Translate/ Translation services online:

Facebook:  taps the community to translate pages for them:

• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/21/facebook-taps-users-to-create-translated-versions-of-site/
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/02/facebook-now-in-german-thanks-to-2000-generous-users/

Learning Foreign Languages

there are 5,000 active languages in the world

Trouble is that most foreign language courses offer English -to-foreign language lessons.  But, what if you native language is Polish?  To address this problem, many web2.0 sites have sprung up.  See the discussion from TechCrunch:  Learning a language the Web 2.0 way

From a business perspective, English is the number one language in the Second Language Acquisition industry - with 750 million learners according to the British Council.

Mobile language lessons:

Here is a unique company that is using mobile technology to deliver english lessons globally:   Urbanmobile

 Spanish

spanish - http://www.speakshop.com/

Miami spanish classes:  http://www.miamispanishclasses.com/

 Portuguese

DVD - as used by portuguese school in Brazil

http://aprovar.com/portugues.asp#port

 Portuguese - list of slang

Online Language lessons

Language learning online is picking up again. We already have sites like Mango Languages and LiveMocha which offer new interfaces on languages, and often social networking features. LingQ, offers vocabulary and grammar drills. Then in Europe you have FriendsAbroad, VoxSwap and the LearnItLists widget startup. Not to mention italki from China.  So now Babbel, the Berlin-based language learning startup which we wrote about in January and which appeared at our London TechCrunch Pitch! event, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from German investors Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin.

eLanguageSchool

http://elanguageschool.net/

This site provides detailed lessons and information on vocabulary and phrases, as well as grammar, and includes follow-up practices and exercises for further learning. The languages covered are Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Nearly all the content is free, with the exception of podcasts and other multimedia sessions.

LiveMocha Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.-based provider of online language education, has raised nearly $6 million in Series A funding led by Maveron Equity Partners, according to a regulatory filing. www.livemocha.com

Google Talk Gets One Step Closer To The Ultimate Babel Fish

Posted: 19 Dec 2007 06:54 AM CST

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Google now offers instant machine translation in Google Talk, a step on the road to the ultimate Babel Fish.

The new service is used by adding a translation bot to a Google Talk chat, for example adding en2zh@bot.talk.google.com provides a translation from English to Chinese. The bot can be used as a direct look up tool for a translation, or in a group chat for translation on the fly as part of a conversation. For a two way conversation two bots are required, one for the English to other language translation, and one for the other language back into English.

A full list of languages available (and codes) can be found on the Google Talk blog here. The service also supports translation from non-English languages to other non-English languages as well, for example French to German and back again.

Lets hope that unlike the Babel Fish in Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy that Google Talk doesn’t start any conflicts; given that the service is pulling data from Google Translate some of those translations may end up being rather interesting to say the least.