Google just announced on their translate blog that they have added pronunciation to a couple of languages – including Icelandic. Cool, finally we can pronounce our most favorite volcano Eyjafjalla the correct way. Sounds kind of funny but it’s the next step to their babel phone. Just wondering when they add more animal languages to their speech output. Oh, that reminds me of an ad that I just saw the other day – TomTom has just released a Darth Vader voice for their navigation system. Here’s the video:

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

While half of Europe is covered in ashes (OK, it is just a big ash cloud but nonetheless) air traffic has basically broken down. Apparently airplanes shouldn’t fly through the ashes as the engines might get destroyed. That got me curious of how the engineers know this. As (almost) always, it’s a proven fact: One of the most famous flights through volcano ashes was British Airways flight 9. Within minutes, all four engines stopped working, forcing the pilot to start a gliding flight. While he was trying to restart the engines with one of the probably most famous quotes of understatement:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

Now, how cool is that? Basically on the verge of crash, surival mode kicks in and he says “I trust you are not in too much distress”. That deserves the survival medal of the month. The crew managed to get the engines started again and kept the record of the longest gliding flight ever. This record was later broken by Air Transat flight 236, managing 19 minutes of gliding flight time – doing an emergency landing on the Azores without any fuel left. That’s what I call fuel efficient.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

As I have talked about the Google Translate functionalities a few times already I didn’t want you to miss out on the latest addition: Google Translate for Animals.

Quite a cool achievement, I would say. Now Google just needs to take over a few content databases so that it actually works out with the animal translation. How about this one? Actually, once Google is done with its street view project it could just reuse the cars to catch animal sounds. Anyway, here’s the video:

Nice idea, only that it is April Fool’s day.

A recent article from the New York times discusses the way how Google tries to tackle the translation problem. I wrote about the Google babel phone idea a couple of weeks ago but I wanted to pick up the topic nonetheless. As the article points out Google uses sheer computing power to make automatic translations work. The first approach was to explain the computer all grammar rules of a language, combining it with a dictionary. Unfortunately it seems that there are just too many exemptions and people just don’t like to follow rules (what a surprise ). Google is now taking already translated documents from the EU and United Nations and comparing these with the text that you enter into the automatic translation tool. By using advanced matching algorithms they can then say which translation fits best. Pretty cool idea, only problem is that most of the spoken / slang / vulgar language still miss the translated documents. But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. And if you still favour the old approach, there’s a great website for learning Spanish grammar, rules etc.

Image credit: Ian Muttoo, Flickr

I grew up with Star Trek. The first years I never wondered why Captain Picard and his crew could communicate with aliens without any difficulty. After all, the universal language is English, right? With the latest (and newest) episodes we know that the first Enterprise had a language specialist on board. And then the universal translator was invented. Now apparently Google wants to leapfrog innovation and build a phone that can translate at an instant, as I read in The Times the other day. Now, is that maybe why the new Google phone is called Nexus? Wasn’t there the Nexus in Star Trek as well? OK, back to the point. Google Translate is already quite a powerful tool, so combining speech recognition with its Translate Tool will definitely be a jump in language technology. Granted, the could call their new app babel fish, just to make it sound right according to Douglas Adams. But then they would probably get into a fight with Yahoo Babelfish.

PS What I am really hoping for is that Google gets it’s innovation timeline straightened up: First the Enterprise, then the universal translator. Come on guys, I know you can do it.

Image credit: osde8info, flickr

Ever since Twitter started it has been very US- or English-focused. Even the international users often tweeted in English as the news/tweets are only of value if you understand them. After Twitter started with local language versions last year they have now apparently added a local trends feature, according to outspoken media. This move finally makes Twitter a truely localized tool as mainstream Internet users stay within their “language aura”. All successful international companies have really localized their regional sites, look at Google (obvious) but also Amazon, ebay, Facebook etc.
It is the correct move to regain some of the momentum they lost in the last months, their growth being only small single digit numbers. I’ll tell you, it all comes down to language

Image Credit: outspoken media