Scandinavians are great with languages, but Finn-Swede smoccahontas isn’t speaking any language in this video, even while it sounds like it. She’s just making up most of the words and make it sound like she is. Having travelled through almost all of these countries, I’ve to admit that she really nails it.
Idiots, racists, and old-fashioned xenophobes took to social media this past weekend to express their disgust with Coca-Cola. The international beverage company had the audacity to run an ad during the Super Bowl that featured people singing "America the Beautiful" in different languages. This, of course, was unacceptable to those who believe that the U.S. should be an English-only zone. And these mouthbreathing dunderheads would’ve felt right at home in states like Iowa and Nebraska during World War I.
Twitter’s six-second video sharing app Vine is making a play for more markets, announcing today that its apps for iOS and Android have been translated into 19 new languages, plus two more just on Android. Also available on Windows Phone and sporting a user base of over 40 million, a blog post also mentions Vine is working on ways to highlight popular clips on a country-by-country basis. Many of the Vine’s we’ve seen work in any language, but we suppose opening up access to the app to more people will only increase the creativity seen. Now, who can translate “Ooooh, kill ’em” into Polish?
Avid users of Babbel’s iPad apps, feel free to give your tablet a rest. The full versions of the Spanish, English and French learning apps have arrived on the iPhone, with more languages to follow. If you’d rather not shell out the $22 fee for a three-month subscription, however, you’d better download the free basic apps soon, as they’ll only be around until October. Meanwhile, linguaphiles running Android hardware will get their chance to compare the service against rival offerings when the apps hit Google Play later this year.
Source: iTunes
It’s been a busy couple months for the folks over at Mozilla. The company rolled out a new logo, launched the first Firefox OS handset and shipped version 23 of its popular web browser. Still, Mozilla shows no signs of slowing down — it just announced a new version of Firefox for Android Beta, which is ready for download and testing. The update brings a raft of new features and improvements, including WebRTC support for real-time web communications, a new Reader and Reading List with enhanced functionality, NFC Bump to share URLs on compatible phones, a Quickshare menu to share content with other apps and additional languages (Catalan-Spanish, British-English and Swedish) for a total of 24. Moreover, Firefox Beta for Windows, OS X and Linux gains a tweaked Browser Console to help web developers — phew!
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Mobile
Source: Mozilla blog
Though we know the real longest word in English takes three and a half hours to pronounce
Say you have some scribbles in an unfamiliar language you want to translate. Better find a native speaker. Or you could just turn to Google Translate, which now supports handwritten translation in 45 different languages.
Rosetta Stone costs $500? Thank you, no. There are too many free language-learning resources on the Internet to warrant that sort of expense. Here are just a few that will cost you nothing but time and effort.
Hello. Hola. Bonjour. Ni Hao. We all say things differently because each language has their own words. Like, duh. But what about how different languages think animals sound? We’re not exactly saying words as much as we are simply enunciating simple sounds and yet, different languages have their own take on each animal sound too.
Flock, Bump Technologies’ photo-sharing app, has just added localization for 15 different languages, gaining it potential international appeal. Founded by CEO David Lieb, Flock is essentially a photo-sharing app that collects photos taken within a certain location and remembers who you were with thanks to that aforementioned geo-tracking data. It’s similar to Highlight or even Color, except the app doesn’t need to be open. Instead, a push notification is sent to all users in attendance, giving them a choice to create a group album of shared photos.
Lieb tells us that it’s picked up some notable user stats since the app’s debut in July last year. Apparently more than 60 percent of the photos that Flock recommends are actually shared, and push notification response rates are around 40 to 50 percent. He also revealed that the average user gets around 33 photos from friends every week, while active users share 25 to 40 percent of all photos taken. It’s no wonder then that the company aims to widen its reach with added localization — after all, we know how well that’s worked for other social networks. Head on past the break to see Flock in action, or just download it yourself from the source. Added languages are iOS-only, with the Android version remaining monolingual for now.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile
Source: Flock (iTunes), Flock