Category: Language

Busing

By Simon

Recently while reading Douglas Coupland novel Gum Thief I came across a used of bus(ing) that I hadn’t heard before – one of the characters talks about “busing” tables, which sounded a bit strange to me. I’m familiar with the word busboy, but haven’t been quite sure what a busboy did. Now I’ve discovered that a busboy, busgirl or busser is someone who works in a restaurant clearing and laying (busing) tables and helping the waiting staff – a kind of assistant waiter. I’ve never heard this expression being used in the UK though and, as far as I know, no equivalent position exists here – waiters and waiteresses are normally responsible for clearing and laying tables.

The use of busing to refer to clearing tables was apparently first attested to 1913 and probably comes from the four-wheeled cart used to carry dishes.

In the UK the word busing might be used in the context of transporting people by bus, especially school children. According to Wikipedia busing is “The transportation of schoolchildren, by bus, to schools in other neighbourhoods in order to alleviate social inequalities or to achieve racial integration.”

Are busing or to bus used in other English-speaking countries? If so, what does in mean?

BSL

By Simon

Yesterday I finally finished the British Sign Language (BSL) course I’ve been working on for the past year – if other things didn’t keep distracting me I would have finished it sooner. The course consists of just seven unit but manages to fit quite a lot in them, including numbers, colours, time, money, describing people, tenses, hobbies and interests, and food and drink. It also shows you how to construct sentences, and provides background information about sign language and the deaf community. I’ve found it fascinating and would like to learn more. Unfortunately there aren’t any sign language courses available in this area, but I do have a few books on BSL and a CD-ROM.

BSL is a bit simliar to Chinese languages in terms of structure – eg it’s an isolating language which uses time expressions to indicate when things happen rather than conjugating verbs. So you sign things like “Yesterday I eat cake” or “This morning I go to work”. Unlike Chinese or other spoken languages, sign languages can modify signs (words) to add nuances to their meanings. The amount of movement in a sign might be increased and/or its direction changed: for example instead of signing the equivalent of “she’s jumping high” you could sign “she’s jumping” with the sign for jump going higher than usual. Or if you’re describing someone’s hair you can modify the sign for hair to indicate whether it’s straight, curly, long or short hair.

One thing I plan to do with BSL is to link signs to words in the languages I’m learning. This will give me something extra to help me remember the words, and will help me to link words in different languages without using English. I think the physical nature of signs helps me remember them better than spoken words – my auditory memory is good, but my physical memory seems even better.

Have you studied or are you studying a sign language?

20 Free Tools for Translators and Language Learners

By Simon

Today we have a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online colleges for OnlineColleges.net.

Finding free translation tools online is a great way for translators and language learners to practice their skills. There are many different tools that can be used for translating text, websites, emails, and even speech. Here is a list of 20 free tools for translators and language learners to try:

WorldLingo – is a top-notch professional translation service that offers a free text, document, website, and email translator. The free translators have a 500 word limit.

SDLFreeTranslation.com – This free translation site provides language learners with tools to translate text and websites into more than 30 different languages.

Free-Translator.com – allows you to translate up to 150 words at a time. With this site, users can also translate web pages, find newspapers and courses for practice, and much more.

Translation2 – features a free text translator, dictionary, text to speech translation, and IM translator. The text translator provides a free editing tool, keyboard, decoder, and spell checker.

Google Translate – a free translator that allows you to enter text, web pages, or simply upload a document. Google Translate also features tools for searching web pages in other languages that can then be translated into your native language.

Dictionary.com – provides a free translator for translating text in over 85 different languages. Just a few of the languages included in this translator are French, Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Hindi.

Mezzofani Translations – This free translation site offers direct access to multilingual dictionaries and translators. Mezzofani Translation features a rating system for several translators as well as offering links to many more.

Freelang.net – provides users with free bilingual dictionaries, human translation, and other resources that are useful for language learners. This site also features a helpful forum for finding words and expressions in a wide variety of languages.

YAHOO! Babel Fish – In addition to providing a search engine, YAHOO! Also offers free text and web page translation tools. The Babel Fish translator allows users to translate up to 150 words at one time or enter the web page they wish to be translated.

ConveyThis – has a free translator that will translate your text into 40 different languages. This site also offers a website translation button that can be added to your website or blog to make it accessible in 40 languages.

Linguanaut Free Translation – features free human translations in over 40 languages. The translations are provided by several volunteer translators. One translation request can be submitted every 24 hours.

e-Free Translation.com – This translation site offers free language translators and dictionaries in over 30 different languages. E-Free Translation.com also provides language practice by featuring the news in 32 languages.

TRADUguide – a portal for language interpretation and translation services, offers a free beta translator’s dictionary. The site allows you to add a word or phrase then pick a source and target language.

Foreignword.com – This online language site offers a translation wizard, dictionary links, and a translator’s directory. The site also features a quick find for other languages and options.

Word2Word – a free language learning site that offers free courses, chat rooms, forums, and translation services. Within this site, users will find links to over 50 free online translators and translation software.

Applied Language Solutions – This online translation company offers a free online language translator that can be used for translating several languages. The translator features text, e-mail, and website translation.

Prompt Translator – The Prompt Translator is a free online dictionary as well as text, website, and desktop translators.

Babylon 8 – This leading translation software offers an online language translator that anyone can use free of charge.

Cucumis – This translator site offers free translations to users. The site is based on a translation exchange service. Every time you translate information you gain points. If you do not speak a foreign language, you can gain points by logging in every ten days.

Global Voices – This site offers free online text translation and translation tools that can be used for translating French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Global Voices also features a free text translation tool for websites.

Text to speech

By Simon

I came across a useful site today that can read out texts in many languages and voices, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. While I’ve seen similar text-to-speech sites for languages like English, Spanish, French and German, this is the first one I’ve found that can read Arabic, Czech, Polish, etc.

This text-to-speech site can also handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and has avatars reading the text.

The quality of the speech on these sites varies – for some languages it sounds fairly natural, for others it sounds artificial. It also seems to depend on the texts you use.

Here are some samples:

すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。人間は、理性と良心を授けられてあり、互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。

모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.

Wszyscy ludzie rodzą się wolni i równi pod względem swej godności i swych praw. Są oni obdarzeni rozumem i sumieniem i powinni postępować wobec innych w duchu braterstwa.

يولد جميع الناس أحراراً متساوين في الكرامة والحقوق. وقد وهبوا عقلاً وضميراً وعليهم ان يعامل بعضهم بعضاً بروح اﻹخاء.

Language 101

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by David, a developer of Language 101.

Language 101 is a mostly free language learning software website that takes the proven principle of spaced repetition and makes it easy to use.

For example, if you wanted to learn French you could be studying beginner’s French phrases in a few seconds by clicking on the big “Try It” button.

After you click on the “Try It” button you will see a screen that has both a good translation and a literal word by word translation. The literal translation won’t always make sense. There also is a blank line with one underscore for every letter of the foreign phrase.

If you know the phrase, try to say it. If the phrase is new to you, you can play the audio very slowly, or click on another button to play the audio at normal speed and display the foreign language text.

After you have tried to say the phrase out loud, and played the answer, it’s time to grade yourself based on how well you said the phrase before you played the answer.

The five grading buttons range from “Beginner or Totally Forgot” to “Right I Know This Well”.

Try to take 15 seconds or less to do a screen, because it’s easy to forget the first item while you are studying the second one.

We think that if language learning is boring, it means you are doing something wrong, so we made movie lessons, song lessons, and of course we have a lot of custom made lessons too.

We want to take the best of every culture and turn it into a language lesson.

Right now there are a lot of lessons in Spanish, French, Russian and German with a few lessons in Danish and Irish.

Come give it a try and see if it works for you.

Accent and ego

By Simon

According to a study at the University of Haifa, the strength of your accent when speaking a foreign language depends, to some extent, on how much you like and respect the person you’re talking to. Your position in relation to the other language also affects your accent, something the article calls ‘language ego’.

I’ve noticed that people who identify strongly with a particular region or country are more likely to have a strong regional or national accent. Whereas people who don’t have such strong affiliations are more likely to tone down or switch off their accent and perhaps adopt another, or least aspects of another accent, to make it easier for others to understand them. This does depend on the circumstances though – in some cases people who wouldn’t normally emphasise their accent might do so to show group solidarity, or to signal their opposition to another group.

My accent in English sort of defaults to RP, but takes on a flavours from other accents depending on who I’m talking to. Though I come from Lancashire originally, I’ve never had a strong Lancashire accent and don’t strongly identify with that area. In Welsh I have a mid-Wales accent which is gradually becoming more northern. In Irish I have a strong Ulster accent, which I tone down somewhat when talking to Irish speakers from other regions. In Mandarin I have a Taiwanese accent, though I can do a sort of Beijing one as well, and in French I had a bit of a Languedoc accent which has morphed into something else now. These accents are a result of spending time in the regions where they’re used, so you could say that I identify to some extent with all them.

Comunicamo

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Anna, the author of Comunicamo

Practicing languages via chat rooms or with pen-pals may be very helpful but for many of us it is often hard to choose an appropriate discussion topic.

Comunicamo is a free website that allows you to practice foreign language by commenting on current news stories and events without pondering over conversation topics and without personal introductions.

Commenting on the news can be very interesting, especially when there’s a hot topic. Sometimes you can draw somebody who turns out to have totally different opinion. That is even better as it makes discussion more ardent and you finally forget that the language you are writing in is not your native tongue.

Here is how it works:

  • After clicking “compose new message” choose the language you want to practice.
  • A random recipient will be assigned.
  • Choose one of the proposed news items (don’t hesitate to choose something controversial or funny).
  • Write your opinion or comment about the news.
  • Your message will be sent to the previously selected recipient and the conversation starts.

You can also log in and wait until somebody draws you.

After exchanging some messages you can start another discussion with the same person or draw another one.

Remember: the website is dedicated for those who study foreign language for some time and want to practice it in real conversations.

If you are a beginner, don’t worry. Users can choose the level of randomly selected conversation partners. After some messages you will be able to see if people understand you.

If you study Spanish then imagine yourself on a street of Madrid. There will be no teacher helping you.

I would be grateful for your comments about the idea.