It was weeks ago but we didn´t mention here. Greek, Japanese, Ukrainian, Finnish and Hungarian translations of Forvo are completed.

We are working on 10 more languages to release before the end of 2010, including Persian, Catalan, Romanian, Korean, Bulgarian, Turkish or Norwegian. If you feel you can help a bit on that you will be very welcome to the translation family.

An amazing project developed by Linguamon – Casa de les Lengües.

“In what country are the most languages spoken? How many languages are spoken in Germany? Where is Swahili an official language? How many dialects of Catalan are spoken in Catalonia? To answer all these questions, and many more besides, look no further than Living Maps, a resource that Linguamón – House of Languages has created, using state-of-the-art map processing technology, to help internet users find out all about the planet’s linguistic diversity.”

More information.

Three new languages available to browse Forvo, Danish, Hungarian and Hindi. The editors who have made this possible are Olfine, Detheltsort, Frankie, Komal_K, so thanks to them.

Maybe you think that we are only releasing new languages these days. Not at all!! :) We are almost done for the API final release. There are more than 40 developers pre-registered and we can´t wait to see what they have in mind to create with Forvo pronunciations.

And we are also readying a special tool that we hope you are going to love as much as we do. Prepared to be surprised.

Another big milestone in Forvo development: we are now releasing Forvo in Arabic. This is the first language we not only translate but adapt the layout to the right to left writing. Thanks to our dear editor jasmen who has guided us in all the translation process.

This is the amazing look of Forvo in Arabic but the best is that you check it online for yourself and don´t doubt to report any problem you find.

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!

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.