languages

Remember the Babel Fish? As fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will recall, it lived in your ear and immediately translated whatever language a person was speaking into whatever language you could understand.

Word Lens for iPhone works just like a Babel Fish, except it doesn't live in your ear, and it translates only printed text, not spoken words. But it's no less amazing.

Working a kind of magic I can't fully understand, Word Lens instantly translates whatever text your iPhone camera sees. Point it at a sign that's written in Spanish and you'll immediately see its English translation. Or go the other way: Point it at a menu that's written in English and you'll instantly see Spanish.

Ay caramba! Seriously, you have to see the app in action to fully appreciate it. So with that in mind, watch this:

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It's a small world, but try telling that to anyone who shares a PC with someone who not only speaks a different language but uses an entirely different character set. Diplomatic relations are possible, thanks to Quick Locale Switcher by Captain Caveman. It's a free Firefox add-on that lets users quickly switch locale-related settings, including languages, spell checkers, context menus, and more. It will even translate complete Web sites automatically, if your browser settings support it. You can configure Quick Locale Switcher for automatic switches or manual function with notifications. Even if your locale isn't listed, you'… Read more

Every now and then you may need to enter special characters and symbols when writing, which can be for relatively common tasks such as character accents or "degree" signs, but also for more obscure or specialized symbols. In the past, many of these came from using special fonts (Wingdings or Dingbats) that contained these symbols as alternates to the standard alphanumeric characters, but these days fonts make use of the Unicode system and can include hundreds or thousands of available symbols.

As with other PC systems, the Mac keyboard layout is a standard one for the most commonly … Read more

Who was the last person you ever saw write anything? You know, with a pen. For me, it was Terrell Owens, when he removed his Sharpie during an NFL game, signed a ball, and thrust himself into greater posterity.

People type these days. They don't write. The issue, however, has been further exacerbated in China and Japan, where languages based on characters, rather than the alphabet, are apparently simply being forgotten by those who have dedicated their lives to keypads and screens.

An interesting Agence France-Presse expose offered a look at just how serious the problem has become. Here'… Read more

We all know what it's like to send a text message or e-mail whose tone is completely misinterpreted. A series of additional messages to better explain ourselves ensues and the efficiency of the original message is long gone.

That's one reason engineers at the University of Washington are testing a tool called MobileASL that uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmit images over U.S. cell networks. Sometimes, words alone just don't cut it.

"Sometimes with texting, people will be confused about what it really means," says Tong Song, a Chinese national who is studying at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., and participating in UW's summer pilot test. "With the MobileASL, phone people can see each other eye to eye, face to face, and really have better understanding."

Eve Riskin, a UW professor of electrical engineering, says the MobileASL team's study of 11 students is the first to examine how deaf and hearing-impaired people in the U.S. use mobile video phones. The researchers plan to launch a larger field study this winter.

The engineers are now working to optimize compressed video signals for sign language, increasing the quality of the images around the face and hands to reduce the data rate to 30 kilobytes per second. To minimize the amount of battery power, the phones employ motion sensors to determine whether sign language is being used.… Read more

The trajectory of the "Danny the Dragon Meets Jimmy" story was fairly standard, as far as modern stories go. First, it was an illustrated book. Then a DVD. Then iStoryTime developed it as an iPhone app.

But it went a step further. As of last week, the award-winning children's book by Tina Turbin and illustrated by Aija Jasuna is the first to be available as an iPad app with a sign language mode.

"We are extremely proud to release the first-ever children's book app for the deaf community," says iStoryTime co-founder Woody Sears. "… Read more

PopChar has been around since nearly the dawn of time, at least in terms of the Mac operating system. PopChar started as a Turbo Pascal-based substitute for Key Caps, created on a Mac Plus way back in 1987. Its core functionality remains the same today, helping users insert unusual characters directly into documents--choosing from an increasingly arcane array of strange and foreign symbols, across thousands of Unicode-supported characters, all without having to learn any difficult key combinations.

Similar to the built-in Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer in OS X, PopChar X is accessed from your menu bar (or with an … Read more

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more

There were many people, quite a few in America, who were excited, delighted, even positively beaming when some clever cove created that smiley colon/parenthesis thing that is now the universal sign of a written smile.

:) That's the one. The one that is sometimes written as ":0" or ":-)" or, for a smiling wink, ";)." Or even, and this is far beyond my intellectual galaxy, "J". Does that signify "JOKINGYOUMORON!!!!!!!!"? I think that it does.

All these symbols have been such great successes in bringing people together and making them … Read more