Most Android smartphones include traditional Arabic locale support, which provides Arabic fonts and the option to change the entire interface into Arabic. But how, you may be asking, do you write Arabic on your Android phone? Many in the region still resort to typing in Arabazi, which is the use of the Latin script to communicate…

By Karen E. Klein for Bloomberg Businessweek I’m looking into starting a translation business, but I worry that with online translation services getting better, my company may one day be obsolete. How well do I have to speak another language to do translation, and is the industry considered recession-proof? —submitted online anonymously If any industries…

By SOMINI SENGUPTA Language does not come naturally to machines. Unlike humans, computers cannot easily distinguish between, say, a river bank and a savings bank. Satire and jokes? Algorithms have great trouble with that. Irony? Wordplay? Cultural context? Forget it. That human edge in decoding what things mean is what a computer scientist turned entrepreneur,…

BY Aldrin Calimlim I’ve touched on the accessibility of iOS and expressed my appreciation of it in a previous post. But today I’m revisiting the topic with renewed fascination, thanks to a recent TUAW article about a new kind of iBooks e-book. In the article, TUAW chats with Adam Stone, an author whose first book…

by Michael Gardner A new computer system that automatically transcribes lectures and translates them into English is being tested at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, or KIT, in southwest Germany. It could benefit foreign students who have difficulty following lectures and other students who have struggled to take notes, as the scripts are stored in…

by Vishal Mathur of Think Digit The iDevice isn’t limited to humans anymore! In an extremely innovative initiative, the Redapes organization is now deploying Apple iPads at various zoos across North America. The idea is to possibly create another medium by which the apes can communicate, and evolve that into something bigger, if the orangutans…

New technology is bridging the gap between the deaf and hearing worlds. For years, engineers have tried to find ways to translate sign language into spoken words, and vice versa. Now, a new project may have cracked the code with a prototype device called MyVoice–a concept device that reads sign language and translates its motions…

What’s the next big challenge for Kinect development? Natural speech recognition, says David Quinn, who worked on Kinect Sports and its sequel at Microsoft studio Rare. He’s one of the foremost experts in developing engineering solutions for the peripheral, having worked with it since its pre-release Project Natal days, and into the latest games for…

By Julie Ashton-Townsend Learning a new language is something that takes time and effort, but now you can do it on the move. This is a guide to the best android, iPhone and BlackBerry apps to help you learn a new language.

by Ben Griffin Learning a language apparently gets easier once you’ve learnt a few, or so someone in Mensa once told us. But that doesn’t mean learning those first few, or even one, is going to be easy. It’s something many of us would love to be able to do but learning a foreign language…