Machine Translation as the Future of International Online Communication

Author(s):  
N. St. Germaine-Madison

American “ownership” of the World Wide Web is on the decline. In fact, two-thirds to three-fourths of Internet users are not native speakers of English. It thus does not require a leap of logic to imagine how many more non-U.S. users would buy from American e-commerce sites or even purchase American-manufactured products if they had access to translations of these e-commerce pages and technical documents in their native languages. The most oftcited reason for not providing content in other languages, however, is the sheer cost involved of first hiring a translator to translate the original content and then keeping material updated. This chapter examines uses of machine translation as a mechanism for addressing these linguistic needs.

2009 ◽  
pp. 1020-1042
Author(s):  
Tatjana Takševa Chorney

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the properties of the online environment in general are inherently suited to help educators reconceptualize their role and engage in constructive cross-cultural communication. This is due to the new technologies’ potential to enable collaborative teaching in an environment of diverse users and to support multiple learning styles. At the same time, the presence of collaborative technology itself does not guarantee that successful cross-cultural communication and learning will take place. The disembodied nature of online communication can sometimes add to the inherent challenges that accompany face-to-face cross-cultural communication. Instructors who teach in cross-cultural contexts online will need to engage with the new technologies in a more purposeful way and apply that engagement to program design and teaching practice. They will need to devote some time to designing for interaction and collaboration in order to overcome common challenges in cross-cultural communication. A more systematic study of the open-ended and interaction- enabling properties of the World Wide Web would help those who design for diversity in online educational environment. The open-ended and interactive nature of the World Wide Web, as the main platform for online crosscultural teaching, can serve as a conceptual model to help teachers overcome common challenges in cross-cultural communication.


English Today ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Ju Kim

Native speakers of English are a minority; there are far more non-native speakers in the world (cf. Kachru 1997, Pennycook 2001). In addition, native speakers' standard or ‘correct’ English, in terms of its grammar and phonology, is not always useful or even appropriate in international contexts (cf. Gisborne 2000, Newbrook 1998, Shim 1999). However, despite global changes in the use of the language, the norms for ENL (English as a Native Language) remain dominant, most notably for the assessment of oral proficiency. Yet it is a major deficiency in the use of international oral tests that the proficiency of non-native speakers is measured against unrealistic and irrelevant standards (cf. Jenkins, 1996). The present paper focuses on the need to revisit the testing of English oral proficiency for non-native speakers, bearing in mind that English is used for world-wide communication and that being able to understand one another (cf. McKay, 2002) is the most important goal.


Author(s):  
Sathiyamoorthi V.

It is generally observed throughout the world that in the last two decades, while the average speed of computers has almost doubled in a span of around eighteen months, the average speed of the network has doubled merely in a span of just eight months! In order to improve the performance, more and more researchers are focusing their research in the field of computers and its related technologies. World Wide Web (WWW) is one of the services provided by the Internet medium for sharing of information. As a result, millions of applications run on the Internet and cause increased network traffic and put a great demand on the available network infrastructure. With the increase in the number of Internet users, it is necessary to enhance the speed. This paper addresses the above issues and proposes a novel integrated approach by reviewing the works related to Web caching and Web pre-fetching.


Author(s):  
Paula J. Wolfe ◽  
Lori A. Olson

Many Internet users believe that archival collections should and will be digitized and placed on the World Wide Web for all to use. This belief derives from several unrealistic ideas about what the Web can do, what archival collections are, and that technology, including processing, storage and display, is free. Attempts have been made by small and large libraries to meet expectations only to find that staff requirements, as well as financial and technological issues, present too many difficulties to overcome (Nelson, 1996). Archivists are now reevaluating the Web and the benefits it offers to their repositories.


Author(s):  
Tatjana Takševa Chorney

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the properties of the online environment in general are inherently suited to help educators reconceptualize their role and engage in constructive cross-cultural communication. This is due to the new technologies’ potential to enable collaborative teaching in an environment of diverse users and to support multiple learning styles. At the same time, the presence of collaborative technology itself does not guarantee that successful cross-cultural communication and learning will take place. The disembodied nature of online communication can sometimes add to the inherent challenges that accompany face-to-face cross-cultural communication. Instructors who teach in cross-cultural contexts online will need to engage with the new technologies in a more purposeful way and apply that engagement to program design and teaching practice. They will need to devote some time to designing for interaction and collaboration in order to overcome common challenges in cross-cultural communication. A more systematic study of the open-ended and interaction- enabling properties of the World Wide Web would help those who design for diversity in online educational environment. The open-ended and interactive nature of the World Wide Web, as the main platform for online crosscultural teaching, can serve as a conceptual model to help teachers overcome common challenges in cross-cultural communication.


Author(s):  
James Dye

The advent of the Internet has forever changed the way people interact, communicate, and share information. The World Wide Web allows Internet users to send a letter in a matter of seconds, to instantly find out the latest sports scores and stock prices, or to learn of breaking world news. The Internet even allows people to have realtime conversations with other Internet users anywhere around the world. The Internet has also provided users a medium through which they can engage in any number of illicit acts. One of the more popular illicit acts, engaged in by millions of Internet users, involves trading music files across file sharing networks. Users accomplish this file sharing, or pirating, by copying the music from a compact disc onto their computers and uploading a file of the copied music onto a network created by software such as Kazaa or Napster. An infinite number of other users can then access this network, providing them an instant ability to copy the file of that song to their own computers.


2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Way ◽  
Nano Gough

We have developed an example-based machine translation (EBMT) system that uses the World Wide Web for two different purposes: First, we populate the system's memory with translations gathered from rule-based MT systems located on the Web. The source strings input to these systems were extracted automatically from an extremely small subset of the rule types in the Penn-II Treebank. In subsequent stages, the source, target translation pairs obtained are automatically transformed into a series of resources that render the translation process more successful. Despite the fact that the output from on-line MT systems is often faulty, we demonstrate in a number of experiments that when used to seed the memories of an EBMT system, they can in fact prove useful in generating translations of high quality in a robust fashion. In addition, we demonstrate the relative gain of EBMT in comparison to on-line systems. Second, despite the perception that the documents available on the Web are of questionable quality, we demonstrate in contrast that such resources are extremely useful in automatically postediting translation candidates proposed by our system.


Author(s):  
Татьяна Александровна Мирвода

С момента наступления эпохи Web 2.0 и по сей день в Интернете востребованы истории о всевозможных ужасах, в обилии представленные на его просторах в виде различных жанров и форм и именуемые самими пользователями крипипастой. Но, как это ни парадоксально, существуя в виде самодостаточной традиции сетевой культуры более пятнадцати лет и продолжая развиваться, данное явление до сих пор остается слабо изученным. Чтобы разобраться в этом обилии присутствующих в Интернете страшных историй и родственных им явлений, мы были вынуждены ввести два интерферирующих понятия: «сетевой “страшный” фольклор» и «“страшный” фольклор в Сети», а также исследовать повсеместно употребляемый интернет-пользователями в отношении содержимого обоих понятий термин «крипипаста». По нашему определению, «“страшный” фольклор в Сети» - это все представленные в Интернете и каким-либо образом ассоциирующиеся со страшным у пользователей и/или исследователей произведения народного творчества как сетевого, так и несетевого происхождения. Сетевым «страшным» фольклором мы назвали пласт собственно интернет-фольклора, к которому относятся подпадающие под его определение произведения, тематически и функционально связанные с переживанием страха, а также все возникшие в Интернете пародии на них, рьяно эксплуатирующие макабрическую стилистику оригиналов, но на деле лишь прикидывающиеся пугающими. Что же касается термина «крипипаста», то, суммируя множество пользовательских трактовок, мы выделили три самых распространенных его понимания: 1) как жанра «страшного» интернет-фольклора; 2) как традиции сетевого «страшного» повествования; 3) как семантической категории, включающей в себя все каким-либо образом связанное со «страшным» в Интернете. From the beginning of the era of Web 2.0 and to this day, stories about all kinds of horrors are in demand on the Internet. They appear in abundance on the World Wide Web in a wide variety of genres and forms, called “creepypasta” by users themselves. But, paradoxically, this phenomenon, which has existed as a self-sufficient tradition of network culture for about fifteen years and continuing to develop, remains insufficiently explored. In this article, we offer two intersecting definitions of this material: “scary” folklore on the Web and the web’s “scary” folklore, and we also explore the term “creepypasta,” which is generally used by Internet users in relation to both phenomena. “‘Scary’ folklore on the Web” indicates all works of folk art, both of web and non-web origin, presented on the Internet and perceived by users and researchers as related to what is frightening. “The web’s ‘scary’ folklore” designates Internet folklore itself that is thematically and functionally related to the experience of fear, as well as Internet parodies which energetically exploit the macabre style of the originals, but in reality only pretend to be frightening. As for the term “creepypasta,” we sum up three of its most common understandings: 1) as a genre of the web’s “scary” folklore; 2) as the web tradition of “scary” narration; 3) as a semantic category including everything in any way connected with the “scary” on the Internet.


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