I have been thinking about the issue of “equitable access to governance in globally distributed multilingual organizations” for several years now. That’s a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop) or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally based in the US [...]

It’s incredible the stuff you can find on the internet, how everything is linked together. So I’m in our little apartment in Beijing trying to clean up before my wife comes back, and put on a collection of Norwegian 60’s music which I have downloaded. The first song is cute, the story of some woman [...]

I’ve previously written about how I used interwiki links in Wikipedia to extract dictionary information (here and here). After talking with a friend, I got another idea for how I could extract even more dictionary information – localization files. You might know that open source projects like KDE are available in many different languages, translated [...]

Yes, that is the unlikely title of a short film that I collaborated in recording in Hong Kong two weeks ago. To find out why, we have to go way back in time. One day in Toronto, my friend told me about this crazy Norwegian lady who was teaching Cantonese in Hong Kong. We went [...]

I am writing a paper about encouraging undergraduate students to conduct research in their mother tongues / other non-English languages that they know. One key element is of course availability — University of Toronto students are lucky to have access to a large repository of foreign online journals, but this might not be the case [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as neat as these projects are, we shouldn’t forget sites like Project Gutenberg, which have been around for much longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and proof-read texts that have [...]

Background
During the presentation on Open Education around the world at OISE last week, I wanted to really highlight to people the incredible array of resources available, in many different languages. I also discussed three different purposes of openness, direct use (by target audience, usually students), reuse (ie. recontextualized by a teacher or other intermediary before [...]

My previous post on extracting an English-Chinese dictionary garnered a fair amount of attention, I got reddit‘ed (on their frontpage for a short time), solidot‘ed, mentioned on the Wall Street Journal blog, and more. Very fun. About 10,000 page views in three days, and a bunch of comments, both here and at Reddit. It was [...]

Background
Although there are some great Chinese dictionaries out there, I often encounter cases when they are not enough. I might either be looking for a specific concept, like “open access” (in scholarly publishing) and want to know how that is written in Chinese, so that I can google for articles about it in Chinese. Or [...]

I love seeing material in multiple languages, even languages I don’t understand. As populations have become more diverse around the world, public libraries have risen to the challenge, and whether you visit the Public Library in Oslo, or in Toronto, they have wonderful collections of children and adult books (and often films, DVDs, magazines and [...]