Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Technology (Page 9 of 11)

Handling Translation on the Web

3 January 2013 / / 2 Comments

Browsing through the Global Voices ‘Most Read in 2012‘ articles, I noticed for the first time the effort that the site makes to accomodate multiple languages.
First, each article has a header saying ‘this post is also available in…’   Then, within the text, any quotes are presented in their original language, followed by a translation.  This article on a Citizens’ Basic Income initiative in Switzerland is a good example.

A post on Global Voices , showing how the site handles translations.

A post on Global Voices , showing how the site handles translations.


Such efforts always introduce a design problem.  The foreign language breaks the ‘flow’ of the text, much like a banner advert in the middle of an an article.  On the Global Voices pages, the designers have made some slight attempt to slightly de-emphasise the original text in favour of the English translation.  However, the long list of alternative languages at the tope of the article presents a barrier to actually reading the text, even when the type size is small.
Technical advances could help solve this problem.  Automated tools like Google Translate allow you to put a rudimentary translation behind a single mouse click (you can read this very blog post in French, Arabic, Chinese or Hindi, for example).
However, it strikes me that some development of HTML standards to accomodate alternative languages would help.  It is possible to embed extra data into any piece of text on a website.  I ranted a bit last month about how quotes and links should include citation information within their code.  The abbreviation tag (<abbr>) typically allows the writer to include more information for the reader, about a particluar acronym.  An example of this feature in action: HTML.
It would be great if a ‘translation’ tag or an ‘original language’ tag were made available in HTML.  Then, any given piece of text could be directly associated with any alternative language translations.  This would allow web designers or app creators to display the translations in the way most appropriate to their content.  It would also give readers the flexibility to show or hide the orginal language text.
Translation is a highly cultural and political act.  How a piece of text is translated matters, and the nuance and tone imposed on the text by a sympathetic or antagonistic translator can have huge consequences.  Technical innovations that allow the original and translated texts to be compared easily would mean more transparency, greater international and inter-cultural understanding, and perhaps even help students to learn foreign languages, and the art of translation.  It may also help unify projects like Wikipedia, where there are almost three-hundred encyclopædias evolving in disparate directions.
Does anyone know if there has been any work or research done on this subject?
 

Bizarre and Sad Recorded Station Annoucements

12 December 2012 / / 2 Comments

https://twitter.com/steishere/status/278802769559818241
Ste complains that a steam train has caused delays to his commute.  I find it amazing and bizarre that the station or the rail company have seen fit to pre-record a message, saying that delays are caused by a steam train.  Is that a regular an occurrence?
One thing I have always thought particularly sad is that the rail companies have a pre-record for “due to a fatality on the line.”  It is clearly a frequent enough occurrence to be a necessary annoucement to have in the library, which is sad in itself.  And yet it also offends that something so serious and sombre should be delegated to the robotic system.  Perhaps I am being an old fashioned ‘digital immigrant‘, but it feels like the sort of thing that should be announced live.  I suppose it is a harsh thing to ask the station managers to do.
My worry stems from the fact that there is a cadence and a timbre to a real voice that a pre-record does not have.  When we cede these tasks to a machine, we lose a whole set of human interactions. We only notice this when the subject matter is something so exceptional as a death.
Is this just modernity? Am I being overly sentimental about routine and repetitive information? It is not as if most of these announcements are declarations of love or philosophical debates.
(See also: my piece ‘Encountering the Submerged‘ from almost exactly seven years ago, on the aftermath of a railway suicide I saw in Glasgow; and ‘The Best People Aren’t People‘ about non-human tweeters with personality).

How Going Digital Could Threaten Civil Society

22 October 2012 / / 2 Comments

Newsweek announces the digital transition

Newsweek announces the digital transition


Newsweek is going digital. Completely online.  No print product.  The Guardian is considering a similar move.
I admit I have bouts of sentiment for the printed page.  In general, however, I allow my head to rule my heart in thse matters.  The China Mieville quote I posted a few days ago persuades me that we don’t really need to fetishize print.
However, I think that two commentaries on this news from two of my favourite bloggers miss something in their enthusiasm for this transition. Continue reading

Twitter Succumbs to Regulation

19 October 2012 / / 0 Comments

The news that Twitter is censoring content in Germany is a great big casserole of free speech and censorship issues. There are so many things to say that I almost don’t know where to start. Almost.
The first issue is over the German laws against holocaust denial and Nazism. These laws are not unique in Europe and should be seen in the context of the second world war. Europeans, and Germans in particular, are obviously very sensitive about the Nazi ideology and one can understand why such laws are in place. However, this does not make them right or sensible. It is all very well to suppress Nazi ideology, but what if the next threat to democracy comes from a left wing perspective? Communism, after all, is as lethal as Nazism.
Suppressing any speech, however abhorrent, only serves to send it underground. It is far better to have such speech out in the open where it can be countered. The great failure in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was not that Hitler was allowed to put forward his views, but that not enough people challenged him. This is how evil flourishes – good people stand by and do nothing. Laws against Nazism and holocaust denial are sticking plasters. They do not tackle the root cause of such ideologies, or change minds. Continue reading

Retreat To The Corporate Silos

21 September 2012 / / 0 Comments

Here is a technology trend I have spotted: it may be old hat to experts and tech journalists, but its news to me.
First, I installed iOS 6 for my iPhone this week. As had been extensively trailed, Apple has switched out the Google Maps app for its own, proprietary mapping service. It is a weaker product.
Then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from IFTTT (If This, Then That, an excellent tool that allows you to automate many tasks between online services, such as cross-posting blogs, auto-tweeting, or logging your social media activity). The e-mail said:

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook.

This is really irritating, as I use IFTTT for many Twitter related tasks.
So, in a single week, I’ve been inconvenienced by the decision of two of the biggest brands in technology to stop co-operating with other services. There is no law that says that they must collaborate, of course, but this is still a dismal state of affairs. I wonder if these announcements might be the beginning of a new era of unco-operation, with more and more products becoming locked, proprietary, and incompatible with one another. I cannot see how this can be good for innovation, small businesses and start-ups in the sector, or the users… Though I do see how it might maximise revenue for the big companies.
The previous high-minded rhetoric that came from these companies makes their current revenue-maximising attitude all the more galling. It has become trite to point out how Apple has changed since it premiered its famous Nineteen Eighty-Four advert at the Superbowl; and Google’s motto was “do no evil”. These latest manœvres, retreating into the corporate silos, are a reminder of the corrupting influence of power and money, and puts one in the mind of the final passages of Animal Farm, when it becomes impossible to tell man from pig, pig from man.
I await deliverance with an iOS 6 Jailbreak.

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