attendrir les étoiles

Two-Headed Calf

“I am the forest, I am ancient. I treasure the stag, I treasure the deer. I shelter you from storm, I shelter you from snow. I resist the frost, I keep the source. I nurse the earth, I am always there. I build your house, I kindle your hearth. Therefore, you people, hold me dear.”

Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity? Swedish, Greek, Hungarian, and Czech have a wealth of language resources, created one human at a time over centuries. They’re the languages of entire nation-states, with national TV and radio recordings that can be used as the foundation for text-to-speech models. Their speakers have the kind of disposable income that makes media companies translate popular novels and subtitle foreign movies and TV shows. They’re found in countries that tech companies imagine their customers might be living in or might at least visit on holiday, meaning it’s worth localizing interfaces and adding them as translation options. They have regularized spelling systems and dictionaries that can be rolled into spellcheckers and predictive text models. They have highly literate speakers with internet access who can contribute to projects like Wikipedia. (Speakers who can even, in the case of Swedish, create a bot to automatically make basic Wikipedia articles for rivers, mountains, and other natural features.) Language resources don’t just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that’s by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.

tfw you understand the language enough to know the subtitles are wrong but not enough to watch the movie without subs.

replacing curses in sentences with harmless words like heck and then sometimes even censoring heck to “h*ck” is a good meme but an even better one would be, like, censoring the wrong word in a sentence entirely. example:

example A

“Museums are places of worship for those whose faith dwells in human stories.”

New level of #academicdrama