Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.
IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.
As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. In just two weeks this past summer, volunteers tackled around 1.3 million words, averaging around 100,000 per day. Overall, n.Fluent has translated more than 400 million words for Big Blue staffers.
The software works as a plug-in or add-on to other applications, making it fairly seamless to use. Plug-ins translate instant messages on the fly. Text from a word processing document or other presentation is copied into one field of the software, with the immediate translation popping up in another field. IBMers can use n.Fluent on their desktops, laptops, and even smartphones.
This "universal translator" can currently tackle English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.
"To become a smarter planet, the world needs a shared vocabulary for collaboration -- particularly the business community," said David Lubensky, an IBM researcher managing the n.Fluent project, in a statement. "We see n.Fluent as just such a tool, helping to expand commerce, cement relationships and make the world that much smaller, one word at a time."
Of course, free language translators, such as Google Translate, are already available. But IBM sees n.Fluent as a better alternative. The software is more secure as it runs behind a firewall. It's also adept at handling business jargon. Right now, n.Fluent is only being used internally. But like many of IBM's research projects, it's likely to find a home outside of Big Blue's walls.
IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said there's no fixed date as to when it might be available externally. "It would be a reasonable assumption that there's a demand in the market for a translation tool that has very good security," he said. "And also this kind of tool is uniquely tuned for a business environment that has almost a language in itself."
Other language translation tools can convert individual words. Key to n.Fluent's success will be how it handles entire sentences and paragraphs as well as colloquialisms. But the company's field tests are geared toward those goals.
"The whole point is to continually refine the idioms and the syntax and the context by people who use the language every day," said Fishkind. "And that's part of this crowdsourcing idea where hopefully at the end of the day we're going to have a system that is not only intelligible but also fluent and fluid."
Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.
At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.
Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.
Last year's Oxford word of the year was the decidedly less mainstream "hypermiling."
A correction was made at 9:25 a.m. PT on November 21. It was players of PackRat, not PackRat itself, that were threatened with account suspension.
Geek culture is once again showing its influence over the mainstream lexicon in the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which includes word additions such as webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting (thank you Hewlett-Packard), and fanboy (thank you Apple).
Webinar is "one more example of the significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language," Merriam-Webster publisher John Morse said in a Monday press release about the 100 or so new words in the 2008 edition of the influential reference guide.
That's in line with Merriam-Webster's choice of the term "wOOt"--with its roots in video game culture--as the word of the year for 2007.
The 100 or so new words in M-W's latest dictionary reflect societal trends beyond technology. For example, some stem from culinary arts, such as prosecco (a sparkling Italian wine), soju (a Korean vodka distilled from rice), edamame (immature green soybeans), and pescatarian (a vegetarian whose diet includes fish).
But my favorite new entry, by far, is mondegreen, defined as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung." According to M-W, the term was first coined by author Sylvia Wright in 1954, when Wright wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine confessing to a childhood misinterpretation of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Moray." "When she first heard the lyric, 'they had slain the Earl of Moray and had laid him on the green,' she felt terribly sorry for the 'poor Lady Mondegreen,'" according to the press release.
A more contemporary example is the bungling of the Jimi Hendrix "Purple Haze" line, "Scuse me, while I kiss the sky" as "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy." My personal mondegreen example is the line from the Clash song "Rock the Casbah," "The shareef don't like it," which I always thought was, "Shareeve don't like it." Who was this Shareeve character anyway, I wondered. You got one? M-W is asking the public to submit their own mondegreens by July 25, with favorites to be revealed and featured online beginning July 28.
M-W says it picks the new dictionary entries only after it starts to see the words used over time without explanation or translation. Here's an Associated Press story with more details.
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