In a recent article, linguist Gretchen McCulloch of WIRED magazine echoes PanLex’s series on radically inclusive machine translation. She notes that only a small number of languages have well-supported machine translation. Most of the world’s 7,000 languages have little or no machine translation support, including some with tens of millions of speakers. However, that could […]
Hidden in plain sight In 2010, I traveled to Los Angeles to meet thought leaders and funders, and raise awareness about the issue of plastic pollution – which at the time was a largely unknown problem, and one almost completely absent from the societal discussion and the mainstream media. At a fundraiser event, I happened […]
In the first two posts in this series, we elaborated our belief that all people should be able to use their native language to exercise human rights and have access to opportunity. We showed that machine translation technology currently falls far short of this goal, but that there are realistic ways to make progress. In […]