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Character Input Methods for SLA (Western)

2012/09/04 1 comment

For studying (typing) Western Languages (= need for diacritics only; whether you have a US keyboard hardware or UK which is pretty similar), we recommend the MS Windows US International Keyboard layout  which is based on “dead keys”.

Currently installed in the LLC are the Language Bar (floating on top of screen or accessible from the taskbar) with these keyboard layouts:

Keyboard layout settings are application/window specific, and “US”  (non-international) is still the default for new applications/windows, so prepare to switch after you start a new application;

There are keyboard shortcuts for switching, however, “Key settings”: “switch between input languages” , using LEFT ALT + SHIFT, does not work. Workaround: use the language bar for switching:

Windows keyboard layout settings can be temperamental – if you find you cannot switch to a certain layout anymore, you may have to restart the computer.

Use the following keyboard shortcuts to enter diacritics more easily:

Press (together, then release)

then press

Example Result

` (accent grave)

any letter  that can have this accent, e.g. "a”, also cedilla ç

à

(apostrophe)

á

^ (caret)-

â

~ (tilde)

ã

(double quotation marks)

ä

CTRL+&

Z or z

æ

rightALT+

X or x

œ

     

rightAlt+n

 

ñ

ALT+CTRL+?

 

¿

rightAlt+?

 

ALT+CTRL+!

 

¡

rightAlt+1

 

rightAlt+s

S

ß

To access the original, now dead keys, press space bar after pressing the dead key.

Modifiers(blue)/Layout

Note the new modifier = “dead” keys, indicated by light blue color (click to enlarge)

Normal

 

 

Shift

 

 

US International

 

Screencast of US International in action here: deadkeys.wmv

Interactive Demo of installation procedure (personal computers outside of the LLC) here: keyboard_usinternational.swf

Planned improvements:

  • Use LEFT ALT+Shift to switch to (Software) “Keyboard Layout” “United-States International”.
  • Use other keyboard short cuts to access a desired keyboard layout directly
  • Dock the “Language Bar” in the Taskbar, then hover over it  to make sure you selected the proper “Keyboard Layout”.

·       

Another nice visualization of US-international keyboard layout is available thanks to http://charsetplus.tripod.com/Keyboard/Latin/EN-USX.htm (click picture for full size): us-international-keyboard-layout

Immerse yourself into your language of study by switching the user interface language on LRC PCs

  1. Ever imagine yourself studying or working in an e.g. Spanish– Japanese- or Chinese- speaking country? Then you will  likely find yourself in front of a computer display that is in that language  – what if you could get a sneak preview before you go?
  2. You can now switch the interface language of the LRC Windows 7 computers (including Internet Explorer and MS-Office (note that you have to change the editing language separately) to your language of study (How?).
  3. All non-classical languages studied here are supported:
    Language Native name
    Arabic العربية
    Chinese (Simplified) 中文(简体)
    Chinese (Traditional) 中文 (繁體)
    English English
    French français
    German Deutsch
    Greek Ελληνικά
    Hebrew עברית
    Italian italiano
    Japanese 日本語
    Korean 한국어
    Polish polski
    Portuguese (Brazil) Português
    Portuguese (Portugal) português
    Russian Русский
    Spanish español
  4. Some languages, however, come only with the limited support of a MS Language Interface Pack :
  5. Hindi हिंदी
    KiSwahili Kiswahili
    Persian (Farsi) فارسی
    Yoruba ede Yorùbá
  6. Below are examples (for German) what you get when you switch the operating system language:
  7. image
  8. image
  9. image
  10. image
  11. image
  12. image

Foreign language support in LRC MS-Office 2010

  1. A full set of proofing tools is available, thanks to MS-Office Language Packs installed on the Windows 7 computers, for all non-classical languages studied here:
  2. Language Native name
    Arabic العربية
    Chinese (Simplified) 中文(简体)
    Chinese (Traditional) 中文 (繁體)
    English English
    French français
    German Deutsch
    Greek Ελληνικά
    Hebrew עברית
    Hindi हिंदी
    Italian italiano
    Japanese 日本語
    Korean 한국어
    Polish polski
    Portuguese (Brazil) Português
    Portuguese (Portugal) português
    Russian Русский
    Spanish español
  3. Some languages have only limited features provided by the MS-Language Interface Pack:
  4. KiSwahili Kiswahili
    Persian (Farsi) فارسی
    Yoruba ede Yorùbá

Foreign Language Character Input on Windows 7 in the LRC

2012/08/16 1 comment
  1. The LRC, now on Windows 7, is testing  Carly J. Born’s U.S. International Extended 2.0 Keyboard, an improvement on the previously used US International Keyboard (still recommended for personal use, as it comes standard with all but ancient versions of Windows) for typing accented characters in Western languages, Pinyin-tone-marks for Mandarin (replacing the also useful, but more evolved Pinyinput), and other SLA tone- and length-marks e.g. for Latin.
  2. Not limited to specific application, you can use anywhere in Windows the following shortcut’s – taken from the original developer documentation (with some minor modifications).
  3. We hope you find the benefit for SLA far outweighs the need to getting used to typing a space between the 2 red characters and a vowel, in order to produce their regular form, without creating a foreign language character.

acute accent, pinyin 2nd tone

apostrophe (= ‘), vowel

(e.g. á é í ó ú)

grave accent, pinyin 4th tone

grave (= `), vowel

(e.g. à è ì ò ù)

c cedilla

comma apostrophe, c

(e.g. ç)

macron accent, pinyin 1st tone

hyphen, vowel

(e.g. ā ē ī ō ū )

vowel with umlaut

double-quote (= “), vowel

(e.g. ä ë ï ö ü ÿ)

vowel with circumflex

shift+6 (= ^), vowel

(e.g. â ê î ô û)

pinyin 3rd tone

Shift+5, vowel

(e.g. ǎ ě ǐǒǔ)

ü with pinyin tones

Accent, double-quote

(e.g. ǖǘǚǜ)

letter with tilde

tilde (= ~), letter

(e.g. õ ñ ã)

letter with dot below

shift+period, letter

(e.g. ạ ẹ Ẹ ị ọ ụ)

letter with double acute

shift+; , o or u

(e.g. ő, ű, Ő, Ű)

«

ctrl + alt + [

»

ctrl + alt + ]

ctrl + alt + 5

ß

ctrl + alt + s/right-ALT + s

ø

ctrl + alt + l

[won’t work in word, onenote, but works in excel]

¿

ctrl + alt + /

¡

ctrl + alt + 1

[To type ¡, disable the command called ApplyHeading1 in the Format category, in word or onenote, but not needed in excel]

œ

Right alt + k

How to change the display language and speech recognition language on LRC Windows 7 computers (and which languages are available)

  1. UPDATE: Since this page seems to be getting a lot of hits, I want to clarify: The step-by-step guide  below only applies after you installed (free) language (or language interface) packs (see list here) on Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate SKU (others SKUs cannot add multiple language interfaces).  UPDATE2: Things got much easier with Windows 8.
  2. In order to
    1. view the GUI of Windows and Internet Explorer in a foreign language,
    2. use the speech recognition in (a subset of the below) foreign languages,
    3. and also switch the default language of MS-Office
  3. Double-click the desktop shortcut “Region and language – Keyboards and languages”.
  4. Select the desired language from the dropdown box, click “OK”.
  5. image
  6. Click: “Log off now”: image
  7. “Log back in” (without restarting).
  8. And if you want the available display languages in English,
  9. here are the fully  supported (MS Language packs):
    Language Native name
    Arabic العربية
    Chinese (Simplified) 中文(简体)
    Chinese (Traditional) 中文 (繁體)
    English English
    French français
    German Deutsch
    Greek Ελληνικά
    Hebrew עברית
    Italian italiano
    Japanese 日本語
    Korean 한국어
    Polish polski
    Portuguese (Brazil) Português
    Portuguese (Portugal) português
    Russian Русский
    Spanish español
  10. and here the partially supported (MS-Language Interface packs):
    Hindi हिंदी
    KiSwahili Kiswahili
    Persian (Farsi) فارسی
    Yoruba ede Yorùbá
  11. And here are the languages that support speech recognition: CAM05478

Making audio cues for model imitation/question-response oral exams with Sanako Study 1200

We can easily record and post-process audio files in the LRC for use with the Sanako Study 1200 oral exam activities.

This can work not only  for outcome exams (course- or chapter-wise), but also or formative assessment:

Think converting your textbook-based “drills” into Sanako, like repetitively recapitulating the newly acquired vocabulary item “donut” with different cues:

Example: “What can you do with [student can enter her favorite new vocabulary item for the current class] on [teacher can ask for one social web service after the other that her students likely are familiar with]?”. In response, student has to practice vocabularry item by forming sentences that fit the vocabulary item that fit like in the whiteboard example.

We can add to these recordings the features explained in the slide below.

image

I’d be happy to play you examples from this slide – and more – in the LRC (not to be published here so that the exam files can be reused).

How the LRC supports Second Language Acquisition (all 4 skills) and testing using computers, and provides requisite documentation and training

Table of contents for 2 screencasts of a presentation, left screen slides/no audio, right screen/speaker audio – best viewed side-by-side.

Time in LRC-report-speaker

Time in LRC-report-slides

Topic

Subtopic

0:00

Overview of LRC activities

0:00

0:40

SLA reading

0:02

1:10

SLA writing

1:00

high-stakes quiz screencast: http://goo.gl/AaGrK

3:40

Movie caption exercise generation using NLP

5:45

2:35

SLA listening

Text-to-speech Deskbot

7:15

4:00

example of time-stretched audio

10:00

10:10

SLA speaking

Moodle Kaltura for webcam recordings homework assignments

12:30

Sanako oral exams

15:00

Example of oral exam material

16:40

15:45

Classroom management systems

27:15

Outlook: LRC as proficiency assessment/testing center, outreach/service to high schools

16:40

Example of oral proficiency exam

28:30

Needed additions: video streaming to students, video recordings from students

30:10

Question period

30:10

LRC media repositories

33:30

Infrastructure work:

Year1:Ghost+imaging

33:35

Year2:LRC calendars (room reservation, equipment circulation, staff timetabling)

34:25

Outlook: things that need to be fixed in LRC calendars

39:25

39:45

19:45

LRC Blog

39:45

Querying tags and categories

45:00

tags, categories, RSS feeds displayed in internet explorer tag display,

55:20

Using tags/categories searches of the LRC blog in training teachers and students

57:25

Q:TOEFL, AP exams and other oral proficiency assessment –

58:45

Webcape placement exams and other written exam in the LRC

59:30

Q:Concurrent exam scheduling

Sanako has no scheduling system to allow a limited number of users to take an exam simultaneously (but it prevents users beyond the licensing seats to use the Sanako, including for exams), Scheduling plug-ins seem to be available for Moodle.

61:40

Outlook: Need more licenses for the Sanako to match the UNCC class size

Setting up European Union translation memories and document corpora for SDL-Trados

  1. SDL-Trados installation allows the translation program to teach this industry-standard computer-aided translation application . So far, however, we had no actually translation memory loaded into this translation software.
  2. The European Union is a powerhouse for translation and interpreting – at least for the wide range of their member languages many of which are world languages – , and makes some of their resources – which have been set up for translation and interpreting study use here before – available to the community free of charge as reported during a variety of LREC’s.
    1. This spring, the Language Technology Group at the Joint Research Centre  of the European Union this spring updated their translation memory  offer DTG-TM can fill that void at least for the European Languages  that have a translation component at UNC-Charlotte.
      1. We download on demand (too big to store: http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/DGT-TM.html#Download)
        1. Is the DGT-TM 2011 truly a superset of the 2007, or should both be merged? probably too much work?
      2. and extract only the language pairs with English and the language only the languages “1”ed here : “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\DGT-tm_statistics.xlsx” (using “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\TMXtract.exe”)
      3. and convert
        1. English is the source language by default, but should be the target language in our programs,
        2. The TMX format this translation memory is distributed provided in, should be “upgradeable ” to the SDL Trados Studio 2011/2011 SP1 format in the Upgrade Translation Memories wizard”.,
          1. TBA:where is this component?
      4. configure the Trados to load the translation memory
        1. how much computing resources does this use up?
        2. how do you load a tm?
        3. can you load in demand instead of preload all?
      5. Here are the statistics for the translation memories for “our” languages
      6. uncc Language Language code Number of units in DGT – release 2007 Number of units in DGT – release 2011
        1 English EN 2187504 2286514
        1 German DE 532668 1922568
        1 Greek EL 371039 1901490
        1 Spanish ES 509054 1907649
        1 French FR 1106442 1853773
        1 Italian IT 542873 1926532
        1 Polish PL 1052136 1879469
        1 Portuguese PT 945203 1922585
        Total 8 8 7246919 15600580
    2. Would it be of interest to have the document-focused jrc-acquis distribution of the materials underlying the translation materials available on student/teachers TRADOS computers so that sample texts can be loaded  for which reliable translation suggestions will be available – this is not certain for texts from all domains – and the use of a translation memory can be trained in under realistic conditions?
      1. “The DGT Translation Memory is a collection of translation units, from which the full text cannot be reproduced. The JRC-Acquis is mostly a collection of full texts with additional information on which sentences are aligned with each other.”
      2. It remains to be seen how easily one can transfer documents from this distribution into Trados to work with the translation memory
      3.   Here is where to download:
      4. uncc

        lang

        inc

        1

        de

        jrc-de.tgz

        1

        en

        jrc-en.tgz

        1

        es

        jrc-es.tgz

        1

        fr

        jrc-fr.tgz

        1

        it

        jrc-it.tgz

        1

        pl

        jrc-pl.tgz

        1

        pt

        jrc-pt.tgz

      5. The JRC-Acquis comes with these statistics:
    3. uncc

      Language ISO code

      Number of texts

      Total No words

      Total No characters

      Average No words

      1

      de

      23541

      32059892

      232748675

      1361.87

      1

      en

      23545

      34588383

      210692059

      1469.03

      1

      es

      23573

      38926161

      238016756

      1651.3

      1

      fr

      23627

      39100499

      234758290

      1654.91

      1

      it

      23472

      35764670

      230677013

      1523.72

      1

      pl

      23478

      29713003

      214464026

      1265.57

      1

      pt

      23505

      37221668

      227499418

      1583.56

      Total

      7

      164741

      247374276

      1588856237

      10509.96

  3. What other multi corpora are there (for other domains and other non-European languages)?