Tag: LANGUAGE

Twitter has announced that its properties on the Web, the mobile Web, iOS and Android are all now usable in Korean. It's the seventh international language that Twitter supports, and there are plans to add more languages later this year. The announcement, written in Korean, contained one other juicy tidbit: over the past year, Twitter use in South Korea has increased tenfold. Twitter has also ...

Google, in association with a couple of boffins from Harvard University, has just released an awesome tool that should entertain you for at least 10 minutes, and possibly more. It lets you compare words, or phrases, from a corpus totaling 500 billion words from 5.2 million books -- in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. The potential applications for such a tool are ...

Here's something that I do all the time: when I want to know how to use a certain word or phrase, I just google it. And when I'm trying to decide on one of two options, I just google them both and see which one is more common, or how it works in a sentence. I use it a lot when I translate ("do people really say that?"), but I also use it when I just write in English. And now, Phras.in lets me do ...

"Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus!" exclaims the introduction of a Google Blog post. Don't worry if you don't understand it, though, because Google Translate now understands Latin! The entire post is written in Latin, so of course, you have to copy and paste it into Google Translate ...

Everyone knows what a mushroom looks like. But what do you call those fin-looking parts under the cap? You know, those thin, membrane-like things? That's the type of question you can't really use a regular dictionary for. You might get lucky with Wikipedia, but in this particular case, you won't. The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary helps you answer questions like these. It's a large visual ...

Sure, you can upload documents to Google Translate, but why bother? Transmiti is a small (<700KB download), portable Windows app that can run selected text through Translate without the need to upload. Just download the standalone .EXE, run it, and Transmiti heads to your system tray. Highlight some text in a Word or OpenOffice Writer document, tap the hotkey, and your translation appears ...

When I first wrote about the Urban Dictionary, many people were quick to note that they already know the service. The Urban Dictionary may be well-known, but it is hard to say that it is well-regarded. True, it is "democratic." You can vote poor definitions down -- but it's not exactly a paragon of linguistic quality, though. I have recently come across the Macmillan Dictionary website. While I ...

Any doubt of Google's long-term plans can now be banished. It's a software platform, ladies and gentlemen -- a native, in-the-browser, secure and sandboxed platform. As of today you can now play with an early version of the Native Client (NaCl) SDK. You'll need a recent version of the Chromium browser too. We first reported NaCl back in November 2009. Back then we thought it would tie in with ...

Surprisingly, I don't think we've covered text-to-speech here on Download Squad before -- at least not in the browser! Perhaps that's because it's a bit chicken-and-egg: for a blind person to find out about a text-to-speech add-on, he would need the add-on. Damn paradoxes. Anyway, I had a play with two solutions today, both based on vozMe's text-to-speech API. The first is a Firefox add-on ...

Language is an ever-changing landscape. That's a cliché if I ever heard one, but it's also true. Urban Dictionary is one of those must-know Web sites; I think it's the largest slang and street language dictionary online. It's incredibly "social," but the social features don't feel forced or bolted-on. They're at the very heart of the site: definitions get voted up or down and are presented ...

As Paper Rater so eloquently states in HUGE type, it's a free grammar and spelling check, with plagiarism detection thrown in for good measure. It's actually an interesting study in graphic design: Look at that screenshot. Would you rely on such a website for editing an important academic paper, a newspaper article, or any other important text? At first glance, I sure wouldn't. That "Use now ...

As a writer, I often have to look words up. For years, Onelook.com has been my go-to tool. Whenever I need to look up a word, I use Onelook to directly search dozens of dictionaries, both plain English and specialized. The results page links directly to the entry I looked up in each dictionary, and getting multiple definitions is just a matter of Ctrl-clicking each of my favorite dictionaries ...

Google just brought its search and translation products together in a useful new way, delivering search results from sites in any language. Sometimes the best results for a particular search just aren't in English, but now Google can find them for you anyway and deliver a translation. It even picks the relevant language automatically. For example, if you wanted to find a restaurant in Paris, ...

Google Translate just got a lot better, with a nice, clean new look and several new features. The first thing you'll notice is that you no longer have to click to translate. Translate now works instantly, as you type. If you're trying to translate something into a language with a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese, for example) Google will also show the phonetic pronunciation underneath the ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/11/11/go-go-google-gopher-go-google-invents-its-own-programming-la/'; In exciting, but not unexpected news, Google has has put its name behind the brainchild of three of their in-house genius programmers. But it's not a web app, nor is it an enterprise solution -- it's not even a downloadable tool like their Chrome browser. They've actually ...