Computer Translator Reads Between The Tweets. One way to follow what's going on in the Middle East and South Asia right now is through social media — Facebook, Twitter and blog posts.
But of course you have to speak the local languages to do that. So scientists in the U.S. are trying to get computers to work around that problem. There are already computer programs to translate text from one language to another. But languages like Arabic or Urdu are tough — the script and the grammar are hugely different from European languages, and digitized dictionaries and grammatical algorithms for those languages are still in the early stages. These languages are politically important. Mining For Sentiment And Opinion Computer scientist Rohini Srihari says existing computer translators for Urdu are often too literal.
"What I want is to determine who are the people, places and things being talked about," she says. At the University of Buffalo, Srihari has developed a natural language program that she says can do that. Generations Around the Globe - Tammy Erickson. By Tammy Erickson | 8:50 AM April 4, 2011 Geography significantly influences the formation of generational beliefs and behavior.
Each country’s unique social, political, and economic events shape specific views and attitudes among today’s adults. Western generational models cannot be applied broadly to a global workforce. My latest research builds on an approach of understanding the generations by looking at the shared formative events that shaped their early years. We did in-depth research into the events occurring in each country during the time each generational cohort would have been in their teens and pre-teens.
This research, confirmed through personal interviews, highlights the logic of each generation’s response to work and life today, encouraging acceptance and appreciation of the different lenses through which individuals view events. Highlights from this research Perhaps the factor shared most widely by Boomers around the world is simply the sheer size of the cohort. Global Expansion for Small Biz. When Karl Halpert heard that 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside of the United States, he knew it was time to take his New Mexico-based small business global.
As the president and CEO of Private Label Select — a manufacturer of lip balms and other personal care products — Halpert said the initial thought of international expansion seemed overwhelming, but the allure of tapping into such a large market was too good of an opportunity to pass up. “It was definitely daunting at first, but once I got on an airplane and met with people, I realized it is about developing relationships,” Halpert told BusinessNewsDaily, “which is not dissimilar from what goes on domestically.”
Today, four years after starting the process, Halpert is selling his products in countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Japan and China. “'Made in the USA' holds great cachet throughout the world,” Halpert said. “Everybody loves the romance of going international,” he said. Top Ten Internet Languages. Tallying the number of speakers of the world's languages is an increasingly complex task, particularly with the push in many countries to teach English in their public schools.
How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council. One of our subscribers, Prof. Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English. Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach).