language

How to easily type in multiple languages on the Web with Chrome

Typing in different languages on the Web can be as easy as clicking on a browser button.

With the Google Input Tools extension for Chrome, you can easily type in multiple languages when typing an e-mail, filling out a Web form, or writing anything else on the Web. Here's how:

Step 1: Install the Google Input Tools extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Step 2: Click on the new browser button in the upper right-hand corner of the Chrome browser and select Extension Options. Choose the languages you want from the input tools list, then close the tab.

Step … Read more

Rumor: Siri to add Japanese, Mandarin, Russian next month

According to a new rumor, Siri may gain support for Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian as early as next month.

The news comes from a Chinese technology news site, DoNews (via Penn Olson), claiming to have spoken to an Apple engineer working on the Chinese-language version of Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant, Siri. The source told DoNews that internal testing has already begun and should result in a public product by next month.

With Apple widely expected to release a new iPad model next month (one that should include Siri functionality), having Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, and Russian in Siri's arsenal … Read more

Google Translate is simple and versatile, so long as you're data-connected

Google Translate for Android is a simple, versatile tool that supports more than 50 languages, offers an SMS translator, and speaks some of your translations aloud.

Google Translate is incredibly simple to use. Just select your input and output languages, then type in your text. You can also set the app to automatically detect your input language for even faster results. To quickly interchange your input and output languages, just hit the conveniently placed (center screen) arrow icon. That's it.

It's no secret that Google Translate performs a solid job translating, but what really makes it shine are … Read more

Change your text with LangOver

Using Windows with non-Western writing schemes is a lot like watching a bad movie: All too often, the wrong characters show up on the screen. You can set up Windows to work in a wide range of languages, fonts, and writing systems, but glitches are common, especially when it comes to different character sets. Many international users have discovered LangOver, a free tool that converts your text to the language and alphabet of your choice when you press F10 (it's customizable). With it, users who set Windows to display Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, or Hebrew characters (for example) won't … Read more

French Digital Kitchen: HAL 9000 meets Jacques Pepin

I know enough French to order two croissants and buy a bottle of wine. That successfully got me through a week in Paris, but I could improve my skills astronomically if I got a French Digital Kitchen.

Newcastle University in England has installed this kitchen, which is designed to helps students learn a language and gain some cooking skills at the same time. PBS should be all over this.

Everything from the mixing bowls to the peelers to the flour and sugar have embedded sensors that work under the same concept as a Nintendo Wii. The computer knows where the tools are and what motions are being made.

The computer gives you instructions in French and tracks your progress as you work your way through a recipe. It's like a GPS for making crepes and Croque Monsieur.… Read more

John McCarthy, creator of Lisp programming language, dies

John McCarthy, the creator of the Lisp programming language and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, has died. He was 84.

McCarthy died yesterday, Stanford University's School of Engineering announced in a tweet today. McCarthy invented Lisp, a program that became the language of choice for AI, in 1958 while at MIT and published its design in the 1960 paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. One of the oldest high-level programming languages (second only to Fortran), Lisp is still in use today.

McCarthy said he felt there were aspects of human intelligence that … Read more

Will the cloud change programming?

The early preview of Dart, a new alternative to JavaScript for Web programming unveiled by Google earlier this week, is the latest entrant into the pantheon of programming languages. As such, it's hardly a rarity. There are hundreds of programming languages--perhaps thousands if experimental and academic variants are included. That said, the number of widely used languages is much smaller, numbering perhaps in the dozens, with fewer still broadly relevant to general-purpose server operations and Web software.

In fact, what's so notable about the computer programming language landscape over time isn't so much its diversity and adaptability, … Read more

Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language, dies

Dennis Ritchie, an internationally renowned computer scientist who created the C programming language, has died at age 70.

Ritchie died at his home over the weekend, according to a Google+ post from longtime colleague Rob Pike. His Wikipedia entry was updated to say he had died in Murray Hill, N.J.

His death was confirmed today by Bell Labs, in a message from its president, Jeong Kim, to employees. That message reads, in part:

Dennis was well loved by his colleagues at Bell Labs, and will be greatly missed. He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just … Read more

Facebook launches its own universal translator

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.

As described by the company, public pages written in a different language will display a "Translate" link next to each post or comment. Clicking on that link converts the post into your own language. Clicking on the &… Read more