Facebook may help save dying language Most of the people who spoke the language Arapesh when anthropologist Lise Dobrin conducted field work in Papua New Guinea about 15 years ago have died. Their children no longer speak the language, and their grandchildren have almost no knowledge of their ancestral tongue. But Dobrin, an assistant professor…

With an increasing demand for online content in Arabic, and the language seeing impressive growth rates on sites like Twitter and Wikipedia, a new project aims to do its part to bridge the gap between Arabic and English content in social media and technology, Gulf News reports. 2,500 volunteers from across 28 countries are in…

Ackuna breaks new ground to become the leading website to offer free community-shared translations. Free translation services have long been left to Google Translate and other online translation tools.  A user would enter their short texts and be returned with a machine generated translation.  Oftentimes, however, this translation would be filled with numerous errors and…

The brainchild of MidPoint/Fountain Square/Bunbury developer, Bill Donabedian, Globili makes it possible for anyone with a cell phone to receive a free translation. The app works with either text messaging or scanning QR codes that are located throughout a city.  Globili translates the signs or other written materials  (even menus) into a wide range of…

Translation Cloud, http://www.translationcloud.net, the application created by Translation Services USA, is an automated system for real time translations via a crowdsourced community of translators.  This week, Translation Cloud opens its API to developers and issues new updates to its existing system. The latest changes to Translation Cloud include altering the code to provide a more…

Twitter announced last week that they were working on adding Right to Left languages, starting with Arabic, Persian (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…

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…

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,”…

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…

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. Silicon Alley (New York) is the newcomer to the country’s technological petri dish, but it is gaining momentum fast.  Although it…