It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

Verify helps Web designers create evaluative tests for their design elements and receive audience feedback. Users can upload an image of a design, create a test for it, and then offer it to users to evaluate its effectiveness. Several kinds of tests are available, such as memory tests and A/B preference tests. Here's a working demo of a Verify test.

It's hard for small-time designers to do this kind of quality control, so Verify is especially helpful to them. We covered Verify's launch last year because the app helps designers make better Web experiences, and the new language support should expand its international audience.

Demo of Verify from Bryan Zmijewski on Vimeo.

Last week, we covered ZURB's ZURBwired event, in which the firm will team up with a lucky nonprofit to solve a design problem. Applications are now closed, and ZURB received 20 submissions. Check out their blog post to see who applied. We can't wait to hear who wins!

A set of new apps hits the iTunes App Store today that offers a much better way to help you customize what you want and need to know about a particular language - whether you're travelling for business or for pleasure. TripLingo launches its first 4 apps with Mexican Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portugese versions.

TripLingo's 7-person team is based in Atlanta, and although the team recently won the Startup Riot competition, it faces stiff competition from a lot of players in the language-learning space. But the customized phrase list definitely sets this app apart from others.

The first 20 ReadWriteWeb readers who click this link will get a free download to try it out. The app normally costs $4.99 per language.

If you've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, know three things - the guide is this really cool book that knows everything about the universe, everyone in that universe can communicate with each other, and you're really missing out on a great story. What's that have to do with anything?

Google today added even more languages to Google Translate for Android and it reminded us of how much closer we are getting to a reality where smartphones will break down language barriers in real-time as we wend our way through the world.

Today, the company that wants to index all the world's knowledge added three more languages - Japanese, Arabic and Korean - to the list of 15 languages that it now offers text-to-speech support for on Android phones. This means, you can directly input text in your language, choose the language to translate it to, and then have the phone say it for you. Of course, you could use it to help learn too, but that's not nearly as interesting as the ability to wander the world and let your phone do the talking. (Have you ever tried to ask "Where's the subway?" in Mandarin? I'm willing to bet that anyone, including my Android phone, could pronounce Mandarin words better than I can.)

We thought we would offer a brief smattering of everything Google has done in the past year in terms of rebuilding that Tower of Babel and helping us all communicate a little bit better.

• Google Rebuilds the Tower of Babel with Real-Time Language Translation
• Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation
• Google Goggles Gets Translation
• Google Translate Now Speaks More Than 30 Languages
• Google Translate & Wikipedia: 16 Million Words Later
• New Google Chrome Extension Will Translate Your Tweets and Facebook Updates
• Google Docs Adds Translation for 53 Languages
• For All Your Dead Language Translation Needs: Google Translate Adds Latin
• Amazing Instant Translation App Looks Great in Video

What other advances has Google made in the last year in its effort to finally dissolve the language barrier? If we've left anything out, help us - and everyone else - recall in the comments below.

On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.

Michael Schade, one of Scannell's students, explains the need.

"Twitter describes itself as 'the best way to discover what's new in your world,' but there is a fundamental issue with this: 'world' is presently limited by the inclusion of only a handful of languages. Although people can tweet in any language on Twitter, finding users who speak the same language is a difficult, or even a seemingly impossible, task. This is especially true for...minority languages."

Scannell's web-crawling software, An Crúbadán, first seeds Twitter searches with common but distinctive words of his 500 languages and crawls Twitter. It finds users who speaks these languages and ranks them. Scannell then recalculates trending topics with a focus on the language specifically, where they are imported into the Indigenous Tweet site.

The top minority languages on Twitter are currently Haitian creole, Basque and Welsh.

On Scannell's project blog, also called Indigenous Tweets, Prof. Scannell says the way he hopes the project will prove useful to minority speakers seeking to keep their languages vital is to make "it easier for speakers of indigenous and minority languages to find each other in the vast sea of English, French, Spanish, and other global languages that dominate Twitter."

As Schade points out, Twitter attempts to classify the language of all tweets, but it sometimes does a poor job of it, especially with the minority languages. Because Scannell has amassed large corpora and developed a technology geared toward identifying languages that might have little readily-available data to start with, he has seen much higher accuracy in language identification and analysis.

This is research that could help Twitter differentiate their users with greater specificity, as well as allow the growth of individual user's communities based on, among other things, language use.

Using LanguageWare as a basis, the team created a set of digital language analysis tools, including one they called Wordsmith, and used them to understand the creation of propaganda in the aftermath of the 1641 Irish Rebellion.

The picture to emerge in the aftermath of Cromwell's destruction of the Catholic rebels was one of mass slaughter by Catholics of women and children. This project's forensic analysis showed how that picture was created.

One thing they found - and that would have taken a generation to parse by hand and eye - was the the worst atrocities were usually accompanied by language indicating the interviewee had not witnessed the occurrence him or herself. This persists throughout the depositions.

In a statement, Dr Nicci MacLeod, a forensic linguist, and one of the four research fellows on the project, said:

"The atrocious acts committed against women and children are a central image of the Rebellion as it was reported in London newspapers and other propaganda texts of the period. We wanted to be able to support our observations (that these were unsupported statements) with hard quantitative evidence and were able to do this using Wordsmith software which enables us to enter a search term such as 'wife' or 'woman' and see what contexts it occurs in, how it relates to other words and in what position, which combined together give us a particular impression of who did what to whom according to the testimony."

Pamphlet image from Trinity College | other sources: Past Horizons

"Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment levels with references to collections and recordings of oral literature that exist in archives around the world."

Ethnologue is a tremendous resource, a catalog of the 6,909 known living languages on earth. The Red List is the product of applying "a set of internationally agreed criteria for classifying species extinction risk to languages."

The database was built with an open source PHP application called DaDaBIK.

The interface allows a user to search by language name, number of speakers, region or country or source. I looked for languages with under 500 speakers and got 1,659 records returned, including the languages Abhaz and !Xoon.

I searched again for a language I've written about, Sahaptin, spoken by American Indians of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon.

This language was listed but there were no resources listed for it.

The database is pretty slow and far from exhaustive, but it is a good start toward documenting something desperately in need of documentation, not just as a kind of electronic tombstone but as a resource for those on the frontlines of language (and therefore culture) preservation and rehabilitation.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Update: Just got an email from Swerdlow, who says they are testing a build that works with Buzz and hope to ramp up on some of the other big sites over the next few months. If you download Social Translate, you can test it by going to Swerdlow's multilingual Twitter page, http://twitter.com/AndroidX.

Definitions:

1. Tweet: noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message.
2. Google: Verb meaning "to search the Internet." Generic form of the trademarked "Google," the world's dominant Internet search engine.
3. Fail: A noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful. Usually written as "FAIL!"

The ADS's members include linguists, grammarians, etymologists, writers, editors and university students. The ADS was founded in 1889.

Twitter and other social networks have clearly captured the imagination of many language societies. Twitter was the top word of in the Global Language Monitor's survey, and unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the year. To represent the 1990s, the ADS picked Web as the top word of the decade.

Do You Agree?

What do you think? Do you think google deserves to be the one word that represents the last decade? Or is this just another example of how Google is succeeding in its slow takeover of our culture?

Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

FTW

FTW is most commonly understood as standing for "For the Win!" The Urban Dictionary says it entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares. The show featured two contestants playing a trivia based tic-tac-toe game where the squares had celebrities siting in them who "helped" answer the questions.

The final question to complete the tic-tac-toe was asked "for the win..." The show ran from 1966 through 1981 but there were several attempts to revive it.

Fail!

Now a one word sentence primarily used to mock, sometimes with a touch of sympathy, the prominent use of the word "Fail" is said to derive from 1998 arcade game Blazing Star. According to an article from this Fall in Slate, "its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: 'You beat it! Your skill is great!' If you lose, you are mocked: 'You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!'"

See also the relatively new FailBlog.org, a daily collection of unintentionally funny images and videos with very simple captions.

Right: The cycles of history have a cruel sense of humor.

Rickroll

From the consistently obscene fringe message board 4chan to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade! Who would have ever thought a joke like this would go so far?

According to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, the practice of telling someone you're linking to one thing and then linking instead to the Rick Astley video Never Going to Give You Up was originally based on a practice known as Duckrolling. The link would claim to be to a news item or some other thing but would instead take visitors to a web page containing a photoshopped picture of a duck on wheels. Hey look, it's a duck...with wheels.

The first Rickroll ever, Wikipedia dutifully reports, was a May 2007 link on 4chan that claimed to be to a mirror copy of the original trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, which was otherwise unavailable.

4chan is also believed to be the origin of Lolcats.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

You often hear about technology companies "eating their own dogfood," which means using their own software to get work done. According to the book Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, the phrase came from Microsoft's Paul Maritz. Maritz had seen an Alpo dog food commercial where actor Lorne Greene told viewers that Alpo was so good he...fed it to his own dogs! Neither Greene nor Maritz apparently ate dogfood themselves, but Maritz did use the phrase in an email calling for Microsoft workers to use their own products more.

Dorky executives have felt like a little "edgy" using the phrase ever since.

Web 2.0

Many people think that Tim O'Reilly, book publisher and founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, coined the term Web 2.0. Last month O'Reilly mentioned in a PBS Science radio interview, though, that some one who worked for him actually came up with the phrase to articulate some concepts the O'Reilly himself had been discussing.

We did a little hunting around and got to what's apparently the truth. More than 3 years ago Tim wrote an article titled What is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software where he says that it was O'Reilly VP Dale Dougherty who came up with the moniker in early 2004. (Photo of Dougherty, left, by David A. Mellis) How many of you got that trivia question right? At the time Dougherty was the Editor and Publisher of O'Reilly's Make magazine, so he was no stranger to invention.

So there you go. Now you don't have to be a wall flower at parties any more, for fear of not knowing the history of these five terms. Or are the conclusions we've drawn here incorrect? If you've got reason to believe so...speak up now!

• Mango Languages: 12 different online language courses presented in conversational format with prices starting at free.
• Vocabulix: Free vocab building lessons in Spanish, German and English, as well as other languages, with a baked in social network.
• Pod Network: Spanishpod - Frenchpod - Chinesepod - Free online lessons in three languages.
• BBC Languages: A host of language learning tools and self-contained online courses from the BBC.
• eLanguageSchool.net: Free lessons for learning 10 different languages online.
• Linkua: An online marketplace of real-life language tutors. There's nothing like learning a language directly from a native speaker.
• LiveMocha: This site combines lessons, with an online community allowing you to practice speaking with native speakers, which dovetails nicely into the next set of sites.

Now that you've learned the basics, you need to practice. That's not always easy if you've been learning on your own and no one around you speaks your new language. The sites below will help you hook up with a native speaker -- usually over VoIP -- to practice speaking.

Practice Speaking

• SharedTalk: A language exchange covering 113 languages from the makers of the popular RosettaStone language learning software.
• xLingo: A language exchange that lets users create and share flashcards with each other.
• Palabea: Reviews of language learning software in addition to an online language exchange.
• iTalki: A language exchange with a Yahoo! Answers-style QnA site, and a wiki-based public knowledge base for 10 different languages.
• Huitalk: Forums, articles, vocabulary lists, and a language exchange using Skype.
• Interpals: A large language exchange from a popular penpal social network.
• Mixxer: A free language exchange using Skype built by Dickinson College.
• TT4You: A free global language exchange site.
• Language Buddy: A free language exchange with 115 supported languages.
• Convesation Exchange: Text and voice chat, email, or face-to-face meetings can bet set up via Language Buddy to improve your conversational skills.
• Lingozone: Build vocab skills by playing game of Word Ladder and Hangman, while making friends with whom to practice speaking.
• Language Exchange Network: Think Craigslist for language learning; this site has super-simple language exchange classified listings.
• MyLanguageExchange: One of the oldest online language exchanges (this site was a Yahoo! Internet Life pick in 2001), it claims over 1 million members speaking 115 different languages.
• Language Exchange: A language exchange application for the Facebook platform.

Bonus Site: ASL Fingerspelling: Test your American Sign Language chops by watching online spelling demos and guessing the word.

"The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words," explains the project's web site. "Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance."

The result is a stunning visual map of the English language. As Angela Gunn points out, it is thus rather ironic that the very first word on the grid is "blind."

Oh, for anyone who was wondering, Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia...