http://www.spiegel.de/international/bus ... -2,00.html
Cho fad 's a bhios 'This page is in Irish - tr*nsl*t* it using Google toolbar?' air duilleagan Gàidlig na h-Alba, agus 's e sgudal a bhios ann às a dhèidh, bidh mi rud beag teagmhach..............There is at least one indication of the programmer's noble intentions. Och and his team have developed a special program that allows interpreters to feed translations into the system on their own, including the translations of extremely exotic idioms in the Bantu language Xhosa, the language spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group in Japan and the Inuit language, Inuktitut. The software developers hope that the program will give a voice to languages that are in danger of being forgotten. Te Taka Keegan, a computer engineer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, has already tested the program with the language spoken by the Maori people. Keegan recently spent six months at Google to figure out whether the digital language miracle from Mountain View could protect the idiomatic expressions of New Zealand's indigenous people from extinction. His experiences have been consistently positive.
"The quantity and quality of Maori translations is growing constantly with the help of this tool," Keegan reports. According to Keegan, a digital archive is being developed that will give the language a significant boost.
"The digital world is our children's future," says Keegan. "The language will only survive if we manage to make Maori part of this world."
