Posted by Jessica Gross on Ted Blog

Texting is not a blight on the English language, says linguist John McWhorter in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Rather, texting is a “miraculous thing”: a novel linguistic mode that’s redefining the way we communicate with each other — for the better.

John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!McWhorter points out that texting shouldn’t be categorized as written language –but as speech. This shift makes the apparent problem of grammatical errors seem misplaced and unimportant.

If we think of texting as “fingered speech,” as McWhorter puts it, it also opens our eyes to texting’s distinct linguistic rules, structures and nuances. McWhorter dives into the example of “lol,” which originally stood for “laughing out loud.” But over the past few years, “lol” has “evolved into something that is much subtler,” signifying empathy and accommodation.

As the mediums through which we communicate quickly multiply, our modes of communication are following suit. After you’ve watched the talk, here are some more examples of new linguistic forms that have developed in tandem with technology.

1. Like “lol,” hashtags started out with a literal function: making topics easy to tag, and thus search for, on Twitter. But in 2010, Susan Orlean, a writer and avid tweeter, pointed out that hashtags had taken on an emotional resonance. Orlean gives this (dated, sorry) example: “Sarah Palin for President??!? #Iwouldratherhaveamoose.” She writes that, while no one would search for “Iwouldratherhaveamoose,” its use here “makes it look like it’s being muttered into a handkerchief; when you read it you feel like you’ve had an intimate moment in which the writer leaned over and whispered ‘I would rather have a moose!’ in your ear.” Hashtags can also be used to indicate a joke, or even — when employed back-to-back –comment on the hashtag that came before. “Amazing how rich and complex 140 characters with a few symbols thrown in can be,” Orlean writes. And how much richer they are now, three years later.
   .
2. GIFs, those omnipresent video loops, are nothing new: they date back to 1987. But in recent years, they’ve started to populate blogs and articles, standing in for written descriptions, often to hilarious effect. Take #WhatShouldWeCallMe (there’s that hashtag again!), a Tumblr started by two friends in law school on opposite sides of the country, where Austin Powers stands in for the boundless joy of discovering your roommate has cleaned and a panda illustrates massive post-party regret. Orthis personal essay about a New Yorker’s experience during Hurricane Sandy, where the accompanying GIFs help make the horrifying event lighter and easier to process.
   .
3. “Fingered speech” though it may be, cellphone communication is generating new avenues for writing, too. In 2008, The New York Times reported from Japan thatcellphone novels (what they sound like: novels written on cellphones) had dominated the previous year’s list of best-selling books. One woman wrote hers, which hit number five on the best-sellers list, during her commute to work. “[M]any cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers,” the Times article notes. (A 2010Los Angeles Times article indicated the trend was still in full force.)
   .
4. More recently, Twitter, too, has been coopted as a tool for fiction. Last year, Jennifer Egan wrote a short story in 140-character nuggets, which were posted on Twitter before they were published in The New Yorker as “Black Box.” A few months later, novelist Elliott Holt wrote her own Twitter story, creating three different avatars/characters and posting from “their” accounts. “The three characters have distinct voices—and by telling the story through them, Holt embraces Twitter for what it is, rather than trying to bend it into some tool that it isn’t,” Slate opined. “With its simultaneous narrators and fractured storyline, this is not the kind of tale that could march steadily across a continuous expanse of white space. It’s actually made for the medium.”
   .
5. Email signoffs, as all things, have their haters: many a screed has implored humanity to dispense with these vulgar written appendages. (Admittedly, this rant inSlate is hilarious: “My transition from signoff submissive to signoff subversive began when a former colleague ended an email to me with ‘Warmest regards.’ Were these scalding hot regards superior to the ordinary ‘Regards’ I had been receiving on a near-daily basis?”) But others among us appreciate the space for expression that signoffs offer. Sadie Stein, in the Paris Review Daily, explains her own choice, “As ever.” And a few years ago, The New York Times offered this survey of signoffs from a bishop’s “+” to Norman Mailer’s “Cheers” to the author’s own “Carpe Diem.”

John McWhorter was a part of TED’s worldwide talent search, giving a shorter version of his talk at the New York stop of the tour. After the talk, he sat down with the TED Blog for this short Q&A »

McWhorter would also like to thank his students at Columbia University for teaching him about the new world of texting: specifically Yin Yin Lu, Sarah Tully, and Laura Milmed for the miracle of “slash.”

Posted by Jessica Gross on Ted Blog 

Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
   .
2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
   .
3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
   .
4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

une 25th, 2013, Roman Mironov 

What is the best compliment for a translator?

A common belief is that the best translation is one that does not sound like a translation at all. Readers do not even realize there was another mind between them and the author. This is often the case with literature, especially classic literature. Take, for example, the French translations of Edgar Allan Poe by Charles Baudelaire, which many consider superior to the original.

While this definition of a perfect translation is generally correct, it’s not universal. Some translations call for a different approach. Let’s look at two reasons why this standard may be impossible or even undesirable.

1. Formal documents. A legal document follows a structure and rules specific to the source language and therefore does not lend itself to this type of “perfect” translation. No matter how hard a translator tries to make the translation feel more natural, he/she is limited by this structure and these rules. To make it feel more natural would require a complete overhaul. This is impossible, however, because no one wants a translated legal document that is substantially different from the original.

For example, a license agreement translated from English to Russian is bound to feel like a translation, because Russian legal documents are simply written in a different way. A Russian agreement begins with a clause about who is concluding the agreement and when, whereas an English agreement often begins with several “whereas” clauses. An English agreement often uses a lot of terms with relatively similar meaning, such as “indemnify, defend, and hold harmless” or “indirect, special, or consequential damages,” whereas a typical Russian agreement uses just one or two.

The bottom line is that regardless of how a translator attempts to create a perfect translation, a formal document will still have an “aftertaste” of the original language.

1. Accuracy vs. style. The second, and even more important, reason is accuracy. The general principle is that the more literally accurate a translation is, the worse the style and the less natural it feels. The source and target languages are often miles away in terms of how a well-structured sentence looks. Going for 100% of the original meaning in the translation—and this is what literal accuracy is all about—leads to the feeling that even though the words in the translation are, say, Russian, the text actually reads like the source language, English. To eliminate this feeling, a translator needs to do two things:

• Omit words that are idiomatic in the source language, but are superfluous in the target language.
• Go for idiomatic phrases in the target language, even though they may not convey 100% of the original meaning.

Very often, however, this is not an option. When translating a user manual or a clinical trial protocol, accuracy is so important that choosing style over accuracy is completely out of the question.

Another reason that translators choose accuracy over style is the fear of being reprimanded for doing otherwise. With accuracy being one of the main evaluation criteria used by translation agencies and direct clients, how many translators have the courage to stray from it in the ways suggested above? Not many, I guess. Most translators prefer to be on the safe side, putting accuracy first and style second. This makes it important for clients to voice their expectations. For instance, with marketing translations, some clients ask us to avoid a word-for-word translation and make a “transcreation” instead.

SummaryMaking a translation sound like it is not a translation at all can be a challenge. With more formal documents, it is next to impossible. With less formal documents, it is easier to achieve, as long as a translator feels it is okay to sacrifice accuracy for style. Because the translator doesn’t know what is right for a specific client, it is important that clients let translators know their expectations about the balance of accuracy and style.
translation?

http://www.velior.ru/blog/en/2013/06/25/does-high-quality-translation-always-have-perfect-style/

This is the first in a series of profiles of Latino entrepreneurs, a preview of Joe Kutchera's forthcoming book, Pursuit of the American Dream: Success Stories of Today's Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Luis von Ahn's new company, Duolingo, has set two very large goals: help users learn a language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. The start up may very well transform both the translation and language-learning industries in the process.

Needless to say, von Ahn has a stellar track record for Internet start-ups. He sold two previous companies to Google and solved massive challenges in the process - reducing spam, digitizing books, and improving the quality of image search - all by applying his research in crowdsourcing.

Luis von Ahn moved from his native of Guatemala to the U.S. to study mathematics but found computer science more appealing, eventually obtaining his PhD in the subject from Carnegie Mellon University. Today, as an assistant professor in computer science at his alma mater, he juggles his entrepreneurial work with research and teaching.

With Duolingo, he hopes to solve two enormous problems for the developing world: bring down the incredibly high-price of computer language learning to nothing and improve the quality and quantity of online content in languages other than English.

"Growing up in Guatemala has definitely influenced my work. $500 dollars is an insane amount of money for somebody in Guatemala to spend on language-learning software, like Rosetta Stone. It isn't possible unless you are super rich. It's a lot here in the U.S. too, but most people can afford it. Because of that, I realized that the only way people would use it from countries like Guatemala is if it's totally free. So we're committed to making everything free," says Professor von Ahn.In addition, he also sees a need for more and better content online in Spanish. "If you ever use the web in Spanish, you realize it's ten times worse: the websites, design, content. Everything's a few years behind in comparison to the U.S.," says von Ahn.

A quick glance at Wikipedia's home page confirms a dearth of content in Spanish. The open source encyclopedia features over 3,831,000 articles in English but only 854,000 articles in Spanish. That equals only twenty two percent of the content in Spanish as of that in English.

Duolingo currently offers beta users classes in Spanish and German and plans to roll out French, Italian and Mandarin shortly.

If you have ever re-typed two squiggly words on websites like Craigslist, Facebook, or Ticketmaster during an online registration or purchase process, then you already know one of von Ahn's previous start-ups. reCAPTCHA reduces spam on email and social media sites as well as e-commerce fraud by preventing automated bots from signing up for thousands of new accounts, hence the acronym CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."



Little do web users know that as they re-type those annoying, squiggly words, they are actually digitizing old printed material, one hard-to-read word at time. Computer scanning systems for old books or newspapers, like those used by the New York Times, fail to recognize around ten percent of the words on scanned pages due to water or pencil marks or even scratches and tears. Fortunately, humans can interpret the words. More than 40,000 Web sites utilize the reCAPTCHA widget to collectively transcribe over two hundred million words every day.

By "outsourcing" this tedious job to the "crowds" on the web (hence the name "crowdsourcing") his system has been able to digitize old texts far more cost effectively and quickly than any other previously existing system. Google found von Ahn's company so useful that it bought reCAPTCHA both for its security features and to facilitate the digitization of its Google Books project.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-kutchera/translate-the-web-while-l_b_1183710.html

Each year on Sept. 30, a holiday is observed by people all around the world that has been celebrated since 1953. It's a feast day that was originally designated for a patron saint (Saint Jerome), but it has grown to transcend all barriers of religion or geography. This year, I am personally sending out greetings to thousands of people in 70 different countries in observance of this important day -- that's far more than I send out for any other holiday.

Yet, if you're like the majority of people, you've probably never heard of this cause for global celebration until now. It's International Translation Day. You might not think about how translation affects your everyday life, but in reality, there is hardly anything in your life that isn't touched in some way by translation. As I explain in my new book, Found in Translation (co-authored with Jost Zetzsche), here are 10 reasons why translation is so significant:

1. Translation saves lives. Did you know that right this very minute, a massive translation project is scanning the international news to catch words that help identify and contain global health outbreaks, protecting the lives of you and your loved ones? And, countless medical interpreters work in health care facilities, whether it's a wealthy patient visiting from overseas and paying for treatment at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, or a refugee who is being treated after surviving violence and other horrors.

2. Translation prevents terror. Intelligence gathering is critical for terror prevention, but no matter how helpful the information obtained, it is useless if no one can understand it and analyze its potential impact. Just consider the fact that the words "Tomorrow is zero hour" were intercepted in Arabic on Sept. 10, 2011, but were not translated until Sept. 12, the day after the 9/11 attacks. As you read this message, foreign media analysts are scanning all kinds of information from Iran, Syria, North Korea, and other important hotbeds of potential conflict. They translate that information in order to help prevent terrorist attacks from actually being carried out.

3. Translation keeps the peace. International diplomacy would simply not be possible without translation. The interpreters and translators at the United Nations and the Department of State do far more than just convert speeches and official documents. Translators are often involved in helping draft the exact wording to be used in peace treaties so that it will be agreeable to both sides. Interpreters are involved in conversations and communications between world leaders, and have the power to nurture relationships, providing insight and guidance to prime ministers and presidents, preventing them from making cultural faux pas and helping them to make the best possible impression for themselves and the nations they represent.

4. Translation elects world leaders. In many countries -- such as the United States, where one out of every five people speaks a language other than English at home -- translation plays a significant role in politics. It's no accident that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have translated versions of their websites in Spanish, and routinely rely on interpreters to communicate with voters who speak other languages. The U.S. government also requires precincts with large percentages of non-English speakers to provide ballots in other languages. These language specialists have the important task of safeguarding democracy by helping people vote correctly, even in situations where a term like "hanging chad" can barely be understood in English.

5. Translation creates jobs. The translation market is worth $33 billion in 2012, as a recent report from Common Sense Advisory shows. There are more than 26,000 companies throughout the world that sell translation and interpreting services. Most of these are small businesses, a vital contributor to any healthy economy. Not only do these companies employ translators, but people who work in finance, sales, technology, marketing, project management, and even engineering.

6. Translation fuels the economy. Global businesses cannot sell their products and services without translation. Pick any Fortune 500 company, visit their website, and chances are it's multilingual. If not, those companies are likely to employ workers who speak other languages, even if they only cater to domestic markets. Without translation, these companies would be unable to meet the expectations of customers -- and shareholders.

7. Translation entertains us. Whether you're a fan of soccer, baseball, hockey, or some other sport, just look at your home team, and chances are you'll find an interpreter or translator on the field or the court. Sports are becoming more international than ever before, and geography is no barrier to recruiting the best possible athletic talent, but language is. That's why professional athletes rely on interpreters when moving from country to country. But other important sources of entertainment, like movies and books, also require translation. How successful would The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have been if everyone were forced to read it in Swedish?

8. Translation tests our faith. Many people read a translation every night before they go to bed, in the form of a sacred text. While some holy books are read in their original language, most followers of religions are not able to access those sources of spiritual information without translation. Indeed, translation is often the source of controversy in religion, whether it's a discussion of whether the Quran should be translated or left in its original Arabic, or whether a new translation indicates that Jesus was married.

9. Translation feeds the world. The people who work in the fields where food is grown often speak different languages from the people who buy the produce picked by their hands. The same is true of meat processing plants. And, major food and beverage companies like McDonald's, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks sell their products globally, but only thanks to translation. All of these businesses rely on translation to communicate with workers who speak other languages, which means that human resource manuals, training software -- and sometimes, worker's compensation cases -- must be translated to put the food on the table.

10. Translation makes us fall in love. Yes, people fall in love thanks to translation. Whether it's thanks to a translated love poem by Pablo Neruda or a translated Hallmark greeting card, translation can help ignite a spark between two people. Having worked as an interpreter for countless "cupid calls," in which two people in love defy the odds by engaging in sweet talk across languages, I can attest that love knows no barriers -- as long as there is translation to hold people together.

And speaking of love, this word seems to be an appropriate way to describe the translation profession. When we polled translators and interpreters for our book, we saw that they love their jobs -- 96.4 percent of respondents reported that they were satisfied with their work.

So, to do your part for International Translation Day, take a moment to consider this profession that is often overlooked, but critical to society as we know it. And perhaps even say thank you to a translator or an interpreter. They're out there, each day, touching your life in ways that are unseen, but that truly make the world go 'round.

Posted: 06/28/2013 11:24 am


What (and how much) gets lost in translation? How does the translator operate the difficult task of rendering an author's words and stylistic choices into often completely different languages? How do politics, aesthetics and culture influence and affect translation? The answer to these and other fascinating questions are presented in this new anthology of diverse and enlightening essays by some of the world's leading writers and translators including Haruki Murakami, José Manuel Prieto, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Cole and David Bellos. Readers may be surprised to find out for example that translation has alternately been considered a sign of divine grace for its exactitude (as in the Greek biblical translation known as the Septuagint), or instead punishable by death for changes deemed to be unacceptable or sacrilegious. The Italian witticism "Traduttore, Traditore" ("Translator, traitor") sums up the historical view of translation as a subversive or treacherous practice.

The anthology is intelligently edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky and also presents pieces on and literary history that will be of interest to the general reader as well. In one of her two essays here ("The Will to Translate: Four Episodes in a Local History of Global Cultural Exchange") Allen, a noted translator of Spanish and French and a tenured professor at Baruch College, ties in the history of English language translation of Latin American texts to President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in fascinating ways.

Allen's co-editor Susan Bernofsky, perhaps the world's most noted German-English translator also makes a sensible contribution with her essay on translating Walser and Kafka: "Translation and the Art of Revision." In it, she reviews her own process of translation in some detail: Bernofsky admits to producing no less than four edits of any text. Maureen Freely's essay on translating Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk amidst threats from the so-called Turkish "deep state" is enlightening for the politics involved as well as the difficult linguistic choices she has made over the years. Perhaps the most playful read comes at the end of the anthology in the form of Clare Cavanagh's witty essay "The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry in Translation."

Cavanagh introduces Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle One Art and its translation or "re-creation" into Polish by her sometimes co-translator Stanislaw Baranscak as a starting point for an extended commentary on the necessary "losses" and creative metamorphoses that the translator must employ in order to create any noteworthy new text. Good translations it turns out are almost never entirely "faithful to the original" -- the whole art form can turn in fact on knowing instead when to move away from an original and seemingly immutable sentence structure or etymological choice -- it's the translator's own artistic license, one might say.

There's a little bit for everyone to enjoy when reading In Translation. If you have ever wondered exactly what a translator does beyond the obvious (i.e. translate): what choices he/she must make, how he or she chooses between one word form or phrasing rather than another, but also how translators often resolve (or not) often difficult relationships with editors, writers and even readers at times, then you are most likely to find this a most useful volume. Granted, these types of questions may not keep the average American up late at night, but they are fascinating nonetheless.


In Translation, Edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernoksky, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013 is available at: here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/when-you-cant-read-the-original_b_3507039.html

 January 28th, 2013 by Maria Khodorkovsky, Contributing Writer

Legalese – the bone-dry and tortuous language of the law – can be as mystifying as it is ubiquitous. To help our readers parse some of the more common and curious legal terms, below are their Latin roots.


a posteriori: A phrase used to describe an argument derived from experience, it means “from later.”

a priori: A phrase used to describe an argument that is independent of experience and relies on previous knowledge, it means “from earlier.”

ad coelom: An abbreviation of a longer phrase, it means “to the sky” and represents the principle that whoever owns a plot of land owns it “up to Heaven and down to Hell.”

ad hoc: A phrase used to designate a solution or group gathered to address a specific issue, it means “for this.”

ad hominem: A phrase describing an attack on an opponent’s character rather than a response to the argument presented, it means “at the person.”

ei incumbit probation qui dicit: This phrase, meaning that the burden of proof is on the person who asserts a crime rather than denies it, is the basis of the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

exempli gratia: Usually abbreviated as “e.g.”, this phrase means “for the sake of example.”

flagrante delicto: A phrase that refers to the act of committing a crime, it means “blazing offense.”

mens rea: This phrase refers to one of two requirements for proving guilt: a “guilty mind”, or criminal responsibility.

modus operandi: Abbreviated as M.O. in colloquial English, this phrase means “manner of operation” and refers to a person’s particular way of doing something.

persona non grata: A phrase used to refer to unwelcome persons, usually in a diplomatic capacity.

pro bono: Meaning “for the public good”, this phrase refers to work done for free.

quid pro quo: A phrase designating an exchange of goods, services, or money, it means “this for that.”

sine qua non: A phrase that refers to an event essential to all subsequent consequences, it means “without which, nothing.”

subpoena: A common summons, it refers to an action done necessarily “under penalty” for failure to do so.

veto: A word referring to executive power to prevent an action, it means “I forbid.”

–

Un nuovo interessante e ricco glossario in lingua inglese da Mobile Cuisine vi aiuterà a districarvi tra parole come Asafoetida, Entrecôte o Puy Lentils . 


Buone ricette e buone ricerche  su  : http://mobile-cuisine.com/gourmet-glossary/new-mc-content-gourmet-glossary/

Our 12 words of 2012
Posted by Collins Language @ Wednesday 19 December 2012



 Here are the CollinsDictionary.com words of 2012 (drum roll please):


• January: Broga – January brought the launch of a new form of yoga tailored distinctly to men. The word “broga” comes from the combination of “bro” and yoga. [Current status: published]


• February: Legbomb – During the Oscars, actress Angelina Jolie posed with her right leg jutting out of her high-slit dress. The unusual pose prompted a new word, “legbomb,” and led to many parody images being created. [Current status: under review]


• March: Eurogeddon – In 2012, Europe was abuzz with the threat of “Eurogeddon” as the economic situation in the Euro zone worsened. A second bailout package was announced for Greece in March, which fuelled fears and debate across the region. [Current status: candidate]


• April: Mummy Porn – With the launch of the “50 Shades of Grey” book series in April, erotic fiction was given a new name. [Current status: published]


• May: Zuckered – In May, Facebook launched its initial public offering (IPO), and its share plummeted almost immediately after hitting the public market. This failure led to the word “zuckered,” named after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. [Current status: rejected]


• June: Jubilympics – The summer of 2012 was filled with exciting events in the UK. In June, Brits were preparing to host the London Olympics and celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. [Current status: under review]


• July: Romneyshambles – When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney travelled to London, his serial gaffes led to a new word, “Romneyshambles.” [Current status: rejected]


• August: Games Makers – London’s vast team of Olympic volunteers were dubbed “Games Makers”. [Current status: under review]


• September: 47 per cent – Romney was secretly taped at a private fundraiser saying that 47 percent of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they are dependent on the government. The video and phrase spread virally and “47 percent” became a key phrase of the election. [Current status: under review]


• October: Superstorm – In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc in portions of the Caribbean, the Mid-Atlantic and the northeastern United States. [Current status: candidate]


• November: Gangnam Style – South Korean musician PSY’s catchy song became the most viewed video on YouTube in November with close to a billion views. It has since spawned many spoofs in countries across the globe. [Current status: candidate]


• December: Fiscal cliff – As 2012 draws to a close, the U.S. government faces a “fiscal cliff,” or a sharp decrease in the government spending and an increase in taxes that could throw the economy back into recession. [Current status: candidate]


Which words do you think define each month? Post your suggestions on our facebook page or tweet @collinsdict.



To find out more about new word submissions visit www.collinsdictionary.com/whatsyourword.

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/words-and-language/blog/our-12-words-of-2012,62,HCB.html

Simultaneous translation by computer is getting closerJan 5th 2013 

IN “STAR TREK”, a television series of the 1960s, no matter how far across the universe the Starship Enterprise travelled, any aliens it encountered would converse in fluent Californian English. It was explained that Captain Kirk and his crew wore tiny, computerised Universal Translators that could scan alien brainwaves and simultaneously convert their concepts into appropriate English words.

Science fiction, of course. But the best sci-fi has a habit of presaging fact. Many believe the flip-open communicators also seen in that first “Star Trek” series inspired the design of clamshell mobile phones. And, on a more sinister note, several armies and military-equipment firms are working on high-energy laser weapons that bear a striking resemblance to phasers. How long, then, before automatic simultaneous translation becomes the norm, and all those tedious language lessons at school are declared redundant?

In this section

• Conquering Babel
• Toxic medicine
• Hysterectomy

Reprints
Related topics

• Google
• Artificial intelligence
• Communications
• Electronics
• Star Trek

Not, perhaps, as long as language teachers, interpreters and others who make their living from mutual incomprehension might like. A series of announcements over the past few months from sources as varied as mighty Microsoft and string-and-sealing-wax private inventors suggest that workable, if not yet perfect, simultaneous-translation devices are now close at hand.

Over the summer, Will Powell, an inventor in London, demonstrated a system that translates both sides of a conversation between English and Spanish speakers—if they are patient, and speak slowly. Each interlocutor wears a hands-free headset linked to a mobile phone, and sports special goggles that display the translated text like subtitles in a foreign film.

In November, NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile-phone operator in Japan, introduced a service that translates phone calls between Japanese and English, Chinese or Korean. Each party speaks consecutively, with the firm’s computers eavesdropping and translating his words in a matter of seconds. The result is then spoken in a man’s or woman’s voice, as appropriate.

Microsoft’s contribution is perhaps the most beguiling. When Rick Rashid, the firm’s chief research officer, spoke in English at a conference in Tianjin in October, his peroration was translated live into Mandarin, appearing first as subtitles on overhead video screens, and then as a computer-generated voice. Remarkably, the Chinese version of Mr Rashid’s speech shared the characteristic tones and inflections of his own voice.

Que?

Though the three systems are quite different, each faces the same problems. The first challenge is to recognise and digitise speech. In the past, speech-recognition software has parsed what is being said into its constituent sounds, known as phonemes. There are around 25 of these in Mandarin, 40 in English and over 100 in some African languages. Statistical speech models and a probabilistic technique called Gaussian mixture modelling are then used to identify each phoneme, before reconstructing the original word. This is the technology most commonly found in the irritating voice-mail jails of companies’ telephone-answering systems. It works acceptably with a restricted vocabulary, but try anything more free-range and it mistakes at least one word in four.

The translator Mr Rashid demonstrated employs several improvements. For a start, it aims to identify not single phonemes but sequential triplets of them, known as senones. English has more than 9,000 of these. If they can be recognised, though, working out which words they are part of is far easier than would be the case starting with phonemes alone.

Microsoft’s senone identifier relies on deep neural networks, a mathematical technique inspired by the human brain. Such artificial networks are pieces of software composed of virtual neurons. Each neuron weighs the strengths of incoming signals from its neighbours and send outputs based on those to other neighbours, which then do the same thing. Such a network can be trained to match an input to an output by varying the strengths of the links between its component neurons.

One thing known for sure about real brains is that their neurons are arranged in layers. A deep neural network copies this arrangement. Microsoft’s has nine layers. The bottom one learns features of the processed sound waves of speech. The next layer learns combinations of those features, and so on up the stack, with more sophisticated correlations gradually emerging. The top layer makes a guess about which senone it thinks the system has heard. By using recorded libraries of speech with each senone tagged, the correct result can be fed back into the network, in order to improve its performance.

Microsoft’s researchers claim that their deep-neural-network translator makes at least a third fewer errors than traditional systems and in some cases mistakes as few as one word in eight. Google has also started using deep neural networks for speech recognition (although not yet translation) on its Android smartphones, and claims they have reduced errors by over 20%. Nuance, another provider of speech-recognition services, reports similar improvements. Deep neural networks can be computationally demanding, so most speech-recognition and translation software (including that from Microsoft, Google and Nuance) runs in the cloud, on powerful online servers accessible in turn by smartphones or home computers.

Quoi?

Recognising speech is, however, only the first part of translation. Just as important is converting what has been learned not only into foreign words (hard enough, given the ambiguities of meaning which all languages display, and the fact that some concepts are simply untranslatable), but into foreign sentences. These often have different grammatical rules, and thus different conventional word orders. So even when the English words in a sentence are known for certain, computerised language services may produce stilted or humorously inaccurate translations.

Google’s solution for its Translate smartphone app and web service is crowd-sourcing. It compares the text to be translated with millions of sentences that have passed through its software, and selects the most appropriate. Jibbigo, whose translator app for travellers was spun out from research at Carnegie Mellon University, works in a similar way but also pays users in developing countries to correct their mother-tongue translations. Even so, the ultimate elusiveness of language can cause machine-translation specialists to feel a touch of Weltschmerz.

For example, although the NTT DoCoMo phone-call translator is fast and easy to use, it struggles—even though it, too, uses a neural network—with anything more demanding than pleasantries. Sentences must be kept short to maintain accuracy, and even so words often get jumbled.


Microsoft is betting that listeners will be more forgiving of such errors when dialogue is delivered in the speaker’s own voice. Its new system can encode the distinctive timbre of this by analysing about an hour’s worth of recordings. It then generates synthesised speech with a similar spread of frequencies. The system worked well in China, where Mr Rashid’s computerised (and occasionally erroneous) Mandarin was met with enthusiastic applause.

A universal translator that works only in conference halls, however, would be of limited use to travellers, whether intergalactic or merely intercontinental. Mr Powell’s conversation translator will work anywhere that there is a mobile-phone signal. Speech picked up by the headsets is fed into speech-recognition software on a nearby laptop, and the resulting text is sent over the mobile-phone network to Microsoft’s translation engine online.

One big difficulty when translating conversations is determining who is speaking at any moment. Mr Powell’s system does this not by attempting to recognise voices directly, but rather by running all the speech it hears through two translation engines simultaneously: English to Spanish, and Spanish to English. Since only one of the outputs is likely to make any sense, the system can thus decide who is speaking. That done, it displays the translation in the other person’s goggles.

At the moment, the need for the headsets, cloud services and intervening laptop means Mr Powell’s simultaneous system is still very much a prototype. Consecutive, single-speaker translation is more advanced. The most sophisticated technology currently belongs to Jibbigo, which has managed to squeeze speech recognition and a 40,000-word vocabulary for ten languages into an app that runs on today’s smartphones without needing an internet connection at all.

Nani?

Some problems remain. In the real world, people talk over one another, use slang or chat on noisy streets, all of which can foil even the best translation system. But though it may be a few more years before “Star Trek” style conversations become commonplace, universal translators still look set to beat phasers, transporter beams and warp drives in moving from science fiction into reality.


From the print edition: Science and technology

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21569014-simultaneous-translation-computer-getting-closer-conquering-babel