IcoText was invited to speak at ABLEconf this year about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Since this is not the usual translators conference, but one for open source enthusiasts, it turned out to be a fun challenge.
Attached the slides from the presentation.
Author: IcoText
Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-30
Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-23
Fun with Machine Translation: Instant Messaging with Instant Translation
As their website proclaims, “MeGlobe™ is fun and easy to use”. While employing machine translation may be fun to use in an instant messaging environment to talk to friends or acquaintances around the globe, it may also turn into funny which is why it made today’s column Frivolous Friday Fun.
Value Proposition
Over time this IM clients will get smarter and their value proposition can no longer be ignored. You can “just type in your own language and MeGlobe™ instantly translates your message into the language of your chat buddy!” One can only hope that with MeGlobe™ you don’t get ‘lost in translation.’
Try it out yourself
If you want to try out IM Chat with Language Translation, check it out at:
http://meglobe.com/
Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-09
Connotation analysis
While reading about the new Palm Pre which runs on Palm‘s new operating system WebOS, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday I came across a posting “Palm’s new OS and the importance of connotation assessments” on ProZ.com by contributor Claudia Alvis.
Frivolous Friday Fun: 2009-01-02
Happy New Year! Let’s start the year off right with some humor – in case you have never visited Engrish.com, do yourself a favor now and check it out!
P.S. Some may not be safe for work (NSFW), so caveat emptor.
Mobile Wikipedia
Wikipedia Goes Mobile
The Wikimedia Foundation has released a mobile version of the Wikipedia encyclopedia or Mobile Wikipedia at http://mobile.wikipedia.com .
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Frivolous Friday Fun: 2008-12-19
What do you call Crowdsourcing in Germany?
Europeana reopened
Reopening
While this may already be old news to some, I have not seen any articles at least this side of the Atlantic about the reopening of one of the most ambitious digitization projects in history: the Europeana.
The origin of the Europeana is truly unifying: “The idea for Europeana came from a letter to the Presidency of Council and to the Commission on 28 April 2005. Six Heads of State and Government suggested the creation of a virtual European library, aiming to make Europe’s cultural and scientific resources accessible for all.” Not only is this new resource a great information resource portal, but one of its lofty goals is the enablement of new business models: “The European Commission’s goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. It will build on Europe’s rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.” The types of long-term benefits of the project, of course, remain to be seen. Given how long the current poor economic climate lasts we should cross our fingers for continued funding of this and other projects like it.
History
According to press reports, the Europeana had been opened about a month ago on Nov. 20, 2008, amid great fanfare, announcing a new open source library. It promptly crashed due to the high demand on its servers: 10 million hits per hour. What is of great interest to translators as well as other language enthusiasts and what makes this project even more ambitious is the fact that at the time of this writing it is available in 25 languages, as there are:
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Frivolous Friday Fun: 2008-12-12
Check out this clever ad (requires the latest Adobe Flash plugin):
http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii
which promptly got imitated – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery:
http://games.yahoo.com
Enjoy your Friday.