This past weekend, 14 students from the Center for Applied Liberal Arts’ Young Translators Institute joined Prof. Julie Tay on a trip to Boston, Massachusetts. From a campus tour of Harvard University to lobster rolls at Quincy Market, students had a number of quintessential Boston experiences. Other highlights included a meeting with Martin Roberts, the founder of Linguistics Systems, Inc., a multi-million dollar translation services company that employs over 7,000 translators.Here is a full account of the Boston trip by By Zirui Zhou, a student from Beijing:
“At the thought of a trip to Boston, the first thing that came to my mind was lobster. Personally, I had starved myself before the trip so that I could enjoy more tasty dishes when we got there!
Around 8 am, we set off from 7 E 12th Street with much curiosity. The bus was freezing but not so much as to cool our excitement. After a tedious four-hour ride, we arrived in Downtown Boston and headed straight for Quincy Market – a gourmet paradise: Steamed lobsters, lobster rolls, shrimp rolls, all of which shocked us at first sight. We had never seen lobsters that huge before. Juicy and natural, a pure taste of Boston, the lobsters seemed to translate the story of the deep Atlantic Ocean, revealing the character of the northeast itself.
East Coast United States is of course famous for prestigious universities as well. The next morning, we toured Harvard with a very tall student guide, Ramsey, who turned out to be a football star! According to Ramsey, hidden in the peace and comfort of Harvard yard are three lies concerning John Harvard: The first is that the John Harvard statue is actually not of John Harvard himself; the second is that John Harvard was not the founder of Harvard University, which is astonishing; finally, the time tag carved on the statue is incorrect. We also learned that Harvard freshmen are entitled to limitless ice cream in the dinning halls everyday.
Next, we stopped briefly on Massachusetts Ave, long enough to admire the majestic MIT building and take more pictures. Then it was off to visit Linguistics Systems, Inc., situated on a quiet street also named Broadway but this one was in Cambridge. Here we learned a lot from the company founder Martin Roberts. Apparently, to keep pace with globalization which has penetrated different Industries, the process of translation has become more than a linguistic issue. Many machine translation tools are used nowadays to deal with the massive volume of text to be translated in different directions back and forth in many different languages. Mr. Roberts told us his company has over 7000 translators in their database! It was amazing how he turned a tiny outfit started in 1967 into a million dollar business.”
Fatigued and filled with memories, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who fell asleep on the ride back to New York, dreaming of limitless ice cream.”
So, Translation services are also available in Houston. Really good info.