Ever wondered if anyone outside your bogan little town writes about it on Wikipedia? Or if anyone has ever written about Australia in Arabic? Guess no longer, because someone’s worked it out for you. More »
A new feature built into Google Translate for Android, Conversation Mode is a little rough around the edges, but it’s basically your own personal Babel Fish. It does what Wordlens does, but in real-time speech, translating English and Spanish. More »
We usually assume words are just a way of expressing ideas already in our heads. But what if it’s the other way around? Some linguists say the languages we speak fundamentally alter the way we think and even perceive reality. More »
A survey of Chinese youths has found that 83 per cent of them have struggled to remember the precise format of their language’s characters when writing, old-school style, with a pen or pencil. Computers and phones are to blame. More »
Google already runs a successful online translator, Google Translate, but they’ve got far-loftier ideas than simply converting the written word. They want to translate languages spoken over the phone, according to their head of translation services. More »
The latest .NET-based programming language by Microsoft is Axum, which was previously known as Maestro. It’s neat because it’s aware of concurrent computing, the paradigm of having multiple processes or programs run simultaneously, which makes it optimal for taking advantage of multi-core processors. [MSDN via Slashdot]
Did you know that there were over 200 different aboriginal languages in Australia? Of those, there are now only about 20 that are still in use today – the rest have essentially been wiped out. What’s more, the Asia Pacific region is home to about a third of the world’s indigenous languages, many which are now facing the possibility of being lost forever.
But, thankfully, a group of Australian scientists are in the process of digitising and cataloging these languages so that they will never be completely lost. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a collaboration between ANU and the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and New England. Already in its data banks are thousands of pages of notes, plus hours and hours of audio recordings as part of their research.
The archive has just won a Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences, which gave them a $26,000 PowerEdge 2950 rack mountable Dell server as their prize.
In the future, it’s efforts like this that will form the basis of cultural and historical studies throughout a large part of the world. Sadly, it’s probably inevitable that these smaller cultures get absorbed into the global machine, but at least we’ll have some record of the past. And probably on a Dell server, no less.
[Science in Public - Thanks Niall!] More »
