Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 7
Posts 1 - 7

Mit diesem Gadget kannst du Sprachbarrieren überwinden

(With this gadget you can overcome language barriers)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 7.8.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | translation
Summary | There is a new invention from China: an in-ear device that can directly translate speech. It lags three seconds behind real-time - plenty of time for silence to become awkward. It is also dependent on a wireless internet connection. So far it can translate these languages into Mandarin: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English, German.
Image Description | Getty images of three women with the German, Spanish, and Italian flag painted on their faces, as well as Getty images of a woman and a man using headphones together, buttons labeled with different languages, as well as GIFs of cats speaking French and Japanese and a film reference GIF (Anchorman).
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, male(s), text

Der Herr der Smileys

(The Lord of Smileys)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 29.7.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | computer programming, emojis, misunderstanding, translation
Summary | The Unicode chief, Mark Davis, assesses which new emojis make it into the Unicode which all major tech firms use. Anyone can propose an emoji but they have to argue why it is a globally significant symbol. They are then written into the Unicode which is a computer code that works for all languages. Tech firms then choose the font for the letters and emojis in which these symbols appear on their devices. Tech companies have chosen more similar emoji fonts over the last years to avoid misunderstandings between devices of different providers if the emojis are displayed differently.
Image Description | Portrait of the interviewee Mark Davis.
Image Tags | male(s)

Das steckt hinter Googles Sucht nach Innovationen

(This is behind Google's obsession with innovations)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 1.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, translation
Summary | Google is always on top of new trends in technology, usually they even set the trends. They are at a turning point right now: the past few years were a search for innovations under the header "mobile first" but now all innovations are geared towards improving artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of the biggest sub-projects of that is Google Translate. Thousands of people around the world are working on improving the translations in as many languages as possible. Users will even be able to take a picture of, say, a menu and have it translated on their smartphone.
Image Description | Image of Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Image Tags | Google, male(s)

Das Monster lebt

(The monster is alive)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 31.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | censorship, cyberbullying, Facebook, law, threat
Summary | Facebook is hiring thousands of new employees to battle cyberbullying on their platform and to remove offensive material as quickly as possible. But a couple thousand are not very many people to combat wrongdoings of 2 billion users. German politicians are trying to make Facebook comply with local laws about removing illegal content from the internet but Facebook is nowhere near fulfilling those requirements.
Image Description | A photograph of a man holding a smartphone showing the Facebook logo and the face of a monster.
Image Tags | Facebook, hand(s), logo, male(s), smartphone

Facebook-App soll das Gedankenlesen lernen

(Facebook app is supposed to learn mindreading)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 20.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | brain, Facebook, privacy, translation
Summary | Facebook is working on new technology to enable mind reading. This would enable users to type just by thinking and moreover possibly type in a foreign language they don't even speak. All this would be possible if we had sensors that could read brain waves and interpret them correctly. The developers at Facebook emphasize that only those thoughts would be read which are willingly shared by the user.
Image Description | Thinkstock image of two cyborgs.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Das steckt hinter Googles Sucht nach Innovationen

(This is behind Google's addiction for innovations)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 1.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, privacy, translation
Summary | Google is always after the most exciting innovations. Their main focus at the moment is on artificial intelligence assistants which can be operated conversationally. Because they are voice-activated, issues with privacy come up: is Google's AI assistant constantly listening in? Google is working on solutions for making privacy settings as customizable as possible. Another big focus is translation. Google translate can already operate in 100 languages and now users can even scan, say a restaurant menu, and get it translated right away.
Image Description | Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Image Tags | male(s)

Jeu capeschel nout!

(I don’t understand anything!)

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Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 8.6.2014
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, translation
Summary | Experts predict the digital extinction of ‘smaller’ languages online. The global lingua franca -particularly in the digital sphere- is English, and it will come to displace all other languages in the digital sphere. Many translation services (e.g. Skype translator) achieve better results when translating into English than into German for instance. Governments should fund the creation of online services in their national languages. The Welsh government has already set up a fund for the creation of Welsh online services while the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) has no such plans for the creation of Romansh online content.
Image Description | Screenshot of the movie Star Trek: Mr. Spock is holding a translation device.
Image Tags | male(s)

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