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.

Thanks to our good friends at Lasai for these great t-shirts. We are making plans so you can get one too.

This summer part of the Forvo team will be visiting Los Angeles and San Francisco to establish partnerships with other tech companies, entrepreneurs and geeks ;)

We have also planned the first Forvo users meetup in the area. If you want to know more about these events planned for August and September just leave your comment, we´ll be giving more information soon in this blog and in our Facebook group.

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.

New languages come in pairs. We mentioned German in our latest post but also Dutch was released. It was an awesome work from more than 20 people that joined their effors to complete these translations. Thanks!

These are the other languages currently been translated: Finnish, Polish, Romanian, Hindi, Japanese, Danish and Hungarian. So we hope to have Forvo translated into your language soon!

Maximum speed at Forvo HQ. After ending the beta stage, now we are happy to announce the first steps of our long-waited API. We have opened a new site to give you more information about it and also to start receiving your pre-inscriptions. If you plan to make your site much interesing using Forvo pronunciations don´t wait to ask for your free API key.

We are quite excited about the news projects and posibilities that the API is giving to you. Pronunciations for your dictionary? A better Google Translate with real human pronunciations? Whatever you want.

Last week also saw the light the German translation of Forvo. We have translated, with your help, Forvo into 11 languages and 5 more are under development. Thanks!

It has been almost two years online collecting the greatest pronunciation database in the world so we decided last week to close the Beta stage of Forvo.

The last improvements were related to the recorder. Now it´s more accurate and sensitive. We would like to thank to the great people at avchat who help us a lot with it. For the people who felt the recorder a little buggy these are great news :)

The end of the Beta is not the end of our project! We keep working hard in new translations, features and of course the “really coming soon” API.

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.

Almost everyday we find a new article or post about Forvo, here are some recent highlights:

- BBC.co.uk, in Persian.
- Habrahabr, in Russian.

What about new languages? We are working on these translations, if you want to collaborate it will be really appreciated:

- German (91% translated)
- Dutch (95% translated)
- Romanian (46% translated)
- Hindi (60% translated)
- Polish( 58% translated)

You have also a new way to stay in touch with Forvo news, our brand new Google Buzz profile. See you there!

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!