Battlefield 3 In Different Languages: www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings In Different Languages: English French German Russian Polish
May 19th, 2012Posted in Videos | No Comments »
The Endangered Languages of South America: Grassroots Language Activism & New Media
May 19th, 2012This presentation was given by Anna Luisa Daigneault at the United Nations Symposium on Language on May 1st, 2012. After giving a brief introduction to Language Hotspots (a model conceived and developed by Dr. Gregory DS Anderson and Dr. K. David Harrison), Daigneault speaks about several indigenous language activists in Paraguay, Chile and Peru who are using digital technology in new ways to revitalize their endangered languages. For more on the Chamacoco Talking Dictionary (an initiative organized by the Living Tongues Institute and Swarthmore College in collaboration with Chamacoco language activists such as Andres Ozuna), please visit: chamacoco.swarthmore.edu For more on the Yanesha Memory Archives, visit: www.yanesha.com The Yanesha Memory Archives is a project organized by the Yanesha Federation in collaboration with El Instituto del Bien Común in Peru. It is headed by anthropologist Richard Chase Smith. For more on Mapuche language activism in Chile, search for "Mapudungun" on Facebook and Youtube. For more on the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, visit: www.livingtongues.org For more on Language Hotspots, please visit: www.swarthmore.edu
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articles in foreign languages…
May 19th, 2012
Hi,Im looking for someone who can write unique and fresh articles for special keywords I would give hiim.
I would need spanish, german, french and also english content.The articles would be about 500 words… and I would need 30-50 articles every month
please send me details if you are interested.
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Twitter Adds Six New Languages To Translation Center Including …
May 19th, 2012
Twitter has added six more languages to its translation center, and is now looking for translators who will help Twitter officially support them. The languages are Catalan, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech and Basque. If you can speak these languages and want to help translate Twitter, you can head over to the Translation Center and start working.
Twitter launched the new Translation Center last year, and since then has been adding more and more languages to the list. It now offers its interface in 28 different languages, after adding support for the Right-to-Left languages Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu only last month.

Twitter receives thousands of requests for new languages, and these six new additions were the most requested languages. According to Twitter, nearly half a million people are already participating in the translation project, which has been around since October 2009. New people, who speak one of these six new languages, are now invited to join in on the fun.
If you can’t speak these languages, you can still help. On the main Translation Center page you can find the full list of languages Twitter is currently working on, which include Dutch, French, Russian, Hindi, Italian, and many others.
Do you help with Twitter’s translation project? Would you consider joining now?
Source: Twitter Translation Center
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Language maintenance through media | Australian Aboriginal …
May 16th, 2012In every culture around the world there are socially undesirable activities that occur, which destroy the health and mind of community members. In the main-stream culture of Australia, there are campaigns that target speeding, smoking, teen-age drinking, ecstacy use and so forth. These campaigns are typically in English and are typically targeted at the anglo-culture of Australia reflecting the linguistic characteristics of the language.
At the bottom of this text is a TV commercial that has been produced for the Amata, Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands in western central Australia. The main focus of the commercial is to target petrol sniffing and cigarette use within the societies of central Australia – which is obviously a concern for the community as a whole, hence the active involvement in producing a community awareness message. The commercial uses a Milpatjunani (sand drawing). By using ongoing ever-changing pictures drawn in the sand, the traditional Milpatjunani is a traditional way of complementing an oral story. The Milpatjunani in the TV commercial is paired with song in language from the area.
Using traditional language and traditional Milpatjunani the commercial targets a forgotten culture in Australia, which mainstream media cannot accommodate. This method of ‘storytelling’ allows for a message to be conveyed through media to the community, addressing many socio-linguistic issues that mainstream media does not. The extension of traditional language to modern media will aid language maintenance and survival in the region, as messages will be passed on reflecting the socio-linguistic features of the language, including discourse and pragmatics.
Media is the easiest form of communication and influences so many people. By combining traditional languages with the media will ensure the languages become readily available contributing to language maintenance and survival.
Nait
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Modern Foreign Languages Alumni Open House | Tucker …
May 16th, 2012The TMC enjoyed hosting the Modern Foreign Languages Open House over Alumni Weekend. The alumni were invited to come and talk with former professors and classmates of their foreign language experience at W&L. In addition to delicious refreshments, the alumni were also provided with free membership to Mango Languages. Mango Languages is an online language service company which is accessible worldwide. With Mango you can learn in excess of 40 languages at your own pace and become more acquainted with the cultures where these languages are spoken. Thanks to the University, this service is free for any alumni who signed up.
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Living the Language – Bolivia: The Aymara
May 13th, 2012The streets of the Bolivian capital La Paz have changed, as have the faces of power. Previously untold stories of colonisation and hardship are now being heard, often in languages once excluded from public discourse.
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Language for Life: Languages and Global Health
May 13th, 2012About 25 students from all across the university gathered to hear Lauren Mueenuddin, Claire Wendland, and Mollie Overby discuss how language study helped their careers in public health, research, and medical practice. More information: www.languageinstitute.wisc.edu
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sFlow: Scripting languages
May 13th, 2012The Host sFlow distributed agent article describes how sFlow agents, embedded in applications such as Apache, NGINX, Tomcat, Memcached and Java, coordinate with the Host sFlow daemon (hsflowd) in order to monitor server and application performance.
Implementing sFlow monitoring natively in widely used applications is worth the effort, since the result is a highly scaleable, easily deployed solution with minimal impact on performance. However, this approach is overkill for monitoring application logic implemented in scripting languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl.
Recently, a simple JSON API was added to hsfowd that makes it easy to integrate performance monitoring in scripting languages. The API is an implementation of the sFlow Application Structures draft, which defines a generalized set of application layer performance metrics.
Note: Even if you instrument your scripted application logic, you should still enable sFlow in the web server since the HTTP information exported from the web server complements application metrics to provide a more complete picture of performance, see HTTP.
Currently the API is only implemented in the Linux trunk. To try it out, you will need to check out the trunk and build hsflowd from sources:
svn co https://host-sflow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/host-sflow/trunk host-sflow cd host-sflow make make install make schedule
Note: See Installing Host sFlow on a Linux server for additional configuration information. The JSON API will be included in the upcoming Host sFlow 1.21 release.
Uncommenting the following entry in the /etc/hsflowd.conf file opens a UDP port to receive JSON encoded metrics:
jsonPort = 36343
Note: It is recommended that you keep the default port, 36343, since any change to the port number will require a corresponding change in any scripts that send JSON messages. The jsonPort value is written into the /etc/hsflowd.auto file so that it is available to client scripts, along with other sFlow settings, see Host sFlow distributed agent. The hsflowd daemon will only accept messages generated on the same host which shouldn’t be a problem since hsflowd should be installed on every host to report host performance metrics.
The following is an example of the type of JSON message that a script can send to describe the outcome of a transaction:
{"flow_sample:{
"app_name":"myapp",
"app_operation":{
"operation":"user.friend",
"attributes":"id=123&handle=sith",
"status_descr":"OK",
"status":0,
"req_bytes":43,
"resp_bytes":234,
"uS":2000},
"app_initiator":{"actor":"123"},
"app_target":{"actor":"231"},
"extended_socket_ipv4":{
"protocol":6,
"local_ip":"10.0.0.1",
"remote_ip":"10.0.0.23",
"local_port":123,
"remote_port":43032}
}}
Note: The names of the structures and attributes in the JSON message mirror the structures defined in sFlow Application Structures.
Many of the structures and attributes are optional, a message can be as simple as:
{"flow_sample:{
"app_name":"myapp",
"app_operation":{
"operation":"user.friend",
"attributes":"",
"status_descr":"",
"status":0,
"req_bytes":0,
"resp_bytes":0,
"uS":0}
}
Constructing and sending JSON messages as UDP datagrams to hsflowd is straightforward. For example, the following PHP app_operation function formats and sends the previous JSON message.
function app_operation($app_name,
$op_name,
$attributes="",
$status=0,
$status_desr="",
$req_bytes=0,
$resp_bytes=0,
$uS=0,
$sampling_rate=1) {
if($sampling_rate > 1) {
if(mt_rand(1,$sampling_rate) != 1) { return; }
}
try {
$sock = fsockopen("udp://localhost",36343,$errno,$errstr);
if(! $sock) { return; }
fwrite($sock, '{"flow_sample":{
"app_name":"'.$app_name.'",
"sampling_rate":'.$sampling_rate.',
"app_operation":{
"operation":"'.$op_name.'",
"attributes":"'.$attributes.'",
"status_descr":"'.$status_descr.'",
"status":'.$status.',
"req_bytes":'.$req_bytes.',
"resp_bytes":'.$resp_bytes.',
"uS":'.$uS.'}}}');
fclose($sock);
} catch(Exception $e) {}
}
Note: This function supports transaction sampling, i.e. if you set a sampling_rate of 10 then there is a 1-in-10 chance that the operation will actually generate a measurement. Sampling allows you to reduce the measurement overhead in high transaction rate environments and still generate useful results. You should set a sampling_rate that reduces the impact of monitoring on your application to acceptable levels, although, you probably don’t need to sample at all unless you are handling hundreds of operations per second. Choose a fixed sampling_rate that works for your application – choose the lowest sampling_rate that protects application performance – as you will see later, a low sampling_rate setting will allow hsflowd to maintain more accurate counters and provide a greater range of sampling rates when it exports the data.
Including the app_operation function in your PHP application library makes instrumenting PHP application logic as simple as including a single line of code in a PHP rendered web page:
<?php app_operation("myapp","user.friend"); ?>
When hsflowd receives a JSON message, it increments per application performance counters (scaled by the sampling rate if needed). The counters are periodically exported along with the other sFlow metrics (CPU, memory, disk and network I/O) that hsflowd exports.
The following output from sflowtool shows the contents of an sFlow datagram containing application counters:
startDatagram ================================= datagramSourceIP 127.0.0.1 datagramSize 112 unixSecondsUTC 1336846918 datagramVersion 5 agentSubId 100000 agent 10.0.0.150 packetSequenceNo 2670 sysUpTime 77514000 samplesInPacket 1 startSample ---------------------- sampleType_tag 0:2 sampleType COUNTERSSAMPLE sampleSequenceNo 4 sourceId 3:150002 counterBlock_tag 0:2202 application myapp status_OK 23 errors_OTHER 0 errors_TIMEOUT 0 errors_INTERNAL_ERROR 0 errors_BAD_REQUEST 0 errors_FORBIDDEN 0 errors_TOO_LARGE 0 errors_NOT_IMPLEMENTED 0 errors_NOT_FOUND 0 errors_UNAVAILABLE 0 errors_UNAUTHORIZED 0 endSample ---------------------- endDatagram =================================
The application counters can be sent to tools like Ganglia and Graphite in order to trend the performance of individual application instances, or of whole clusters of applications.
The transactions are also sampled by hsflowd based on the sampling setting in hsflowd.conf, or DNS-SD. Specific sampling rates can be set based on application name, for example, to override the default sampling rate of 400 and apply a sampling rate of 1-in-100 to the myapp, use the following setting:
sampling.app.myapp=100
Note: If the transactions were sampled before being sent to hsflowd, then they will be sub-sampled to achieve the target sampling rate. For example, if the script used a sampling rate of 1-in-10, then hsflowd would apply a 1-in-10 sampling operation in order to achieve the desired 1-in-100 sampling rate.
The following output from sflowtool shows the contents of an sFlow datagram containing an application transaction sample:
startDatagram ================================= datagramSourceIP 127.0.0.1 datagramSize 136 unixSecondsUTC 1336846925 datagramVersion 5 agentSubId 100000 agent 10.0.0.150 packetSequenceNo 2671 sysUpTime 77521000 samplesInPacket 1 startSample ---------------------- sampleType_tag 0:1 sampleType FLOWSAMPLE sampleSequenceNo 1 sourceId 3:150002 meanSkipCount 10 samplePool 10 dropEvents 0 inputPort 0 outputPort 1073741823 flowBlock_tag 0:2202 flowSampleType applicationOperation application myapp operation user.friend request_bytes 0 response_bytes 0 status SUCCESS duration_uS 0 endSample ---------------------- endDatagram =================================
The transaction samples provide details that complement the counter samples. For example, if you were to see a rise in the errors_TIMEOUT rate, you could look at the transaction samples and determine the operations associated with the timeouts.
Note: Anyone familiar with Etsy’s StatsD tool will see a similarity in the way sFlow monitoring is embedded in scripts, see Measure Anything, Measure Everything. The main difference is that sFlow application measurements contain additional structure that allows them to be part of a large scale monitoring system linking network switches, hosts and applications together. In addition, sFlow’s inclusion of sampled transaction records allows metrics to be broken out into fine detail, making it possible to see how application instances interact and get to the root cause of performance problems.
Finally, the application metrics extension to the sFlow standard and the implementation in hsflowd are still in the early stages. Please try them out and provide feedback. Any comments or suggestions regarding the sFlow metrics should be directed to the sFlow.org mailing list and comments or questions relating to the scripting API should be directed to the host-sflow mailing list.
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Asian Language Debate in Australia — at what price …
May 13th, 2012TONY ABBOTT’S plan to boost the study of Asian languages in schools would cost $1 billion to implement, according to a leading Asian languages educator.
On Thursday night, Mr Abbott said one of his key priorities, if elected, would be to increase the number of high school students studying foreign languages – particularly Asian languages – to 40 per cent within a decade.
”We are supposed to be adapting to the Asian century, yet Australians’ study of foreign languages, especially Asian languages, is in precipitous decline,” Mr Abbott said.
But the announcement raised eyebrows among the Labor Party, given that, in 2002, the Howard government axed a successful program that had doubled the number of students studying Asian languages.
The National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools strategy was scrapped eight years into its 12-year cycle.
The executive director of the Asialink and Asia Education Foundation, Kathe Kirby, said based on that program’s costs, Mr Abbott’s policy would cost about $100 million a year over 10 years.
”It will take very significant investment,” she said. ”Right back with NALSAS, when we doubled [the rates] in today’s monetary terms, that was an investment of $100 million a year … If we’re not talking something in that ball park we don’t do it.”
Mr Abbott said in his budget reply that since 2001 – the year before the scheme was scrapped – there had been a 21 per cent decline in students studying Japanese and a 40 per cent drop in students studying Indonesian. He did not offer a cost for the policy.
The School Education Minister, Peter Garrett, dismissed Mr Abbott’s policy, calling it a ”rehashed announcement” from the 2010 election.
”There were no details and no dollars, just an aspirational target and a vague intention.”
The number of students studying foreign languages has plummeted since the cuts, with just 12 per cent of year 12 students learning a foreign language.
The previous strategy had increased the number of students learning foreign languages to 25 per cent.
Ms Kirby said it was reassuring to see bipartisan support emerging for Asian languages.
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