ATIMAC held its first international conference in Monterrey, Mexico, hosting presenters and delegates from Costa Rica, France, Spain, and the United States. ATIMAC is the leading association of translators and interpreters in Nuevo Le�n, Mexico.

"TransPerfect Translations announced that Crimson Language Services has joined its growing family of companies. The merger creates a newly-formed Life Sciences Division that combines Crimson’s ISO 9001:2000/ISO 13485:2003 certified quality system and patent-pending risk management methodology with the production resources and localization talent of TransPerfect and its software localization unit, Translations.com. Crimson’s Financial Translations unit will be combined with TransPerfect’s existing financial practice group — providing enhanced resources for Sarbanes-Oxley compliant financial translations."

Rory Cowan and Mark Lancaster, CEOs of Lionbridge and SDL, respectively, debated their firms’ approaches to translation and localization in the Localization World (Seattle, USA) keynote panel moderated by Hans Fenstermacher, chairman of GALA.

In an October speech at Princeton University, Bill Gates said that Microsoft’s internal machine translation system achieved the same quality as human translators in the domain of technical documentation. Meanwhile, Language Weaver announced SMTS V4.0 of its statistical machine translation software. This version adds a new tool, the Customizer, which allows systems integrators and users to customize the general translation system delivered by Language Weaver with their own domain data. It also provides an iterative feedback loop for continuous quality improvement. The company also said that this version cuts the initialization time in half and improves translation output quality across all language pairs.