Interesting Articles

Me Translate Pretty One Day - Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (December 2006; Issue 14.12).

Mark my words. The Economist (February 16, 2007). "For those who put their faith in technology, therefore, it was encouraging to hear Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, demonstrate his linguistic skills a few weeks ago with a palm-sized gizmo that provided instantaneous translations of spoken Japanese into near-flawless English and Chinese.

Top minds taxed by translation challenge - Creating a real-time translating machine is harder than it seems. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press /available from MSNBC.com (November 5, 2006).

Tech Solutions to Iraqi-U.S. Language Barrier. Xeni Jardin's Xeni Tech report for NPR's Day to Day (November 13, 2006: audio available). "Part of the daily struggle for soldiers and Marines in Iraq is communicating with civilians and suspected insurgents.

Military getting high-tech help from SRI lab - New system can recognize words, understand simple foreign phrases. By Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com (May 29, 2006).

How to Talk Like an Iraqi - Laptop software that can translate English-Arabic conversations on the fly is being tested in Iraq. By Kate Greene. Technology Review (August 23, 2006).

Google's Peter Norvig on managing the data deluge. Video of talk delivered on September 25, 2006 at UC Berkeley as part of the CITRIS Distinguished Speaker Series. "Researchers in computational linguistics and information retrieval now have a million times more data than was available 30 years ago. In this talk, Peter Norvig explores what this data can do for problems in language understanding, [statistical machine] translation, information extraction, and inference, and extrapolates to what more data may bring in the future."

Machine Translation - Inching toward Human Quality. "In the News" article by Jan Krikke. IEEE Intelligent Systems (March/April 2006;  21(2): 4-6). "After 50 years of research and tinkering,machine translation might be ready to compete with human translators. Several companies have announced breakthroughs or substantial progress in MT research in recent months.

Translations of the Tower of Babel
Versions of the Tower of Babel story in many different languages.

The Tower of Babel Affair
The building of the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues (languages) in ancient Babylon is mentioned rather briefly in Genesis Chapters 10 and 11. ...

Dictionaries

Medicine, life sciences:

Orthodontics, an English dictionary of orthodontic and dental terms
http://www.bracesinfo.com/glossary.html

Medical computer terminology, a German dictionary of computer-related medical and general terminology with  acronyms, over 500 entries and many useful cross-links, maintained by Gunther Eysenbach
http://www.yi.com/home/EysenbachGunther/wb.htm

The Online Medical Dictionary, a searchable English medical dictionary
http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/omd/

Health and disease information, follow link to English medical dictionary
http://www.medicinenet.com/

BioTech's searchable life sciences English dictionary with close to 4000 terms from medicine and the life sciences
http://biotech.icmb.utexas.edu/search/dict-search.html

German medical dictionary from ratiopharm, a German manufacturer of pharmaceuticals
http://www.ratiopharm.de/html/otc/lexikon/index.htm

Chemistry, chemical technology, analytics:

Beilstein German/English dictionary of organic chemistry terms, searchable in English or German
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/swain/beilstein/bedict1.html

Science dictionary for chemistry, searchable in English and German
http://www.chemie.de/tools/dictionary/?language=e

Internet, computing, software:

English to German dictionary of basic computer terminology
http://www.css.qmw.ac.uk/foreign/eng-german.htm

Microsoft glossaries, bilingual dictionaries with the official translation of strings in Microsoft products  (e.g. Windows 95, NT etc.), free to download
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/msdn/newup/glossary

English on-line dictionary of net-related terminology
http://www.netlingo.com/

Searchable English on-line dictionary of computing terms (FOLDOC), with other useful links
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html

Browsable on-line dictionary of Internet and computing terms (in German), free to download
http://www.commando.de/glossar/

Glossaries

Medicine, life sciences:

MT Desk medical and surgical glossary with product specific information & links to additional information
http://www.mtdesk.com/frame.php?frame=glossary

Multilingual Glossary of technical and popular medical terms in nine European Languages
http://users.ugent.be/~rvdstich/eugloss/welcome.html

Medical glossaries in seven different languages with definitions
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~rvdstich/eugloss/language.html

Chemistry, chemical technology, analytics:

Polyurethane plastics, an English glossary and term descriptions to flexible urethane foam
http://www.pfa.org/glossary.html

Internet, computing, software:

Microsoft glossaries, bilingual dictionaries with the official translation of strings in Microsoft products  (e.g. Windows 95, NT etc.), free to download
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/msdn/newup/glossary