Internationalized Domain Names Officialy Approved

Posted On October 31, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Languages, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/ No Comments

An Article from NY Times reports:

By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets, the organization overseeing Internet domain names announced Friday in a decision that could make the Web more accessible.

In an action billed as one of the biggest changes in the Web’s history, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or Icann — voted Friday during its annual meeting, held in Seoul, to allow such scripts in Internet addresses.

The decision is a “historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

This change affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, Icann’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.

Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with “country codes,” the designators at the end of an address name, like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, Icann said.

Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge.

“I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,” Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. “Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.”

The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for Icann to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names Nov. 16. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand for the new “internationalized” domain name system has been among the strongest, Icann officials say.

Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said.

This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.

Hong Jong-gil, an Internet industry analyst at Korea Investment and Securities in Seoul, said the new names would help children and old people who had not learned the Latin alphabet. But he did not foresee any major increase in the number of Internet users because Internet penetration has less to do with whether one has to type in English-alphabet domain names and more to do with “whether you can afford a PC and your community has broadband access.”

Agencies that help companies and individuals get Internet domains welcomed the Icann decision, noting it would be good for their own businesses.

“This is great news for us. This opens a new demand for domain names,” said Yang Eun-hee, an official at Gabia.com, an Internet domain agency. “There will be a rush among businesses to get new local-language Web addresses to protect their brand names. These days, a big company typically has dozens or hundreds of domains for their products, and it will be quite a cost to get all the new names.”

Observers agree that the change could make a difference for many businesses. “A lot of companies will end up having double domains — the existing one in English and a new one in the local script,“ said Choi Kyoung-jin, an analyst at Shinhan Investment. “A Korean domain name may be useful for Koreans but it’s not for foreign customers.”

Users who do not use the Latin alphabet can now reach Web sites by asking search engines to provide their links.

But a change in the domain name policy has become inevitable, Internet industry officials said. For example, there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use, they said.

“Today’s decision opens up a whole new Internet territory,” Ms. Yang said. “The Internet will become more multi-lingual than before.”

Crowdsourcing Translations: A Loss for Both Translators and Businesses

Posted On October 28, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/ No Comments

The use of crowdsourcing to harness the power of the masses to translate web content has become all the rage at behemoth social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In an attempt to make these sites accessible to a broader user base, the sites are asking users, rather than professional translators, to collaborate on the translation of site content. Though it’s a noble goal to expand the reach of sites like Facebook to an international audience, turning to crowdsourcing for translations hurts translators and businesses alike.

LinkedIn, a social network that aims to promote and support professionals, recently polled those members who are professional translators in order to gauge their potential interest in translating the site “for fun” or in exchange for nothing more than a profile badge. The site generated a great deal of controversy and managed to offend quite a few members, since LinkedIn was clearly looking for something for nothing. What LinkedIn failed to realize is that asking translators to work for free further devalues a profession that already struggles for recognition. In fact, many translators deleted their LinkedIn profiles following the incident, as they felt that their professional needs were no longer in line with the site’s priorities.

While the idea of tapping into the collective wisdom of a community has its merits – after all, translators reach out to each other all the time to debate issues in translation, terminology, etc. – websites must acknowledge that their image, content and reputation are at stake when they turn to anyone other than a professional to translate their content. Interestingly enough, after receiving numerous user complaints about the quality of localized translations, Facebook did turn to professional translators to edit flubbed translations and improve the consistency of translated terms across the site. Indeed, if websites insist on employing crowdsourcing to cut costs, they must acknowledge that at a bare minimum, professionals should be involved to provide quality control to avoid alienating their user base through poorly rendered content.

At the end of the day, there’s really no substitute for a professional; perhaps crowdsourcing will demonstrate that to companies the hard way.

English Words with a Spanish Pedigree

Posted On October 22, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Languages, Spanish Language/ No Comments

Over the centuries, Spanish has made a significant contribution to the English language. When American settlers began exploring the west in the early 19th century, they crossed paths with an established Mexican culture that supplied the English language with a number of everyday words. Merchants conducting trade in the Spanish-influenced Caribbean brought back not only goods but new words as well. Novel foods introduced to us through exposure to Hispanic cultures have expanded both our menu options and our vocabulary.

Let’s explore some of the Spanish loan words that you probably use all the time but never gave a second thought as to their origins.

Chocolate – When the Spanish conquistadors took their first sip of xocolatl, a beverage made from the pods of the cacao tree, they knew the Aztecs were on to something. The Spanish returned to Europe with their newfound chocolate, a word they derived from the Aztec language Nahuatl and later passed on to English.

Hurricane – With the constant threat of these severe storms looming over the tropics, it’s no surprise that the English word “hurricane” comes from huracán, a word picked up by the Spanish explorers from Taino, an indigenous language from the Caribbean.

Aficionado – Aficionado came into the English language from Spanish in the mid-1800s. While the word was initially only used within the context of bullfighting, it later came to mean a “practitioner or enthusiast of any sport or activity.”

Rodeo – The word “rodeo” is derived from the Spanish verb rodear, which means “to surround.” In the past, rodeo was used to refer to the pen where cattle were corralled and eventually to the informal events involving horses and livestock that took place there. Related words like lasso, rancho, hacienda, bronco and even buckaroo passed to English from Spanish back in the days of the Wild West.

Tomato – This vegetable’s (or is it a fruit?) moniker comes from the Spanish word tomate, a corruption of the Nahuatl word “tomatl”. A number of other fruits and vegetables that may grace your plate such as banana, papaya, jicama and potato have their roots, so to speak, in Spanish.

Will 90% of the world’s languages cease to exist?

Posted On October 17, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Languages, Spanish Language, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/ 2 Comments

A program in BBC radio reveals the following:

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades.
In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist.
According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

What is lost when a language dies?

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says French linguist Claude Hagege.

“It´s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are a living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

Cross words

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?

One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists’ sake than for the communities themselves.

Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.

This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.

“There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something,” he says.

What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.

Babbling away

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Mouri in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life.

But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.

“You’ve got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

“We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation.”

Some Statistics

6% of the worlds languages are spoken by 94% of the world’s population
The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people

SOURCE: Ethnologue

The Use of Neutral Spanish for the U.S. Hispanic Market

Posted On October 14, 2009By TranspanishIn Latinos, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators/ 2 Comments

There is little doubt about the growing influence of the Hispanic demographic in the United States. According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos comprise 14.8% of the population for a total of 44.3 million people. What’s more, Hispanics are projected to account for almost 25% of the total U.S. population by the year 2050.[1] The incredible cultural and linguistic diversity of the U.S. Hispanic population presents a challenge for retailers and other businesses who want to reach out to the Latino segment and harness the economic potential within that group. So, how does one effectively communicate with and market to an audience consisting of cultures from across the Spanish-speaking world? The answer lies in the use of neutral Spanish.

When creating advertising campaigns, website content, or other materials geared toward the U.S. Hispanic audience, companies are wise to consider the use of neutral Spanish, which avoids regionalisms, colloquial language, and certain verb tenses and conjugations that hint at a particular dialect. Translators and writers employing neutral Spanish seek to produce a text that is universally understood by Spanish speakers. Given the dynamic nature of the Latino community, a translator should have contact with the Hispanic market in the U.S. in order to make the best decisions regarding word choice.

The use of neutral Spanish for Latino audiences is gaining traction in television and radio as well. The rise in popularity of neutral Spanish on the airwaves signals a real change in how U.S. Hispanics view themselves as a unique community apart from their respective countries of origin. Ilan Stavans, Professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, notes, “It is a widespread trend that is quite significant because it says much about how Latinos in the U.S. are consolidating their own identity.”

Though neutral Spanish lacks an equivalent in the real world (think Received Pronunciation in the U.K. or Standard American English in the U.S.), erasing traces of a telltale accent from spoken Spanish or country-specific slang from the written word serves to avoid confusing or even offending the audience and goes a long way in appealing to the broad Hispanic demographic in the United States.

References:
[1] Hispanic Population of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau

British companies relying too much on the English Language

Posted On October 13, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Translation Buyers/ No Comments

English may be the leading international business language and UK companies may still have a head start in the 53 Commonwealth countries where English is spoken, but the National Centre for Languages says that three-quarters of the world’s population speak no English and 94% of English speakers do so only as their second language. Chinese is the most widely-spoken language, followed by Spanish and then English.

When the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) asked almost 3,500 of its members for reasons why they did not export to Europe, 11% cited language barriers and 5% cultural barriers.

Isabella Moore, former president of the BCC and managing director of Leamington Spa-based Comtec Translations, says the survey showed that on average small businesses were losing up to £250,000 a year in orders due to a lack of language skills.

“You have a school of thought that you manage in English. But when you look at our export successes, we do best where English is spoken widely,” she says. “Then you look at countries like Spain and Italy, where we don’t do as well proportionately. Look at South America and it’s only a fraction of our overall export figures.”

Prof Foreman-Peck also found that British exporters are not benefiting from others’ willingness to learn English to the extent that they may believe. Analysis in the US found that online buyers with poor English were six times less likely to make a purchase than those with good English. The research also showed the customers were willing to pay more if the website was in their native language.

The BCC research found that the main reason why companies choose a particular export market is because they know there is
potential demand and feel able to secure sales, but 14% said they were attracted because of linguistic and cultural similarities to the UK.

However, businesses in the same survey did not see securing better language skills as a priority. Only 5% of the companies polled said they would welcome subsidised language training.

Similarly, demand for an “Export box” all-in-one starter package launched by UK Trade & Investment in June, which included translation services, has been slow.

The package included subsidised website translation and redesign to target a foreign-language market, a Google adwords campaign, logistics from Royal Mail and subsidised banking services from HSBC.

Mr Wheeldon says there were plenty of inquiries, but a “much smaller number” had actually then bought the service, which costs £3,000. “I knew that we were not great at exporting, but I didn’t appreciate the fear and anxiety and the time it takes for people to do it,” he says.

source: Telegraph.co.uk

Machine Translation or Human Translation?

Posted On October 11, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators/ No Comments

CNN published an article explaining the different approaches from Google and Facebook to translating their webs. Below you will find some highlights:

Facebook aims to translate the Web using an army of volunteers and some hired professional translators. Meanwhile, Google plans to let computers do most of the work. Which method will ultimately prevail remains to be seen.

But for now, here’s a look at the latest language features from both companies, and some background on how their translation services work. (Feel free to add your own Internet translation tips — and fun translation bloopers — in the comments section at the bottom of the story):

Facebook’s human translation

Many tech bloggers think Facebook’s method of human translation seems promising. After all, the American-born social networking site introduced non-English languages for the first time only in January 2008. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s 300 million users are outside of the United States.

How it works: Real people are at the heart of Facebook translation plan. They suggest translated phrases and vote on translations that others have submitted. These crowd-sourced edits — which work kind of like Wikipedia — make Facebook’s translation service smarter over time. Go to Facebook’s translation page to check it out or to participate.

Size: More than 65 languages function on Facebook now, according to Facebook’s statistics. At least another 30 languages are in the works, meaning Facebook needs help working out the kinks on those languages before they’re put to use.

What’s new? Facebook announced in a blog post on September 30 that the social network has made its crowd-sourced translation technology available to other sites on the Web. The update allows sites to install a translation gadget on their sites through Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users sign in on other Web pages.

Facebook also added some new languages, including Latin and “Pirate,” which translates the Facebooky word “share” as “blabber t’yer mates!”

Pros and cons: People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things.

Also, Facebook’s site is available in many languages, but its human translators don’t touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don’t share a common language with you. People who use Facebook Connect to translate their sites can choose which text they want users to help translate, according to Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

Craig Ulliott, founder of whereivebeen.com, said he’s excited about Facebook’s translation application, but it would be too much to ask his site’s users to translate user-submitted material.

Google’s ‘mechanical’ translation

Google uses mathematical equations to try to translate the Web’s content. This fits in line with the company’s mission, which is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to all.

How it works: Google’s computers learn how to be translators by examining text that’s already on the Web, and from professional Web translations posted online, said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google. The more text is out there, the more Google learns and the better its translations become. The search-engine company currently translates documents, search results and full Web pages.

Size: Google claims to be the largest free language translation service online. It covers 51 languages and more than 2,500 language pairs. The site’s interface has been translated, with the help of Google users, into 130 languages.

What’s new?: Google recently created a widget that any Web developer can put on his or her page to offer up Google translations. So, say you’re a blogger who writes about music. You might get some Brazilian readers if you offered up a button to translate your site into Portuguese.

Google also recently unveiled a translation service for Google Docs, which lets anyone upload a document to the Web and have it translated into a number of languages for free. And there’s a new Firefox add-on from Google to help people translate the Web more quickly.

Och said real-time translation of Internet chats is on the horizon, as are more languages and increased quality as Google’s computers get smarter.

Pros and cons: Google’s computerized approach means it can translate tons of content — and fast. But computers aren’t quite up to speed with ever-evolving modern speech, so reports of translation errors are fairly common.

On the plus side, the service has been vastly improved in the last five years, Och said. Also, Google lets people spot translation errors, suggest new wordings and translate its interface into languages Google’s computers don’t speak just yet.

Lunfardo: The Slang of Buenos Aires

Posted On October 6, 2009By TranspanishIn Languages, Latinos, Lunfardo, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/ No Comments

Argentine Spanish is peppered with words and phrases from Lunfardo, a vast vocabulary developed on the streets of Buenos Aires in the second half of the 19th century. Criminals and other shady characters looking to keep their activities under wraps developed Lunfardo by borrowing and twisting words from the melting pot of languages that surrounded them, allowing them to communicate with each other even in the presence of the police or prison guards. While initially used by the more unsavory element of Argentine society, Lunfardo was later popularized through the tango, literary art forms, and upwardly mobile immigrants and has become a part of everyday, informal speech regardless of social class. Today, the use of Lunfardo is most prevalent in Argentina (particularly in and around Buenos Aires) and Uruguay, though some elements have been adopted by neighboring countries such as Chile and Paraguay.

Lunfardo was largely a product of the great wave of European immigration to Argentina that took place from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. The huge influx of immigrants hailing from Spain, Italy and France, many of whom spoke non-standard regional dialects or languages, greatly influenced the development of Lunfardo. Certain words also arrived via the gauchos from Argentina’s interior as well as from native groups like the Guaraní, Quechua and Mapuche.

One of the features of Lunfardo is the use of vesre, a form of wordplay that involves reversing the order of syllables in a word. The term “vesre” is derived from the Spanish word “revés” (in reverse/backwards). Examples of vesre include café → feca (coffee), pantalones → lompa (a truncated form of the word for pants) and hotel → telo (a pay-by-the-hour love motel).

In addition to vesre, Lunfardo also employs words based on metaphors such as tumbero, a slang term for “convict” that originates from the Spanish word “tumba” meaning grave. Another example is the word “campana” (Spanish for “bell”), which describes the lookout man ready to sound the alarm should the police suddenly arrive on the scene.

For those of you looking to add a splash of color to your Spanish, the following website has compiled an extensive list of Lunfardo words and phrases: Diccionario de Lunfardo.

Some Lunfardo words added to our blog:

Meaning of “guita“

Lunfardo: Money Talk

Meaning of Atorrante

Notable Hispanic and Latino Americans – Part II

Posted On October 1, 2009By TranspanishIn Latinos/ 2 Comments

Part II of our list of some notable Hispanic and Latino Americans, citizens or residents of the United States with ancestry or origins in Hispanic America.

Education

Richard A. Tapia selected for the National Science Board (governing board for the National Science Foundation) by President Bill Clinton.

Richard A. Tapia (born March 25, 1939) is a renowned American mathematician and champion of under-represented minorities in the sciences. In recognition of his broad contributions, in 2005, Tapia was named “University Professor” at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the University’s highest academic title. The honor has been bestowed on only six professors in the Rice’s ninety-four year history. Tapia is currently the Maxfield and Oshman Professor of Engineering; Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Office of Research and Graduate Studies; and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University.

Tapia’s mathematical research is focused on mathematical optimization and iterative methods for nonlinear problems. His current research is in the area of algorithms for constrained optimization and interior point methods for linear and nonlinear programming.

Music

Tito Puente (Puerto Rico)
Tito Puente, Sr., (April 20, 1923–May 31, 2000), born Ernesto Antonio Puente, Jr., was an Latin jazz and mambo musician. The son of native Puerto Ricans Ernest and Ercilia Puente, of Spanish Harlem in New York City, Puente is often credited as “El Rey” (the King) of the timbales and “The King of Latin Music”. He is best known for dance-oriented mambo and Latin jazz compositions that helped keep his career going for 50 years. He and his music appear in many films such as The Mambo Kings and Fernando Trueba’s Calle 54. He guest starred on several television shows including The Cosby Show and The Simpsons.

Carlos Santana (Mexico)
Carlos Augusto Alves Santana (born July 20, 1947) is a Mexican-born American Grammy Award-winning rock musician and guitarist. Santana became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his band, Santana, which pioneered a blend of rock, salsa and jazz fusion. The band’s sound featured his melodic, blues-based guitar lines set against Latin percussion such as timbales and congas. Santana continued to work in these forms over the following decades. He experienced a sudden resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s. Rolling Stone also named Santana number 15 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time in 2003

Visual arts

Franck de Las Mercedes, painter
Franck de Las Mercedes, (b. 1972 in Masaya, Nicaragua) is a Nicaraguan American artist, based in New York. He was raised in a family of Nicaraguan folklore dancers, musicians and teachers, and spent his childhood immersed in the performing arts. In the mid-eighties, the Sandinista/Contra war forced Franck’s family to immigrate to New York where Mercedes grew up and worked in music and theatre, studying under Gail Noppe-Brandon. In the late nineties he began working as an artist.

He has painted small empty boxes, a public art project called the Priority Boxes, labelled with the words “PAZ”, “JUSTICIA”, “TRANQUILIDAD”, and “AMOR”, which he sends around the world for free. This mail art project started in 2006. “The Priority Boxes” project is a public art series that seeks, to make people reconsider their ability to influence change, question the fragility and priority of entities like peace, and also to communicate, interact through art and make it accessible to people from all walks of life.

Soraida Martinez, Artist, Creator of Verdadism (Mexico)
Soraida Martinez is a contemporary abstract expressionist artist who creates hard-edge paintings. She was born in Harlem, New York City, USA on July 30, 1956.

Since 1992 Soraida Martinez has been known as the creator of Verdadism, a form of hard-edge abstraction where each painting is accompanied by a written social commentary. Martinez is the only artist to write a social statement for every painting that she creates. Viewers are drawn to both the artist’s abstract paintings and her bold commentaries on humanity and the universal human condition. According to Martinez’ artist’s statement, “My art reflects the essence of my true self and the truth within me…My struggle is for recognition, acceptance and inclusion; and, against racism, sexism and the dominant eurocentric male society, which never expected much from me but still did not allow my voice to be heard. My belief is that one must empower oneself with one’s own truth…”.

Sciences
Fernando Caldeiro, astronaut (Argentina)
Fernando “Frank” Caldeiro (b. June 12, 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an American astronaut (Class XVI) with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona and the University of Central Florida.

Caldeiro, whose ancestors are from Galicia, is currently assigned to high altitude research flights in the NASA WB-57 aircraft.

In 2002, he was appointed to the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

Mario Molina, Nobel Prize-winning chemist (Mexico)
José Mario Molina-Pasquel Henríquez (born March 19, 1943 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-born American chemist and one of the most prominent precursors to the discovering of the Antarctic ozone hole. He was a co-recipient (along Paul J. Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland) of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases (or CFCs), becoming the first Mexican-born citizen to ever receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Basketball

Manu Ginóbili, NBA player (Argentina)
Emanuel David “Manu” Ginóbili (born 28 July 1977 in Bahía Blanca, Argentina) is an Argentine professional basketball player. Coming from a family of professional basketball players, he is a member of the Argentine men’s national basketball team and the San Antonio Spurs in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Ginóbili spent the early part of his basketball career in Argentina and Italy, where he won several individual and team honors. His stint with Italian side Kinder Bologna was particularly productive, earning two Lega A Most Valuable Player awards, the Euroleague Final Four MVP and the 2001 Euroleague and Triple Crown championships. The shooting guard was selected as the 57th overall pick in the 1999 NBA Draft and is considered one of the biggest draft steals of all time. Ginóbili returned to Italy and only joined the Spurs in 2002. He did not take long to establish himself as a key player for the Spurs, and has since won three NBA championships as well as being named an All-Star in 2005. In the 2007–08 season, he was named the NBA Sixth Man of the Year.

Francisco García, NBA player (Dominican Republic)
Francisco García (born December 31, 1981, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is a Dominican professional basketball player who currently plays for the Sacramento Kings of the NBA. A 6’7″, 195-pound guard–forward from the University of Louisville, García was selected by the Kings in the first round (23rd overall) of the 2005 NBA Draft. He now plays a variety of positions for the Kings, and on September 25, 2008, signed a five-year extension with the Kings. It was worth $23 million.

As a college basketball player at Louisville under coach Rick Pitino he enjoyed great success along with future NBA player Reece Gaines. He averaged 15.7 points per game as a junior and, along with teammate and best friend Taquan Dean, led his 4th-seeded team to the 2005 Final Four in Saint Louis, Missouri. Forgoing his senior season, García decided to go professional and enter the ranks of the NBA. In his rookie season for the Kings, García appeared in 67 games (11 starts) and averaged 5.6 points per game.

Source: Wikipedia

Month: October 2009