A VC - Latest Comments in The Global Discussion

Re: The Global Discussion

Paraic — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:23:06 -0000

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) recently funded a large-scale effort (Academia-Industry collaboration) for 'Next Generation Localisation': www.cngl.ie. We're just starting out, but allowing "people to participate in this 'social media' regardless of language" is right where we're aiming and a lot of our recent discussions have revolved around peer production and open source (in addition to language technologies). Will keep you posted...

Re: The Global Discussion

Ed — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:33:46 -0000

Perhaps test drive this widget http://googlewebmastercentr...

Re: The Global Discussion

Hemant — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:43:51 -0000

Yes, such software exists by one of the portfolio companies that nfactorial Software ( http://www.nfactorial-softw...) is incubating. The company name is Image Point Technologies ( http://www.imgpoint.com/ind...

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:17:14 -0000

Very funny

Re: The Global Discussion

slowblogger — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:42:58 -0000

You are not thinking like an American (in a good sense). Few Americans care about the language issues especially from the perspective of non-Americans.

I also thought about this. As fas as I know, there is no good solution for what you are looking for. I don't think any of the existing approaches (I have researched before) has the potential to nail it down.

Re: The Global Discussion

Steve Kane — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:48:26 -0000

http://memory-alpha.org/en/...

Re: The Global Discussion

a. — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:07:40 -0000

There are a lot of problems concerning translations at e.g. Google translate. Among other, it often doesn't detect typically Hebrew constructions of e.g. a "prefixed" preposition to a noun, and this is what renders artificial intelligence in this sector nearly unusable. I wrote a comment on this phenomenon on my own blog only some days ago (unfortunately for you it's in... German).

This said, if you'd like a usable translation of the article, I'd volunteer as well.

Re: The Global Discussion

Ed — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:37:04 -0000

Surely with all of the brilliant, innovative technology, education, and linguistics companies out there, more viable solutions can be near.
Perhaps there is a start up waiting to happen, that embraces this challenge.
Someone has to pick up where Rosetta Stone got Fat and happy?

I have seen the difference full communication has made, first hand.
The sounds and site of words,
exchanging our ideas should no longer prevent exactly that.

Dr. Israelian learned a second language [4th really] and became a world class doctor. Her sister did not (formally), and became a seamstress with little voice.

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:23:54 -0000

Thanks Ouriel. You clearly are living this on a daily basis

Re: The Global Discussion

OurielOhayon — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:20:29 -0000

You point to a big gap regarding the blogosphere. Having faced this for TechCrunch i can tell you there is no good solution but human. The guys at alphabetic (israeli based) may have found a solution which is partly automatic and partly human.

Google translate in hebrew, like in any other language is far from accurate and brings up many nonesense. So if you have a good friend in Israel just ask him to have it translated for you or put it in a wiki and i am sure you ll get it translated pretty quickly

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:04:10 -0000

That last line may well be true. But I wish it were not so

Re: The Global Discussion

Nathan Lipson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:51:36 -0000

Hi Fred! I understand exactly what you mean here, perhaps because I read and write in two languages. I think that both people and technology will bridge that gap - more people in non-English-speaking countries blog in English (a few Israelis too, e.g. Orli Yakuel), and in the meantime technology makes it easier (and more accessible) to translate whole sentences and even passages. But this gap will never be fully bridged - too few people are really multi-lingual and technology cannot capture the intricacies of natural language.

Re: The Global Discussion

gruvr music map — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:54:07 -0000

Another vote for Mechanical Turk - it's very well suited to this - work done in small amounts, by humans, and an API to control how it gets parcelled out and results collected. Works for me...

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:27:15 -0000

Thanks

It's not very good in hebrew but maybe better in other languages

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:16:18 -0000

That's painful reading

The technology has to get better

Re: The Global Discussion

fredwilson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:14:19 -0000

I had a feeling that others would be doing this

Re: The Global Discussion

Scott — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:17:37 -0000

To reiterate what others have said, Google Translate offers a gadget you can drop into your blog and it will translate for 35 languages, including Hebrew and English, as best as the current technology allows. See
http://translate.google.com/translate_tools

Re: The Global Discussion

jrh — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:28:04 -0000

I work in Natural Language Processing and am sorry to say that the state of the art isn't good enough to do what you want automatically. The result is too garbled to be informative, and too stilted to make appealing daily reading. Appealing in the sense intended by the writer at least -- check out the Google translation:

http://translate.google.com...

Is there a decline worth of startups - recruitment new nostrils?

Absolutely!

Re: The Global Discussion

Joe Lazarus — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:07:56 -0000

Alfabetic presented a solution like this at Techcrunch 50 this year. They create hosted, translated versions of popular blogs and hope to make money by selling ads on the international versions of those sites and split revenue with the original publisher. I believe they use real people to translate, but that the service isn't designed to scale. Rather, they're focused on translating just the most popular blogs. Techcrunch is one of their beta customers...

http://www.alfabetic.net/

In terms of self-serve API's, Google and Yahoo! both offer machine-based translation API's, but the translation quality isn't very good. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a good middle ground. You can submit content to be translated through an API, but real people do the work.

Re: The Global Discussion

issackelly — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:04:46 -0000

Google does offer an API for their translation service...although I'm not sure how good it is for Hebrew.

There was a demo of adding full-translation to any page through their API at google-IO this year.

Re: The Global Discussion

Kevin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:18 -0000

Google Translate can handle Hebrew. Here's a translated version of the article -

http://translate.google.com...

About as good as computer translation gets nowadays...

Re: The Global Discussion

Chris Dodge — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:09 -0000

As an FYI, if case you haven't seen this, one interesting similar site for crowdsourcing of video language translation (subtitling) is http://www.dotsub.com

Re: The Global Discussion

Rogel — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:53:53 -0000

If you still need a translation of this article I'll be happy to help.

Re: The Global Discussion

AndyFinkle — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:54:21 -0000

suggest you look into alfabetic (sp). Also, I think Google offers an API (widget?) for their language translation tool ...Doesn't it always suck when technology is ALMOST there, but not quite?