Abstract
Many of the changes that condition cultural and linguistic diversity today are inseparable from the co-evolution of technology and humans. This chapter focuses on linguistic diversity and assesses developments to that end at the intersection of language and technology. This is an area that has recently experienced a historical infrastructural shift: from a monolingual-only to a multilingual-ready Internet. Take the Web giants Wikipedia and Google as examples, which currently support about 300 languages, and compare this to traditional broadcasting media such as the BBC World Service, which currently serves 28 languages. This shift has allowed more people to become new Internet users, most of whom demand support for languages other than English. Figure 9.1 shows not only the contrast in the world’s Internet population between 1996 and 2012, but also the most recent reality: almost 90 percent of all Internet users live outside of the US, with a large proportion of Internet traffic generated outside North America in 2012.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alvestrand, HT 1998, ‘IETF Policy on character sets and languages, network working group, Trondheim’, Available from: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2277. txt [Accessed June 12, 2012].
Bellos, D 2011, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, Faber & Faber, New York.
Clark, A 1997, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Press/Bradford Books, MIT Cambridge, MA/London.
Dunne, K 2006, Perspectives on Localization (American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series XIII), John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam & Philadelphia.
Gillespie, TL 2013, ‘The relevance of algorithms’, in Media Technologies: Paths Forward in Social Research, eds. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski & Kirsten Foot, MIT Press, Boston.
Golumbia, D 2009, The Cultural Logic of Computation, Harvard University Press, Boston.
Gutjahr, R 2010, ‘Interview with Franz Josef Och.’ Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThQedY-H4Q [Accessed July 18, 2010].
Haddad, G 2010, ‘Facebook Global Strategy.’ Keynote presented at LocWorld, Seattle: October 7.
Hardy, Q & Perlroth, N 2012, U.S. ‘Jury hands Google mixed verdicts on Oracle’, The New York Times, May 7.
Hess, C & Ostrom, E 2006, Understanding Knowledge as Commons: From Theory to Practice, edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, MA: MIT Press, Cambridge.
High, R 2012, The Era of Cognitive Systems: An Inside Look at IBM Watson and How It Works, IBM Redbooks, New York.
Hildebrandt, M & Gaakeer, J 2013, Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives, Springer, Heidelberg.
Hutchins, WJ 1986, Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future, Ellis Horwood, Chichester.
Hutchins, WJ & Somers, H 1992, An Introduction to Machine Translation, Available from: http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/IntroMT-TOC.htm [Accessed April 30, 2009].
Kittler, F 2003, ‘Code’, in Software Studies, ed. Matthew Fuller, MIT Press, Boston, pp. 40–48.
Leyden, J 2010, ‘Turkish pranksters load Facebook Translate with swears: The rudeness of crowds’, The Register, July 29, Available at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/facebook_translation_turkey_prank/ [Accessed August 8, 2010].
Lopez, A 2008, ‘Statistical machine translation’, ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 40, no. 3, http://bit.ly/gmCplA [Accessed May 30, 2009].
Mitchell, T 1997, Machine Learning, McGraw Hill, New York.
Mounin, G 1964, La machine á traduire: histoire des problèmes linguistiques, Mouton, The Hague.
Petzold, T 2012a, ‘36 million language pairs’, Cultural Science, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 106–19.
Petzold, T 2012b, ‘36 million language pairs — How to unleash the true momentum of knowledge’, TED Talk, Berlin, November 23, 2012.
Razavian, NS & Vogel, J 2009, ‘The Web as a platform to build machine translation resources’, Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, Available from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1499233& dl=ACM [Accessed January 10, 2010].
Schneider, R 2003, ‘Statistische übersetzung mit Paralleltexten: Franz Josef Och mischt die MÜ-Branche auf’, Available at http://www.uebersetzerportal.de/nachrichten/n-archiv/2003/2003-09/2003-09-17.htm [Accessed August 2, 2009].
Tabuchi, H 2011, ‘Facebook wins relatively few friends in Japan’, New York Times, January 9, 2011, Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/ 10/technology/10facebook.html?_r=3&pagewanted=2 [Accessed January 20, 2011].
Turing, AM 1950, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, MindLIX, 236.
Weaver, W 1949, ‘Translation’, in Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, eds. WN Locke & AD Booth, John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 15–23.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Thomas Petzold
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Petzold, T. (2015). Human-Algorithmic Scaffolding. In: de Been, W., Arora, P., Hildebrandt, M. (eds) Crossroads in New Media, Identity and Law. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491268_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491268_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50444-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49126-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)