Daily Archives: Wednesday, March 27, 2013

  • Online dictionary Linguee adds new languages

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech

    Canada’s La Presse reports that Linguee has just launched new language pairs – German-English, Spanish-French and Portuguese-French – for its online dictionary.

    Since its creation Linguee has recorded more than a million search requests from around the world. For the Linguee team the application can be very useful within a professional, academic or private context to understand the contents of an email or a text in a foreign language, as well as current expressions, technical terms or the usual wording of greetings or salutations.

    According to Linguee’s founder and CEO Gereon Frahling, its “servers have roamed the internet and have analysed and evaluated billions of multi-lingual texts”.

    Hat tip: Richard McCarthy

  • Today is Document Freedom Day

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    The last day of March each year is Document Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of open standards for document and information exchange.

    In 30 countries around the world, activists from more than 50 groups are hosting events from Brussels to Nicaragua to Taiwan.

    DFD2013 banner
    DFD – an annual celebration of open standards

    Open standards are crucial to ensure that different computer systems can work together and users can access documents irrespective of the computing platform or device they use.

    Sam Tuke, Campaign Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe said: “Markets for digital products such as audio books and cloud documents have grown dramatically. Open standards let users break free from vendor lock-in and corporate control.”

    This year’s campaign focuses on web-streaming technologies, such as Adobe’s closed, proprietary and insecure Flash. “This time, we are encouraging people to switch to HTML5 technologies,” said FSFE Community Manager Erik Albers.

    Do you use open document formats? Examples include HTML (what the web is built upon), Open Document Format (the native file format used by office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice), PDF and plain text (.txt).