Globalization, which is the current buzzword in discussions about the economy, has also affected the world of translation. With the media revolution and its string of intangible exchanges, the translator suddenly found himself involved in every aspect of intercultural communication. Wherever the local language is an influential parameter, he is called in as a decoder and mediator, sometimes even as a negotiator. Advertising, be it written or audiovisual, is now one of the areas of activity that most often makes use of the services of specialized translators.
The media are more and more varied: the press, the radio, television, and the Internet. The multinational advertising agencies, the cross-border television networks, and the success achieved by multilingual publications have contributed to the expansion of this phenomenon. For all of them depend, for their own survival, on the manna of advertising.
Mathieu Guidère, Ph.D.
You just have to watch the satellite broadcast television channels for a day to see the same campaigns shown in several languages. In the same way, consulting various weekly or monthly editions of the same magazine enables you to come across the same translated advertisements again and again. All these media provide an extraordinary amount of advertisements and rich material for the study of advertising translations.
In short, advertising translation finds itself caught in a body of parameters, the stakes of which transcend the limits of the language. These parameters are of a pragmatic and immediate nature: the problems raised by advertising translation, both at the economic and linguistic level, originate from a concern for short-term commercial achievement and long-term staying power. The responsibility for achieving of these goals, both legitimate and paradoxical, is assigned to the translator. He must have some knowledge having to do with a real communicative skill of an interdisciplinary nature. To accomplish his mission successfully, the translator is required to think and to integrate a certain amount of data, not only about marketing and basic communication, but also about geopolitics and ethnology.
The shipping industry has always operated with amazing efficiency and has generally been reluctant to adopt emerging technologies that may be disruptive to their logistical systems. However, with higher consumer demands regarding shipping times and sustainable operations, operating in the digital age means the industry needs to take advantage of the benefits that new technologies must offer.
One form of automation has already been implemented in the shipping industry with the use of automated cranes for transferring shipping containers from ship to shore. The future of shipping is heading beyond container handling to using automated vehicles and ships for transporting goods. Apple and Google both have autonomous vehicles in development, and this technology has big implications for the shipping industry.
However, deliveries are now going through yet another stage of development, and innovation is changing shipping again. Here is a look at some of the newest and most innovative delivery methods that companies are trying now.
For thousands of years, deliveries were made either on foot, or with the assistance of a horse or a ship. Then trains, automobiles, and planes came along and radically changed things. In the past 100 years, deliveries were able to be made faster, safer, and more efficiently than at any point in history.
The final leg of the shipping process, delivery, is also set to benefit from the latest robotic technologies. Amazon recently made headlines with the first successful drone delivery, and its success looks to inspire the further use of drones in the shipping industry.
The benefit of drone deliveries is that it drastically cuts the cost of labor by reducing the number of vehicles on the roads, and it also has the potential to eliminate the challenges of accessing rural areas or difficult geographical locations, which can add to the cost of shipping.