With the community-driven Translations effort leading to availability in dozens of languages, Facebook has already done a phenomenal job at ensuring that their popular social network continues its viral-like spread across the globe. Today Facebook’s map is expanding even more by making the sit...

Have you ever stared blankly at a block of text wondering what language it was? With the Internet as powerful as it is nowadays you can translate almost any language to any other language lickty split. But there is one caveat - you need to know what language it is to start with. I use Yahoo’s ...

Filed under: Internet Tools Apologies for the insane article title, it's one of the results of passing a piece of text through "Blahblahfish", a fun yet useless re-translator. The site takes any text you enter, and translates it to one of the 28 languages supported by the translation site, then tran...

Is there a program I can download/buy/steal/borrow that can "read" scanned pictures of letters and transform them into digital text, like the letters I'm typing right now? Ideally this would include the unique letters and diacritical marks in many other languages like Portuguese, French, R...

Happy Poetry Month! Congratulations to Carmen Berenguer who has won the 2008 Premio Iberoamericana de Poesía Pablo Neruda. I am very happy for her! And for everyone who will now read her marvelous poems! It makes me extremely happy that work so radical, experimental, feminist, and wild, has been re...

Kantalk is more or less a social network for language learners. It’s a place where non-English speakers can find topics of interest practice their English on a native speaker and share the lesson through video. I had the opportunity to talk to David Liu, one of the creators of Kantalk. Here is...

Looking for an English translation of the Portuguese lyrics of a song (Oiça lá ó senhor vinho) by my current favourite singer, Mariza, I decided to take Google up on its offer to “translate this page.” Now the translation of plain text is hard enough, but the translation of song lyric...