At TED 2011 Rajesh Rao tells how he is enlisting modern computational techniques to read the Indus language.
Some more information about his work from the Guardian's Grrlscientist blog here.
Thursday 30 June 2011
Wednesday 22 June 2011
Google Translate now supports 5 Indic languages
Google Translate has improved a lot in the past 3 years and it's now the most powerful machine translation service that's available for free. Google Translate is the only machine translation service which supports languages that have less than one million speakers (Maltese, Welsh) and languages that are underrepresented on the Web (Galician).
Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate and they're some of the most popular languages in the world, with more than 600 million speakers: Bengali (300 million speakers), Gujarati (46 million), Kannada (51 million), Tamil (65 million), Telugu (130 million).
"Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages. (...) You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese — which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. (...) Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we've enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards," informs Google.
( Via: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ )
Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate and they're some of the most popular languages in the world, with more than 600 million speakers: Bengali (300 million speakers), Gujarati (46 million), Kannada (51 million), Tamil (65 million), Telugu (130 million).
"Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages. (...) You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese — which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. (...) Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we've enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards," informs Google.
( Via: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ )
Friday 10 June 2011
World Atlas of Language Structures
World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).
The first version of WALS was published as a book with CD-ROM in 2005 by Oxford University Press. The first online version was published in April 2008. Both are superseeded by the current online version, published in April 2011.
WALS Online is a joint effort of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library. It is a separate publication, edited by Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2011) ISBN: 978-3-9813099-1-1. The main programmer is Robert Forkel.
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