Thursday, April 17, 2008

Open Nursery - Slideshows to learn languages

How to get languages to kids (and not only).

Well when my kids were approx. 3 years old I wanted them to be exposed to a certain kind of terminology in German, because many of the "kid's words" were not part of our daily language. They are twins and therefore of course prefer to play one with the other and mom was was called when it was about eating, drinking, going to the bathroom etc. Then I created slideshows with all kinds of words that were interesting to them and I noted that this worked really well. The photos I then used cannot easily be published in a slide show (because of the licenses that others used – GFDL is not suited at all for photos) and therefore I now just took what my two produce(d) at school.

I created a slide show where the intro still needs to change, but I already wanted to show you an example and ask you to help with the translation and the recording of the words. It is really not much: just 10 objects, some colours and 10 short sentences. They can be recorded in "one rush" using audacity (I can cut them) and you need to use OpenOffice.org since I use a presentation I then transfer into single jpg files from where I create the slide shows.

The contents are available under cc-by-sa which means that also your translations will be under that license.

I already talked with SJ from the OLPC project and yes: the videos will be available for OLPC.

You can have a look at the sample slideshow here:

http://www.youtube.com/iiterinternational

I did not upload the file to be translated since I would like to avoid that maybe two of you do the same language (so I will send it to you by e-mail). Btw.: it would be nice to get the recording of the English terms from a native speaker – I did it myself in that trial part. Over time I would like to see American, European, Australian etc. English, because indeed there is a difference.

For now, since this video is part of the Open Nursery project which will be introduced during our conference about less resourced languages in Cherasco, Piedmont, Italy, I am concentrating on less resourced languages, but: all languages are welcome. I will just create the ones that belong to the less resourced languages first.

During the next days I will create a second slide show which shall include the numbers from 1 to 10 in combination with the words I used for the first slide show.

Like I already said: the introduction will be different, I just added it so that one sees that there will be an introduction.

As for the programme of our conferece, you can find it here:
http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3%B9/programme-international-day-31st-may-english-language

Some notes on the Open Nursery project can be found here:
http://eng.i-iter.org/content/open-nursery

Anybody is welcome to join us. Besides that the event will be also available via web-tv.

Well, so now I hope you will help to translate these videos. They will be made available in various places – so if you wish to host them as well: that would be really great.

This is being posted in various groups and sent through various mailing lists, so sorry if you get it more than once.

Thank you for your attention and I hope to read you soon!

Cheers, Sabine
*****
Sabine Cretella
CCO – Vox Humanitatis
s.cretella [at] voxhumanitatis.org
skype: sabinecretella

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Anaprhaseus version 1.16

I just noted that Anaphraseus 1.16 is out and downloaded it.

These are the news:

2008-04-06 17:25 [1.16b] ole_yansen

* Unicode UTF16 support for TM files

* Fixed "Segment are not opened in end of document" bug

And I am now going to test it whith a short Sicilian-Neapolitan translation :-)

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