Porque hace mucho que no pongo nada musical. Porque si pongo algo más en Tumblr, me echan. Porque España ha vuelto a hacer el ridículo en Eurovisión. Porque sí.

It doesn’t have any much sense without an explanation, but well, there it goes.

There are dozens of machine translators on the web, but probably none of them is as used as Google Translate. This does not necessarily mean that this machine translation is the best one created, but it is a good choice for someone who is looking for a free translator. Of course, we should always bear in mind that a machine is never as precise  as a human, so we can never totally rely on the translation given. There are always quite a lot of mistakes, especially in long sentences and texts.

To begin with this article,  I think it is quite interesting to know a little bit more about machine translation, so before continuing reading, you should take a look at this article I wrote some time ago. As I assume that you already know a little bit about machine translation, I will start talking about Google Translate.

Google Translate is a free statistical machine translator*, obviously provided by Google.

What I find more interesting about this translator is its multiple possibilities. We are able to translate words and phrases in a moment to almost any language we want. We can see the languages available here (57):

But this is not the only interesting part of this translator. One thing I find interesting is the fact that, once the word is translated, we can click into a button to listen to how the word is pronounced. And if we still are not able to understand the word perfectly, we can click into “Read phonetically” (only available in some languages like Armenian or Bulgarian) and Google Translator will give us an easier way to read the word. For example, “къща” is “house” in Bulgarian. As we are probably not able to read those type of letters, Google Translator will give us this: “kŭshta”, which will probably make our reading much easier.

Another good facility in the website is that we can have a keyboard in our screen. By clicking , this is what we will get:

We can move this digital keyboard through the screen and place it where we prefer. It is really useful when our keyboard does not work well on we prefer to use just the mouse.

New facilities have been added into this translation, and the one I most liked is the “suggestions” of the translation. When you translate a word, for example “casa”, from Spanish into English (“home”), there is now an option to click into the translated word, home, and Google Translate will show us more options to the translation. I think it is easier to understand with a screenshot:

I just clicked into “home”, and that was what I got. Google gave me more option to the translation. Of course, I also got a list of other possible translations for the word “casa”:

I think I have already mentioned the most interesting things about Google Translate, but you should take a look for yourself if you really want to learn to use this tool correctly. There are many possibilities and translations are quite good, so I really recommend you to go and take a look at it.

To end up, I will add just one more thing, and it is the free iPhone/android application. I strongly recommend it because it is a very easy way to always have a translator with you, and with the application, you will have the same possibilities as you have in the web, with some new options. For example, you are able to favourite a translation, so you can take a fast look at it whenever you want, and you can speak through the microphone and the translator will interpret what you are saying, in order to translate it. This is how the application looks like for iPhones:

* Statistical Machine Translator: according to Wikipedia, SMT “is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contrasts with the rule-based approaches to machine translation as well as with example-based machine translation.”

References:

• Google Translate (07:06, 6 May 2011). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16.40, May 6, 2011, from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate
• Statistical Machine Translator (21:47, 17 March 2011). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17.03, May 6, 2011, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation
• Google Translate. In Apple iTunes. Retrieved 17.39, May 6, 2011, from: http://itunes.apple.com/es/app/google-translate/id414706506?mt=8
• Inside Google Translate. In Google Translate. Retrieved 17.45, May 6, 2011, from: http://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/

CORPUS

What is a corpus?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a corpus is “a collection of written or spoken material in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of linguistic research”.

The plural word to corpus is usually “corpora”.

What are they used for?

They are used to store words, whose features can be analyzed by means of tagging and use of concordancing programs, and they help studying linguistic competence. They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on a specific universe.

Types of corpora

There are quite a lot of different types of corpora, as they can contain written or spoken language. The “General Corpora” consist of general texts, texts that do not belong to a single text type, subject field, or register. When the texts are all taken from a dialect or from a subject area, we can also call them “Sublanguage Corpora”.

BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

I have chosen this corpus for my article because I believe it has a great importance. It was the one that most attracted me when I took a look at different lists of corpora.

What is the British National Corpus?

According to the British National Corpus’ website itself, “the British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written”.

The biggest part of the collection is written (90%), that includes extracts of different document such as national newspapers or university essays, but the spoken part is important too, which consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations and spoken language collected in different contexts.

When was it created?

Although it wasn’t finished until 1994, it started being built 3 years before, in 1991.

What sort of corpus is it?

1. Monolingual: Because it only uses one language, and it is British Language. This doesn’t mean that foreign words cannot appear.
2. Synchronic: It covers BE of the late 20th Century, and not the historical development that produced it.
3. General: It doesn’t include just one style, but different fields, genres and register. As mentioned before, it includes not only written language as some other corpora, but also spoken.
4. Sample: Very long texts are sampled into 45,000 words, which allows a wider coverage of text within the 100 million limit.

A quick look at the British National Corpus website

This is a screenshot of the website (click in the image to see it bigger).

This is how the Corpus works when we are trying to look for references from a particular word. First of all, we have to write the word we are looking at in the box where it says “Search the Corpus”. In this case, I decided to write a very simple and common word: house.

Once we’ve written our word, we just have to click on “Go” and we will get up to 50 examples, as seen here:

As I have already shown, it is very easy to look for a word, so you should just try yourself and discover new things about this interesting Corpus!

References:

• Corpora (2011). In Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved 20.07, April 1, 2011, from: http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0181220#m_en_gb0181220
• A Brief Introduction Of Corpus (2009). In Slideshare. Retrieved 20.30, April 1, 2011, from: http://www.slideshare.net/yaoyao112358/a-brief-introduction-of-corpus
• Text Corpus (22 March, 2011). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20.40, April 1, 2011, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_corpus
• About the BNC (January 2010). In British National Corpus’ website. Retrieved 21.04, April 1, 2011, from: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml
• What is a Corpus? (1998). In Essex.ac.uk. Retrieved 22.34, April 1, 2011, from: http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/w3c/corpus_ling/content/

Although it might seem that these are not many languages, in fact French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese represent around 93% of the Romance language speakers in the world, which, as far as I am concerned, is quite a lot.

In 2009, more language pairs were added: English-German, English-Russian, English-Romanian, English-Polish, English-Czech, English-Greek, English-Turkish, English-Chinese, English-Japanese, English-Korean and English-Arabic, but they are still in progress of being finished.

The dictionary that WordReference uses as a resource is Oxford Dictionary, which contains around 100,000 words and sentences with more than 200,000 translations in each dictionary (English-Spanish, English-French…), but for people who want even more, there are larger dictionaries available (Oxford Unabridged and Concise dictionaries) for a subscription of 45USD per year (around 30EUR).

For those who might think that this online dictionary can only translate some words and sentences into other languages, I must say they are totally wrong. WordReference can do much more than that, as it is also a monolingual dictionary that gives definitions of words. This is an example, which I made by writing “casa” (which means “house” in Spanish) and then clicking into “Español: definición”:

I wrote some numbers in the screenshot to try to explain everything that appears quite clearly. If you wish to see the complete page, just click here.

1. By clicking there, we can listen to the word “casa”, so we know exactly how it is pronounced.

2. This is telling us that “casa” is not only “house” as we thought, but that it is also some form of the verb “casar”. It explains which form it is and it gives us the chance to see the conjugation of the verb.

3. This is the source of the information. WordReference took all that data from the Diccionario de la lengua española, Espasa-Calpe.

4. Here we have the definition of the word “casa”, as a noun. This is just a part of everything that appears when you enter the word, as there are 24 definitions of the noun and many others of the verb.

Anyway, I would like to take a deep look at this, as it is one of the most important features of WordReference:

Those who have already used WordReference will probably know what this is, but for those who don’t, these are links to the WordReference Forum. What is it for? Well. Sometimes the dictionary cannot really help us as we are looking for a very specific word, in a very specific context, so WordReference webmasters decided to create a forum where real people could help us with our questions.

This forum is exactly what makes WordReference special and different from other online dictionaries. If we cannot find the word or the expression we are looking for, we just have to enter the forum, register and ask the more than 25,000 users what it means or what the translation should be like. We can also find very useful what we see in the screenshot, which is questions other people made related to the word we are looking for.

For all this, and the fact that we can also look for synonyms, antonyms and so on, WordReference is one of the best online dictionaries available from my point of view. If you wish to start knowing it by yourself, just click on the banner!

References:

• WordReference. In WordReference.com/es. Retrieved 16.09, March 13, 2011, from: http://www.wordreference.com/es/
• WordReference. In WordReference.com. Retrieved 16.28, March 13, 2011, from: http://www.wordreference.com/
• WordReference.com. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17.06, March 13, 2011, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordReference.com
• WordReference.com. In Wikipedia, La Enciclopedia Libre. Retrieved 17.09, March 13, 2011, from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordReference.com
• Casa. In WordReference.com. Retrieved 18.30, March 13, 2011, from: http://www.wordreference.com/definicion/casa

Aupa Donosti eta aupa Amara Berri!

Esta simplificación del jeroglífico se usaba sobre todo en textos administrativos y religiosos, aunque el jeroglífico parecía seguir considerándose más sagrado. A pesar de todo, si nos ponemos a mirar las diferencias entre la escritura hierática y la jeroglífica, nos daremos cuenta de que apenas hay diferencias a parte de la simpleza. Los signos hieráticos corresponden exactamente con los jeroglíficos, por lo que la única diferencia es visual: la escritura hierática es mucho más simple y se escribe en cursiva (por sencillez). Aunque podríamos pensar que la escritura hierática ya es una forma muy simplificada de los jeroglíficos, existe aún una escritura más simplificada: la demótica.

El hierático se escribía principalmente sobre papiro, y a pesar de ser una escritura muy antigua, en aquella época ya tenían métodos para resaltar lo que les parecía más importante: el texto principal se escribía tinta negra usando una caña afilada, y cuando querían darle especial importancia a algo, usaban tinta roja.

Para poder hacernos una idea de cómo era la escritura en aquel entonces, aquí dejo una foto en la que se aprecian perfectamente los signos y la distinción entre tinta negra y tinta roja:

Referencias:

• Literatura Antigua. En Galeon.com: http://galeon.com/odesa/hieratica.htm
• Algunos principios generales sobre escritura egipcia. En Antropos.galeon.com: http://antropos.galeon.com/html/escrituraegipcia.htm
• Hierática – Escritura. En Egipto Foro: http://www.egiptoforo.com/antiguo/Hieratica_-_Escritura
• Hierático. En Wikipedia, La Enciclopedia Libre: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hier%C3%A1tico

Empezaré por lo tanto explicando las características principales de cada una de ellas:

• Biblioteca Electrónica (por ejemplo la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Deusto).
  La biblioteca electrónica es probablemente la que más se asemeja a la tradicional. Se trata de una instalación física en la que se ofrecen servicios de forma electrónica, como préstamos o el acceso al catálogo de la biblioteca. Ésto quiere decir que los libros sí que están en formato papel, pero a través de Internet podemos ver cuáles son los libros que tiene esa biblioteca, y pedir uno en caso de que queramos. Esto supone un avance bastante importante de la biblioteca tradicional ya que la administración es más sencilla de llevar a cabo.

• Biblioteca Digital (por ejemplo la Biblioteca Digital del INAP)
  Esta biblioteca es parecida a la electrónica, pero muchas de sus colecciones se conservan en un formato digital como pdf o doc. Esto quiere decir que podríamos encontrar la versión digital de un libro en este tipo de bibliotecas usando simplemente un ordenador y acceso a Internet. Muchas veces, los archivos que buscamos sólo existen en formato digital, lo cual puede considerarse bueno o malo, según el punto de vista. Una gran ventaja de estos formatos digitales es que los usuarios pueden acceder a ellos de una forma mucho más rápida y sencilla, sin tener que acercarse a una biblioteca física. En este tipo de bibliotecas no sólo tienen, como podría creerse, libros digitales, si no que es muy normal encontrar mapas, revistas, artículos y muchas otras cosas.

• Biblioteca Virtual (por ejemplo la Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes)
  La biblioteca virtual es la que no ocupa ningún espacio físico, ya que no tiene un edificio que contenga libros de papel. Todos sus contenidos están en formato digital en la red, y cualquier persona puede acceder a ellos. Este tipo de bibliotecas necesitan una tecnología muy amplia para así poder reunir todos los recursos que se distribuyen y además tienen que procurar tener un interfaz que atraiga a los usuarios. Teniendo en cuenta que las bibliotecas virtuales son un equivalente de las bibliotecas tradicionales pero en Internet, es lógico pensar que el usuario debe sentirse como en una biblioteca de verdad, y para eso un interfaz adecuado es imprescindible.

Vistos los tres tipos de biblioteca, podemos ver que hay bastantes diferencias entre ellos, aunque las bibliotecas digitales y virtuales tienden a ser confundidas bastante fácilmente. Cada una de ellas tiene sus ventajas y sus inconvenientes, así que cada persona tiene que elegir la que más se asemeje a sus necesidades. Aún así, está claro que las nuevas tecnologías han ayudado mucho a la evolución de las bibliotecas, siendo ahora mucho más fácil acceder a la información desde cualquier parte del mundo.

Referencias:

• La nueva gestión en las bibliotecas virtuales. En la Asociación Andaluza de Bibliotecarios: http://www.aab.es/pdfs/baab74/74a2.pdf
• Digital v. Electronic v. Virtual Libraries. En Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/mydefinitions.html
• Bibliotecas electrónicas, digitales y virtuales: tres entidades por definir. En Acimed: http://bvs.sld.cu/revistas/aci/vol10_6_02/aci05602.htm
• Digital Library. En Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_library

Open Access can be provided in two different ways:

• Green OA: Authors provide Open Access to their already published articles, by making their own e-prints free for all.
• Gold OA: Authors provide immediate Open Access to all of their articles by publishing them in an open access journal.

Although OA is free to readers, it is not, as we may believe, free for producers. As we can read in the Budapest Open Access Initiative FAQ page, ”Free is ambiguous. We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free (without cost) to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge (without price) for readers and users.”

So, if it is free for readers but not for producers, why would someone want to publish their article using Open Access? Well, probably because money is not everything. Producers might in some way lose money every time they publish something, but the impact of that published article will be much bigger, and that is sometimes more important than money. Readers obviously prefer free articles, especially if they are doing some kind of research and they need to take a look at many articles to compare which one their prefer or simply to collect information from different sources. If they have to pay for one article, they might decide not to buy it and look for the information in another place, but they will certainly take a look if it is cost-free. This means that more people will read an article in an open access journal, which makes easier for the author to become popular.

Also, publishing an article in an open access journal is still cheaper than publishing it in a traditional scientific journal, as authors pay about $1,000 per article in an open access journal and $20,000 for an annual subscription for a traditional one. So, authors will have to choose which method they prefer.

References:

• Open Access (publishing) (21:33, November 18, 2010). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18.44, November 22, 201o, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)
• Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles (2006). In Plos Biology. Retrieved 19.21, November 22, 2010, from: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157#s2
• Open Access overview (November 6, 2010). In earlham.edu. Retrieved 19.50, November 22, 2010, from: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
• Budapest Open Access Initiative: Frequently Asked Questions (August 4, 2010). In earlham.edu. Retrieved 20.04, November 22, 2010, from: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#wishfulthinking
• Parallel universes: open access and open source (February 22, 2006). In LWN.net. Retrieved 20.12, November 22, 2010, from: http://lwn.net/Articles/172781/
• What is Open Access?. In E-prints. Retrieved 20.16, November 22, 2010, from: http://1ajgarci.wordpress.com/page/2/

Es algo obvio que la escritura a ido evolucionando con el tiempo. Sólo hay que acordarse de los antigüos jeroglíficos egipcios, que ya no se usan. A su vez, no sólo la escritura sino sus soportes han ido cambiando radicalmente. Ahora parece obvio que se escribe sobre papel, cartulina o algún material similar, e incluso sobre ningún material en concreto: en un soporte informático. Sin embargo, cuando todos estos medios no existian, ¿qué se usaba para escribir?

El material más usado con la aparición de la escritura fue la arcilla, aunque también parece que se escribió sobre piedra o incluso metal. Las tablillas de arcilla como soporte de escritura tuvieron mucha importancia en lugares como Egipto o Mesopotamia. Parece ser que en estas tablillas se solían representar bienes y unidades de tiempo empleado en el trabajo, por lo que podríamos decir que se usó sobre todo para fines económicos, por llamarlo de alguna forma. Tampoco podemos olvidarnos de materiales como la madera, las tablillas de cera o las cortezas de los árboles. Los caparazones de tortuga también se usaron para pequeñas inscripciones en China.

Después de la arcilla, llegó el rollo de papiro, que fue un gran adelanto ya que era un material mucho más fácil de transportar por su ligereza. Tuvo especial relevancia en Egipto, Grecia y Roma, e hizo posible la escritura de textos mucho más largos a los que se escribían anteriormente.

No podemos decir que haya un desarrollo especial en la época del Imperio Romano, al menos al principio, ya que seguían escribiendo con los rollos de papiro. Al final del Imperio Romano, ya se fue transformando el formato, y apareció el pergamino. El pergamino viene e la palabra latina pergaminum, que tiene su origen en pergamo, ya que era en esta ciudad donde se preparaban las pieles para escribir (de oveja, de cabra, de cordero…). También se usaron los pergaminos para forrar libros etc.

Bizancio es donde después se dará el paso principal, que ya empezó en Roma, con el que se pasará del rollo al códice, que es el libro manuscrito anterior a la imprenta. Todos los libros que se producen desde este momento hasta que sale la imprenta, se conoce como el códice.

Después del códice, y con la aparición de la imprenta en Europa, llegó el libro impreso, que es el que seguimos teniendo hoy en día. La Biblia de Gutenberg o la Biblia de 42 líneas se considera el primer libro impreso.

Los soportes de la escritura, por lo tanto, han tenido una evolución importante con el tiempo, probablemente intentando mejorar su utilidad, ya que ahora podemos escribir textos mucho más largos de una forma mucho más sencilla.

Referencias:

• Escritura. En Wikipedia, La enciclopedia Libre: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escritura
• Libro y lectura en la era digital. El gran desafío de la educación actual. En Monografías.com: http://www.monografias.com/trabajos13/librylec/librylec2.shtml