Blogs are a versatile digital tool used by millions of people across the world to share aspects of their personal lives and work, disseminate news, and even sell products. They’ve also become an increasingly popular way for our faculty to communicate with students and outside audiences alike. In an effort to continue promoting their endeavors and strengthen our community, we’ve decided to create a network of CALA faculty blogs on our homepage and coordinate an ongoing series of guest posts to further showcase their writing.
To start off the series, we are featuring the work of Françoise Herrmann, a CALA faculty member who teaches French to English Patents Translation and English to French Medical Translation in our Foreign Languages, Translation, and Interpreting department. In addition to her dedication to these courses, she also has two blogs which she updates regularly. The first, called Patents on the Soles of Your Shoes, is where she explores the history of patents on everything from Louboutin heels to 19th century fountain pens. Tradmed, written entirely in French, is based on her Medical Translation course materials and class discussions.
Here’s an excerpt of her most recent Patents post on robotic agricultural machinery from Naïo Technologies:
Aloha!* It’s time for farmers to Rumba! The French startup Naïo Technologies is designing agricultural robots!
Do you have any idea how hard it is to till soil…? High tide for automating the year-in, year-out, back-breaking tasks of weeding, plowing, hoeing, sowing, mowing, spraying and clipping.
The prior art of agricultural machinery is significant. All sorts of tractor or rototiller machines assist farmers in toiling the land; machines equipped to sow, to hoe, to weed, to harvest and to apply pesticides. But all of this machinery requires a user/driver, and the machines are often too big to navigate narrow rows of fruit and vegetable crops. Besides, this heavy machinery is also well-known and criticized for its large fossil fuel footprint, with designs supporting extensive use of pesticides and herbicides, in turn also contributing to greenhouse gas effects.
In comes the Naïo Technologies automated autonomous agricultural device… an agricultural robot (and farming companion) which no longer requires a driver, and is small enough to navigate narrow rows of crops, in particular fruits and vegetables. The Naïo agricultural robot is also optimized to perform non-randomly in a field of obstacle geometry with a delimited perimeter.
Be sure to follow both of Françoise’s blogs, and check out her CALA translation courses!
English to French Medical Translation (Fall 2016)
French to English Patents Translation (Spring 2017-link coming soon)
More Fall 2016 Translation courses
Note: If you’ve never taken one of our translation course before, you’ll need to pass a written admissions test before registering. Please email sps.translation@nyu.edu for more details.
CALL FOR FACULTY BLOGS
We are currently in the process of compiling the list of recommended faculty blogs to feature on our homepage. If you would like to have your blog(s) included, send us a link to sps.cala.blog@gmail.com along with a brief description of the content.
Great idea and I love the ag robots post – thanks!