Thursday, March 29, 2007

Google Translates Into Revenues [Fool.com] March 29, 2007

Google Translates Into Revenues [Fool.com] March 29, 2007: "All of this should be music to Google investors' ears. Just imagine the possibilities as millions of citizens all across the globe stream onto the Internet and are no longer restricted to reading materials or accessing websites only in their native language. At a minimum, the service should lead to a sizeable increase in advertising revenue and that, in turn, should translate into higher revenues and profits for Google."

1954 all over again...

Language Weaver Launches Consumer-Focused Subsidiary, Kontrib, First to Offer Multilingual Social Bookmarking Site

Language Weaver Launches Consumer-Focused Subsidiary, Kontrib, First to Offer Multilingual Social Bookmarking Site: "Kontrib uses Language Weaver’s automated language translation software, a proprietary software engine developed using statistical methodology, or mathematical probability algorithms, to automatically translate English, Spanish, French and Arabic-language news items and postings into any or all of these languages. If a user submits a story in English, Spanish, French or Arabic it is available in the other languages in a matter of minutes. "

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Google seeks world of instant translations - washingtonpost.com

Google seeks world of instant translations - washingtonpost.com: "Google chairman Eric Schmidt also sees broad political consequences of a world with easy translations.
'What happens when we have 100 languages in simultaneous translation? Google and other companies are working on statistical machine translation so that we can on demand translate everything all the time,' he told a conference earlier this year.
'Many, many societies have operated in language-defined communities where they really don't understand and are not particularly sympathetic to other peoples' views because of the barrier of language. We're about to have that breakthrough and it is a huge thing.'"

Thursday, March 22, 2007

The Phoenix Online - Linguistics professor’s new book laments dying languages

The Phoenix Online - Linguistics professor’s new book laments dying languages: "K. David Harrison’s new book “When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge” looks at what is lost from scientific, linguistic and humanistic vantage points when a language dies by examining field studies of endangered languages in Siberia, Mongolia, the Himalayas, North America and elsewhere."

Just finished reading this book. Very interesting, especially the discussion on calendars. It was a topic I hadn't read about in a long time...



Here is an interview to National Geographic.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Powerset Welcomes Ronald Kaplan as Chief Technology and Science Officer @ SYS-CON Media

http://www.sys-con.com/read/348724.htm: Barney Pell, Founder and CEO of Powerset: "Ron's computational linguistic expertise is widely respected, and his decision to join our team gives us a clear competitive advantage over today's keyword-based search offerings. In addition, our ongoing exclusive right to the technology that Ron and his former team at PARC are developing comprises a core part of our aggressive business strategy."