LingoScoop - Language Industry News

Are you worried about how many words your child is exposed to on a daily basis? As you know, increased language interaction helps children learn faster and at a higher level than others with less exposure. It’s kind of strange, but there’s a device that your child wears inside of their clothing that will actually show the number of words spoken and conversational turns taken throughout the day.

See the LENA system here

I find it very interesting - I would agree that the higher exposure the better, but where I’m a little confused is that is it really worth making your kid wear a special geek device just to measure this? As parents are we getting a little bit crazy by going this far? Personally, I wouldn’t put this on my kid - instead I’d just try to expose them to as many quality environments and conversations as possible. To me the end result is the same, provide a good learning environment for your children with diversity in what you do. Allow quality time with friends, parents, teachers, outside activities, educational environments, and even good television. I don’t need a device to tell me that my word count is low, so therefore I need to bring my kid to the New York stock exchange to increase it.

Anyway, it’s a cool geek toy to read about nonetheless!

So I stumbled across this article and I’m left wondering how the interpreting quality is? The article specifically mentions “For individuals with strong bilingual skills interested in becoming a telephone interpreter, Language Line Services does not require prior interpretation experience and offers an orientation program, ongoing training and mentoring for its employees.”

They are one of the big players in the telephone interpretation space so I’m sure it must work well, but I wonder what would happen if they got an inexperienced interpreter that started asking their own questions, or even started altering facts during a very important 911 call? I hope their training program is stronger than what the article left us believing.

If you have specific views on this, feel free to leave a comment.

Facebook apparently didn’t get the right translators for their venture to publish their website in other languages. According to this article, they can’t even get the Spanish language site right. When you’re coming from the English language, there are plently of very qualified translators that can handle a Spanish translation - so I’m left wondering what were they smoking on that one? Please say they weren’t using a web based translation tool …

Google is developing a new internet based application to improve upon what they’ve already got for on the fly translations.  As we all know, the translations from Google are fun to play with, but rarely correctly translate the original message with accuracy.  It’s quite difficult for a computer to read beyond the definition of just the words, and a simple one to one translation of words will fail to convey the original message correctly nearly every time.

However, with additional computing power it becomes very possible to improve upon the system by teaching the systems to understand the entire meaning of the sentence or paragraph.  This allows for potentially a better translation - and it’s my opinion on where Google is headed.  Using clusters of computers, they can offer better translations right to the finger tips of every web user.

Related article on ComputerWorld

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