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Facebook To The Rescue
May 8th
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 of linguistics at the University of Virginia, has created a digital archive with the help of an emerging collaboration with some middle-aged and younger Arapesh.
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Volunteers Across The Middle East Are Compiling A Web 2.0 Dictionary In Arabic
May 2nd
Image Credit: Gulf News
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 the process of putting together a dictionary of technological and social media-related terminology.
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Ackuna Provides An Open Platform For The Community To Help Share Translations
Apr 9th
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 inaccuracies. Despite the current advances in technology, there is still no conclusive solution to accurately translate languages with computer programs. That is why Ackuna has become such a fast growing and valuable resource for free and accurate translations.
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Globili App Makes Translation For Businesses And Tourists Easy
Apr 9th
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 languages and dialects.
The creators of Globili wanted to create a way for everyone to receive translation help, not just people with smartphones. “With people coming from all across the world, we don’t know what devices they’ll be using,” says Globili co-founder Ran Mullins. “Ninety-eight percent of cellphones have text messaging.”
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Translation Cloud Releases API for Developers In Its Updated Version 2.5
Feb 14th
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 robust algorithm for crowdsourcing as well as a new and improved Translation Rank system. The new Translation Rank system now ranks the translators on a scale of 1-50, providing a more detailed and secure evaluation of linguistic accuracy. This improved quality control system helps to prevent scammers from taking advantage of the program, ensuring only qualified translators can contribute.
With the release of version 2.5 comes another big milestone in the continued success of Translation Cloud. Recently, the program reached 10,000 qualified translators signed up in the system. Right from the start, Translation Cloud has consistently attracted more and more new translators to its increasing community. However, according to Alex Buran, CEO and founder of Translation Cloud, the goal has only been 10% achieved.
Twitter Adds Arabic Language
Jan 31st
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 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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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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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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