Andrew Joscelyne
European, a language technology industry watcher since Electric Word was first published, sometime journalist, consultant, market analyst and animateur of projects. Interested in technologies for augmenting human intellectual endeavour, multilingual méssage, the history of language machines, the future of translation, and the life of the digital mindset.
The ethics of grammar checkers?
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington, has written a withering critique of the Word grammar checker as...
Transblogating
English first, then shock & horror: other languages don’t fit. Develop a technical fix. Which turns into a business opportunity. Until the next big...
Multilingual definitions on Google
Google will now do define: operations on words in other languages than English. As an example, check this result for “rough" which has...
Doug Piranha software
Can you automatically detect affect in linguistic media such as speech and text? In December, I mentioned a Scottish company that claims to identify...
Program writing on the wall?
For most of the past 4 millennia, writing (inscribing linguistic and related signs on a visible, semi-durable surface) has been an elite skill. Mass...
Derestricting web corpus building
Language scientists and developers need corpora, but licensing them (no, not the linguists) can be costly. Either they are too expensive, or there are...
Wiki search engine
If you use Wikis, check out Wikiwax, a handy new index that uses the same sort of “predictive typing” tool as Google to suggest...
a-lettristic
Thanks to Language Hat for this piece of alphabetic fun by Simon Whitechapel. It consists of a set of rotating glyphs as stand-ins for...
Pwnc: Cyfieithu peirianyddol
Among EU languages, Maltese is this year’s joker. Every time the European Commission announces a web site – such as this handy new Eurobook...
Lack of French language technology?
First the call from Noel Jeanneney (see my post on this, and Mark Liberman for further well-informed and useful comments) for a European search...
In memoriam Minitel
Jean Véronis has drawn attention to the fact that SMS spelling can be used to query the Yellow Pages (YP) in France.
Prsone n sembl...
Beyond tomAYto and toMARto
There’s an intriguing grass roots website that allows non-native English speakers to input their pronunciation of a test sentence which is then digitized....
The Great Speech Translation Race
Article from Wired on U.S. progress in bringing the notorious Phraselator system used in Iraq back home for use by local cops. Here’s the...
South Africa speaking
There’s an article in the latest MIT Technology Review on South Africa’s effort to kick-start a multilingual technology industry from scratch. The idea is...
The French disconnection
Old European holdings, New World prism. Mark Liberman of Language Log recently questioned the back story to Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s call to resist Google’s plan...
The 40 language dash
Just before Christmas last year, a French computer geek called Alex Lemaire managed to break the record for the mental arithmetical calculation of the...
Longtemps je me suis…
Why can’t Americans read the last volumes of the updated Penguin translation of Proust’s A la recherche...? Read this article from Slate on copyright...
The dyslexicographer
Margaret Marks at Translation Blawg rightly wonders what on earth the Webster’s Online Dictionary (WOD) is all about. Although there is quite a lot...
Help not pity for the poor immigrant
Remember Bob Dylan’s song on John Wesley Harding:
I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would’ve stayed home
One way to help immigrants feel less deterritorialized...
Localized English
Newsweek Europe (probably need to subscribe) this week has a feature on Global English. The basic argument is that a) English as a...
What’s best?
Is there a ‘best’ automatic translation system? Sure. But you can only know by constantly testing them all across all languages against a vast...
Collective translation of the Encyclopédie
The Encyclopédie Diderot et d’ Alembert is often cited as an early (1750s) beacon of choral authorship (140 contributors) in a traditional European culture...
Here’s Lingster
Seems to me there is a knowledge hole in the language technology communication space. There are lots of R&D sites and community events, a...
20,000 words under the C:
It’s Jules Verne year, the centenary of his death. Blogos has mixed feeings about celebrating the demise of this garrulous if entertaining writer.
The world...