I have been working over the last few months on designing a Business English course for a virtual school called languagelab.com that has an island in Second Life
Google is preparing to launch Google Translation Center
This is an interesting move, and it has broad implications for the translation industry, which up until now has been fragmented and somewhat behind the times, from a technology standpoint
Google has been investing significant resources in a multi-year effort to develop its statistical machine translation technology.
Google Translation Center is a straightforward and very clever way to gather a large corpus of parallel texts to train its machine translation systems.
If Google releases an API for the translation management system, it could establish a de facto standard for integrated machine translation and translation memory, creating a language platform around which projects like Der Mundo can build specialized applications and collect more training data.
On the other hand, GTC could be bad news for translation service bureaus — especially those that use proprietary translation management systems as a way to hold customers and translators hostage.
For freelancers, GTC could be very good news; they could work directly with clients and have access to high quality productivity tools. Overall this is a welcome move that will force service providers to focus on quality, while Google, which is competent at software, can focus on building tools.
That strategy would also eliminate a potential conflict of interest
translation professionals are understandably wary of contributing to something that could put them out of work
as well as avoid channel conflicts with partners who will be their best advocates in selling to various clients
my guess is Google will make this a free tool for the translation industry to use, and it will figure the money part out later. It can afford to be patient
I remain convinced that a multilingual web will be a reality in a short time, and that a menagerie of tools and services will emerge over the next few years — some geared toward helping translators, some toward building translation communities, and others that make publishing multilingual sites and blogs easy and intuitive.
the web will begin translating itself, and within a short time
Social media is driven by another buzzword: "user-generated content" or content that is contributed by participants rather than editors.
I'm going to share my research in three acts:
1) How did social media - and social network sites in particular - gain traction in the US? And how should we think about network effects?
2) What are some core differences between how teens leverage social media and how adults engage with these same tools?
3) How is social media reconfiguring social infrastructure and where is all of this going?
Facebook was narrated as the "safe" alternative and, in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred. Those college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook while teens from urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace while simultaneously rejecting the fears brought on by American media. Many kids were caught in the middle and opted to use both, but the division that occurred resembles the same "jocks and burnouts" narrative that shaped American schools in the 1980s.
over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site
many adults have jumped in, but what they are doing there is often very different than what young people are doing.
Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends and they learned a harsh lesson with social network sites. Even if they are just trying to talk to their friends, those who hold power over them are going to access everything they wrote if it's in public
while you can replicate a conversation, it's much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.
1. Invisible Audiences. We are used to being able to assess the people around us when we're speaking. We adjust what we're saying to account for the audience. Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences.
Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate
1) How did social media - and social network sites in particular - gain traction in the US? And how should we think about network effects?
2) What are some core differences between how teens leverage social media and how adults engage with these same tools?
3) How is social media reconfiguring social infrastructure and where is all of this going?