Today MySpace launched its Brazilian Portuguese website with the goal of challenging Google’s Orkut, which is favored by 14 million of the 20 million Brazilian active internet users. The English version of MySpace already has 1 million samba lovers. But they might be late to the dance. Other social networking tools have already taken hold over there.

Barely a quarter of the world’s translators have access to desktop translation memory tools. How about taking a gmail approach to increasing the number of translators who benefit from this useful technology?

From more U.S. money being thrown into Iraq to the U.K. recommending a cut in their £100m spent every year and for officials to “think twice” about spending money on translation, we round up some stories on government spending in translation.

At the recent conference of the American Translator’s Association in San Francisco, we put our thoughts about the end of localization and translation as practiced for centuries into practice. Using a variety of commercial and open-source software, professional, part-time, and accidental translators how have access to a set of free, collaborative tools that will change the paradigm.