Google Translate just added a cool new feature that allows you to easily create a personalized phrasebook with the phrases and sentences you want to memorize and/or find yourself translating repeatedly. As the Google Translate team notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to allow you to jumpstart the process of committing the translation to memory by “allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them.”
Why not become a citizen of the world and learn a new language?
Of course the best way to do this is to learn under the tutelage of a native speaker or trained instructor, but a number of readily-available apps are out there to help you dip your toe into the world of foreign words.
It's unlikely that you speak Mandarin, but that doesn't mean you won't need to at some point. Now, Microsoft has created software that can analyze your speech, translate it and then spit out a new recording of your very own voice speaking in a different language.
It isn't witchcraft though: it's just damned clever, and a major advance in speech analysis compared to what we usually see. It's not easy, of course. To reach a stage where this is possible requires providing the software with hours of a single person's voice. This isn't something that can be used by just anyone, casually.
Sometimes the toughest part of getting started with a first design project can be understanding the language of design. Typographers, for example, have a whole language of their own that relates to type, fonts and design.
To have an open and successful conversation in your next design meeting, it will help to fully understand the lingo when talking about type. Here’s your primer.
Unsurprisingly, a lot's changed since the 1500s, not least of all language. But now a physicist has crunched through 5.2 million books published over five centuries in order to analyze the way the English language has changed over time.
There is, of course, one constant: by far and away the most popular word throughout history is the humble definite article "the". No surprise there, as it's an indispensable classic.
Dig around into short phrases, however, and things get more interesting. Back in 1520, the most popular three-word phrase was "of the Pope". Not so these days, because it's been superseded by the more useful, but rather more boring, string "one of the".
Most of us have faced that terror of being trapped in a foreign country with little understanding or comprehension of the language.
Whether it is a parking sign that makes no sense, or a menu that is all Greek to you, an app for Android and iPhone could be the solution by translating words on-the-fly with the help of your camera lens.
WordLens uses your phone's inbuilt camera to recognise text that is viewed through the lens, and then translating them to English.
Google wants to change the way the world writes software. In recent years, the search giant has unveiled two new programming languages that seek to improve on some of the most widely used languages on the planet.
With a language called Go, it seeks to give the world a replacement for the venerable languages C and C++, providing a more nimble means of building really big software platforms inside data centers. And with Dart, it hopes to replace JavaScript, improving the way we build software that's run in our web browsers.
Most of us aren't aware of our body language, especially when we're in a stressful situation — but interviewers are trained to read it.
Karl Rozemeyer at TheLadders says in a report that involuntary body language can be compared to stage fright for an actor.
To see how actors effectively communicate with their bodies, Rozemeyer spoke to John Treacy Egan, a Broadway actor, and Jodie Bentley, an acting coach.
“I think it is important to have body awareness before you go into an interview,” Bentley said. "There are many actions and habits that we should consider doing or avoid doing to tell the right story during the interview setting."
We contacted TheLadders who gave us permission to share these 12 body tricks jobseekers should master before stepping into the interviewing room. All of the photos are modeled by Business Insider staffers.
Most of us aren't aware of our body language, especially when we're in a stressful situation — but interviewers are trained to read it.
Karl Rozemeyer at TheLadders says in a report that involuntary body language can be compared to stage fright for an actor.
To see how actors effectively communicate with their bodies, Rozemeyer spoke to John Treacy Egan, a Broadway actor, and Jodie Bentley, an acting coach.
“I think it is important to have body awareness before you go into an interview,” Bentley said. "There are many actions and habits that we should consider doing or avoid doing to tell the right story during the interview setting."
We contacted TheLadders who gave us permission to share these 12 body tricks jobseekers should master before stepping into the interviewing room. All of the photos are modeled by Business Insider staffers.
A new iPhone app aims to remove the language barriers users face while traveling abroad. SayHi is a translation app available in Apple’s App Store that flawlessly translates a user’s spoken words into one of 33 different languages and dialects. The app was released almost two weeks ago and is already the No.1 business app in the App Store, with a four and a half star rating from more than 1,600 individuals. While at times there are a few hiccups, as with any app, the program worked as intended during our tests and did so in a reasonable amount of time. SayHi is available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad running iOS 4.3 or later, and can be had for $0.99 in Apple’s App Store.
Industrial psychologists and others can give you statistics on verbal and non-verbal communication, but I have been led to believe that as much as 60% of communication is body language. That seems a little high but I can tell you from experience it's pretty close to the mark.
In my experience body language can shift a conversation much more quickly than the spoken word. Here are some examples and how they might be used.
Google Translate has reached a milestone of 200 million users on translate.google.com. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t report a basic usage statistic like that, but this one deserves to be celebrated. Google's scale could someday make it possible for all human beings to understand each other. Here's how.
App icon design is easily one of the most important aspects of an app. When you’ve put your app in an app store, the icon represents that app, if it is awfully designed or isn’t eye catching then people just won’t be interested. Also having a bad looking icon can make the app look unprofessional, so people won’t even bother. I know that I won’t even bother downloading an app unless it has a good app icon. If you can’t hire an epic icon designer, take the minimal route and create a simple but representative app icon. Here are 30 great examples of app icon designs.
Today i came across an infographic on Udemy.com about the war between popular programming languages; PHP vs Ruby vs Python.
The infographic compares the popularity(ratings as of December 2011),ease of learning,ranking in the previous year,marketability,most job postings,number of developers on LinkedIn and how fast they are etc.
Wikipedia will blackout all 3,847,673 of its English-language articles in protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA), according to co-founder Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia is going black on Wednesday, January 18, to help fight the contentious Protect IP Act (PIPA), which is set to go for a vote before the Senate on January 24. The move, first reported by Neal Mann, digital news editor at Sky News, was confirmed by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the far-reaching online encyclopedia, on Twitter. Wales says the blackout was a “community decision.”
Before you approve that new logo you’re considering, stop for a moment to consider how people perceive visual information.
The content of your logo is third in the sequence of recognition, behind shape and color, because the brain takes more time to process language.
The iPhone 4S' Siri integration may be a potential game changer, but she's not quite the world traveler some of us would like her to be. In fact, it seems she's as lost outside of US borders as any unprepared tourist. Looking for a pub in London? Better find a traditional map. Need to know the time of day in Canada? Siri admits she has no idea, go buy a watch.
Those of you who'd like to read Facebook pages written in a foreign language now have a way to translate posts and comments into your native tongue.
Using the translation tools of Microsoft's Bing, the social-networking site is now offering an inline tool that will translate posts made on public Facebook pages into the language indicated in your profile.
Would you believe that the words you use actually determine whether you succeed or not? Language shapes how we experience the world. Take a few minutes and just listen to the conversations around you. Count how often you hear the following words: but, want, should, hope, try.
Languages that don’t change over time are considered dead languages. The fact that English changes so much, shows that it is alive and well. Because English has changed over time, speakers of 1500 AD would not have understood an English speaker from 500 AD or the modern day English spoken today. The first written English dates back to 450 AD. Over time it has evolved from the use of “Old English,” to “Middle English,” “Early Modern English,” to present day “Modern English.” These changes are a direct reflection of the era in which the English was spoken and the modern day technology available. The simple expression “Dude,” in 1880, described a man who went slightly overboard with his fashion. And today, the expression has become part of the teenage vocabulary as a way to show excitement. Times they are a changing, and the English language will continue to do so as well.
