Language Trainers Blog

In my opinion, yes.  Google has an amazing ability to search and compare a whole lot more data than any other company in the business, and offers translations between a lot more languages.  Read on for some history and some interesting possible applications.

In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed.

The message said Google was a favorite search engine, but the result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing”

Brin said Google ought to be able to do better. Six years later, its free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

“What you see on Google Translate is state of the art” in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area, said Alon Lavie, an associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world’s largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cell phone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation.

The concept of getting instant translation of a picture you take with a mobile phone is phenomenal, and it doesn’t seem like it will be too far away.

In the meantime, the headline of the original article could have done with a rewrite: “Google’s computer might betters translation tool” has tripped up a few people I’ve shared the article with.  The use of the word might (here used as a noun) has turned it into a garden path sentence.  When you read the first half of the sentence, you think that Google’s computer might do something, but then you get to ‘betters’ and think…what?

Source: CNET News.

So I guess I don’t have my finger on the pulse, because March 4th was National Grammar Day, and I had no idea it was happening until it already had*.  The day, a chance to celebrate grammar and language in general, was started in 2008 by the founder of SPOGG (Society for the Protection of Good Grammar), and hosted by Mignon Fogarty (also known as Grammar Girl, who brings us the brilliant Quick and Dirty Tips).

Check out the National Grammar Day site for ways to celebrate and find out more about grammar and language, including links to some great cartoons, resources, e-cards and t-shirts. Let that grammar slacker in your life know it’s important to you (well, if it is, of course).

From the site, 10 grammar myths exposed:

1. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence.
2. You shouldn’t start a sentence with the word “however.”
3. “Irregardless” is not a word.
4. There is only one way to write the possessive form of a word that ends in “s.”
5. Passive voice is always wrong.
6. “I.e.” and “e.g.” mean the same thing.
7. You use “a” before words that start with consonants and “an” before words that start with vowels.
8. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.”
9. You shouldn’t split infinitives.
10. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.

(Click here for more information about the list above.)

Did you celebrate the occasion? Do you think grammar deserves its own day?

*I think this is a failing of people who start ‘national’ days.  They should really go big and go international. Grammar is important everywhere!

I’m sure you’ve considered a day when you would be interacting with humanoid robots on a daily basis, right?  Well, that day is coming up soon in South Korea.  The government will spend about 45 million USD on an “R-Learning” program that will put English-speaking robot teachers into preschools and kindergartens nationwide by next year.

Of course, the kids won’t be supervised entirely by these bots, but they will be involved with duties like singing songs and telling stories.  As with many non-English speaking countries, there just aren’t enough qualified English language teachers (let alone native speakers to interact with students), so this easily-standardised method is definitely a viable option.  Most of us wouldn’t be comfortable speaking to a robot, but if kids are acclimatised early, this could lead the way to further robo-education.

With all the advances in computer and robot technology, do  you think that there will soon be a replacement for real live teachers?

Source: Crave blog. Image: ocularinvasion.

It sounds like a normal-enough story: a 3-year-old born to Chinese parents in America is brought back to China and so needs a Chinese teacher because she only understands English. The odd part? The ‘child’ is a giant panda.

Because of an agreement between China and several other countries, any pandas (and their offspring) sent out of China to foreign zoos are only on loan for study purposes, and must eventually return to their homeland.

Mei Lan, a panda born in Atlanta, Georgia, is due to move to a breeding centre in Sichuan province in China this week.  As part of her welcome and orientation, the centre is arranging for a Chinese language tutor to teach her some basic phrases, as she has only ever heard English.  She will be also be weaned off the biscuits she was used to in the US, and moved on to a Chinese recipe supplemented by fresh bamboo.

I’m not sure how fast pandas can learn commands, though.  If their general behaviour is anything to go by, it will be a slow process!

Source: LA Times.

I recently wrote about enthusiasts of Na’vi, the constructed language (or conlang) from the recent film Avatar.  Today I read a news story that claimed that over 12,000 people are learning the language in Australia alone*.

This made me wonder about the number of people speaking minority languages around the world.  According to Wikipedia, of the 6-7,000 languages spoken in the world, around half of them have less than 3,000 speakers.  It is anticipated that in the next 50-100 years, sadly, most of these languages will become extinct.

So, in a few short months, Na’vi has overtaken over half of the languages in the world in terms of numbers.  It may not share rich history or large vocabulary, but something has to be said for the achievements of its creators.  While some may say that it’s a pity that people are ‘wasting their time’ on learning a made-up language, I think it’s kind of nice that there are language enthusiasts out there, regardless of the ‘validity’ of the language.

*This is based on usage from a single website, though, so this may be a worldwide number.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary in the UK, has said that every secondary school student should have the opportunity to learn Mandarin, and other ‘up and coming’ languages.

With mandatory language study for seven-to-11-year-olds coming into effect next year, this recommendation will no doubt spread to primary schools.

Even though students will by no means be forced to study Chinese (any language will do), there have been a lot of arguments against attempting to make the language accessible to every student.  For a start, where will these teachers come from?  There are very few students studying Mandarin at present, and most teachers would come from that demographic.  It has been suggested that there would be specialist language centres that students would go to in order to study, but is this a practical solution?  Another major argument is that Chinese is only the predicted most-useful foreign language for kids of this generation (although other recommendations are Russian, Polish, and even Indonesian).  When I was growing up, Japanese was the next big thing, and it wasn’t so long ago that people thought everyone would need to speak Russian. Will Chinese ever be useful to the everyman in the UK?

I think that the focus should be taken of the specific languages being recommended, and put on the fact that kids will need to do second language study.  Although I was quick to drop languages when I was younger, I did enjoy them, and wish I had continued for longer.  If we can instil a love for language learning in the next generations, regardless of the language they choose, it will never be a bad thing.

Which language do you think will be essential in the next 10 or 15 years?

Source: Telegraph.

Once again, President Obama and his wife (sometimes dubbed Mobama) have led the way in terms of most-used words of this year.  They were only eclipsed by Twitter, and nearly by King of Pop Michael Jackson.  I guess it’s unsurprising that other top words of 2009 were H1N1 (or swine flu), and stimulus, but I am a bit sad that vampire came in at number 5.  I can only assume that it was related to the popularity of recent films from the Twilight franchise.

Click for the top words of 2009, and, if you’re interested, the top words of the decade (including Global Warming, 9/11, Obama).

Since its beginnings, the Internet has been held mainly in the realm of languages that are able to be written in the English alphabet.  Sure, there are plenty of websites available in every language imaginable, but their domain names (or URLs, URIs) have had to be written in anglicised form.  You may not think that this small part of a site has that much impact on users, but for those who are unused to reading or writing English, even transliterations of their own language can be difficult.  Imagine seeing http://语言培训.com and trying to remember it to put into your browser.

So the big news is that the internet regulatory organisation Icann has approved a proposal to allow people to register domain names in non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.  According to Icann, over half of the 1.6 billion internet users in the world, over half use non-Latin scripts, so this change should have a significant impact on the ease of use of the internet for many people.  It may also mean that there will be many more new users of the internet, as sites become more accessible in their audience’s native languages.

If you are learning a language with a cyrillic or pictorial script, this may represent a new challenge for you!  After International Domain Names (IDNs) are introduced sometime next year, it could make search engine experiences a lot more interesting.  Good luck with finding the information you want in the language you want!

Source: Guardian. Image: aljazeera.net.

It’s a widespread (but not entirely correct) notion that British people don’t really bother learning new languages. Of course, there are countries which have worse reputations when it comes to foreign language learning, but I won’t point the finger at anyone.

A recent article has claimed that with British people love to travel to far-flung and exotic destinations, they are very unlikely to pick up any of the local language, and not just that they don’t, but that they refuse to. The survey by travelsupermarket.com revealed that over 10% of respondents said that they don’t believe it’s necessary to learn other languages because everyone else speaks English anyway. Around 45% of respondents said that they had received at least some negative attitude from locals in the places they’d travelled, because of their lack of language ability.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and some demographics (under 20s, over 60s, and Northern Irish travellers) appear to be the most likely to know or be willing to embrace a local language.

Of course, the audience reached by that particular website is probably not representative of all travellers from the UK, so this should be taken with a grain of salt.

I personally believe that people should at least learn a few of the local pleasantries (greetings and other basic phrases), and in my experience, these and a smile go a long way towards making a holiday that much more enjoyable.

What do you think? Do Britons make enough effort when it comes to learning languages for travel abroad?

One of the leading English language education companies, Pearson, has fully automated International English examinations that overseas students must take before being accepted into university.  While computers have been used to grade multiple choice and short answer questions successfully, many people have doubts about the ability of computers to really grasp long answers and complicated concepts.

From The Guardian:

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said that computers could be useful in many areas of assessment but cautioned against their use in English exams: “I’m very concerned that it would constrain the nature of the questions being asked. You won’t pick up nuances by machine and it will trigger a trend to answering narrower questions. It could be a disaster waiting to happen.”

A Pearson spokesman told the TES that its system produced the accuracy of human markers while eliminating human elements such as tiredness and subjectivity.

Other exam boards said the adoption of computers to mark beyond their current use in multiple choice tests was inevitable. Tim Oates, director of research for Cambridge Assessment, which owns the exam board OCR, said: “It’s extremely unlikely that automated systems will not be deployed extensively in educational assessment. The uncertainty is ‘when’ not ‘if’. But all systems need to meet exacting quality criteria and should definitely not be adopted just to make life easier for testing organisations.

It isn’t mentioned whether or not there will be ongoing human grading for quality control, or whether there will be any kind of appeals process, but I imagine if I were a student wanting to get into a university in the UK, I would definitely want to make sure I was getting the correct grade.  As well as this, effective communication in another language doesn’t solely rely on textbook answers.

In related news, according to existing electronic grading systems already in place in US schools, Winston Churchill (too much repetition), Ernest Hemingway (”lack of care in style of writing and vocabulary”), and William Golding (”inaccurate and erratic sentence structure”) would not have done very well at school.