Having an advanced degree in Linguistics and being involved in a number of volunteer activities, including the upcoming Crisis Camp NM, this story resonates in me.
While human translators were at the ready in Haiti, translation of written documents required the work of automated software. Fortunately for the rescue effort, Google, on top of pledging to donate $1 million, added Haitian Creole to its Google Translate service. Microsoft has done the same, introducing Creole into its proprietary Bing Translator. Spotlighted by certain automated translation needs in the face of the Haitian earthquake, scientists at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute are working on their own Creole translation application, a project that was originally scrapped in 1990.
via bigthink.com
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