Foreca

Ancient language meets new technology in Foreca’s mobile weather services in Latin

Helsinki, Finland – Cumulus, stratus and cirrus clouds are well known among all the weather freaks. The Latin names for the clouds have already been used more than two hundred years. Foreca – a Finnish weather service company has taken weather services back to its roots. Foreca’s mobile weather service foreca.mobi is now available also in Latin.

“Latin is the language of the science and also meteorology. We want to show respect to this great science and therefore we made foreca.mobi also available in Latin language”, commented Marko Moilanen, the vice president of business development in Foreca. “We also want to show that Foreca can offer international weather services in any language in the world.”

Jokke Häsä, Master of Science at Helsinki University, translated foreca.mobi weather services in Latin. “Weather related words can be found in dictionaries quite easily although some special words like different terms related to snow were more difficult. These terms I had to create myself by benchmarking other languages. The technical terms related to the use of the service were more complicated because they were totally new words and sometimes the meaning of the original term was not so clear”, commented Jokke Häsä on Latin translations.

Jokke Häsä is also involved in Finnish Broadcasting Company’s team called Nuntii latini, News in Latin. “I am not writing news frequently since I am more involved in correspondence. In both cases there is a bigger freedom in translating and writing than in this new task. You only need to write something in good language. The greatest challenge in foreca.mobi Latin translations was to translate individual words, so that terms could be understood out of context.”

In foreca.mobi, there is weather information for more than 80.000 locations around the world. Service includes current conditions as well as weather forecasts up to seven days.  Service also contains animated maps, for instance satellite data covering the whole world and rain radar images for selected territories. The service was launched in mid December 2008. There have been more than 400 000 visitors since then. At the moment, foreca.mobi is available in 15 languages.

Visit foreca.mobi/Latin
To visit foreca.mobi, type foreca.mobi in mobile phone internet browser. In Settings, choose Lingua Latina.

About Foreca
Foreca is the full-scale weather service company, which is providing weather services for its clients anywhere in the world. Foreca is a privately owned company based in Helsinki, Finland.  Website: corporate.foreca.com

For more information:
Sales Director Tiina Asula , Foreca Ltd
e-mail: tiina.asula@foreca.com, mobile: +358 40 558 1368