Reboot 9: Stephanie Booth

Posted on May 24, 2007 under blog ,

Stephanie Booth went from being teacher to a full time web consultant – “the exciting stuff that people are doing online” and will present at reboot a topic dear to my heart: being multilingual in an english oriented webworld.

Her talk is going to be: “While We Wait For The Babel Fish”

Which is probably why this one is *cough* over 50 minutes. ;)

Download MP3 (51:30 min, 12,9 MB)

Content:

there is no such things as an exact translation
why she is trying to bridge the language divide
internet gets rid of space but you stay sutck in your linguistic group, the example of “backwards” french sites because of not having the same kind of access
her translation site pompage.net
her ongoing interest about what happens around this area
relationship human beings have to their langauge(s) is different how the internet deals with languages
it is only a small amount of people which is comfortable with using more than one language but many people are able to understand a little bit
people do not relate to languages in stating yes or no in little boxes
the differences even inside one language, for example french-french, swiss.french and canadian-french
why she speaks english to other swiss and some “funny words” in french
the big question: how can me make it easier for those tools? what can we do to help this?
about blogging in more than one language and why she uses summaries
why it is bad that tools do not understand that there might be more than one language on a page
automatic translation and dictation tools – they are laughable now, but they are a step in the right direction and sometimes they do help already
the favorite topic about why you have to thinking early in the specs about localisation
conclusion: first we have to take on the language problems, and then we can gap cultural differences
and some geeking out about tools ;)

Some additional links from Stephanie:

my interview with Suw Charman about the multilingual web

my Zurich talk (with video, and actually, the collection of links to most of my interesting “language stuff”)

Here are things I’ve written over the last years relating to language (some of the posts in there are irrelevent to our concern here, like the ones that poke fun at typos in French newspapers)

In particular, you might want to have a look at:

BlogCamp: Multilingual Blogging Session

Multilingual Proposals (Reboot, BlogCamp)

Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit!

English Only: Barrier to Adoption

About the Swiss Blog Awards (SBAW)