Zababa, czech editor.

Q: A little bit about you.

A: My name is Sven and I come from Liberec, Czech Republic. I currently live in Germany where I studied linguistics and now work on the moribund Nǀuu language. I speak Czech (my mother tongue), but I also German, English, Afrikaans and Nǀuu.

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: A colleague of mine, an enthusiastic German pronouncer introduced me to Forvo on January 26th 2009 and I immediately got excited about it. I saw almost nothing in Czech on Forvo so I began building it up.

Q: What did you like most?

A: I like when people add Czech words they are familiar with but never heard them pronounced the native way. Think of Čapek’s word robot or the etymologically Czech pistol known all over the world. Often people add names of Czech celebrities or politicians they hear in the news – or the names of favourite musicians and their works. Think of Dvořák, Smetana or Janáček, composers who have their admirers all over the world. At Forvo you can hear the native sound of all of them. I remember how happy I was when Forvo notified me that there are pronunciations for the names of Scotch of Irish whiskeys I added because I never knew how to pronounce them correctly. That is a very nice service and I love to contribute to it.

I wonder if Forvo’s recordings could be used some day to shape the sound and pronunciation of computer programs designed to read texts or for speech recognition. Smart people got quite far with that in English already, but for other languages there are almost no resources to start with. Forvo would then be a good source for phoneticians and automatic speech analysis. I hope one day it’ll become really valuable. Not to think about it’s documentary character when decades have passed. We know our grandfathers did speak differently, but how did it actually sound like? With forvo we (actually our descendants) will see how a language has changed. That’s fascinating. Let’s hope Forvo will stay here for generations.

BTW: Zababa, Roll4Net and Skypi have just finished translating Forvo into Czech. Fantastic work!

1. mierda
2. Paella
3. Che Guevara
4. Te quiero
5. gracias
6. Hola
7. Te amo
8. Ibiza
9. Oaxaca
10. México

Reading the most popular posts of 2009 from the interesting blog Global by design, I´ve found one article about the need for a standard language change / choose icon. Many icons have become quite standard in the web world: rss icon, share icons, etc.. But when it comes to choose language every website create a new way of doing it. Sometimes is a flag, an world icon, a map or hundreds more.

There is now a new iniciative called Language Icon from OMC that proposes this icon to choose languages. What do you think about it? Does it make you to choose your language in a website?

The year is ending but we continue working hard and bringing new languages to Forvo. This time thanks to OziX for the Swedish translation, and Shady_arc and Eugeniavlasova for the Russian translation. We are working on more languages to be released soon: Dutch, German, Romanian and Chinese are on their way.

Do you think Forvo is useful? We hope so :) But here is a nice figure that confims that idea. Do you know how many time have been listened to the pronunciations on Forvo? Well, more than 25 million times. To be exact: 25.307.322.

Good news: We are very happy to announce the release of Forvo in Portuguese, Italian and French!

As promised by the end of the year we would have more languages available and here it is the first one. The delay until the very end of the year was not intentional anyway. ;)

We have to thank to the editors (Heracleum, spl0uf, emanuelJoab and Diônifer Alan) who have translated Forvo into these languages and also the rest of them who are making a great work in other languages too. Expect new languages in the next weeks, days, or even hours.

And remember, if you want to help to translate Forvo to more languages you just have to ask for it. We´ll set up a translator account for you in minutes.

Forvo supports the following manifesto:

A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

More info: Wiki

Portuguese speakers have always been very active at Forvo. They have just made their language to be the one with more pronunciations making English number 2 for the first time.

We hope to have soon a Portuguese version of Forvo, and not only portuguese but a dozen more languages too. Don´t wait too much for these new features and if you want to collaborate with any translation in your language you will also be able to do it. Contact us for more info.

Pleitecas, spanish editor.

Q: A little bit about you.

A: My name is Pedro. I´m an almost retired spaniard looking for developin my hobby, my comunication skills. I love nature and peace. I studied Geography. I´m sure we can be happy together if we are able to understand each other. We need a tool in order to traslate our feelings! I´m able to understand Spanish and written English, France and Italian, and a little bit of Romanian, Portuguese, Russian and Bulgarian.

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: I knew Forvo a year ago when a was looking for Bulgarian pronunciations.

Q: What did you like most?

A: What I like most is the possibility to record the MP3 pronunciations and listen to them wherever you are, until you are able to remember it. I like to put words together and build up phrases. That is the best!

I remember a book  I read when a was only a boy. The author is Ramon J. Sender and the title La tesis de Nancy (Nancy´s thesis). The story is about a study trip to Spain of a North American teenager trying to learn Spanish in Sevilla and a young gipsy with his own dialect-language different to regular Spanish as a teacher. Funny. I would like to recommend it all of you.

One of things we most like about Forvo is the oportunity to meet some incredible valuable people. That´s why we are starting a new section in this blog to introduce you to some of the editors that collaborate at Forvo. Snowcrocus, an english editor it´s the first one.

Q: A little bit about you.

A: I currently live in Florida, though hopefully I’ll be moving to Europe once I finish my doctorate. I grew up in Wisconsin, mostly in a tiny village with one business – a blacksmith. I’ve also briefly worked and/or gone to school in Germany, Peru, and France.

My background is anthropology/archaeology, and I currently do research in heritage conservation policy. Languages are kind of a hobby for me; I’ve studied Latin, German, French, Low German (Plattdeutsch), Russian, Swedish, and Spanish (in that order).

I even made up a language when I was 12 and taught it to a friend, so we could get in trouble with our teachers for speaking it in front of them. Unfortunately the only languages I can still speak are German and French, and I’m still working very hard to become fluent in French (which I find way more confusing than German!).

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: The French is what brought me to Forvo in the first place – looking for pronunciations of French words, especially things I couldn’t find in the dictionary or that have sounds I’m bad at distinguishing.

I’ve enjoyed doing pronunciations in English (often cringing when I hear my own voice afterward, though). Hopefully they’ll prove useful to someone along the way, as I’ve found the pronunciations by the French-speaking members so helpful, myself. After careful consideration, I’ve been forced to admit that English pronunciation is even more convoluted than French pronunciation…

Q: What did you like most?

A: Forvo has also been a great place to interact with other members, sharing information about dialects and discussing odd linguistic tid-bits. I enjoy learning about variations within English as much as I enjoy fiddling around with foreign languages, and Forvo is certainly a great forum for that.

In the following weeks we expect to bring you more Forvo “interviews”.