International Mother Language Day fan page on facebook

I think about this fan page over and over again. It comes alive once a year, only to "sleep" again until the next 21st February. Many people caring about their mother language. Well, there was a time when we reached near 10,000 people with a group. We then were 15 admins and also there the main activity was around International Mother Language Day. The group was then deleted by facebook for whatever reason.

But why do we care only once a year? Why don't we care every day or at least once a week?

When one of the languages of this world gets lost, loads of wisdom gets lost with it. Wisdom not only about words, but also about living, medicine, plants and so much more. Is language loss and biodiversity loss correlated? What if everything from poisoning our planet to using materials that pollute our environement is correlated as well?

What if we start to preserve each day a bit? A bit of a language, a bit of our planet? Hmmm ....

Image from Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/letters-school-learn-alphabet-abc-3704026/

Why save a language?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/why-save-a-language.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=1&referrer=

International Mother Language Day 2015

You go to a meeting for one very specific thing and go home with something completely different: here we go ... we are starting NOW to program our event around International Mother Language Day 2015 :-) - you think it's too erarly? Well ... I don't think so ... it's going to be a fairly busy task. And yes please: start to think about what you are going to do on 21st of February 2015 :-)

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

Anaphraseus a CAT-Tool supporting ISO 639-3

I got my first Easter Egg from a colleague and I would like to say to Urs Wolffers: thank you Urs, you made my day :-)

Why? Well he asked if I knew something about a CAT-Tool which did not work well with him and I did not know about it. So I had a look and downloaded Anaphraseus and tried it out. I had some minor problems, because having a new tool and trying to do immediately "all you need" is not really the best way to start off with.

I am really happy that I found that tool because it solves at least two really relevant issues I had with OmegaT and one of these issues is only covered by Anaphraseus as much as I know.

ISO 639-3 support: yes, Anaphraseus supports ISO 639-3 language tags for its translation memories and that is really something special. Ahhh ... you are a programmer and say that it is quite easy to implement, well: maybe it is easy, but it is probably not interesting enough since I have been asking for it being implemented for approximately one and half a year. Now I have it and I don't need to fake to translate to whatever language anymore, but I can insert for example "EN" for the source language and "NAP" for the target language. THAT IS INDEED SOMETHING!

The second issue I always had was proofreading. I am working with a person who knows Neapolitan well for proof reading, but he is NOT a translator and therefore does not know CAT-Tools. I tried to give him the OmegaT TMX files for proofreading, but for some reason his Operating System mixed up the codes and I got a corrupted TM back. We could not figure out why this happened. So another time I copied and pasted the whole of the TMX file into a .doc document, but even that was somewhat troublesome. The solution in the end was to export the translation and send him the source and target files and then, when they came back, I had to copy and paste the changed sentences back into my project to have the translation memory with the changes. I believe you can imagine that this was quite time consuming.

Now with Anaprhaseus I have a Trados-like or Wordfast-like segmentation and even if it is not the nicest layout (a bilingual table would be the best one, but one cannot have all :-) it will save me loads of time and therefore I will be able to create more contents in Neapolitan. I mean considering how many people do actually write in Neapolitan this makes a really huge difference.

Here is an example of how such a segmented text looks like (this one is without proof reading – I just did some sentences to show you how it looks like):

{0>Questo libro è dedicato a mia figlia Luna che ama tanto i cavalli.<}4{>Chesto libbro è dedecato 'a figlia mia Luna ca ama tanto 'e cavalle.<0}>Visto che non esistono storie di cavalli multilingue sono passata a scriverle io.<}9{>Mo sto scrivenno io cheste storie pecché nun ce stanno 'e storie 'e cavalle in cchiù lengue.<0}

The glossary function is like with OmegaT: you have to work on it manually, so anyway there is no difference for me.

I did a complete translation of the first chapter of a book for my daughter from German to Italian (which I sent this evening to a colleague for proof reading) and I did it all with Anaprhaseus. Everything worked fine. The few issues which I had were solved quite fast and the reason for them was mainly me not knowing what to do and Ubuntu behaving a bit different then expected. But now: everything works fine from the very beginning to the clean-up at the end. There is already a short manual by Dmitri Gabinski, but it is for now not available online. I will let you know as soon as it is.

Thanks to Oleg Tsygany for the work already done and to Oleg and Dimitri for the time they took to answer all my questions.

African Music

Well, for now I call it African Music ... it is just: we don't know enough about this huge continent here in Europe and I suppose also in the rest of the world and so it is hard for us to feel the differences ... why don't they tell us more about the rest of the world???

It's been some weeks now that I met Outi who is Finnish and married with Ismaila Sané who is from Senegal. What I still find so strange is that I chose some people to contact by chance and ... well ... she's another one wanting to change the world :-)

We believe in local languages, in local culture and that they need to be maintained. We want our kids to learn the languages of the various families, simply because it is the only way to really connect them with their original cultures and give them their very own identity.

How many of us are out there? I mean: are you, who are reading another one like us? If so: just join us :-)

For now I would like to have you listen to the song Outi sent me today - I like it.