Tag: language
You thought the internet was anonymous? Think again
You may keep your personal details to yourself, as well as your gender, location and political afflictions. But it doesn't matter – the internet knows who you are. It may not be able to figure out your name, but…
Tweet in Italian: the Twitter translation project keeps on growing
Back in October, Twitter asked its users to help translate the site into over 70 new languages worldwide. With the Twitter translation project moving full-steam ahead, Italian Twitterers can now tweet away in their mother-tongue. In a statement (translated by…
Welsh out-of-office autoreply ends up on road sign
Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gygieithu. That’s welsh for “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”. Certainly not “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”
That’s what Swansea council wanted, but they got an out-of-office autoreply instead, and put it on the sign anyway. That’s what you get for putting the work experience kid on translation duties.
(via BBC)
Related posts: Welsh web users campaign for dot cym | 40MBit/s fibre for London and Wales from BT
Learn, or teach, a language online with Myngle
It’s tough learning a language. It’s easy to start, but it takes a loooong time to become proficient, and if you’re not using it every day it’s difficult to keep it in your head. If you need to learn a language, for work or just for fun, then Myngle might be for you.
The language-learning service has just hit 100,000 unique users a month, and left beta status. It allows anyone to learn or teach a language from their computer. The latest stats say that students from 152 countries are learning a language from teachers in 62 countries. Languages offered right now include Arabic, Kazakh, Finnish, Sanskrit and Cebuano. If you know where Cebuano is spoken, then give yourself a pat on the back.
If you want to find out more then there’s a delightfully cheesy infomercial style video here, or just click over to the website and look around.
Related posts: Voxswap social networking site could help you learn a new language, launches today | Google Translate adds new language conversion features to web searching
Learn Chinese Characters with this freeware application
Chinese isn’t the easiest language in the world to learn. Unlike our 26-letter Western alphabet, there are estimated to be more than 50,000 characters, depending on how one counts variants. However, you only (only!) need to know about 3,000 for basic literacy, and a well-educated person would know around 5,000 characters…
Facebook offers German version
Facebook has announced that it has launched a version of the site fully translated into German. Thanks to around two thousand German-speaking users on Facebook who chose to be part of the translation effort, the whole site was transformed in under two weeks.
Matt Cohler, VP of Product Management, said that there were currently over a million active users in German-speaking countries. “We look forward to making it even easier for them to connect and share information with family and friends,” he said.
Google Translate adds new language conversion features to web searching
Google has announced that it’s added new features to Google Translate to make it easier to search for and read web pages in other languages.
Google already offers basic translation services on web pages and language phrases. Their updated system allows anyone to search for web pages in another language, and read the results in their own language.
Shock: Text messages blamed for declining standards in written language
Ireland's State Examination Commission has come to the conclusion that we all knew already: the rise in text messaging is a contributing factor in the decline of writing standards. "The emergence of the mobile phone and the rise of text…
Google has visions of instant online translation
Whilst Google's current translation service is passable, it can give some bizarre results, such is the nature of automated translation tools. Nevertheless, their vision of the future is to have documents instantly translatable into the world's major languages using…
