On the Internet, we are now able to acquire digital music and digital books for free, and we can even browse newspapers …

April 2011 Ivan Obolensky Where and when to best concentrate one’s business efforts depends not only on what one’s company produces but also on the global business climate that exists at the time. One of the least known areas that influence business is the ebb and flow of funds between countries and the resulting exchange rates. On the surface it …