As China’s economy is growing rapidly, cultural exchange between the western world and China is flourishing. However, one of the largest barriers is language. New media technology provides us with creative solutions. Chinese Radio Amsterdam (CRA) presents an overview of state-of-the-art media and technology to bridge the language barrier (e-mail, mobile, podcast, game, wiki).

Chairman Hong Tong Wu starts the session with showing the new Chinese Radio website and name; Chinese Radio and Television (CRTV). He shows a snippet of a Miss Asia contest, his personal favorite ;-). CRTV offers language lessons, video’s and an hour of radio every week.

ChinesePod
The second speaker is Hank Horkoff of Praxis Language. He broke the language barrier when he moved to China.

At first it was hard. He joined a class but spent more time speaking to the other students than the teacher. He then bought a book but was still lacking the basics. Lucky for him, he got a Chinese girlfriend and then started to get a grasp of the language ordering coffee with her at Starbucks for example. Chinese is a difficult language. Chinese has thousands of characters instead of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Also the pronunciation is hard to learn. Instead of creating classes of books, Hank created the service ChinesePod. Daily free podcasts distribute lessons of high-quality teachers. The lessons are in a hip radio format. He created a community around the service where users added information to the teaching. A premium package is available with learning tools starting from 5 dollars a month.

Chinglish
Next speaker is Marius van Bergen, the founder of chinglish.com. He starts his talk with some figures: 1,3 billion native Chinese speakers, 30 million second language learners, 150 million internet users and 100 million chinese learnes in 2010. Compare that to the 350 million native English speakers, 1 billion second language learners. More than 300 million of them are Chinese and that amount is growing fast. In the next ten years, there will be more Chinese persons who speak English than native English speakers. The consequence is that we won’t get one lingua franca. Rather more large languages will exist next to each other.

Chinglish.com covers easy translation between Chinese and English and back. The most intriguing feature is a webmail tool, which instantly translates mail text into Chinese in a nice dual-screen interface.

XS2 The world


Sander Musterman was often lost in translation in China. He couldn’t find restaurants, nightclubs etc. He created with XS2 The World a mobile city guide in English which speaks Chinese phrases. You can choose your mobile brand on the website and download the application. Here you can choose sentences such as ‘ I have a headache/’ and the mobile phone will speak it in Chinese. With the cityguide it’s possible to find restaurants and have the directions spoken by the phone for the cab-driver. Sander shows some videos in which the mobile acts like a remote control for Chinese people. It transforms a mobile phone in into a compact city travel guide, a communication tool, interpreter, language teacher and the perfect ice breaker. A great tool!

Chinese Language Game
Anton Eliens (VU University) talks about the elements of a Chinese Language Game. Eliens shows that the online translation tools often get it wrong. Eliens is in the proces of developing a platform for serious games in which you can learn Chinese by playing and making a game. With the software is developing Eliens you can take a Youtube movie, download it and use it to create your own Chinese game.

Wikipedia China
Ting Chen is the administrator of the Chinese Wikipedia. Everybody knows Wikipedia, but not everyone knows that Wikipedia is a multilingual project with a lot of dialects. Chen shows some of the projects of the Wikimedia foundation. A important aspect of Wikipedia are the Interwiki’s. They contain the link between the different Wikipedia languages. Interwiki is a good tool for translations, especially for technical terminology. With WikiBooks every can add to a book, the goal is to create free content learning (and other) books. Another project from Wikimedia is the Wiktionary, a free dictionary project of the Wikimedia foundation. About the Chinese Wikipedians: In June 2007, 7789 Wikipedians were counted that had made more than 10 edits overall. The total of editors is increasing every day. It started off late compared to other languages because the Wikimedia system wasn’t able to capture Chinese writing until recently. Compared to the Dutch community, the community is much more heterogeneous. The members of the community come from Taiwan, Hongkong, Macau, China and overseas. Everyone has a different view on the Wikipedia, this takes up a lot of discussion. Another big challenge is to overcome the blocking of Wikipedia from the Chinese government. Some languages are available, but the Chinese version is still blocked.