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| Jobs: English, German & Applied Linguistics, Translation Studies: Research Associate, Zurich Universitiy of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Switzerland |
28 June 2007 |
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| Word processor simplifies bilingual publishing |
28 November 2006 |
| (InfoWorld) - A word processor developed by the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and based on OpenOffice.org 2.0 could make life easier for bilingual communities around the world.
The translation software, Agored, which means open in Welsh, contains prominent buttons to switch the language of the user interface between English and Welsh. Similar buttons change the language used by the spelling checker, either for the whole document or for one paragraph.
There's already a Welsh-language version of OpenOffice, but the application interface only shows one language at a time, and changing it involves delving into the menus.
Much of the bilingual functionality that Agored adds to the interface is already present in OpenOffice, but not readily accessible, said David Chan, a programmer who worked on the project. Agored makes it easier for users to sit down in front of a computer and switch the application to their strongest language, he said.
Wales, one of the four constituent nations of the U.K., has two official languages with equal status, Welsh and English, and local government bodies and other public organizations must issue documents in both languages.
Almost one in four of the country's 2.8 million inhabitants speak, read or write Welsh, according to the latest national census , but there are few exclusively Welsh-speaking communities left.
"Those people need bilingual software, not Welsh software," Chan said.
In addition to the coding, a lot of work went into the translation of Agored's menu items, dialogs and numerous help files -- around half a million words in all, according to Diarmuid Johnson, who worked on the translation.
The University of Wales at Aberystwyth developed Agored with funding from the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh public television channel S4C and the Welsh Language Board. Some of the computer-related terms had already been defined by the Welsh Language Board in a joint project with Microsoft Corp. in 2004 that led to the creation of a Welsh language interface pack for Office 2003 , Johnson said.
In the three days following Agored's release on Nov. 16, it was downloaded 200 times, Chan said.
The functions that Agored adds to OpenOffice could interest many more people than that, though. Chan said the project team took care to make their code changes useful to other bilingual communities, groups that could include speakers of English and Irish Gaelic in Ireland; of French and Dutch in the Belgian capital of Brussels; of French and German in Switzerland, and of Basque and Spanish or of Catalan and Spanish in Spain. Chan said he had already been contacted by Catalan speakers during Agored's development.
Speakers of Catalan and Welsh have another IT interest in common: Internet top-level domains (TLDs) to promote their languages and cultures.
Domain name registry Fundació puntCAT won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the dot-cat TLD for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community in September 2005. One year later, Fundació puntCAT said it had registered 17,500 dot-cat domains.
Inspired by the Catalan success, a Welsh group has launched a campaign for a Welsh TLD , dot-cym. (The y in cym rhymes with the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "hood.")
The campaigners hope that dot-cym will stimulate the use of Welsh on the Web in the same way that the creation of the dot-cat TLD led to the creation of sites written in the Catalan language.
Earlier this month, members of the National Assembly of Wales voted to support the dot-cym campaign. |
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| TURKEY AND GERMANY SIGN COOPERATION PROTOCOL ON DEVELOPMENT |
01 January 0001 |
| ANKARA (A.A) - Turkey and Germany signed a protocol on
cooperating in development, German Embassy in Ankara said on Wednesday. |
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| What the doctor ordered |
29 November 2007 |
| <b>LONDON</b> It reads more like a spell from a Harry Potter book than a
medical manual. But 300 years ago women having difficulty conceiving were
advised to drink the spit from a hare’s mouth. A rare copy of <i>The
Ladies’ Companion</i>, or <i>The English Midwife</i>, written by a
Bristol physician, Dr William Sermon, and published in 1671, is expected to
fetch £2,000 when auctioned at Sotheby’s in London next month. |
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| Police moves highlight the shortfall in FA resources |
29 November 2007 |
| With all the other ills of the English game to talk about, we had forgotten
about corruption. With the arrest of Harry Redknapp, the Portsmouth manager,
and four other men prominent in football yesterday, an inability to keep
possession suddenly seemed like the least of our worries. |
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| Satellite tie-up for fast Galileo |
28 November 2007 |
| UK and German companies join forces to bid to build more spacecraft for the Galileo satellite navigation system. |
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| Strong sales lift Porsche revenue |
28 November 2007 |
| Luxury German carmaker Porsche sees its revenues rise 15% from August to October, driven by strong sales. |
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| Programming less |
28 November 2007 |
| A programming lesson I keep relearning.
The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way.
Any extra thought that goes into this, will pay off in:
1. Maintainability of the code.
2. Size of the code (you'll write less code with a well thought-out central data structure).
3. Simplicity of the user interface (the structure inevitably shows through in the UI).
4. Ability to respond to feature requests.
5. Adapt to new hardware, OS changes, other apps.
6. More "it just works" experiences.
This is why it's sometimes the right thing to start over from scratch. Programmers often want to start over because they look at the code and it looks complicated, and they think they can make it simpler if they start over. They're right, of course, it will be simpler when they start over, because it won't do nearly as much as the mature product does. Once they finish building out the feature set, it may well be just as complicated.
It's a judgement call. I remember looking at the source of Unix kernel for the first time as a grad student in Wisconsin, and being amazed at the simplicity and obviousness of the code. I couldn't believe something so simple actually worked. Your code at its kernel level must have this simplicity. But at the edges, where you're accomdating the minds of users, inevitably it gets a little messy. The key thing to look for is how hard is it to add a completely new feature. It should be easy to do that. If it's not, it's likely because of a poorly organized (and therefore not well-understood) central data structure.
I've rewritten apps many times, over many years, because when I wrote the first or second versions, I didn't understand the problem well enough, and the code had turned into a morass of patches and workarounds.
Right now I'm recoding the internals of a special-purpose aggregator. I've written many of these, over the years, always quickly, trying to get something running fast, and then lived with data structures that resulted. This time I'm going slowly and carefully, with an installed base of one (me) and ripping up the pavement whenever I find even a slightly better way of doing something. I have other users who are waiting, but that's life.
5/7/97: "When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed." |
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| Google: Jolly green giant? |
28 November 2007 |
| The search and advertising company is a force to be reckoned with across the Web. Now it's looking to do the same in alternative energy (along with many others, large and small). |
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| Google service uses cell towers to locate users |
28 November 2007 |
| Google launched a location service for mobile users on Wednesday that doesn't rely on GPS.Google Maps with My Location, currently in beta, locates users who don't have GPS-enabled phones based on their location to nearby cell towers. The result isn't as accurate as GPS but works for people who lack the positioning technology in their phones."It helps users speed up search by showing the general neighborhood they're in," said Steve Lee, product manager at Google for the service. Without the location service, users must type in their address or neighborhood in order to find nearby businesses using Google Maps.Google Maps with My Location will use GPS data to locate the user if the phone has the capability. But even for users of GPS-enabled phones, the cell location service might be useful, Lee said. That's because the cell tower feature works better indoors than GPS, it doesn't drain the phone battery as quickly and can bring up a result quicker, he said.The service could be useful to a person who might be traveling in an unfamiliar city and looking for restaurants or other businesses. A user pulls up Google Maps and hits the zero key on the phone. A blue dot will appear on the map in the user's location. If the service used GPS in the phone, the blue dot will be solid. If the service used cell towers to determine the location, the blue dot will have a halo around it, indicating that the location isn't precise. The user can then search for nearby businesses.Google says the cell tower technique will locate the user within about 1000 meters. It doesn't use triangulation, which calculates a user location based on the user's distance to three nearby towers. Instead, it essentially shows the range of the tower that the user's phone is connecting to.But the accuracy should improve as more people use the service, Lee said. That's because Google is keeping a database of location queries, minus any personal information like individual phone numbers or names. That will allow Google to learn more precise information about the range of each tower so that it can deliver a more accurate location area to users. The coverage area of cell towers can vary from about a quarter of a mile to several miles based on whether the tower is in an urban or rural area.For now, Google Maps with My Location doesn't feature any advertising, but it could in the future. "This product makes a lot of sense for advertising," Lee said.In order to use the service, phone owners must download a free application from Google. The application will work on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones as well as many phones that support Java. A few notable exceptions include the Samsung Blackjack, Moto Q, and Palm Treo 700W, which don't support the APIs Google requires to find cell towers, Lee said. |
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