The Voice of LingoTech
Will The Telugu Language Soon Be Dead?
Feb 1st
According to a law laid by the UN, if less than 1/3 of the state population does not use the state language then it is declared a ‘dead language’. Ironically, today less than 1/3 of the Hyderabadi population does not use Telugu as a medium to communicate. This trend has scholars worried that the language will soon be declared officially dead. 
“Out of the 250 students in my school only 40 chose Telugu as their second language. Right from the schooling stage Telugu is being neglected. Parents do not guide their children well. They themselves choose Hindi, as they believe that it will be useful if they move to any other state. But if parents continue to do this, then how will the child learn the importance of our mother tongue. The management is also under the impression that as more number of students are opting for Hindi why give importance to Telugu. Every year several publishers send books to our school but none come from the Telugu department. We hardly have any Telugu books in our library,” laments Padma Sree, Telugu teacher at Pallavi High School, Secunderabad.
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Twitter Adds Arabic Language
Jan 31st
Twitter announced last week that they were working on adding Right to Left languages, starting with Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to their website by this Spring.
These additions are thanks in large part to the @supportarabic campaign, and the fact that according to a study by Paris-based agency Semiocast, Arabic is the fastest growing language on Twitter. Out of 180 million tweets posted daily, 2.2 million were posted in Arabic, amounting to an astonishing 2,000% increase in 12 months.
The @supportarabic account holds over six thousand followers and the Support Arabic campaign has over five thousand members, pressuring the social media company to meet the demand. Support Arabic have supported their demands on their website, by saying: “It is one of the oldest languages, the official language of more than 22 countries and spoken by 350 million people around the world. Many languages have borrowed vocabulary from Arabic and that makes it a source language.”
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Twitter Selling Out to Censorship Pressure?
Jan 30th
In a controversial step, Twitter announced its new censorship plan to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.
This comes as quite a big shock and disappointment to those in other oppressive countries, where there is no freedom of speech. Recently, Twitter has played a pivotal role in many political protests, in particular the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria; countries where Twitter is often the only outlet many citizens have of being able to communicate freely. Censoring them on Twitter would be like turning your back on them, ostensibly pulling away the life preserver from someone who is struggling to survive.
Due to this, many of the tweets calling for a boycott of Twitter on Saturday – using the hashtag (hash)TwitterBlackout – came from the Middle East. “This decision is really worrying,” said Larbi Hilali, a pro-democracy blogger and tweeter from Morocco. “If it is applied, there will be a Twitter for democratic countries and a Twitter for the others.”
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Mobile Smartling to the Rescue!
Jan 27th
At a recent New York Tech Meetup, Smartling‘s Sales VP Matt DeLoca introduced the company’s next BIG venture: Going small. Smartling has decided to enter the mobile platform to localize languages on mobile apps.
You have to give CEO Jack Welde credit. Hitting the mobile front with translation services is a stroke of business genius. In a market that’s already over flooded with useless apps, now with Smartling’s help, those apps can be available to just about everyone. As most people are aware, unless your app is listed on the first few pages in the app store, chances are likely that only a few people will ever come across your app, much less download it. But with Smartling’s help, those apps now have the unique chance to be overlooked in over 50 languages!
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President Obama’s ‘State of the Union’ Gets Crowdsourced
Jan 26th
The recent Presidential State of the Union received special attention this week from one company, NewsHour. NewsHour asked its viewers and web followers to utilize Universal Subtitles, a free video subtitling tool on the web to translate the President’s speech in almost real time.
Tuesday night’s effort marked the beginning of “NewsHour Open Election Community 2012,” a project in partnership with Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has provided NewsHour with a $420,000 grant for the project, and Mozilla and PCF are matching that with a $260,000 investment.
The goal of the crowdsourced translations is to make news videos more accessible. Traditionally, video has been a completely static form of entertainment and news; You simply watch what is presented to you. Now, with this technology, it gives people ways to interact with videos that they traditionally couldn’t.
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Video Translation Service for Hospital Patients
Jan 25th
As we all know (besides the lucky few who haven’t had the pleasure), hospital visits can be a stressful and frustrating experience. This is true even more so for patients who do not speak the native language, and must rely on either a family member who knows the native language or a helpful staff member if they happen to be available. Sometimes patients can bring a translator with them to scheduled appointments, but during emergency visits, this scenario isn’t always an option.
At Southlake Regional Health Center in Canada, they have begun using a video translation service geared towards hospitals and health care facilities called, VICKI. VICKI is a real-time video interpreting service from Able Translations Ltd., that helps patients who come into the hospital who do not speak the native language of the doctors. The ability for patients and health care professionals to communicate and understand each other is key to a positive patient experience and receiving the right treatment.
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eBay Offers a Translation App For Your Listings
Jan 18th
In an effort to expand the reach for its sellers globally, eBay is now incorporating an third party translation app for its listings. The app lets sellers translate item listings and descriptions on eBay for use on several of its associated national sites.
The site offers two translation options, machine and human. The more basic machine translation is a computer generated translation, similar to Google Translate. However, this more often than not, will provide a translation that is not 100% perfect, hence the lower cost.
For a higher rate, sellers can choose to go with the more expensive option which uses human translator services to provide a professional and grammatically correct translation. While this costs more, it may be more beneficial in the long run since many people may feel apprehensive about purchasing from a seller with a poorly translated item, as they may fear it is not a trustworthy source.
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Starting a start-up
Jan 14th
But if you want to build a feature that pretends to be a product that pretends to be a “startup” and you want to raise a bunch of cash from douchebags in order to flip it to Google or whomever in 18 months— then the valley is the only place to do that. - Jessica Darko“
It’s New York, baby. Everyone is here if full of crap. Fake people, searching fake opportunities, making fake friends, earning fake living.
What is happening since 2007?
I think Amazon Web Services has done more damage to the tech industry, than any other technology altogether. On top of it, all these Android and iOS app have sparked such a huge demand of IT, that companies no longer can outsource it to India and have to scramble to find local talents. Big companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook all opened up offices in Manhattan. The NYC despite being a huge city has become a desert when it comes for the search of talent. Clueless, would-be, so-called programmers ask for 100K starting salaries. They can’t program. They just want the money.
Year 2012.
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Text to Speech Goes Social with The Social Radio
Jan 13th
The new startup company, The Social Radio, brings the functionality of text to speech to Twitter, allowing you to listen to your twitter feed as if it was a radio broadcast. Right now, The Social Radio is available only as a free Android app, with iOS and Blackberry apps in the works.
The app can be used when you’re at work, jogging, or what I think is most important, while driving in your car. Since the social networking world has taken over our interests and attention, it’s become increasingly dangerous for smart phones in the car for people who can’t bear to miss out on anything happening online. With this app, you can listen to your Twitter updates without having to take your eyes off the road.
Currently the website is in private Beta, so you must go to their website and enter your email to be invited to use their service. All you need to do is download it and sign in with your Twitter account. The Social Radio will start reading your tweets aloud, with a few seconds delay compared to your timeline. In between tweets, you can also listen to music from your own library. If you’re in the US, you can also stream tracks from Google Music.
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East Coast vs. West Coast 2.0
Jan 12th
In the 90′s we had Notorious B.I.G. vs. Tupac leading the East versus West feud. In today’s tech culture, we have website companies duking it out in the Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley feud.
Staff at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School have summed up the promising new companies coming from each location in the graphic above.
Silicon Alley (New York) is the newcomer to the country’s technological petri dish, but it is gaining momentum fast. Although it is the underdog at this point compared to California, New York stands to become on par with Silicon Valley as one of the nation’s leading areas for entrepreneurs in tech innovation.
In the last year, New York has increased its digital groundwork substantially by welcoming prestigious startup accelerator TechStars, opening new offices for Twitter and Facebook and announcing plans for a 2.1-million-square-foot Cornell tech campus.
According to New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, “We understand that we will not catch up to Silicon Valley overnight,” he said in a speech to the business community. “Building a state-of-the-art campus will take years, and attracting a critical mass of technology entrepreneurs will take even longer. But — as with everything we have done — we are taking the long view.”
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