his issue starts the Translation Journal's fifteenth year of continuous, uninterrupted publication. Fifteen years is not much from an historical perspective, but it is an eternity on the Internet, where new technologies appear every year and web sites are born and die every day.
We have provided a forum for authors from all over the world regardless of their race or the political system of their countries of origin. | During these 15 years, while we did our best to improve the appearance and contents of the TJ, we did not change the basic technology of its production or, more importantly, the principles on which it was founded: Free access, including to all past issues, without need for registration (which is used by many sites to generate spam) and without personal data being requested or captured. We have also provided a forum for authors from all over the world regardless of their race or the political system of their countries of origin. This issue of the TJ is a typical example of this principle: On its pages, you'll find articles by an American-Israeli, an Egyptian Arab, and an Irani, as well as a Greek and a Turk, among authors of other nationalities, peacefully coexisting despite the differences that separate their fellow countrymen in their countries of origin.
The reputation of the TJ and its popularity among readers and authors has made it possible for us to select articles for publication by stricter criteria that those used in the early years of our Journal. For each issue, we are now receiving dozens of submissions, many of which we have to regretfully reject either because, due to their subjects, they are of limited usefulness to working translators or because the number of grammatical and other errors, whether due to carelessness or lacking language skills, makes them too time-consuming to edit. The limited amount of time we have for editing also forces us to reject submissions not in compliance with our Editorial Guidelines. The most frequent errors of this type are the inclusion of graphics that do not properly convert into a web-compatible format, the use of text boxes, tabs, and spaces for aligning text.
Your editor has recently sold his company, Accurapid Translation Services, which means that our resources for editing non-English text, especially in languages using non-Latin scripts, have been further limited. Therefore, we no longer accept articles containing text using Arabic, Persian, Chinese, or Japanese scripts (Russian Cyrillic is OK). As previously, we continue to accept articles written in any of the major European languages: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian. However, authors should keep in mind that articles in English have a larger readership. As a language lacking diacritic accents or special characters, English also ensures compatibility with virtually any browser and operating system.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our readers for their loyalty and encouragement for the past 15 years, our authors for their valuable contributions, and our advertisers for their financial support. Without them, the TJ could not exist.
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