Category Archives: Language

Of “Cloud brainstorming” and the falling of language barriers

Business, Language, Technology, , , , , ,

Twitter is rapidly changing the way we communicate, and different people use it in different ways. A few days back, as I was going through the some tweets, I was quite impressed by the way Anand Mahindra (Managing Director of Mahindra&Mahindra and an MBA from Harvard) was using it.

Anand was participating in a CEO conference and asked twitterers to send him some ideas regarding some plausible and implausible developments in business over the next decade. He got several ideas which prompted him to say “Prolific&excellent inputs fr which I’m grateful…It’s ‘cloud’ brainstorming lk cloud computing.Will retweet some….” (I  like the expression “cloud brainstorming“)

One plausible idea that he retweeted was “barriers fall completely using real-time translators revolutionizing 1-to-1 commerce”. This caught my attention, as language translation is part of my daily life and fired up my imagination. Image what would happen if I could talk in my mother-tongue to anyone, anywhere in the world.

I lived in a multi-lingual atmosphere in India till a few years back, but technology was not available for real-time translation(RTT) at that time. Even though I had seen my East Asian classmates in US using the translators to aid their studies, my most interesting personal RTT experience came during my apartment hunting days in Shanghai.

During my apartment search,for some reason, my non-Chinese friend accompanied me to a property agent. My friend knew only basic Mandarin, and we were getting stuck at several points, unable to communicate our thoughts. We even tried sign language with limited success. Fortunately,the property agent  was very internet-savy. She quickly typed something on her computer and then pointed to the screen. We realised that she was using Google translator to communicate with us. Even though many of the translations were hilarious, from the context of the situation we could understand what she wanted to tell us. Once I understood that, I typed in my response in English and used the tool to translate to Mandarin – Real-Time Translation at it’s best.

Currently I am in a German speaking environment and I use some of the online translators daily – Yahoo Babel Fish, Google translate. But the difficulty is that I have to type in each word in these translators.  This cannot be avoided while reading a German book, but hated it when I had to copy and paste whole webpages to one of these translators. That was till I learned about the features in Google tool bar.

What Google tool bar does is to automatically translate the entire webpage to the desired language. This comes in very handy when I have to get some information from a German website that doesn’t have an English version. Take an example of the official Switzerland Weather website – http://www.meteosuisse.admin.ch/web/de/wetter/detailprognose.html . If you are on a German page and have a Google Tool bar, the toolbar will ask you which language you would like to translate it to. There are several languages available, including Hindi, Chinese and Greek. Google Tool Bar

In fact, Google’s subsidiary YouTube is also using this tool for translating the titles and descriptions of videos. Even though the translation is not perfect, I believe that it is rapidly evolving.

This brings us back to the idea that came out of “Cloud brainstorming” – will language barriers fall? I believe that it has already started falling and if technology can be developed for Real-time voice translation, the “linguistic barriers” will one day be completely demolished. The same way internet demolished the “information barriers“. The implications of this will be enormous. What do you think?

PS: Will someone design a face mask that prevents “Swine Flu” and also do voice translation?

What is in a name?

Custom, Language, Tradition, , , , ,

Roman Polanski, Polish film director, has been in the daily news here in Switzerland because of his arrest and subsequent imprisonment. After a point, the news became stale but it raised my curiousity about his name. I asked myself,  “why do most Polish surnames end in – ski/cki/dzki ? ” The answer to this question led me to some interesting cultural learnings(?!).

In Polish language, “ski/cki/dzki”(masculine) or “ska/cka/dzka” (feminine) are adjectives that mean one of these – of/from/nobility. So, Kowalski means “of Blacksmith(Kowal)” and Bradowski means “lord of Bradow”. So Polanski might mean “of Poland”.  My curiosity now increased and I started looking for similarities in other languages. And I started with Russian names.

The common Russian names end in “ov, ev” for men and “ova, eva” for women. Apparently these mean son and daughter respectively. Hence the names like Kasparov, Gorbachev and Medevedev for men and Kournikova, Sharapova and Dementieva for women.

Then I remembered what a Dutch friend told about names from Netherlands. Many of the Dutch surnames start with a Van(of/from) and de(the). Examples – Van Gogh(meaning – from Gogh), de Groot(the large one).

The funny story behind these Dutch names is that, before Napoleon annexed Netherlands, Dutch did not necessarily have surnames. When Napoleon forced them to have surnames, the Dutch chose names to confuse or make fun of the French rulers. For example, according to Wikipedia, the surname Rotmensen means “Rotten people” and Naaktgeboren means “born naked“.

But two very interesting naming traditions come from Africa. In one of these traditions from Ghana, children are given one of the days of the week as a name. For example, Ghana’s first President Khwane Nikrumah was born on a Saturday and hence has “Khwane(Saturday)” in his name. The “Kofi” in ex-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stands for Friday(Thanks to Abhi for this information).

The second tradition comes from the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert(remember the hilarious movie series – the Gods must be crazy?). They have an exclamation/clicking sound in their names. For example, the name of the protagonist in the movie, “the Gods must be crazy”, is Nǃxau(Try to pronounce it). Watch a video from the movie here.

That brings us to Indian names. The north-Indian names follow the pattern of a first,middle and a last name. But names become somewhat complex in South India. The order of name changes a bit and it usually in this order – Father’s name, First name and Last name. In some cases, there is also the name of the place of origin. Take the case of one of the former prime ministers, P.V. Narasimha Rao. The full name is Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao.

South Indians encounter this name issue when they go abroad. For people not familiar with these long names, it is quite difficult to pronounce them. So, to make their life easy, these names are shortened. Haven’t you noticed a “Krishnan” becoming Kris, “Laxmanan” becoming “Lux”, “Gomathi Sundaram” becoming “Gomez” …..and a “Madhavan” becoming Maddy?

After all, what is in a name? 🙂

PS: Don’t miss a funny video from Stand Up comedian Russel Peters here.

Source information – Wikipedia

My keyboard troubles

Language

One of the obvious difficulties that we face while moving to a non-english speaking country is the language. This difficulty can manifest itself in different ways and can sometimes take us by total surprise. On my arrival in Switzerland, little did I know that a small surprise was waiting for me in the office.

On my first day at office, as I glanced at my official computer and keyboard, I realised that it was a Swiss keyboard and had extra German and French alphabets on it. In order to accomodate them, several other characters had to be moved around and some keys could be used to enter 3 different characters(with the help of “Shift” and “Alt Gr” keys). I mentally prepared myself to adjust to this new reality. But there was one key difference that I overlooked.

As I started working on the computer, I noticed that something was wrong when I typed the following sentence, “Yesterday I arrived in Switzerland”. It actually came on the screen as “Zesterdaz I arrived in Swityerland”. I usually don’t have to look at the keyboard while typing and I initially thought that I had pressed the wrong keys. Then when I looked at the keyboard, I realised what that small surprise was – the position of the  keys “Z” and “Y” were interchanged. Apparently, “Z” is very frequently used in German language whereas “Y” is seldom used. Hence the German speaking countries adapted the “QWERTZ” keyboard as against the “QWERTY” keyboard that is used in most english speaking countries. (By the way, China also uses the “QWERTY” keyboard with extra Mandarin characters). 

Swiss keyboard
Swiss keyboard

Now that I realised this problem, I started to consciously look at the keyboard while typing. Soon, my fingers started to hit the right keys and I managed to get my official work done without much “alphabetical” troubles. But this problem revisited me as I came back home and started using my personal laptop, which has a “QWERTY” keyboard. When I typed the sentence “Yesterday I arrived in Switzerland”, it appeared as “Zesterdaz I arrived in Swityerland”. The reason? Perhaps the subconscious mind continued to think that I am still using the “QWERTZ” keyboard and instructing my fingers accordingly. After some effort, my mind got itself back to the “QWERTY” mode only to switch to the “QWERTZ” mode next morning.

The next day and almost every day after that, the problem from the first day repeated itself in the office and at home.It is annoying to have to consciously think about these two alphabets, but  I have slowly become used to it. And the only good thing about this is that I am about to finish writing a short anecdote about “Z” and “Y”(who would have thought that I will be writing about alphabets?  🙂 ).