No, I don't mean CAT Tools, but cat the animal. The application is still in progress of development. Here what the news says:
Coming soon - a Chinese mobile app that translates cat body language
and lets you know what your cat is trying to tell you - as if you didn't
know already.
Although it isn't yet available, cat lovers can sign up to be
notified when Māo, an app for Android and iOS, is released in the coming
months.
How often have you wished that your cat, who seems to understand so
much of what you say, could answer back? Well most of the time your cat
is tyring to communicate - it's just that humans often fail to
understand. As the Māo website puts it:
Every part of a cat's body, from the mouth to the tail, speaks
volumes about how they feel. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to
read their body language.
And that's where Māo hope to bridge the gap using body language and
16 distinct vocal patterns which are universal to all cats. The app is
said to distinguish between the behaviour of adult cats and kittens and
claims that over time it will learn to recognise parts of your cat’s
unique personality and vocal characteristics by calibrating captured
data to basic behavioural and vocal patterns.
SOURCE
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Google Glass versus Google Translte
A nice column on the usage of Google Translate in Quebec, Canada.
MONTREAL - For most of the world, English is just a
language. But for us Quebec anglos it’s a cause — an endangered dialect
we’re on a constant vigil to protect.
Take alert Gazette reader Beverly Cooper who recently sent me a picture of her latest French flyer from Linen Chest, where she quickly spotted two store locations had been francisized.
The LaSalle store was no longer on Boul. Newman but was now on Boul. Nouveauman.
The downtown store wasn’t on Rue Ste-Catherine anymore but on Rue Ste-Calesrine. Obviously the letters “the” in Ste. Catherine had been translated to the French word les.
So instead of Ste. Ca-the-rine, it became Ste. Ca-les-rine.
Don’t worry, everyone, it’s not the pasta police hunting down more English words — it’s just a computer translation program that messed up bad. Programs like Google Translate are becoming common and until they work out the kinks, we’ll see more crazy errors and linguistic foe paws … er, faux pas.
Rue Penfield will probably shows up on a flyer as Rue Stylo-champs, Atwater will become À L’eau and electronic traffic websites will warn us there’s a confiture de circulation up ahead instead of a traffic jam.
Meanwhile, in computer-translated French-to-English, Rue Maisonneuve will become Newhouse St., while N.D.G. becomes O.L.G. — Our Lady of Grace,
But like all gadgetry, electronic translation will improve quickly and I’m sure Google Translate will eventually crack the language barrier. In five years we’ll probably be able to point our phone at any French word and get a perfect English translation using some app.
A French ARRÊTE sign will translate into STOP right on your screen, while an English STOP sign will translate to the French STOP.
As well, the much talked-about new Google Glasses will soon let you see your computer screen right on your glasses — so you can surf online with voice commands as you walk down the street, or drive your car — or bungee jump while watching yourself live on YouTube.
Google has announced it’s looking for more uses for these glasses, so let me suggest an idea we could use here in Quebec to end Hassles 101 — with Google Glasses 1.01.
Why not install a program on the glasses that translates all French signs and words you see into English (or vice versa) the instant you see them? The signs would still be French to the naked eye, but you’d see them in English if you looked though your glasses. Frankly, there are times when I could use “English-coloured” glasses.
As I get older my eyesight is weaker and I sometimes can’t read English that, under Bill 101, is in smaller print than the French.
For instance, over at my pharmacy there’s a blood pressure machine with bilingual instructions — but the English version has smaller lettering. So before you have a blood pressure test you need an eye test, or a French test.
I now realize these small English letters discriminate against older people — exactly the pre-Bill 101 generation that needs to read them most.
It’s worse in restaurants where I occasionally need menu help — like at a Bâton Rouge where the lighting was so dim I could barely see the French lettering, let alone the tiny English. What the heck was aiglefin anyways — I’d forgotten? Not to mention macaroni à l’effiloché du porc?
Take alert Gazette reader Beverly Cooper who recently sent me a picture of her latest French flyer from Linen Chest, where she quickly spotted two store locations had been francisized.
The LaSalle store was no longer on Boul. Newman but was now on Boul. Nouveauman.
The downtown store wasn’t on Rue Ste-Catherine anymore but on Rue Ste-Calesrine. Obviously the letters “the” in Ste. Catherine had been translated to the French word les.
So instead of Ste. Ca-the-rine, it became Ste. Ca-les-rine.
Don’t worry, everyone, it’s not the pasta police hunting down more English words — it’s just a computer translation program that messed up bad. Programs like Google Translate are becoming common and until they work out the kinks, we’ll see more crazy errors and linguistic foe paws … er, faux pas.
Rue Penfield will probably shows up on a flyer as Rue Stylo-champs, Atwater will become À L’eau and electronic traffic websites will warn us there’s a confiture de circulation up ahead instead of a traffic jam.
Meanwhile, in computer-translated French-to-English, Rue Maisonneuve will become Newhouse St., while N.D.G. becomes O.L.G. — Our Lady of Grace,
But like all gadgetry, electronic translation will improve quickly and I’m sure Google Translate will eventually crack the language barrier. In five years we’ll probably be able to point our phone at any French word and get a perfect English translation using some app.
A French ARRÊTE sign will translate into STOP right on your screen, while an English STOP sign will translate to the French STOP.
As well, the much talked-about new Google Glasses will soon let you see your computer screen right on your glasses — so you can surf online with voice commands as you walk down the street, or drive your car — or bungee jump while watching yourself live on YouTube.
Google has announced it’s looking for more uses for these glasses, so let me suggest an idea we could use here in Quebec to end Hassles 101 — with Google Glasses 1.01.
Why not install a program on the glasses that translates all French signs and words you see into English (or vice versa) the instant you see them? The signs would still be French to the naked eye, but you’d see them in English if you looked though your glasses. Frankly, there are times when I could use “English-coloured” glasses.
As I get older my eyesight is weaker and I sometimes can’t read English that, under Bill 101, is in smaller print than the French.
For instance, over at my pharmacy there’s a blood pressure machine with bilingual instructions — but the English version has smaller lettering. So before you have a blood pressure test you need an eye test, or a French test.
I now realize these small English letters discriminate against older people — exactly the pre-Bill 101 generation that needs to read them most.
It’s worse in restaurants where I occasionally need menu help — like at a Bâton Rouge where the lighting was so dim I could barely see the French lettering, let alone the tiny English. What the heck was aiglefin anyways — I’d forgotten? Not to mention macaroni à l’effiloché du porc?
Most challenging was a St. Denis St. menu where I recently faced this
dish: Magret et jambonneau de la Canardière, soubise d’oignons grillés,
cardamine carcajou, pleurotes érigées et faisselle de chèvre maison.
Sure, I could have asked for an English menu, but that’s embarrassing in your own hometown. So I held the menu close to a candle trying to read the miniscule English translation — until I saw it was singed by flames.
But my Google Glasses idea could solve all this instantly by translating any dish for you in big computer print. Imagine! There’d be no more Bill 101 hassles for anyone. American tourists could to go St. Dennis Street to a restaurant called The Express — and order the steak-fries and caramel cream.
Francophones could translate pasta into pâtes, or hamburger into hambourgeois.
The same would go for street signs. Most streets would be in French to your naked eye but a fast glance in your glasses would get you a translation. So Ave. des Pins would become Pine, St. Jacques would become St. James and Ste. Calesrine would become Ste. Catherine.
Montreal would keep its French look but we’d have a private English version, too. Everyone would be happy! We could end the sign law debate once and for all — and more.
To read this column in French please use Google Glasses, version 1.01 français.
Voilà!
Merci.
joshfreed49@gmail.com
Sure, I could have asked for an English menu, but that’s embarrassing in your own hometown. So I held the menu close to a candle trying to read the miniscule English translation — until I saw it was singed by flames.
But my Google Glasses idea could solve all this instantly by translating any dish for you in big computer print. Imagine! There’d be no more Bill 101 hassles for anyone. American tourists could to go St. Dennis Street to a restaurant called The Express — and order the steak-fries and caramel cream.
Francophones could translate pasta into pâtes, or hamburger into hambourgeois.
The same would go for street signs. Most streets would be in French to your naked eye but a fast glance in your glasses would get you a translation. So Ave. des Pins would become Pine, St. Jacques would become St. James and Ste. Calesrine would become Ste. Catherine.
Montreal would keep its French look but we’d have a private English version, too. Everyone would be happy! We could end the sign law debate once and for all — and more.
To read this column in French please use Google Glasses, version 1.01 français.
Voilà!
Merci.
joshfreed49@gmail.com
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
Friday, May 31, 2013
Crowdsourcingtranslation?
Has anyone had any experience on this crowdsourced translation project?
In today's world of constant connectivity, we are bombarded with an overload of messages, information, and content on our computers, mobile phones, and various other devices.
The plethora of information, in many cases, is not relevant to us. The most relevant content, on the other hand, is sometimes not searchable, and therefore, it is difficult to access what we really want to see.
Related:
- Crowdsourced Translation Service Gengo Raises $12M
- Let's Translate the World's Videos, Starting With This One
Take for example, when we type in a search for “best of French wine.” We get thousands of relevant results, but in reality, the most pertinent answer is often not at the forefront of our search for one simple reason – language barriers. The results we see and the way we search the web is limited by language parameters, so if it is not written in our native language, it may not materialize on our search results. And even if it did, we would not been able to understand it, unless we were fluent in that language.
Subsequently, the article on French wines written by a local French connoisseur that would have been the perfect find may remain inaccessible. When we search on Google, the search engine automatically detects our IP address and brings us to the local Google page, unless we manually override the language settings. This is true of many other sites as well. The results we get are only in the default language selected. Content that is more relevant to our search is “hidden” because it is written in a different language. In a perfect world, we could get search results from anywhere from around the world, translated to your native language.
A few companies crowdsource volunteer multilinguals from all over the world to make content accessible through translation. These volunteers help break the language barrier. Some do it because they are passionate about a specific subject. Some do it because they are passionate about translating. Many do it to help level the playing field and make information accessible to all. We’ve seen this happen successfully with Wikipedia, where its crowdsourced translation model continues to flourish, with over 280 language editions made available through their volunteers.
Source: here
In today's world of constant connectivity, we are bombarded with an overload of messages, information, and content on our computers, mobile phones, and various other devices.
The plethora of information, in many cases, is not relevant to us. The most relevant content, on the other hand, is sometimes not searchable, and therefore, it is difficult to access what we really want to see.
Related:
- Crowdsourced Translation Service Gengo Raises $12M
- Let's Translate the World's Videos, Starting With This One
Take for example, when we type in a search for “best of French wine.” We get thousands of relevant results, but in reality, the most pertinent answer is often not at the forefront of our search for one simple reason – language barriers. The results we see and the way we search the web is limited by language parameters, so if it is not written in our native language, it may not materialize on our search results. And even if it did, we would not been able to understand it, unless we were fluent in that language.
Subsequently, the article on French wines written by a local French connoisseur that would have been the perfect find may remain inaccessible. When we search on Google, the search engine automatically detects our IP address and brings us to the local Google page, unless we manually override the language settings. This is true of many other sites as well. The results we get are only in the default language selected. Content that is more relevant to our search is “hidden” because it is written in a different language. In a perfect world, we could get search results from anywhere from around the world, translated to your native language.
A few companies crowdsource volunteer multilinguals from all over the world to make content accessible through translation. These volunteers help break the language barrier. Some do it because they are passionate about a specific subject. Some do it because they are passionate about translating. Many do it to help level the playing field and make information accessible to all. We’ve seen this happen successfully with Wikipedia, where its crowdsourced translation model continues to flourish, with over 280 language editions made available through their volunteers.
Source: here
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Google Translate can now handle images of text
Google has released yet another update for its official Translate app for the Android devices.
Google has released yet another update for its official Translate app for the Android devices. The new update for the Google Translate brings image translation to the Android platform. Besides that, the app also brings instant translation of words as you type. With support for more Asian languages, the new Google Translate is one of the must have applications when you are travelling to any new place.Google Translate helps one translate words and phrases of the language they do not know to their own language. The app offers text to speech and speech to text options to enable a conversation between people speaking two different languages.
The image reading feature will work with all languages that are available via Translate and allow users to highlight relevant text from the photo for conversion.
Using the app on your phone will allow you to take a picture, then swipe gestures to highlight the text needed to be translated. The cropped image is then sent to Google's servers where it is sent back translated.
The only catch is that you must select the language, since Google cannot auto-detect it.
Sources: indianmobile, afterdawn
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
My Video Intro to TRADOS
TRADOS is a prerequisite for professional translators. If you want to know a little about this, I have created this video on youtube.
Friday, July 6, 2012
PEN Translation Fund Grant Winners Announced
The PEN Translation Fund, now in its ninth year, has
announced the winners of this year’s PEN
American Center
Translation Fund Grants. “From a field of 130 applicants, the Fund’s Advisory
Board—Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Epler, Edwin Frank, Michael Reynolds, Richard
Sieburth, Eliot Weinberger, and Natasha Wimmer, and chaired by Michael F. Moore—has
selected…twelve projects for funding.” Below are brief summaries of the
projects.
from “Thirty Eggs”
Alexander Booth for Im Felderlatein (In Latin Fields) by Lutz Seiler. Widely acknowledged as one of the major German poets of his generation, the work of Seiler has been translated only sporadically. Booth’s translations give a strong sense of Seiler’s poetic voice, with an incessant use of fragmentation as he attempts to pin down memory (usually childhood memory, sometimes of traumatic events) and the stark imagery of his terse lines. (Available for publication)
Brent Edwards for L’Afrique fantome (Phantom Africa) by Michel Leiris. A diaristic account of Leiris’s activities as the “secretary-archivist” of Marcel Griaule’s Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-33), often compared to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques for introducing a path-breaking critical self-reflexivity into the discourse of anthropology. (Seagull Books)
Kraus. These translations display an explosive inventiveness and poetic intelligence that find surprising, engaging ways to render Kraus’s poems. They appeal as much through their sly punning and syncopated rhythms as they do through the stories told between the lines. (Available for publication)
Musharraf Ali Farooqi for his translation from the Urdu of Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar’s Hoshruba: The Prisoner of Batin, the second volume of an 8,000-page late-nineteenth century epic of magical fantasy based on the popular oral narrative tradition. (Random House India)
from “Sorceress Nafarman”
Deborah Garfinkle for her translation of Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life Under Normalization, a selection of hallucinatory poems that were banned by the government and circulated in samizdat copies, by the Czech poet Pavel Šrut. Šrut’s poems were written during the Prague Spring of 1968 and then, after a ten-year silence, in the 1980s before the fall of Communism. (Available for publication) from “Worm-Eaten Light”
Hillary Gulley for the translation of Marcelo Cohen’s El fin de lo mismo (The End of the Same). A formal experimentation and sci-fi-inflected mini-plots—including a prison on the beach and a man in love with a woman with three arms—shape this finely wrought Argentinean novel. (Available for publication) There are men on the beach. They are prisoners. Right now they are establishing a routine in order to accommodate various states of rage, depression, and reverie. Most of them have been unsuccessful. . . It seems as though some of them have already met before prison, or maybe they are just drawn to each other by their rancorous affinities; now some of them lounge in the shade of the canopies on the beach, others sit on the parapet between the sand and the asphalt, others keep their distance, lying at the water’s edge, and still there are others who do not leave their cells, perhaps because they have never seen the sea and are more skeptical than curious.
Bonnie Huie for her translation of Notes of a Crocodile by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. The only novel published by Qiu before her suicide at 26, this work is an extraordinary combination of mash note, love story, comic shtick, aesthetic manifesto, and spiritual autobiography. It is a groundbreaking queer novel and a classic of modern Taiwanese literature. (Available for publication)
from “Notebook #1″
Jacquelyn Pope for her translation of Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots, from the Dutch. These wry, unsentimental poems gently upend myths of domestic life and wax anti-poetically (yet beautifully) on the most ordinary manifestations of nature. (Available for publication)
Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad for a delightfully light-on-its-feet translation of the novel in Urdu Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi. Tracing an arc of nostalgia between Pakistan and India, its main characters are all Indian Muslim immigrants in Pakistan whose struggles veer from the comic to the tragic. The translators’ touch is graceful, lively, and supple. (Available for publication)
Carrie Reed for a complete translation of Youyang zazu (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) by Duan Chengshi. A vast compendium from the Tang Dynasty of weird scientific and ethnographic information and generally strange stories. (Available for publication)
Nathanaël for The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert, a posthumous collection of the private journals that the well-known novelist and AIDS activist kept from 1976-1991—a series of literary snapshots of the author’s various objects of desire and mourning and already a classic of French autobiography. (Nightboat Books)
The Advisory Board is also pleased to announce that its nominee for a 2012 New York State Council on the Arts translation grant, Ana Božičević, was awarded a grant in January for her translation of It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Serbian poet Zvonko Karanović. Karanović, a countercultural icon, writes in a vivid, sophisticated vernacular of desire and transcendence amid cultural and political change. (Available for publication)
Publishers and editors who wish to express an interest in any of these projects are invited to contact Paul Morris (paul at pen dot org ) or Michael Moore (michael dot moore at esteri dot it).
The Fund gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of Amazon.com, which has assisted the Fund’s work this year with a gift of $25,000.
From poetryfoundation and pen.org
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