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Open-Source Streaming Translations in Porto Alegre
Roland Piquepaille writes "The World Social Forum (WSF) (choose your language on the site), which ends today in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has less money to spend on computing than the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland. But at both events, many different languages were spoken, meaning that simultaneous translations were an absolute necessity. If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source. The NIFT (Nomad Interpretation Free Tool) was already used for the 4th WSF held last year in Mumbai, India. The free software, which runs on a simple PC, collects and digitizes the translations from the interpreters before broadcasting them to a variety of devices. In fact, the technically-advanced NIFT allows for real-time streaming over the Internet of speeches in several different languages. This overview contains many links, references and illustrations about the NIFT project."
just use speech recognition software, followed by a translation by Babelfish? It would make all of the speeches humourous, I bet!
From TFA:
[M]any different languages were spoken, meaning that simultaneous translations were an absolute necessity. If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source.
This is fantastic, and will be a good selling point for open source software around the world. Many countries in this world have two official languages, or at least want their mechanisms of government to be accessible. Some enterprising young bureaucrat should pitch this. Canada, for example, makes extensive use of translation technology - I was in Ottawa for a conference, and we made use of it as we could not all speak French. Hopefully, this can hold true in most countries.
This just helps somebody make a pitch for Open Source, by being able to go 'did you know, [insert high bureaucrat's name], we can even do this with open source software - not to mention Openoffice, Linux, Mozilla, etc.'
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source.
Can anyone tell me what, exactly, this sentence is trying to express?
Thanks...
Hopefully this will lead to reduced spending on translation by governments and other such organisations - just think how much conducting a meeting of the U.N. must cost in terms of proprietary software. Also you could have simultaneous meetings in different parts of the world both being translated and relayed to each other. The U.N. in New York and Geneva perhaps? Maybe there's a way to do something similar without it descending into chaos :)
One good turn - gets all the covers.
I know this isn't the place for the spelling nazi, but the comment is about grammar. You would think that it would at least use correct spelling.
Example: "Correct grammar"
Your post is dumb because it:
X was authored by a guy named Roland
X was authored by a guy surnamed Piquepaille
X has some connection to a fuckwad named Roland Piquepaille
X It's this mother fucker again! Please stop posting his shit!
X We really mean it!
X Fuck you, I'm never coming back!
X And you did it again! Fuck this fucking fuck! Gah!
the headline is right. Porto Alegre means 'Happy Port' in portuguese
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
after consulting this i conclude that Porto Alegre is the correct spelling.
Taiwanese interpreter: (in english) "we unholy communist dogs will kill you all"
The reason that interpreters are so highly paid is because they are vetted professionals that will not lose anything in translation. Their livelihood is dependant on their integrity.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
and yet another dodge of the cowardly slashdot "editing" staff in their failure to even admit some sort of relationship between them and (plagarism-guilty) Roland. Hey Taco and crew, have you got ANY sense of ethics? Either you guys have some sort of agreement, or your "editing" staff is as incometent as all the trolls say (and the way things are going, the trolls are more believable than OSTG....)
Be wary of the poetry, Mr. Dent.
42
Was I the only one who was reading this sentence expecting it to end with "held in Davos, Switzerland, spends on catering"?
--Joakim Ziegler
It's Porto Alegre.
Look up for yourself, for a change.
Friend of the Wise, Brother of the Brave.
Oh Boy this is good.. Just what "Isn't" an inferior Operating system too you???
it's not Porto Allegro, it's Porto Alegre. Look @ the map http://www.thepacthq.net/upload/brazil.gif
Multimap has it as Porto Alegre. Besides, both alegre and allegro translate to something like "lively", but the former is Portuguese and the latter Italian. Portuguese would seem to be the relevant choice here as it's the main language spoken in Brazil.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
I think it would be better if everyone would speak the same language.
Something easy to learn, multi-cultural, like Esperanto...
He is referring to the doodles that Bill Gates left behind and were analized. The doodle's were mistakenly though to be tony blair's handwriting. Gates misspelled Port Alegre as Port Allegro.
Slashdot ran an article about it this morning. But I guess you guys dont RTFA.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
The free software, which runs on a simple PC, collects and digitizes the translations from the interpreters before broadcasting them to a variety of devices
Why are most posts trumpeting this like if it was a real-time translation engine? Or is it really???
about how Bill Gates wrote it Porto Allegro on the notes he left which we attributed to Blair and then analysed and covered here today at /.
don't feel bad, it was an inside joke intended to make you look stupid. I'm so sorry about that.
-pyrrho
jeez... troll, snif snif...
/. article of the day...
um... troll, or joke! That's how Bill Gates mispelled Porto Alegre on the notes lovingly covered in the other really important
don't tell me you guys don't read the articles?!?!
-pyrrho
I know this isn't the place for stupid inside jokes, but the post is about Porto Alegre which Bill Gates thinks is Porto Allegro. People could at least have checked every link on the internet before rating me a troll.
Now I have that on my permanent record.
And my resume.
Bastards!
-pyrrho
Ironically so do you and I... and our moderators do too!
what good is slashdot if you can't make an inside jokes that requires you to have read the article of a story earlier that da----- oooooooh!
-pyrrho
Wow.... that died before it even took off.
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
Karma be damned - mod me down. Slashdot is usually scrupulous about disclosing any time an article deals with OSDN or another affiliate. I have no idea how many current members there are here but I have to think that the chances are pretty slim that RP is submitting about 15% of all stories. Why does he get such a disproportionately high number of submissions published, all trying to drive traffic to his blog?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I think it will be a while before the translation software catches up to reality.
Sure, they'll be able to translate the words, and soon even proper grammar on the fly.
But when, if ever, will you get an automated system that can understand the cultural references made by the primary speaker?
How does this bode for the growth of a language? Many words cross languages. Will this continue if everybody can speak in their native tongue, and no middleground is met?
Just thinking out loud, not pointing out problems...
My mom says I'm cool.
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money.
Visit http://www.blogads.com/qjrvfopptgs/premiumpiquepai lle/advertise to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net. Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced, priced at 69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He m
If certain open-source programmers made laud objections to the use of their offerings by America's military, I wonder why everyone is quiet about their software used at a forum, where Cuba and Venezuela (Cuba's and FARC's best friend) were the stars.
I intend to amend my license to ban the use of my work by anyone with a Che Guevara T-shirt.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or tone, inflection, nuance, attitude? If we look back to the movie Fail Safe, Larry Hagman as the translator was asked by the President (Henry Fonda) to try to interpret how the Russian was communicating. Is he mad, accepting, furious, tired, drunk, whatever. Things we could not ask a program to deliver.
How many times have we misinterpreted an IM or other online communication, even though we 'read the words' correctly?
Great demonstration of the fact that machine translation has a long way to do before it's really usable in any real sense.
sig != null
found a note from the WEF that read: Will you fucking hippies take a bath if I give you free soap? The translation volunteers from the FSF immediately started arguing over the meaning free, the French started molesting the SanFranciscans, the web geeks complained they didn't get a corresponding DTD, and none of them knew what to make of this 'bath' thing. Chaos reigned.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
OK,
I'm a long time slashdot user with plenty of karma and I normally don't post this type of stuff.
Roland Piquepaille has been submitting warmed over articles that link to his blog for ages now, and an INCREDIBLE number of them get posted. The usual suspects are timothy and michael (two of the weaker slashdot editors in my opinion).
The details of all of this I'll leave to others that care more, but it'd be nice to see slashdot get a grip on this. Worth a laugh at this point though.
I'm a simultaneous interpreter and I see this error all the time. Just to make it clear to everybody who are confusing the terms in this thread (including the original poster):
Interpretation is oral, translation is written.
Just wanted to also add that the streams with live video and audio mixed by using PiDiP, then encoded into Theora and sent over Icecast2. Totally free software platform for video streaming. Was a bit experimental and still needs work, but nevertheless a great step forward.
More info at http://psand.net/wsf05/
After the World Economic Forum (WEF) and World Social Forum (WSF), can we look forward to the World Technical Forum (WTF)??
I live in Porto Alegre. "Alegre", in Portuguese, does NOT mean "lively". It really means 'gay' (in the 'happy' sense of it).
My other account has mod points.
I live in Porto Alegre. "Alegre", in Portuguese, does NOT mean "lively". It actually means 'gay' (in the 'happy' sense of it).
My other account has mod points.
You're right - I probably shouldn't have lumped the two words together so much, even though they have the same linguistic origin. "Lively" was the best compromise fit for both alegre and allegro, and it's how alegre's present meaning is derived - first it became something like "merry" and now it's more like "happy"...
If you're interested in that sort of thing check out the Indo-European Roots Index . It continues to amaze me how much the same word can change over time.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
You Sir is a moron. If Taco didn't take money for Microsoft and other such numbnuts, the website you happily rant on about it would have ceased to exist long ago. And besides, you should enjoy the irony of Microsoft paying to appear on a (mostly-)Microsoft-bashing website, where, as a bonus, it's fairly obvious that nobody looks at the ads anyway.
Taking money from Microsoft is okay. Taking money from SCO is okay too. It's taking money from criminals, pedophiles and other genocidal neo-nazis that's not. Don't be one of these idiot F/OSS jihadist and adjust your sense of morality to a reasonable level.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
And I shall ban the use of my work to anyone WITHOUT a Che Guevara T-Shirt.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
As Commies are no better than Fascists, I hereby put you on the official list of assholes.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.