Language

January 12, 2007 The barriers between cultures that create fear, mistrust and conflict seem to be dissolving – first distance and now language is going the same way as the Berlin Wall. At CES, electronic handheld information publisher Franklin Electronic showed its new 12-Language Speaking Global Translator (Model TGA-490). The US$230 pocket-sized handheld contains over 450,000 words and 12,000 phrases in twelve languages and features recorded human speech providing accurate and clear pronunciation of words and phrases in all twelve languages. Basically, this means that if you speak Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish, you now have the basics to have a conversation with anyone who speaks one of these languages, though this communication tool was specially designed with the non-Asian language speaker travelling to the Far East in mind. The new PDA-sized device has a slide out keyboard and a rechargeable battery and also includes an MP3 player, a currency converter, world clock, alarm, and voice recorder. Read More

November 4, 2005 Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Karlsruhe's joint International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) held a landmark videoconference last week to demonstrate new breakthroughs in cross-lingual communication. InterACT director, computer science professor Alex Waibel, who is a faculty member at both institutions, demonstrateed domain-independent, speech-to-speech translation in a lecture, which was simultaneously translated from English to Spanish to German. Current speech-to-speech translation systems allow translation of spontaneous speech in very limited situations, like making hotel reservations or tourist shopping, but they cannot enable translation of large, open domains like lectures, television broadcasts, meetings or telephone conversations. The new technology developed by InterACT researchers fills that gap and makes it possible to extend such systems to other languages and lecture types. Read More

September 2, 2005 Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences. The development -- which has a patent pending -- has implications for speech recognition and for other applications in natural language engineering, as well as for genomics and proteomics. It also offers new insights into language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Read More

The most effective time to learn a language is between birth and age five - and that's the target age group of the Bilingual baby video series which covers most languages (Japanese, German, English etc) and uses an entirely immersive method of tuition where the language being taught is the only language used. Your child will only hear the language on the video. Foreign language words appear on screen to help readers and to reinforce what they see and hear. Small on-screen words appear in English so parents and older siblings can learn too! Read More