Contents

[Language Grid Bangkok Operation Center]

[Report on Japan-Korea Webcam Exchange Event]

[Wikipedia Translation Project Launched]

[Language Grid Toolbox ver. 2.4 Released]

[Monthly Maintenance for November and December]

[Language Grid Users] AIAA Japan Forum on Satellite Communications (AIAA-JFSC)

Language Grid Bangkok Operation Center

Last September, the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) of Thailand began operating the Language Grid, which can be used for non-profit and research purposes, as the Language Grid Bangkok Operation Center.

Currently, six NECTEC - developed Thai language services have been registered - three Thai morphological analyzers, an English-Thai translator, English-Thai bilingual dictionary, and Thai text-to-speech engine.

In October, NECTEC and Kyoto University will plan to start federated operation of the Language Grid, which enables users to access the Thai language services with affiliated usage permission. Various language services, mainly for Asian languages, will be added to the Language Grid.

Those wishing to use all the Thai language services registered on the Thai Language Grid should conclude a service grid agreement with the Language Grid Bangkok Operation Center. Please see how to join the Language Grid for the details.

Language Grid Bangkok Operation Center's Web Site

Thai Language Services

Report on Japan-Korea Webcam Exchange Event

NPO Pangaea is a non-profit research and development organization providing universal playgrounds in which children around the world can develop personal bonds that transcend the boundaries of language, time, space, and culture.

We held the "Japan-Korea Webcam Exchange Event" dually in Tokyo and Seoul on September 11, a date coinciding with the terrorist attacks that led to Pangaea's founding.

One activity for students at the event was the word-association game Nazoren, in which hints are given to help the partner country's teammate come up with the answer. Hints are exchanged using multilingual chat while using a webcam to watch teammates' faces. The students were excited when they were able to help their teammates get the right answer using hints based on their partners' situations.

Technically, the chat part of Pangaea's proprietary Webcam system employs the "Translation Combined with Bilingual Dictionary" service on the Language Grid. In advance, each team's students planned hints for their partner country and checked the back-translation using Toolbox's Text Translation system. Since the multilingual chat and the Language Grid Toolbox use the same translation service, their outputs correspond with each other. In a follow-up questionnaire, nearly all the children agreed with, "The Language Grid is useful and interesting, and I'd like to use it again."

Staff that day also gave detailed accounts of their positive experiences via the Toolbox BBS. Through the BBS, we hope to learn the outcomes from both countries at the event and use them for our future activities.

Wikipedia Translation Project Launched

Discussions among voluntary communities around the world have led to an abundance of entries on Wikipedia. Yet the number of English entries overwhelms that of other languages, which presents language barriers toward acquiring knowledge. The "Wikipedia Translation Project", aiming to translate Wikipedia entries into various languages via multilingual discussion, was launched this summer at Ishida & Matsubara Laboratory, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University. In the first efforts, the project is experimenting by having an English and a Japanese native speaker collaboratively translate an entry on a US national park into Japanese. This allows us to analyze the multilingual article creation process and evaluate the supporting systems.

The system has been developed with NICT by porting the Language Grid Toolbox to MediaWiki, a software application used for handling Wikipedia projects. This enables actions such as machine translation-mediated multilingual discussion, creation and editing of bilingual dictionaries for each article, and text translation. NICT is also refactoring the Language Grid Server software to customize it to our project.

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., running Wikipedia, is also interested in our project, and one of its engineers is now reviewing this system. By integrating our system into the Wikipedia, we are aiming to support the Wikipedian all over the world.

Shown here is part of the discussion between the Japanese and English speakers in the test translation of an entry. (English display mode) The Japanese speaker is asking about Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road.

Language Grid Toolbox ver. 2.4 Released

The new version of Language Grid Toolbox has been released and now offers the following features.

• Notification of new BBS posts

Users can receive e-mail notification when new messages are posted on the multilingual BBS. Notifications, which can be sent for each post or daily, contain a message summary, the date, and the link to the message. Users can also disable notification.

• Text-to-speech for translation result

This function reads out translation results of the Text Translation function. A generated sound file can also be downloaded. This function relies on the text-to-speech service on the Language Grid and is available for English, Japanese, and Chinese.

• Meta-translation

Translation of a part of an input sentence can be avoided by surrounding the part that does not need translation with <skip_translation></skip_translation> tag. For example, inputting "How do you say <skip_translation>'independent administrative agency'</skip_translation> in Japanese?" will give 「'independent administrative agency'は日本語で何と言いますか？」. (How do you say 'independent administrative agency' in Japanese?).

Monthly Maintenance for November and December

The next maintenance of the Language Grid will be conducted on the Mondays of November 1 and December 6, at 18:00-21:00 JST. If you wish to use the Language Grid during this period, please contact us in advance at operation [at] langrid.org.

Language Grid Users: AIAA Japan Forum on Satellite Communications (AIAA-JFSC)

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Japan Forum on Satellite Communications (AIAA-JFSC) was launched in January 1999 as a subcommittee of AIAA's Technical Committee on Communication Systems (TCCS). It holds quadrennial international conferences (AIAA ICSSC) in Asia, exhibitions, and other such activities intended for the research and development of satellite communications system, and also issues the online journal, Space Japan Review (Japanese-English bimonthly - http://satcom.nict.go.jp/). The first issue was in February 1999 and with the August/September edition the long-running journal reached its 69th issue.

Monthly editorial committee meetings for planning articles and specifics have identified translation as a problem. To date, translation experts and commercially available software have been employed. Starting this year, the journal has begun to rely on the Language Grid Toolbox. Since the Toolbox allows us to make a dictionary of satellite communications terms and to collaboratively translate the journal using the dictionary, the editorial committee expects the Language Grid. Recently, it has become common to issue academic journals online, but this was unusual when Space Japan Review was first released.

Though it is setting the bar quite high, the aim is to publish the magazine in the future in languages beyond only Japanese and English. The journal is packed with interesting articles, so please access the site at the above URL.