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#3330: Awareness of MIT2 Growing in Haitian Circles & Beyond (fwd)




From:MariLinc@aol.com

Below are several examples of the growing awareness in Haitian Circles of the 
work Mason Integrated Technologies (MIT2) has been doing for the advancement 
of the Haitian Creole language.

1) TANBOU / TAMBOUR (a trilingual journal of Haitian political and literary 
studies which is published in Cambridge, MA) has listed us within their 
"Haitian resources on the Internet: Our A–Z list of web sites and e-mail 
addresses" at:

http://www.tanbou.com/1199Resources.htm

Scroll down to M and you will find MIT2 hotlinks under the entry "M—Marilyn 
Mason: Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd".

2) During this Holy Week - Easter season, I'd like to point you to an 
attractively designed page containing the Biblical story of the sufferings of 
Jesus -- in Creole.  It is found at:

http://www.haitionline.com/2000/420.htm#Istwa

I was pleasantly surprised and pleased to see this and wrote the following to 
the publisher of Haiti Online:

"Your Holy Week tribute on HOL is beautiful. And I'm proud you published it 
in Creole!"

This was Dr. Yves Renaud's reply:

"I did it for you. That's why I added the MIT2 logo* on the page. By the way, 
I had the document in the older Creole version. I had to manually change the 
"in", or "roi", etc. I almost emailed you the text for orthographic 
conversion. Because of the deadline (I wanted to post this on Good Friday), I 
did it myself. Next time, I'll e-mail the text to you."

*Haiti Online has also placed an MIT2 publicity graphic in the left margin of 
its main news page at: http://www.haitionline.com/actuel.htm

The graphic is hot-linked to the Main MIT2 Web Site. As a result, Internet 
traffic to all of our Web Sites has skyrocketed.

3) The Haitian Times, a full color weekly Haitian English-language newspaper, 
which learned of the strategic alliance which is being forged between Mason 
Integrated Technologies and CreoleTrans (a Haitian Creole translation agency 
out of Miami -- http://www.creoletrans.com), this past Tuesday sent one of 
its reporters to conduct an on-site interview in Miami with Fedo Boyer of 
CreoleTrans, part of which was linked with me in Boston via speakerphone.

As a result, a feature article will be published in this coming Wednesday's 
print edition of the Haitian Times.  Don't know yet if a portion of it will 
appear in the Web-based edition (http://www.haitiantimes.com), which usually 
appears on Thursdays.
    
4) One of my recently published short articles (entitled "Authoring and 
Documentation Workflow Tools for Haitian Creole - a Minority Language"), 
which was recently published in Germany in Technical Communicators' (TC) 
Forum Magazine (volume 1-2000 - January-March 2000, pp. 8-9), is now 
available on-line at:

http://www.tc-forum.org/

To download the issue containing this article in PDF format (you'll need 
Adobe Acrobat Reader to read and print this document), go to the link above; 
click on "Paper Version" in the left-hand margin; then click on "the most 
recent issue". Both a 1 MB (with title page) and 300 KB (without title page) 
version are available.


As I leave for Seattle this coming week to participate in the Association for 
Natural Language Processing Conference (ANLP2000) and the Controlled Language 
Applications Workshop (CLAW2000), I am mindful that not only are our roots 
growing deeper into the soil of contextualization in Creole societies, our 
trunk is getting thicker as our infrastructure is being strengthened, and our 
branches are spreading out further and further in order for the essence of 
Creole languages and cultures to flow upward to be integrated into the very 
design and content of the next generation of language technology tools.

Think good thoughts as I participate in these 2 Seattle conferences, which 
will give MIT2 its first opportunity to be showcased to corporate CEOs, CFOs, 
and language technologies R&D specialists.  Should any of the computer 
industry "big players" conclude that it would be in their best interests to 
invest in MIT2 so that we can gear up to do the R&D to expand the 
functionality of their existing software products to more language groups -- 
we could be up and running sooner than we think!

In addition, if any of you are in a position to do so, I would encourage you 
to invest at least $500 US (for 50 shares of stock) in the company so that we 
can cover the expenses of our next steps of growth.

Purchasing stock in Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd (MIT2) is a very simple 
process. All you have to do is fill out a stock purchase form (which can be 
downloaded from http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/Investing.html), issue a 
check made out to Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd, and mail that check and 
the stock purchase form to Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd, PO Box 181015, 
Boston, MA 02118.

(The current stock price is $10.00 US per share and can be purchased in lots 
as small as 50. Minimum purchase price is $500.00 US.)

When such checks are received, I do these two things:

1) personally send an acknowledgement letter, and

2) send the stock form and check to our Treasurer, who records the 
transaction and deposits the check to the MIT2 account. Then, a Stock 
Certificate is issued in your name and sent to you by certified mail.

>From then on, as a shareholder in MIT2, you will receive update information 
and reports on a regular basis and you are invited to attend the Annual 
Shareholders Meeting of the Company, usually held in the months of May or 
June each year.

Each share of stock you own represents a vote at the Shareholders Meeting! As 
a stockholder and part owner of the company, you have a say!

In an otherwise uncertain atmosphere where one wonders "what can I do to help 
a place like Haiti?", here is a strategic, tangible way to act: Let's work at 
preparing the way for written Haitian Creole, as well as other minority and 
vernacular languages, to not only survive but thrive into this new Digital 
Information Age!

Marilyn

*******
Marilyn Mason, President
Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd
P.O. Box 181015
Boston, MA  02118  USA
(617) 247-8885 (office & answering machine)
(617) 262-8923 (FAX)
MariLinc@aol.com (e-mail)
Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd Home Page:
   http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/Index2.html
MIT2 President's Update:
   http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/Update3-2000.htm
Introducing CreoleScan(tm) and CreoleConvert(tm):
   http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/IntroCrScCrConv.htm
Orthographically Converted HC Texts Download Site:
   http://hometown.aol.com/mit2haiti/Index4.html
Meet Marilyn Mason (includes publications list):
   http://hometown.aol.com/marilinc/Index3.html
MIT2 Job Opportunities:
   http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/JobOpps.html