If so, which resources do you use, and for what language pairs? What have you learned or discovered works well for you?
Why would you search in a foreign language? Well, perhaps you need to find out about the latest news from a particular country's point of view? Or you might need to keep up with the latest developments in your professional area, but the resources are not available in your own native language. Or you might have a different case scenario? Please share.
I'm specifically looking for cross-language information retrieval tools (search engines, multilingual dictionaries, repositories, digital libraries, etc.) that you may have found particularly useful. In a broader sense, I'm interested in strategies to get around language barriers in information-seeking. Please share a link for a relevant technology, resource, research, and/or your experiences. Much obliged!
I'm interested in a wide range of multilingual and multicultural situations broadly across the globe. However, my specific interests for this fall term are tied to the following 13 languages (as being accessible to English speakers): Arabic, Cantonese, Croatian, Dutch, Flemish, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Maltese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish. And conversely, the situations where English materials need to be accessed by the speakers of those 13 languages.
Any insights?
Any input would be much appreciated.
have you investigated the open parallel corpus ?
http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/
OPUS is a growing collection of translated texts from the web.
Aniruddh Siddh, thank you for your suggestion. Have you seen ontologies implemented in a search tool with an interface for a lay user, or are you speaking from a developer's point of view?
Christian Bauckhage, thanks for your note. Yes, Google-Translate seems to be the way to go nowadays. Is that the only MT system you'd opt for? And does it (or any others) work relatively well for your purposes, in the language pairs you work with? Just curious. Thanks again!
if you have any interest in Multilingual Agriculture Ontology, you can access to the FAO Agrovoc Ontology
http://aims.fao.org/agrovoc
I only use, and heartily recommend in my textbook and courses the technique mentioned by Christian, together with Google Scholar for research reports.
We live today in a world where every researcher has access to the wonderful wealth of material available in foreign languages. Thus we are now able to see and are compelled to consult the wider picture.
(In this field, we do not have to worry about the issues you study of the translation of deception, uncertainty, credibility, and emotions.)
The language pairs concerned are English and the major producers of research.
Don't fret about career: we still need careful, refined translations of selections of foreign language material we need to study in great detail!
Dear Victoria,
That is an interesting question and a rather difficult one for me to answer. I constantly use and look for resources and material in different languages but I can't give you the name of a specific site.
If you start looking for information in the pertinent target language, you will find all the sites you need in that language. If I want something in French, I surf in French, the same goes for German, Spanish, etc.
I hope this answers you question and good luck.
Sarah
I use Christian's approach of using Google translate for languages I do not speak. For English and German, I just repeat the search in each language and develop a path for each language separately depending on the answers that come up. Sometimes a concept I discover in one language translates well into the other and that might spark a new search in the second language. However, often answers are also culturally bound. For example, when searching for local medical recommendation, those are different not just in trade names but also because of different traditions.
Thank you, Annika Hinze, for your thoughts. I like your observation. I agree that query formulation can be very tricky and anyone searching across languages often has to shift between cultures as well. The question for system developers here is how to support a searcher with only passing knowledge of the target language in selecting the right choices for queries. The search results need to make sense and be ultimately useful, relevant, and accurate to the searcher's true information need.
The question needs to be addressed from technical, linguistic and cultural aspects and in future a synergy needs to be evolved to reach to a much advanced meta search across languages. presently, we don not have any sound system available except Google or Google like mechanism which helps us to retrieve different words or phrases from databases available in different languages.
However, I may not be updated with the developments in the field of Language translation and its application in web based retrieval which need attention of diverse specialist across the globe.
The following may be of interest:
http://port.modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/languages/fr
http://port.modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/languages/fr/virtual
http://guides.library.duke.edu/content.php?pid=18017&sid=122884
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mGGIh3giyX4J:waset.org/publications/9247/finding-authoritative-researchers-on-academic-web-sites+'Most+authoritative+french+academic+sites'&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
http://libguides.brown.edu/content.php?pid=328549&sid=3077902
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Mathematics