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Posts Tagged ‘translation’
Google speech translation now in 14 languages
Friday, October 14th, 2011Lingoes - free dictionary and translator
Saturday, November 14th, 2009Following on from my earlier post on Google Translator here’s a handy little app I found on Lifehacker the other day: Lingoes. It lets you mouse over to get definitions and translations in 23 languages. It’s free and very small. This would be handy to have on a usb stick for example.
Google translator toolkit now translates between > 10,000 languages
Thursday, November 12th, 2009The Google translator toolkit is a set of online tools that can help human translation between a range of languages. It combines machine translation with various collaborative tools for uploading, editing, checking and sharing translations. Google recently increased the number of languages it handles by 285, bringing the total to 345. This means it can translate between over 10,000 language pairs. Pretty amazing stuff. A specific purpose of the toolkit is to ‘help preserve and revitalize small and minority languages’, according to Google.
Here’s a video from Google explaining more about how the toolkit works:
Automatic spoken translation
Friday, October 30th, 2009How cool is this? Speak into your Iphone in English and get a spoken translation in Arabic (and vice versa). I actually saw a device that did this (I think by the same company) but it was a dedicated piece of (expensive) hardware. Having this available on your Iphone (it’s not public yet), would be amazing.
Mobile object recognition for language learning?
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009I was just reading about advances in technology that allow machines to recognise facial expressions - to the extent where a computer is able to tell if (for example) an employee is smirking, grinning or smiling at a customer (scary stuff). What caught my eye was that computers are now apparently able to connect images with the internet. The Accenture Mobile Object-Recognition Platform will let people send pictures from their cellphones to look things up on the internet. I was just thinking how neat it would be for learners to point and shoot at everyday objects and get information about them. This could be either through regular Google searches but it could just as easily connect to a translation site. So, you walk around town and see an object you don’t know the word for. Simply take a picture and get the word both in your own and in the target language! (See the Economist from March 7 for information about the technology and an interesting Technology Quarterly supplement).
