many languages one idea

I first discussed Rosy in early June. Rosy is Google’s new “character-by-character, word-by-word” translation tool that is part of Chrome, the new OS that Google is developing and which translates between any two of forty languages. It’s built on the back of the Google Translate engine.

In case you missed the video of the demonstration I have put it at the end of this post. I said the implications were stunning. Time to talk about what they are.

In the Real World, there are approximately 7,000 living languages (via Ethnologue). However ” … 389 (or nearly 6%) of the world’s languages have at least one million speakers and account for 94% of the world’s population. By contrast, the remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people.” The top 5 are Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi, in that order.

It’s difficult to assign any similar kind of number for languages on the Internet. What would that mean? Number of Website/blog pages in a given language? Number of words? What about the flow of chat? Does Internet telephony/videocalling count?

I can make an educated guess and say that English, Chinese and Spanish are the languages that most words on the Internet are written in today – not necessarily in that order. But it’s just a guess and if you know better let me know. Thanks.

I have discussed Facebook before as an example of a digital country in the making and use it here as the primary example since it is the furthest along.

Facebook has been translated now into over 60+ languages (Settings > Account Settings > Language).

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a user base of 300 million, which in the language of cldwrld and digital countries means that facebook now has 300 million inhabitants, speaking 60+ languages.

On Facebook they “talk” to each other primarily in writing. So here’s my idea to improve communications between people online (and then in the Real World). It’s in beta …

Set up a test project within Facebook called the Facebook Translate Languages Instantaneously Project (FTLIP).

Install Rosy into FTLIP chat with a drop-down menu to allow people to communicate with each other in the language of their choice. Invite multilingual people to participate in the project.

Here’s how a FTLIP chat works between, say, between two English/Spanish speakers, called Ed and Sara … and Rosy:

Ed sends a message in English.
Rosy converts that to Spanish and shows the English and Spanish text to Sara.
Sara corrects the translation if necessary and sends the result to the Google Translate database.
Sara replies to Rob in Spanish.
Rosy converts that to English and shows the English and Spanish to Ed. He corrects the English if necessary and sends the result to the Google Translate database.
Ed replies to Sara in English.

And so it goes.

There exists a widget that allows Windows-users to select text in any website and throw it to the Google Translate service and get a translation back. Let’s integrate that into Facebook chat and allow chatters to select any of the 40 languages supported by Google Translate (the GT40).

As the crowdsourced translations betweeen the multilingual speakers on the FTLIP team feed into the GT40 more languages will become available and the quality of the translations will go up.

Thus we will have to simply call Google Translator the GT, driven by Rosy and note that communication between users of Facebook who don’t speak the same language is made easier.

the cloud and me