Metaglossia: The Translation World

The two tech reviewers who got to try Google Glass said they had "potential," which is one of those euphemistic words teachers use to describe C students, as to not hurt their parents' feelings. Both The Wall Street Journal's Spencer E. Ante and The New York Times's David Pogue used the p-word twice in their reviews of the not yet finished project, which isn't a bad thing, but didn't sound that good to us either. Since this reminded us of something an educator might say of his or her developing student, we asked a teacher source of ours about these terms, which she tells us are called "teacher code." In other words: A term educators use to soften the blow about struggling students. In fact, both Ante and Pogue peppered their reviews with hedged terms like these, which we didn't quite know what to make of. We had her translate that code.

It’s tough being a rich and famous fashion mogul. You’ve seen the best of the world. You have exclusive access to private events. You have expensive tastes — as you should.
And then all of a sudden, Google hands you a fancy new toy.
That has been the case for famed designer Diane Von Furstenburg, who has been playing with Google Glass, the tech company’s wearable augmented reality glasses hardware. Von Furstenburg (or DVF, for short) used them to document her days in the lead up to New York Fashion Week, the premier runway event of the haute couture world, where designers the world round come to show off their new clothing lines.
DVF basically used Glass as a personal diary in the days leading up to her runway show, capturing the sights of Manhattan along with showing the hardware off to her suite of models. It’s also the first actual video that’s been shot using the glasses — unlike the highly criticized, completely produced promotional video that showed what Google imagined Glass would be able to do someday.

La mise à jour de l'application Google Traduction pour Android, sortie le 9 août, propose la traduction de textes photographiés avec un smartphone. La traduction, disponible en 64 langues, s'obtient en surlignant le texte capturé. La fonctionnalité conversation audio, introduite en 2011, est quant à elle toujours proposée dans 17 langues, pour une traduction qui peut être énoncée en 40 langues.

Dans un billet publié sur son blog au mois d'avril, Google annonçait que translate.google.com comptait plus de 200 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels (plus encore si l'on compte les utilisateurs de Chrome, des applications mobiles et de YouTube). Près de 92% des utilisateurs se situent hors des États-Unis. Selon ce même billet, l'outil est surtout utilisé par les voyageurs. La compagnie a vu son trafic mobile quadrupler d'une année sur l'autre.