August 16, 2011

Using ABBY Translation to share good news

“Can technology usher in another Pentecost?” via Associated Baptist Press. This isn’t about speaking in tongues, as you might suspect from the source. Rather, it’s about “Hope Chat,” which uses “ABBY,” an advanced online artificial intelligence translation program.

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August 16, 2011

Ife researchers unveil local language text-to-voice application

“Ife researchers unveil local language text-to-voice application,” in Nigerian Bulletin. “To help secure, protect and bring back most of the local languages that are going into extinction.” The software translates texts into voice messages in Nigerian English languages. Would be interesting to see how accurate it is.

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June 21, 2011

Translations into multiple languages via Google Translate

Today Google has launched a new translation tool for five “experimental alpha languages”: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. Many of these are highly unreached languages. Kannada is a priority area for MUP. I’ve been playing with this tool, with fascinating results. I put in “Jesus loves you” in English, translated to Hindi, and then copied the Hindi and tried translating it back to English–and it worked well. But simply typing dynamically “Jesus loves you” into the Hindi box did not translate so well. It will be interesting to watch how this tool develops. It might very well be useful [...]

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May 12, 2010

Google translating more languages

Google adds text-to-speech translation for additional languages, including five of the largest unreached peoples in the world.

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April 16, 2010

Toward the Last Languages

Read about Wycliffe’s Vision 2025 campaign: a vision that all language communities needing a Bible translation would have a program in progress by 2025: Toward the Last Languages (Wycliffe USA)

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March 22, 2010

Machine Translation will miss a lot of languages

Eddie Arthur (Wycliffe UK) makes an excellent point: although machine translation will be great for the top languages in the world, the minority languages will likely be left out. And the “digital divide” will grow even larger.

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March 6, 2010

Google Chrome 5 auto-translates web pages

A new feature – currently only the development version of Chrome 5 – will automatically detect the language of a web page and translate it without opening a new page. Now you can read all of those Spanish language mission pages by COMIBAM.

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