Now You're Speaking *Your* Language.

Yesterday's discussion about language translation on-the-fly (make sure you read the <A href="javascript:void(0)">comments) is taking a new turn. Brent Ashley (he who figured out how I could provide an abridged RSS feed for my site) is taking his fascinating BlogChat tool to a whole new level with language translation. Bear witness:

"I've been playing with realtime translation with BlogChat. I'm at a pretty early proof-of-concept stage, but have used it to good effect already. Here's a capture of a session:

It's simple to use and quite fast. I've got a whole bunch of ideas of how to build a useful translating chat. Time to leap into the conversation, I guess!"

This is great news, and kudos to Brent for this work. Of course, my next question is how do we get on-the-fly translation into news aggregators, but I'm sure we're a ways off from that.

[The Shifted Librarian]

While I'm on my TTS kick, if this could also read you the phrases in the other language, it could help you to learn it much faster, especially if the translator transliterated as well as translated the phrases entered.

1:17:52 AM    

Is it just me, or do other people think that XML feeds like RSS can help make information more accessible to people with disabilities? What about outliners? [Scripting News]

It's not just you. Having a custom browser that handles text to speech interpreting the XML, or an outline reader that do the same would be fantastic. Having a CSS set up that adds inflections as it hits punctuation, headlines etc would help tremendously as well.

1:15:59 AM