I thought I’d reboot my blog Dreamers and Doers – so it could use a captatio benevolentiae at this point. In this blog, I collect my thoughts on the history of translation technology – any technology that employs machinery for people to understand each other. At times, I take a peek at the science behind well-known technologies and services (like machine translation). I aspire to write my notes for the non-researcher: the professional translator, the student of engineering or linguistics – these posts are practically for anyone interested in language and technology. In this, I’m trying to contribute, meager as my contribution might be, to public communication about science and engineering, more specifically, language technology.
dreamers
Dreamers and Doers
This blog is about language and technology. Not language technology, although at first I plan to explore what people dreamed up and crafted through history to bring down language barriers. Hence the title ‘Dreamers and doers’ – I see development as a whirlwind where dreams and actions endlessly spin around each other. Later, we might also look at how language influenced the development of technology (or if we can talk about development at all), but first, let’s just think of this:
Language has immense power: to name things. Once you can name things, you can talk to others about it, and then several people together might even create them. Just think: humans, through language, can name things that don’t exist in the physical world – and the moment you name one such thing it is brought into existence. Maybe not in a tangible form, but it will exist.
Dreamers and Doers 