“Powered by” in Spanish

The Problem:

When it comes to properly mean “powered by” in Spanish web pages, a lot of spanish-speaking users don’t seem to agree on how to properly mean that, as can be seen from the following links:

http://www.spanishdict.com/answers/144054/how-do-you-say-powered-by-in-espanol

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=329580

Not even Google and Microsoft seem to find a sounded way of meaning the above:

http://es.bab.la/diccionario/ingles-espanol/powered-by

I realized that this is an even worse problem among those hispanics and second generation latinos in the U.S. that are too “americanized” (if that is a valid term).

The Solution:

When we have problems finding terms from different languages with equivalent meanings, the best that we can do is to stop forcing translations and start describing what we want to say. This is a kind of a descriptive strategy.

For instance, according to http://arl-shipzine.com/issue-2-powered-by , “powered by” implies the notion of a service being “provided by”.

So, following the descriptive strategy, “provisto por” is a more appropriate option than ”impulsado por”, “potenciado por”, “generado por”, “auspiciado por”, “producido por” and other expressions that sound a bit ridiculous for the context in question. Of course, that’s just my opinion and you don’t have to agree with me.

“Impulsado por”…really? Are you launching a rocket?

“Potenciado por”…really? Are you a battery or power supply?

“Generado por”…really? Are you an electric generator?

“Auspiciado por”…really? Are you sponsoring something?

“Producido por”…really? Are you in a production business?

I know, I know. I’m being sarcastic. Me bad.

What is important to point out is that the above alternatives are subject to misinterpretations, while to imply “a product or service provided by”, o “un producto o servicio provisto por” has only one meaning: a product or service provided by someone, in a b2c (business-to-consumer) or b2b (business-to-business) context. 

At first glance, the above seems trivial, but is not. You would be surprised to see the faces of those latinos that read web content and creatives translated by SEO companies with no knowledge about Spanish or that use automatic translators. Bad translations can ruin any marketing, press release, or link-building campaign.

Some nice features added to the Image Crawler

Some nice features added today to the Image Crawler, to please requests from current users. Thank you for the feedback.

http://www.miislita.com/images-crawler/images-crawler.php

The Images Crawler

The Images Crawler has arrived at Mi Islita.com. An easy way to view images from Web documents. Use it to view images from newspapers, forums, social networks, etc. Enjoy it!

Who can benefit from this tool?

• Webmasters and designers that want to check for broken images and their resolutions across browsers.
• Site owners checking if other sites are infringing on their images, pictures, banners, logos, or icons.
• Users looking for an easy way to find images from newspapers, forums, social networks, or any site.
• Marketing researchers, psychologists, and others interested in studying the power of images.

A nice service for my locals

Puerto Rico Daily News & Image Searches. Driving traffic to Puerto Rico’s best media sites. The fastest way to find news and images relevant to Puerto Rico. Coming soon to http://www.miislita.com

I think this can be applied to many knowledge domains without making the same mistakes from similar services across the Web.  For now, baby steps.

An update to the Web Crawler

A nice update, indeed: http://www.miislita.com/web-crawler/web-crawler.php

New similarity measures

We have added a new round of similarity measures to our Binary Similarity Calculator, for a total of 30.

http://www.miislita.com/binary-similarity-calculator/binary-similarity-calculator.php

We plan to add few more in the future, so more data miners, researchers, and students can benefit from it. We plan to make this a comprehensive project on similarity analysis. For this purposes, several doctoral theses are deployed. Any help, correction, feedback is appreciated.

The Web Crawler is Back!

Our popular tool, The Web Crawler, is back! This new iteration of the tool is a lot more faster because is based on a different strategy: extractions of HREF sets and then refinement of these to get URLs that are qualified for status checks. So the tool also works as a link checker.

Another advantage of the above strategy is this:

A set of HREFs may contain information about absolute and relative URLs, visible and hidden links, internal and external file paths, email addresses, css files, local javascript calls, and anchors (#). A subset of HREFs can also be used as pointers to anchor text information. So, a set of HREFs can be more informative than a mere set of links or URLs as it subsumes both.

Tracking Users: An Email Crawler on Steroids

We have added to our email crawler

(http://www.miislita.com/email-crawler/email-crawler.php)

the following features:

1. A User Tracking Session (just find the link and click on it) to view current user data.

2. Search for user email addresses in the top search engines and social networks

Give it a try.

We plan to add the tracking session feature to all our pages. This feature is now visible to gives you an idea of how it works, but can be invisible to users. Geo and search data can be added in a snap.

Why pay monthly fees when you can have your own tracking service, customized to your needs?

The Email Crawler: A Tool for Gathering Emails

The Email Crawler, a tool for retrieving email addresses from all over the Web, is now available at http://www.miislita.com

The Binary Distance Calculator – a tool for comparing binary sets

The Binary Distance Calculator, a new tool for computing the distance or dissimilarity (lack of resemblance) between any two binary sets of same size is available now at http://www.miislita.com Its FAQs section includes a clear definition of distance in the context of Information Retrieval and Mathematics.

This tool was developed to complement The Binary Similarity Calculator, one of our popular tools.