University of Glamorgan

I see from a story on the BBC that English language speeches in the Welsh Assembly will no longer be translated into Welsh in the official record of proceedings. While this has raised eyebrows/objections/hackles in various quarters for a variety of different reasons, it is interesting that part of the argument in favour of this refers to “…proposals to make the records of our debates and proceedings more user-friendly by imaginative use of modern technology.” Given the importance of parallel bilingual texts for technology such as Google Translate, I can’t help wondering whether this will in fact inhibit the use (imaginative or otherwise) of Welsh in future modern technology and whether the strategic goal to “increase participation in the democratic process here in Wales”, will ultimately result in cementing English as the language of Welsh politics.

While this may be an easy way to save £250,000 in austere times, we should perhaps be mindful of unintended consequences, both directly for the language and indirectly in terms of the erosion of the Assembly’s claim to be “an exemplar organisation in its delivery of bilingual services.” Exemplar organisations are needed to develop and demonstrate innovative, effective, affordable, responsive bilingual organisational practices – if the Welsh Assembly can’t fulfil this role, who else will?

Posted by djcunlif | Tagged with google

Whilst idly considering the issues of bilingual blogging I came across an announcement about Google Translate on the murmur blog.

Google Translate now includes Welsh among its languages, but by Google’s own admission the quality of translation is “still a little rough”…

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Having previously suggested that Google might be doing some interesting things with regards to minority languages, I was delighted to receive the following press release about the Apertium Welsh-English translator.

I know that they have had a few set-backs in the past, and they seem like nice guys, so it is great to see them getting a bit of a boost.

I think Fran’s comments about not getting any Welsh students applying for the post are interesting – many people have commented that Wales should be well-placed to be a leader in bilingual software design, localisation, translation technology and so on, and we have some great people doing some excellent work around the country – maybe we need to think about how this might be more directly fed into the computing and other curricula in universities to really build a knowledge/skill base and develop an industry.

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Amid all the excitement and furore around Google’s Street View a colleague of mine (thanks Ceri) unearthed this little gem from the comments on dot.life – A blog about technology from BBC News.

“20. At 3:56pm on 20 Mar 2009, paulvilla wrote:

I had a look at Swansea and noticed that streetview had blurred the Welsh version on some of the roadsigns. I assume the numberplate detection got confused by the non-standard letter patterns. Curiously the English on the same sign is un-blurred. If nothing else, at least streetview brings a bit of relief from bi-lingual everything – if only briefly!”

I must confess to having tried to find some examples of this – without success. Can anyone with the necessary lack of a life find any examples of this? Has this affected other languages?

Ceri’s email had the subject line “Google tries to stamp out Welsh language shocker” which I was really tempted to use as the title of this post. However I have learned that humorous titles don’t always travel well :-)

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There is an interesting snippet on the Google Reader Blog entitled Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?. The title is rather misleading however, it actually refers to a new feature in Google Reader whereby you can have feeds translated into your language. Or at least you can if your language is one of the chosen few and you are happy to put up with the vagaries of machine translation.

I do get the feeling that opening up to multiple languages is rather the flavour of the moment, which is no bad thing and long overdue in my opinion. My concern is that this will only extend as far as the usual suspects, reinforcing their position and weakening the lesser used languages – again.

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One of the weaknesses I recognize in my own research (and that of others) is that I often find myself studying the artifacts of online communities rather than learning anything about the people who created and make up these communities. I have described this as taking an “Archaeological” approach rather than an “Anthropological” approach. By adopting a more anthropological approach perhaps we can stop producing interesting statistics and start to understand peoples language behavior and how technological artifacts affect this behavior.

TangataWhenua.com has a nice feature article giving some of the back story to the Google Maori project. It doesn’t really tell us anything about the technical or linguistic issues faced, but paints a nice picture of some of the people and processes (and problems!) involved.

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Well it appears to be an interesting time for te reo Māori and the internet with the launch of Google Aotearoa as reported in BizReport and excitement around the possibility of reo Māori internet domain names according to a press release from the New Zealand Māori Internet Society reported in Scoop.

However as I seem to habitually see the glass as (less than) half full…

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