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!
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.
