Good news from the UAE, where the Ajman University of Science and Technology has just set up a ‘state-of-the-art’ Linguistic Research, Studies & Translation Center .

One of the aims, it seems, is to address the needs for knowledge transfer by training a new generation of into-Arabic translators. Although there is plenty of translation education around the Arab world (certainly in the Maghreb and Egypt) there is little evidence that the results serve the vital cause of transferring today’s knowledge in the way that the Arabs in 9th century Baghdad translated and thereby kept alive ancient Greek philosophy and science, or in the 19th translated European knowledge at the behest of Mohammed Ali in Egypt.

The contemporary translation scene in Arabic-speaking countries recently received a blistering attack in the Arab Human Development Report 2003, (written by Arab scholars) citing various demeaning statistics on the number of books and other sources of knowledge that are Arabized each year.

While in the U.S. and presumably worldwide, there is enormous interest in mining information from Arabic texts and having it translated into English or other strategic languages, at least someone in the Arab world is trying to do the opposite and hopefully professionalize the local translation community for the more attractive task of localizing global knowledge for the future, not just local news stories for the very immediate present

According to a news report from Brussels, Belgium’s new Foreign Minister, Karel de Gucht, suggested on Monday this week that Flanders (Flemish speakers) and Wallonia (French speakers) could function separately inside the European Union. This is not of course the first time that a Flemish speaker has suggested such a divorce for this endlessly bickering couple of communities. But now that there are more small-population countries in the EU, the arguments might appear more compelling.

It would certainly have the effect of radically reducing demand for Flemish-French translation, as well as normalizing the two ‘countries’ along the quasi one country/one language EU format. All countries are multilingual to some extent, of course, since they harbor minorities of all kinds, some more vocal than others. But explicitly multilingual countries would include Spain, Malta, Finland (Finnish and Swedish) and, plausibly, Ireland, which is trying more than ever to have Irish adopted as an official language alongside English. Minority language militants would obviously not agree with this interpretation of the linguistic space in Europe. To complicate the Belgium situation, for example, there is also a minority German-speaking community.

Yet if nothing else, an official split would at least rid each language group in Belgium of the publicly sustained illusion that they are expected to learn each others’ languages, and endorse out loud what each side thinks about the other sotto voce. The same is true for that other European multilingual country Switzerland, whose French speakers in Suisse Romande rarely learn Swiss German properly from their cousins in Zurich – and vice versa.

A lot of people probably saw the announcement that speech tech developer Wizzard Software is entering its product Rex, the talking prescription bottle, in the competition for Best Embedded Solution at the 2004 Fourth Annual Speech Solutions Awards sponsored by Speech Technology Magazine.

Rex is a “self-contained, disposable prescription bottle that uses text-to-speech technology to read the medication information and instructions in a very natural computer generated voice.” It is designed to help blind and cognitively impaired users avoid making mistakes with their prescription drugs.

What the story did not say is why on earth Wizzard’s device was baptised Rex. Isn’t it an archetypal dog’s name, after all? Well, yes – and thereby hangs a tail. In 1922, the Elmwood Button Co. for some reason developed a one-off toy dog that recognized its own name. According to this source, “Rex was a celluloid dog with an iron base held in its kennel by an electromagnet against the force of a spring. Current energizing the magnet flowed through a metal bar which was arranged to form a bridge with 2 supporting members. This bridge was sensitive to 500 cps acoustic energy which vibrated it, interrupting the current and releasing the dog. The energy of 500 cps contained in the vowel of ‘rex’ was enough to trigger the device when the dog’s name was called.” If Wizzard did in fact know about good old Rex, why did they use it to name a device that offers speech production rather than speech recognition?