Перспективи за Постигане на Универсална Езикова Комуникация

В съвременната епоха съществува неутолима потребност от взаимоопознаване и сътрудничество. А едно от най-сериозните препятствия за пълноценната глобална комуникация на основата на информационните технологии е езиковата бариера. В статията се набелязват от една страна пътищата, по които се осъществява сближаване между езиците – чрез подезиците на науката и технологиите и чрез социолектите на различните субкултури, носители на универсализираната масова култура. От друга страна - посочват се мерките, взети за разрешаване на проблема – и технически, и социални. Правят се изводи по повод уловената от нас тенденция към оформяне на универсален език и езици-регионални медиатори. Използването от всеки човек на повече езици, съобразени със социалните, професионалните и националните територии, в които той се движи, многократно повишават неговата комуникабилност и я правят независима от други външни фактори – технология, решаваща речеви и ортографически трудности, наличие на преводач и т.н. Тогава, изборът да превключи на определен език зависи единствено от комуникативната ситуация. Би- и полилингвизмът се сочат като най-естественото и тотално разрешение на проблема за уникалната езикова комуникация днес, при неимоверното увеличаване на преките и непреките езикови контакти.

Kirova, Ludmilla. Liternet (2001). (Bulgarian) Articles>Language>International

Язык как Форма Жизни

Поворот от сознания к языку обычно расценивают как исток неклассической философии. Он состоит в понимание языка не как нейтрального средства выражения мысли, а как продуктивного медиума, определяющего онтологию бытия и сознания. Однако постановка и решение центральной проблемы значения еще долгое время опирались на классическое понимание истины как соответствия высказывания и реальности. Язык считался средством выражения мыслей и чувств и обозначения предметов. Парадокс состоял в том, что теория значения в семантике выдвигалась для преодоления затруднений классической теории истины и вместе с тем опиралась на нее при анализе и проверке значения. Принцип лингвистической относительности устраняет данный парадокс. Согласно Сепиру и Уорфу, каждый национальный язык содержит свою собственную онтологию. Признание этого тезиса означало, что ни в мысли, ни в действительности не существует чего-то такого, что обусловливает единство языков и дает возможность их понимания и перевода на основе универсальной логической или онтологической структуры. Язык не принимает каких-либо внешних ориентиров, и только в его рамках определяется, что такое "истина", "мир" и "значение". Соответственно, помимо языка не существует независимых масштабов оценки моральности, красоты, блага, рациональности и т.п. Но такая радикальная программа кажется заведомо бесперспективной, ибо обрекает на солипсизм и релятивизм. Если все "языковые миры" признаются изолированными, несоизмеримыми и равноправными, то непонятно, как возможно общение между представителями различными языковых систем. Ведь в современном мультикультурном мире взаимодействуют различные дискурсы и системы взглядов. В связи с этим возникает вопрос о том, что или кто, если не разум, является медиумом, обеспечивающим взаимопонимание и перевод разных языков.

Markov, B.V. Argumentation (2000). Articles>Language>Rhetoric

Think Globally, Write Locally

Using a process called localization, language professionals translate the source document’s words and adapt its content to the needs and norms of the target country or market. Because language professionals can work only with what they are given, the document’s creator is partly responsible for ensuring the localization process is effective. After all, poorly written English cannot be turned into good Japanese.

Giovanis, Kristen. TechCom Manager (2006). Articles>Language>Localization>Translation

Translation and Localization Options

How do you identify the many options available for localizing your products or materials, and how do you select the right ones for your company?

Johnson, Dan. TechCom Manager (2005). Articles>Language>Localization>Translation

Web Retrieval Systems and the Greek Language: Do They Have an Understanding?    

Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well.

Lazarinis, Fotis. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language

Lost in Translation: Contributions of Editors to the Meanings of Text    

Authors of scientific articles in one language are often required to provide abstracts of their papers in a second language, and they use a variety of ways to achieve this.

Hartley, James, Alan Branthwaite, Frank Ganier and Laurent Heurley. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Language>Editing>Translation

Popularity and Findability Through Log Analysis of Search Terms and Queries: The Case of a Multilingual Public Service Website    

SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs.

Ravid, Gilad, Judit Bar-Ilan, Shifra Baruchson-Arbib and Sheizaf Rafaeli. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language

Could You Mind Your Language? An Investigation of Communicators' Ability to Inhibit Linguistic Bias    

Three experiments that examine communicators' ability to inhibit linguistic bias are reported. Research has shown that communicators use more abstract language (e.g., "Jamie is affectionate" vs. "Jamie kisses Rose") to describe more expected behavior. Recent research has shown that this bias may be overwhelmed by goals to put a "spin" on actions or to manipulate audiences' impressions of actors. Similarly, the present experiments show that people who wish to communicate without bias may often be able to do so. Inhibition occurred when participants selected descriptions from a list of alternatives and when they freely described both expected and unexpected behaviors. However, inhibition failed when participants were asked to freely describe either expected or unexpected behaviors alone.

Douglas, Karen M., Robbie M. Sutton and Katie Wilkin. Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2008). Articles>Language>Professionalism>Rhetoric

Linguistic Bias in Personnel Selection    

The present research examines how hiring committees strategically use language abstraction to collectively account for their decision to hire a job applicant over the others. In addition, the authors investigate how work interdependence between single members of hiring committees and applicants and common affiliation to the same work organization affect the language used to write individual reports on job candidates. Results of the first study show that selected applicants were described with positive terms at a higher level of abstraction and negative terms at a lower level of abstraction. The second study supports the selection linguistic bias in individually written reports and demonstrates that members of hiring committees describe interdependent applicants and those belonging to their group with negative terms at a lower level of abstraction than other applicants. The implications of the findings for the wider personnel selection context are discussed.

Rubini, Monica and Michela Menegatti. Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2008). Careers>Interviewing>Reports>Language

Globalizing Garmin: Finding the Way and Other Points

Stay flexible. Maintain vendor relationships. Avoid proprietary lock-ins. Maintain ratio of writers/engineers. Stay focused on deliverables. Shift job descriptions and work responsibilities.

Arnold, Larry W. STC Proceedings (2008). Presentations>Language>Localization>Case Studies

Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK.

Murphy, M. Lynne. Separated by a Common Language. Resources>Language>Blogs>United Kingdom

UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.

HTML Purifier (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Language

How to Correctly Initiate a New Localization Project    

Undertaking a localization project is a multi-step process. This article offers a step-by-step guide to localization that makes the project seem less daunting.

Freij, Nabil. Intercom (2008). Articles>Language>Localization

Controlled Language in Technical Writing  

The documentation used in manuals and other technical writing worldwide is predominantly created in English. Though much discussion has been devoted to it in academia and elsewhere for years, technical English continues to be written in a way that is difficult for many people to understand.

Braster, Berry. Multilingual (2009). Articles>Language>Technical Writing>Controlled Vocabulary

Coping With Babel: How to Localize XML

Translating XML documents presents many opportunities as well as challenges. There are clear do's and don'ts when it comes to designing your documents regarding translation. You can use also use XML to your advantage to reduce costs and increase quality. One of the most exciting ways to do this is via the use of the XML Text Memory Namespace - xml:tm.

Zydron, Andrzej. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Language>Localization>XML

Evaluation of International English and Machine Translation

Machine translation often gives humorous translations or incorrect translations. Usually, a bad translation is because the source text is not clear in a way that a machine can 'understand'. If text is optimised for machine translation, machine translation gives excellent results. There are two sets of texts. The first set is written in standard English. The second set is equivalent to the standard English text, but it is optimised for machine translation. Google Translate was used to translate the texts into Bulgarian and into Spanish.

Unwalla, Mike. TechScribe (2009). Articles>Language>Localization>Machine Translation

Machine Translation and International English

Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation of text using only software without the help of a human translator. An alternative name for machine translation is automated translation.

TechScribe (2009). Articles>Language>Translation>Machine Translation

Why Qualified Translators Are a Must in Product Localization and Translation?

Money paid to qualified technical writers and translators in a localization project is money spent very well indeed. Why? Because the worst thing for a project is to have the customers or end users switch to another product since they either cannot understand the instructions and the way an interface works, or the localized copy contains embarrassing mistakes that damage the brand name and image.

Akinci, Ugur. Technical Communication Center (2008). Articles>Language>Localization>Technical Translation

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data  

Follow the data. Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data. Represent all the data with a data. Of course, we’ll find immense opportunities to create interesting data sets if we can automatically combine data from multiple tables in this collection. This is an area of active research. Another opportunity is to combine data from multiple tables with data from other sources, such as unstructured Web pages or Web search queries.

Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira. IEEE Intelligent Systems (2009). Articles>Language>Search>Theory

Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode

A little-understood corner of Unicode is its handling for bidirectional text (The spec is a little dry). While English languages are read left-to-right, plenty of scripts (notably Arabic and Hebrew) are read from right to left. When only a single direction of text is used in a document, it's fairly straight forward, but when texts with different directions are mixed in one document, some difficulty arises in determining direction. This document attempts to explain how bidirectional text in Unicode works and what this means for the web. In the Unicode standard, characters have a representational order in memory (which English speakers tend to think of as left to right, but is really start-to-finish in a file), which the bidirectional algorithm then operates on to determine the display characteristics.

Henderson, Cal. Iamcal (2009). Articles>Language>Localization>Unicode

Unicode Consortium Technical Report on Unicode Security Considerations

Unicode Technical Report #36 on Unicode Security Considerations "describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account [when using the Unicode Standard], and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems."

Cover Pages (2005). Articles>Language>Security>Unicode

Guide to the Unicode Standard

This document is mainly intended for “ordinary” people who read the Unicode standard in order to get information about some particular characters or character processing issues that are important to them. The standard, though available online, is difficult to use without some help, and you can easily miss essential information when looking up things in it.

Tampereen Teknillinen Yliopisto (2005). Articles>Language>Localization>Unicode

Writing Global English

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as simplicity-checking software - even remotely like the description above. Audience Dialogue tried to persuade a few software developers to make their fortunes by writing this software, but with no success so far. In the meantime, there are a few widely available tools to use.

Audience Dialogue (2007). Articles>Language>Minimalism>International

Preparing Text for Translation: One Translator's Perspective, Reliable Translations

Provide a glossary of terms specific to your product and/or industry. Consider other languages' space requirements and writing conventions (e.g., right‐to‐left). Provide context, especially for translating interfaces only. Provide original (Word, Excel, ...) documents rather than PDFs.

Jungwirth, Barbara. STC Proceedings (2009). Presentations>Language>Localization>Technical Translation