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Written by Evan C Norman
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Friday, 29 December 2006 |
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English loses a little of its luster as language learners begin to look further afield
In the cramped reception area of a gray office building not far from Matsudo station near Tokyo is a bookshelf packed with well-thumbed textbooks. "Easy first steps in Indonesian" reads one. Another is titled: "An Introduction to Russian." Next to it is a row of Chinese-Japanese dictionaries. On the other side of the room, a notice board displays leaflets advertising study trips to Shanghai and Seoul, and a large poster shows two colorful stars of the Peking Opera. |
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Written by Evan C Norman
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Tuesday, 19 December 2006 |
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Some of the best stories in the news about translators/interpreters are coming, of course, from Iraq: Abba, Bryan Adams, Lionel Richie all helped him along his linguistic journey. To this day, his favorite song is the Bee Gees' "Staying Alive". "That's what it's all about these days in Iraq," he joked. "When we got a pirated copy of the movie 'The Godfather', I could tell my grandfather everything De Niro was saying. That's when I realized I spoke English." |
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Written by Evan C Norman
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Monday, 11 December 2006 |
'No Noising' and 'Airline Pulp' have been named the Top Chinglish Words of 2006 in The Global Language Monitor's annual survey of the Chinese-English hybrid words known more commonly as Chinglish. Though often viewed with amusement by the rest of the English-speaking world, The Chinglish phenomenon is one of the prime drivers of Globalization of the English Language.
"The importance of Chinglish is the fact that some 250,000,000 Chinese are now studying, or have studied, English and their impact (and imprint) upon the language cannot be denied," said Paul JJ Payack, President and The WordMan of the Global Language Monitor. "Since each Chinese ideogram can have many meanings and interpretations, translating ideas into English is, indeed, difficult. Nevertheless, the abundance of new words and phrases, unlikely as this may seem, can and will impact Global English as it evolves through the twenty-first century". |
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Written by Evan C Norman
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Monday, 11 December 2006 |
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More than half of the world's 7,000 existing languages "are headed for oblivion in this century," according to an NEH/NSF press release. One reason is globalization: People increasingly find it necessary to do business in the most widely spoken languages, such as Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi. The Internet and print and television media also speed the rate of language loss. Ten languages account for nearly 80 percent of Internet users, with English and Chinese alone accounting for 42 percent, according to internetstats.com, a search engine that provides Internet, business, financial and advertising statistics. |
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Written by Evan C Norman
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Wednesday, 22 November 2006 |
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Von Ahn says he has one goal: "To be able to use all of this data and to have computers be able to do pretty much everything we can do." The end result is a kind of artificial intelligence that would drive a computer to think and act like a human -- the kind only seen in science fiction movies. There are already rudimentary examples of human computation in use. Many online stores, for example, feature a recommendation system that suggests products to a consumer after considering the buying patterns of like-minded customers -- essentially creating a knowledge database of consumer tastes as a salesman in a brick-and-mortar store would. Von Ahn envisions computers in the future translating foreign text while respecting the nuances of language or summarizing lengthy documents effectively. And he sees computers making fast diagnoses of ailments in hospitals. |
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Translation
