Duolingo, a language learning and crowdsourced translation platform from Recaptcha founder Luis von Ahn, has raised $15 million in Series B funding from New Enterprise Associates and Union Square Ventures. Read more »
The Finnish firm’s founders are moving to New York to cash in on heavy U.S. demand, they say, while also revealing the opening of a Singapore office. Read more »
The Google Translate app is taking on the ability to handle translations of pictured text. It’s a feature that first appeared in Google Goggles, but it now allows users to highlight which text they want to translate by running their fingers over specific words. Read more »
The service offers a human-powered alternative to automated translation, by creating an online clearinghouse for interpreters and web-using or smartphone-toting customers who urgently need to break down language barriers Read more »
Cloudwords’ says its OneTM unified translation management service will streamline the onerous — and very expensive — process of translating software and documentation. The startup sports SaaS cred from co-founder Scott Yancey, who designed the system along with former Salesforce.com CTO Craig Weissman. Read more »
Video of President Obama’s State of the Union speech has already been translated into seven languages, and additional translation efforts are underway online. The multi-lingual captioning efforts are the result of an election year partnership between PBS Newshour, Universal Subtitles and Mozilla. Read more »
Smartling, a New York City-based start-up focused on enabling websites and apps to go multilingual, has raised $10 million to ramp up its localization tools. The company offers crowdsourcing tools for websites and apps to quickly and easily add additional language support. Read more »
How many times have you tried to translate a sentence and have come up with embarrassingly incorrect results via a translation site? Or have you used Google Translate to translate a website from another language and cringed at the stilted results? Read more »
If you had any doubt that we are living in the future, Google today introduced visual translation tools for use with a camera phone. Specifically, the new version of its Google Goggles app can recognize pictures of words written in five languages and rapidly translate them. Read more »
Could your smartphone one day allow you to speak to anyone in their native language? It would probably take a client-server setup like the one Microsoft is demonstrating. This Translating Telephone prototype offers near-real-time translation that could end up in your future handset. Read more »
