No.1
July 15, 2008

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English | Japanese
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About Language Grid Newsletter

Contents

Contents

[From the Editorial Committee]
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[Monthly maintenance] The operation of the Language Grid will be suspended for maintenance.
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[New language resources] Multilingual parallel texts for daily life and disaster information
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[New language services] You can compose multiple language resources.
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[Language Grid Users]Introduction of each user; first user is the NICT Language Grid Project.
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From the Editorial Committee

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Already half a year has passed since the Language Grid became open to the public. Currently, we have around fifty groups as users. We will continue our efforts to popularize it further around the world. This newsletter has been launched to deliver new information related to the Language Grid. It is edited by the NICT Language Grid Project, Language Grid Operator, and Language Grid Association and will be published monthly. We hope it will be useful to the readers! (Eri Tsunokawa, a member of the Language Grid Newsletter Editorial Committee)


Monthly Maintenance

Notice from the Language Grid Operator: The Language Grid will be suspended for maintenance on the first Monday of every month. The next maintenance will be carried out from 7:00 to 10:00 JST on August 4, Monday. If you wish to use the Language Grid during this period, please contact us in advance at operation [at] langrid.org in advance.


New Language Resources

Two new language resources were registered in the Language Grid. At present, a team of Nagoya University and Kyoto University is developing wrappers to compose the resources.
-Multilingual Parallel Translations for Life Information
  Provider: Aichi International Association
  Languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish
-Multilingual Parallel Translations for Disaster Information
  Provider: Multilingual Disaster Information System Consortium
  Languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish


New Language Services

The following language services were registered in the Language Grid. You can compose multiple language resources using the following services:
  - Specialized Translation Service
   Composition of dictionaries, morphological analyzers, and machine translators enables the translation of unfamiliar words such as technical terms.
  - Two-Hop Translation Service
   It enables translation between two languages without a direct translator by composing two machine translators that translate to/from intermediate languages.
  - Two-Hop Translation Service through English
   Composition of two translators through English as an intermediate language.
  - Two-Hop Translation Service through Japanese
   Composition of two translators through Japanese as an intermediate language.
  - Three-Hop Translation Service
   Enables translation between two languages without a direct translator by composing three machine translators that translate to/from intermediate languages.
  - Three-Hop Translation Service through Japanese-English Translator
   Three-hop translation through Japanese-English machine translator.
  - Three-Hop Translation Service through English-Japanese Translator
   Three-hop translation through English-Japanese machine translator.
  - Back Translation Service
   Retranslation of output sentence into input language enables the estimation of the accuracy of the translation.


Language Grid Users: NICT Language Grid Project

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The NICT Language Grid Project was launched in April 2006 and is based in the Keihanna area in the southernmost part of Kyoto. The aim of the project is to overcome the language barriers by composing language resources on the Internet. Our task entails research and development of the infrastructure of the Language Grid and of related collaboration tools. Currently, three researchers, two developers, and one secretary are working at Keihanna. The feature of this project is collaboration among the public, industry, government, and universities. We have been conducting research and development with participation and feedback from users including NPOs and NGOs since the beginning of the design phase of the system. We also have a satellite office at the very center of Kyoto City.