"Toes" by Ingorrr, licensed CC-BY
Toggletext is dipping its toes into the world of blogs. It is an experiment for us, and currently I have that butterflies in the stomach feeling of excitement and nervousness, wondering how this will go.
Who are we?
We are Toggletext, a small language technology company based in Melbourne, Australia. What does “language technology” mean? It means most of us are serious language geeks (and by serious I mean SRSLY serious), who get way too excited about interesting syntactic structure and enjoy novel terminology usage far more than any person should. We also enjoy programmer’s humour.
Also, the beach is about 200 metres from our front door. It’s pretty cool.
Who am I?
Me, personally, the one writing this: my name’s Brianna. I’m 25, I’m a computational linguist and I’ve worked with Toggletext for over a year. And I like blogs.
I like the idea that a blog provides another way for a company or an organisation to communicate with its customers and other entities in the same space. I think we work on interesting problems, and I like being able to share that others.
Who are you?
Are you an Indonesian to English Kataku user?
Are you an English to Indonesian Kataku user?
Are you a language technology geek wondering how MT even gets made by small companies? (Sometimes we wonder, too :))
Do you use Kataku to translate news, gossip, emails, blogs, assignments, love letters from your cross-cultural sweetheart?
Do you use Kataku for a competitive advantage at work, to give you a head start on homework, to get the inside scoop on what’s happening in Indonesia, find out the latest sports news from Detik?
See, I just have no idea what the answers are to these questions… but I’m interested to find out.
Why are we doing this?
As a company I think we are growing pretty steadily. We recently completed a major website overhaul and a few of the projects we’re working on will be nearing completion by the end of this year. Our website gets thousands of visitors every single day and I find it just amazing that we don’t have a good mechanism for talking with those people (if you made it here, chances are you’re one of them). Oh, sure, we have a contact form, and it gets used often enough, but that doesn’t let people hear what others are saying too.
So basically, I hope we can use this blog to share our enthusiasm for what we do with everyone. And I hope we can get input from people “out there”, who find our products useful, to understand each other a little better.
8 Comments
i love toggletext,,,
is Very friendly and informatif.
I’ve been using Toggletext for nearly two years to translate some of my “cross-cultural sweetheart’s” texts and emails.
Sometimes I translate my replies before sending them to her as she has infrequent internet access.
About a year ago Toggletext had some serious bandwidth and server issues. But since your website overhall the reliability has been absolutely excellent, and all this is free!
I really am extremely grateful for this service it’s a real lifeline.
I would like to know how to feedback phrases that never quite get translated effectively (possessive pronowns spring to mind) and I’m also a little unsure about how well tenses are translated. Since there’s the world of differnce between “went to the beach” and “will go to the beach”, I would like to have more confidence in those translations.
I also think it would be good to have a “Formal/Informal” style switch, and I’d also like to whether the “SMS” switch really does anything.
Please keep up the good work, and I wish you all the best for the commercial service you have recently launched.
Thanks again!
I find that toggletext is very useful,
but a friend of mine has reported that instead of translating the word, it replied with a sentence.
whats with thaaaaaaat?
she went to translate ‘choose’ into indonesian and instead of replying with ‘pilih’ it replied “i want have a conversation with you one day” (in indonesian).
Hm, that’s very strange, J Smith! I just now translated “choose” and it came back with “pilih”, so I’m not sure how your friend managed to get such a strange translation…
yes i know, i was quite confused, but once i tried to translate a ‘experience’ but it replied with ‘i dont know’ is it allowed to do that??
J Smith, I’m not sure if it’s “allowed” to, but it’s probably not “supposed” to :)
If we can’t reproduce the problem it’s really hard for us to fix it. So if you notice any weird translations like this, let us know the exact words you put in, and we can try and reproduce it and fix it.
This is such a great tool. I use it for work and ‘cross-cultural sweetheart’ communications. I am trying to learn bahasa as well so this has been a real boon.
I also make use of the site via my internet phone when on my travels and most of the time it works in both directions. Gets a bit stuck on idioms sometimes but so do I :-)
If I have some expression that is completely new to me I translate to bahasa and then back again (sometimes more than once) to get a sense of how it translates. This allows me to refine what I am writing to get closer to my desired meaning. So far nobody has questioned my use of the language and has understood what I am trying to say.
I would like to see a Windows Mobile version as the interface when using my phone is not so convenient.
The Kamusku app looks great, when can we non-apple mortals get the same sort of facility?
Can’t quite believe that we get all this for free.
Thanks
Thanks a lot for the nice words, Andrew!
I don’t know if we will work on versions for other platforms. It took us quite a while to get the iPhone one into existence
“Can’t quite believe that we get all this for free.” — neither can we, Andrew ;)
cheers,
Brianna