In the following video from The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in June 2010, lexicographer and Wordnik CEO Erin McKean demonstrates how Smartwords allows someone to get lengthy definitions for technical terms, buy books on searched concepts, and get quizzed on words for the college entrance exam (hat tip to VentureBeat).

Link to video

The video below from O’Reilly’s TOC Conference (Tools of Change for Publishing Conference) in February 2010 is disappointingly vague, but the main point is that the Smartwords platform lets you learn (about words):

• where they are and
• where they came from
• when they are
• how they relate to other words
• who created them and
• who they’re with now

I take this to mean the contexts, connotations, collocations (words that co-occur), and other connections among words. I would dub this “Word Con 4,” but one is a col- and it might also sound like a word conference or a lexical DEFense CONdition for shooting language-maven missiles (after eating and before leaving) at people who misuse too many words.

Link to video

These are exciting times for how we access words and information. Once we reach the immersive hologram phase I suppose tagged words will have avatars to come by and explain themselves to us. “Wrestling with” a new concept could cause injuries without proper safety protocols, and “wrapping your head around” an idea might make for an unflattering online video of you.

Side note:

Erin McKean (her Twitter) uses delightful analogies. Below are two talks she has given about dictionaries.

2007 TED Talk on redefining the dictionary

Link to video

2007 talk at Google on what one should know about dictionaries (almost 55 minutes)

Link to video

Lingro works for English-English and both to and from English for:

• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• German and
• Polish.

It uses the free Wiktionary dictionaries and also has an input-translator dictionary, file translator, and vocabulary study tools.

Go forth and click multiple unknown words.

Here’re the domains:

• http://مثال.إختبار/الصفحة_الرئيسية Arabic
• http://例子.测试/首页 Chinese (simplified characters)
• http://例子.測試/首頁 Chinese (traditional characters)
• http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή/Αρχική_σελίδα Greek
• http://उदाहरण.परीक्षा/मुख्य_पृष्ठ Hindi
• http://例え.テスト/メインページ Japanese
• http://실례.테스트/대문 Korean
• http://مثال.آزمایشی/صفحه‌ی_اصلی Persian/Farsi
• http://пример.испытание/Заглавная_страница Russian
• http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை/முதற்_பக்கம் Tamil
• http://בײַשפּיל.טעסט/הויפּט_זײַט Yiddish

It’s still ASCII encoding; each domain has a transliteration encoding starting with an “xn--” prefix.

Here’re the actual addresses:

• http://xn--mgbh0fb.xn--kgbechtv/ Arabic
• http://xn--fsqu00a.xn--0zwm56d/ Chinese (simplified characters)
• http://xn--fsqu00a.xn--g6w251d/ Chinese (traditional characters)
• http://xn--hxajbheg2az3al.xn--jxalpdlp/ Greek
• http://xn--p1b6ci4b4b3a.xn--11b5bs3a9aj6g/ Hindi
• http://xn--r8jz45g.xn--zckzah/ Japanese
• http://xn--9n2bp8q.xn--9t4b11yi5a/ Korean
• http://xn--mgbh0fb.xn--hgbk6aj7f53bba/ Persian/Farsi
• http://xn--e1afmkfd.xn--80akhbyknj4f/ Russian
• http://xn--zkc6cc5bi7f6e.xn--hlcj6aya9esc7a/ Tamil
• http://xn--fdbk5d8ap9b8a8d.xn--deba0ad/ Yiddish

When you get into Web pages, the encoding gets rather long. For example, this would be the wiki listing for Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa:

http://例え.テスト/黒澤明

Here’s what you may see in your browser address bar:

http://xn--r8jz45g.xn--zckzah/%E9%BB%92%E6%BE%A4%E6%98%8E

They worked in my browser and E-mail. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Chinese and Japanese domains work with both the ASCII period/full stop “dot” (.) and with the Chinese/Japanese open-circle period (。).

More information at:

My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live

IDNwiki

You can help on Monday, October 15, 2007

Visit the links on their page to the test domains in:

• Arabic
• Chinese (simplified and traditional characters)
• Greek
• Hindi
• Japanese
• Korean
• Persian
• Russian
• Tamil and
• Yiddish.

Within their own country codes (.cn, .jp, etc.), some countries have been using their own writing systems for domain names since 2003, but they’ve still been stuck with the top-level .cn, etc. Even accented letters are a tricky thing. Just this week Spain, within .es, added accented vowels, tilde-n, and more.

China has gone further and added Chinese-character top-level domains: .公司 (.gongsi, .com; “company,” “corporation”) .网络 (.wangluo, .net; “network”), and .中国 (.zhongguo, .cn; “China”).

Now ICANN wants to make those sort of non-ASCII domains accessible for Web surfers who aren’t in China (and avert the surfing errors that could happen with multiple, separate internets).

Why the delays?

Aside from the technical difficulties and possible indifference to other languages by the American company ICANN (moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page94?oid=165049&sn=Detail) [EDIT (6/6/10): dead link], there are also the fears of trademark holders and opportunities for spoof domains using similar-looking letters from languages like Greek and Russian.

But let’s look to the future. Onward to an Internet for all writing systems!

Icons

Zlango currently has over 200 icons (219, including at least four repeats I noticed) on their site in eight categories:

• People: 25 icons
• Actions: 43
• Places: 21
• Feel: 26
• Time: 22
• Language: 20
• Fun: 25
• Descriptions: 37

Zlango is not an international language, of course. It has no grammar and favors languages like English that mostly use word order instead of morphology (word changes and affixes) for grammar.

Observations

• Why are “beach” and “army” considered types of buildings like “cafe” and “pub”?
• The hungry bird chick looks more like “hungry” than “want.”
• Flying Superman doesn’t make me think “can.”
• “Please” looks like “pray.”
• A timer bomb about to explode doesn’t really work for “soon” when it’s a good thing about to happen.
• Would everyone get “beautiful” from a picture of a swan (presumably from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” who was really a swan-to-be)?
• Amusingly, it’s an Israeli company, but “food” is a hot dog and “restaurant” is a hot-dog place (perhaps it’s a kosher hot dog from beef).

Videos on Zlango’s Youtube page

You might also want to look into psychologist David Premack’s work with chimpanzees and plastic tokens to create simple communication.

In the UK, soon you’ll be able to use IBM UK’s Say It Sign It (SiSi) translation system.

SiSi converts spoken English to British Sign Language (BSL) via speech recognition, translation, and a computer-animated avatar character.

Demonstration video on Youtube (14 seconds)

Link to video

This is a wonderful invention for simple communication and last-minute occasions. I hope, however, that people don’t try to replace human interpreters with speech-recognition avatars. The nuances of the face, which can carry important grammatical information in sign languages, can’t be perfectly rendered in animation in all their complexity and subtlety.

I also wonder how good the speech-recognition and translation programs are. I suspect the device is really translating into a pidgin sign language that includes elements of BSL and English. The way information is presented in natural sign languages and spoken languages can be quite different. Sign languages use a lot of simultaneity/overlapping of information in space and what are called size and shape specifiers, or classifiers (such as for flat objects or round objects or vehicles or people). Translation is not easy.

Still, I hope IBM can make Say It Sign It better and better.

You can download French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. They’re planning on adding Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, and other languages in the future.

You don’t have to be able to pronounce the foreign language; just find the expression you want and let the phrase book say it.

Press release

Thanks to Roy Forsdick, Managing Director, iDev Entertainment (apparently Coolgorilla is their brand) for informing me about this.

British regional dialect words for Microsoft Office 2007 products.

You can offer your suggestions to judge Jonathan Robinson, curator of English accents and dialects at The British Library (site) via E-mail: dialect at microsoft dot com.

Speaking of The British Library, you can listen to British dialects (with Windows Media Player) from the archive:

Sounds Familiar?

See also:

• (British) English Translated For Americans
• The English-to-American Dictionary

From the press release linked above:

Jim Kyle, Harry Crook Professor of Deaf Studies at the Centre for Deaf Studies said: “This is a first step to providing support to hearing people’s communication with Deaf people — anywhere and at any time. From our research, we have identified this point of contact as a major issue for Deaf people in shops and daily life. The next step for us will be to construct a phrasebook in order that more extensive interaction can be supported.”

Mobilesign

Signstation: BSL and Deaf awareness workplace materials

It’s nice to see technology working for Deaf people instead of against them (radio, movies going from readable intertitles to talkies, telegrams going to telephones). I hope we get something like this for American Sign Language (ASL), especially with the current work on sign-friendly video compression (see my post Better cellphone video for Deaf signers?).

But now University of Washington researchers are working to improve video compression with a project called MobileASL.

What makes this a language-related project is how the researchers are trying to compress the video. They’re exploiting how sign languages are perceived.

With sign languages the face is more important than the hands. When people sign, you look at their faces (with your acute “foveal” vision, as opposed to peripheral vision). The signer’s face carries not only the emotions of the signer but grammatical markers as well. With ASL, markers for yes-no questions, wh-questions (who/what/where/when/why/how), negatives, sentence topics, and conditionals are made with the face. The face also conveys commentary on whether something described is ordinary, of poor quality, and so forth.

Thus, instead of compressing the video evenly, the researchers are compressing the area around the signer’s face a little less and the area around the torso a little more. They’re also using somewhat fewer but higher quality frames of video (PDF research paper).

I hope they have success. I would think companies involved with mobile video phones would be interested in this targeted compression. Even if you’re watching people speaking English on video, you want to see their facial expressions and you just want to see their faces.