Google launches “near-instant voice translation”

Google held a major demonstration on December 7th 2009 at the Computer History Museum and displayed a number of incredible new features. Vic Gundotra, vice-president of engineering for Google showed off five great innovations.

But the one that is of interest to linguists was the "near-instant voice translation" service . This prototype allows you to search the web via voice, which is an amazing breakthrough, but it also provides near-instant translation. The initial prototype can handle only English to Spanish at the moment, and handles all the translation work in the cloud via your mobile phone.

Gundotra spoke a paragraph's worth of words into his phone and within seconds the phone recited a translated version back in Spanish. Google hopes to have support for all the world's major languages completed sometime in 2010.

This is an amazing development in the use of machine translation, but it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Just like the machine translation we already know it will never be 100% accurate, and due to the differing accents and tones in peoples voices will probably give an even worse result than typed machine translation.

Though it has some short comings as stated above, Google should be applauded for this major development. However, it will take a lot of time and research before such applications replace humans for translation/interpretation. In the meantime, professional interpreters and transcribers are safe in their jobs. :)

Goroawase System - Japanese Mnemonics! Real fun !!

In our school days, we had a really tough, yet fun time while remembering the order of the Solar system in Geography("My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine" for remembering - Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc etc in that order), or remembering the colors of the rainbow in Science(VIBGYOR). Apart from these commonly known mnemonics, we prepare our own mnemonics to memorize some things in our curriculum.

When it comes to Japanese, they have a peculiar system called as Goroawase(語呂合わせ).
Goroawase is a common form of Japanese wordplay whereby homophonous words are associated with a given series of letters, numbers or symbols, in order to associate a new meaning with that series. Goroawase is mostly used as a mnemonic technique, especially in the memorization of numbers such as dates in history, scientific constants, phone numbers, exam numbers, etc.

Here are some of the popular Goroawase:
As mnemonics:
1492 (the year of discovery of America) can be memorized as: iyo! kuni ga mieta! (derived as follows: i (1) yo (4)! ku (9) ni (2) (ga mieta)!), meaning: "Wow! I can see land!"
23564 (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, the length of a sidereal day) can be read "ni-san-go-ro-shi", which sounds very similar to "nii-san koroshi" (兄さん殺し), or in English killing one's brother.
Other examples:
4649 "yoroshiku" (derived as follows: "yo" (4) "ro" (6) "shi" (4) "ku" (9)) means: "Nice to meet you."
18782 can be read "i-ya-na-ya-tsu" (いやなやつ) – meaning unpleasant guy
893 can be read "ya-ku-za" (やくざ) or Yakuza. It is traditionally a bad omen for a student to receive this candidate number for an examination.
573 stands for "ko-na-mi" or Konami. This number appears in many Konami telephone numbers and as a high score in Konami games.
.59 "ten go ku" is the title of a song from the Konami game beatmania IIDX.
3923 "san kyu ni san", or "Thank you Nissan!"(Nii-san means elder brother, so it more like "Thank you, brother."). Found in the Online Comics of NBC TV Show Heroes, for which Nissan is a sponsor.
More recently, a popular book by name 1Q84(Ichi Kyuu Hachi Yon which is read as 1984) has been published in Japan and is a best seller already.

Happy reading and happy exploring Japanese language to all !!
Till then, 39(san kyuu = Thank you) from me !! :)

Mahatma Gandhi in Japanese Wikipedia - Makes for an interesting reading!!

While surfing the web randomly for my Japanese language study, I came across an interesting webpage on Japanese edition of wikipedia.
LINK - http://tinyurl.com/yr8lqo
This link gives information about Mahatma Gandhi in Japanese language.
There are many interesting words in content. Here are some of the words which I found interesting:

I was amazed to see the power of expression Japanese language can impart to the words because of its unique capability to convey meanings through pictorial symbols. Happy reading to all !! I am sure there are many other such interesting words in this article as well as other Japanese content.

Let us collect such great words!!