Languages

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Spotlight on Mirandese

by Richard Kazandjian February 2, 2012 Languages

The New York Times recently ran an article by Seth Kugel, the Frugal Traveller, describing a recent visit to the Mirandese-speaking region of Portugal. Today, Mirandese is Portugal’s second official language, but before it was officially recognized as such in 1999, it was sometimes treated as a rural (and therefore undesirable) dialect of Portuguese. However, [...]

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Recovering Aboriginal Languages

by Richard Kazandjian January 26, 2012 Languages

In Australia, English is by far the most commonly spoken language. Of course, that wasn’t always so.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, before Europeans set foot there, about 250 languages were spoken, divided into at least 500 different dialects. Many of those languages are completely extinct. As it stands now, only about 15 [...]

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Texting in Endangered Languages

by Richard Kazandjian January 18, 2012 Education

If you’re trying to preserve an endangered language, technology can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. More and more frequently, however, technology has become an ally in the quest to keep indigenous languages alive. Apps and computer programs have been developed to bring these previously left-behind languages into the digital age. That [...]

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Speaking Dothraki

by Richard Kazandjian December 16, 2011 Education

Now  more than ever, it seems like constructed languages have really taken off. Tolkein got the ball rolling with his elvish languages, Sindarin and Quenya, and Klingon has been showing up in some of the strangest places imaginable. Now, the success of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series has fans trying to pick up another fantasy [...]

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Duolingo

by Richard Kazandjian December 15, 2011 International

What language does the Internet speak? All languages, of course, but English much more so than others. Per Wikipedia, anywhere from 65 to 85 percent of the content on the World Wide Web today is written in English. That’s great for all of us English speakers, but what about the huge chunk of the world [...]

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18-century Code Cracked

by Richard Kazandjian December 14, 2011 Languages

Machine translation is probably not a good choice for your business. However, in the right hands it can be quite useful. A case in point: researchers from the University of Southern California and Uppsala University in Sweden just used a machine translation program described as being similar to Google Translate to crack an 18th-century cipher [...]

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Universal Translator

by Richard Kazandjian December 8, 2011 Interpreting

“Universal translators” have fuelled science fiction plots for decades, and building such a device has long been the Holy Grail for tech-oriented linguists. However, the prototypes that have appeared so far have used machine translation. Over the past few years, machine translation has  improved by leaps and bounds, but it’s still not precise enough to [...]

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Ojibwe Language Into Modern Day

by Richard Kazandjian December 2, 2011 Education

The Ojibwe language is the fourth most common Native American language spoken in North America, with a total of approximately 56.531 speakers in the US and Canada. Even so, like most native languages, it is in some danger of dying out as most of the speakers are elderly. However, steps are being taken to preserve [...]

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Zambian Farmers

by Richard Kazandjian December 1, 2011 Languages

One of the most important aspects of language preservation is the ability to record the language in writing. However, many endangered languages lack an orthography, or writing system. UNESCO notes that “it is extremely difficult to estimate how many written and unwritten languages there are in the world, and there is no established source of [...]

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Deaf Jail

by Richard Kazandjian November 30, 2011 Interpreting

Can you imagine being held prisoner by people you cannot communicate with, with no idea why you are there or when you will be released? That’s what happened to Timothy Siaki, an American man imprisoned in a Colorado jail for 25 days without an interpreter. That’s almost a month! How did this Kafkaesque situation come [...]

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