Has Statistical Machine Translation had its time? With the news that Facebook has now fully transitioned to a neural-network based A.I system (Neural Machine Translation), many people are asking whether this is the end of days for Statistical TM. “Of the 1.6 billion people who actively use Facebook, more than half…don’t speak English at all. Most of […]
Why haven’t apes used Sign Language to ask us a question? What’s going on in the mind of a monkey? Can we ever find out? Research into the language of apes has scientists teaching sign language to the smartest primates to try to communicate. It turns out they are thinking a lot more than “I want […]
Learning a second language as an adult There is a myth that it is much more difficult for adults to learn a second language than it is for children. Many people believe that you are basically ‘doomed’ if you didn’t start learning your second language as a child. Fortunately, it is indeed only a myth. […]
Language Learning with an App Nowadays, our mobile phones are with us at all times and it feels like there is an app for everything; reading the news, checking the weather, tracking your steps and calories, editing photos, booking flights… And there are, of course,...
Localisation and multilingual websites It is important to create a multilingual website if you want your business to reach a wider audience. Creating a multilingual website from scratch is difficult, but WordPress has made it easy! The WordPress Multilingual (WPML)...
Do you Dab or Vossi Bop? The famous first lines of the chorus of Stormzy’s song “Vossi Bop” are “My bruddas don’t dab, we just Vossi Bop”. So, what's a dab? Or even a Vossi Bop? And how did this all start? The Dab The Dab started way back in the U.S, in the...
The Importance of Language in eCommerce If you were to put a Brit, an American, and an Australian in the same room together, it would probably take just 10 minutes before one of them used a word the others didn’t know. “Slagging off, what does that mean?” “A...
The rise of the machine translators! Machine translation is a term used to describe automated software that translates source content (speech or text) into a target language. Often machine translation (MT) software is operated by human translators who “supervise” the...
Tricky Idioms! Idioms are notorious among foreign language learners and translators alike. They can be quite hard to learn, and translating idioms can feel almost impossible! However, idioms are also what gives a language its identity, what makes one’s speech rich,...
Who are the Language Martyrs? Language martyrs are people who have died to preserve the use and legacy of their mother tongue, and who oppose the enforcement of another language as the sole official language in their state or country. Many language martyrs and their...