ResearchBuzz

There’s a new free interpreter phone service available, and though it’s only available in six markets at the moment — Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC — it promises to be national by the end of the week. In those markets the service can be accessed by calling 1-888-855-0811.

The languages? This service offers Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. I wasn’t able to test it, because it’s not in my market, but here’s how it’s supposed to work — someone calls the new service (it’s called “Your World. Your Language.”) and selects their preferred language and a business category. A human interpreter comes on the line and helps the caller communicate with the business.

The press release says “Your World. Your Language. allows limited English speakers to access a host of key commercial, retail and entertainment businesses anytime and at no charge,” and according to the site’s frequently asked questions, “consumers who call for assistance are referred only to these participating businesses.” It’s not clear if someone called trying to reach a specific business — their doctor, for example — would be able to use the service to communicate, since there would be no referral involved.

The Web site for the service is available at http://www.languageline.com/yourworldyourlanguage/. I’ll try to get more on it when it enters my market.

Pecan Sandies to Darren Straight, who discovered that Windows Live (as opposed to Windows Filmed-On-Location-Before-A-Studio-Audience) now has a translation service available, http://translator.live.com/Default.aspx . It’s in beta.

The first thing I noticed is that the language offerings are not quite like Google Translate, with at least one translation pair (Dutch -> English) not available at Google. The second thing I noticed is the side-to-side translation. You put the text (up to 500 words) on one side and get the translation on the other side. Even when I couldn’t read a language, I could sometimes use this setup to pick up sentences and try to retranslate them or translate them word-for-word.

When you translate a page — actually the first page I tried refused to be translated. It was text (not Flash or anything like that) but nothing doing, Windows Live couldn’t translate it. (There’s a FAQ available if you run into a problem. The FAQ won’t fix anything, but might help you understand why something isn’t working.) The second page didn’t work either. Neither did the third or fourth. I finally gave up.

If you manage to get an entire page translated, you’ll find that the original page and translation are presented side-to-side, though there are layout options in the top right of the translation page.

I like this layout, and there are options here you don’t see at other translation services. But I never could get a Web page to translate, and I didn’t see dictionary translation like you’ll find a Google. Worth looking at, but can’t replace existing tools.

An Oneida tribal elder and a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor have teamed up to create an online database of Oneida language resources, available at http://www.uwgb.edu/oneida/ .

The language site has several different tools available. There’s a background to the Oneida language. There’s a downloadable Oneida grammar, which is available in about a dozen different files or one large 26MB download. (The downloads are PDF files with include sound files. Click on the bold Oneida words to hear them spoken.)

On the site there’s a searchable English to Oneida dictionary (Oneida to English will be available at some point.) You can do a word search or a phrase search. I did a search for tree and got 25 results, ranging from the word tree to “beech tree with face in it” to “tree noise in winter” to “hang a tree up on another tree”. If you click on the Oneida word, you’re supposed to be able to hear it, but alas the whole thing is triggered through a Java applet and I had trouble getting it to work in Firefox.

The site’s clearly under development; the dictionary is nowhere near complete and there’s a “sample texts” page that isn’t functional yet. But the dictionary and downloadable grammars are well worth browsing if you’re at all interested in languages or Native American cultures.