If you are ready for a smile in your day, check out the Fake Unicode Consortium page on Google +. Clever people with great imaginations are taking Unicode characters and giving them a new interpretation. Some of my favorites: NOW FLIP SNAKE TO COOK OTHER SIDE: MONOCLE OF DISAPPROVAL: And, my favorite: iPAD vs iPAD3
Author Archives: Donna Parrish
World library for kids
I just ran across the International Children’s Digital Library, whose lofty mission is “to support the world’s children in becoming effective members of the global community.” Who can be against that? The site lists books from all over the world, in many languages. Some of the books reside in digital form on the website, while...
Which names are English
I just came across this article on the ctv.ca website about the enforcement of a decades-old law in Quebec which requires companies in the province to use French names: “The Quebec government is getting ready to launch a campaign this fall against big-box stores and their stubbornly English names.” I refuse to get drawn in...
Carved in wood: endangered alphabets
Languages are constantly changing. But that change sometimes mean that a language dies. Much has been written about this in books, blogs, articles. Something that gets lost in that discussion is that there are also dying alphabets associated with those languages. A recent article in The Atlantic led me to Tim Brookes who is bringing...
Language as a weapon
A whistleblower tells ABC News (US) that many interpreters hired to work for the US army in Afghanistan cannot speak the local language very well. Story here. This is probably no huge surprise, and definitely not a surprise to the armed forces personnel who are trying to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghan...
Computers translating voice; Phones translating text
Microsoft’s Translating Telephone and Google’s Goggles turn the tables on what devices normally do. The lines blur. In fact, there are no lines anymore. We’ve been using our computers to help us talk to people all over the world for some time now. But now, at this week’s TechFair in Mountain View, California, Microsoft is...
Saving Salish
If the Salish Native American language is to endure, it is up to the few remaining speakers and today’s youth together to save it. Nothing new here. There are dying languages all over the world. But here in the Idaho/eastern Washington/western Montana area, with a fairly homogeneous population base, it is exciting to see the...
Laurel Wagers, Rest in Peace
Laurel Wagers, managing editor of MultiLingual died on February 13, 2010. An employee at MultiLingual Computing, Inc. since 1998, Laurel quickly found a home and took the editorial reins of MultiLingual. A self-confessed Luddite, she nevertheless jumped into all the editorial content, including the more technically oriented coding pieces. She had a sharp eye and...
Language — what we have in common?
Once thought of differentiator between humans and other animals, perhaps we are now learning that language is something we have in common. The New York Times reports from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a study of monkeys in Africa finds them putting conditional suffixes on sounds—or shall we say words? Klaus...
Lost in localization
Maziar Bahari was imprisoned for interview on The Daily Show. Maziar Bahari is a Canadian Iranian journalist. He was interviewed by Jason Jones of “The Daily Show” when Jones was in Iran during the upheaval earlier this year. If you are not familiar with “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”, it is a US-based satirical...