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!
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.
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”.
We have introduced a new lovely feature: translations for each word. Thanks to the Google Translate service, now from every word page you will see that word translated from the original language (more than 50 languages in google´s tool) to the interface language (spanish and english at this moment).
So if translations are not perfect blame Google :)
All Forvo members hope you will enjoy and learn more with this new feature.
