Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other words that are used in a similar context.

Wordnik isn't exactly Wiktionary, but it does accept user contributions of just about anything you can think of about a word. The combination of images, audio and contextual clues would also seem to make it a better dictionary than most for non-english speakers, and its library contains a weighty 1.7 million words. Since it's laid out better than most dictionary sites, and also incorporates definitions from some of the better ones, it wouldn't be a bad move to replace your current favorite online dictionary with Wordnik.

We're hitting the home stretch in the MindBites Screencast 4 Cash contest! As I discussed last month, MindBites is holding a contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

The deadline for entries was extended until June 1, so you still have time to enter in your own screencast. Have some awesome coding or web design skills you want to share? Share them with the world!

Right now, individuals can vote once per week, but starting June 2, you can also vote daily! Even better, for every vote cast, $0.10 will be donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which helps underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

If you want to create a screencast but you're unsure of what software to use, peruse our past reviews and tests of web and client-based screencasting apps! Check out the contest page for all the rules and requirements, plus check out the entries that have been submitted thus far.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, you have until June 1 to enter. Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what else gets submitted!

Tired of using other people's lame tablature to learn how to play your favorite songs, if you can even find a tab at all? Would you rather just figure out the music yourself? Well then, Capo is the Mac app for you. Drop an audio file from hard drive into it, and it will slow down the music so you can figure out how to play it. Everything takes place with one simple, beautiful window.

Capo has a lot of other neat tricks that make learning a song easier. One of the best features is looping a selected part of the song, so you can focus in on the bits you're having trouble with. Playback speed and pitch are adjustable, and you can drop handy markers for verses, choruses and the bridge, so you don't have to scroll through the song to find the part you're looking for. Sure, it's a tool that's designed to do one thing, but it does that one thing extremely well.

At SXSWi 2008, Grant and I met Jason Reneau, the founder and CEO of MindBites, a platform and marketplace for video lessons. We were really impressed with the MindBites vision last year. When we met up with them this year, it was awesome to see how far the community, the site and the market for quality video tutorials has come.

Today, MindBites is launching the Screencast 4 Cash contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

Every vote cast in the contest will yield a $0.10 US donation to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which exposes children in underdeveloped parts of the world to technology through instruction and staffed technology centers. So just by voting, you can help underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

Screencasts are a great way to learn, or teach a specialty. We covered some iPhone-specific screencasts last month and found the medium really, really ripe for learning or supplementing other forms of instruction.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, enter the contest! Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what stuff gets submitted! You can read more details on deadlines and voting dates over at MindBites.

Want to know more about MindBites? Check out this video from SXSWi 2009!

Microsoft Encarta is a digital encyclopedia that used to come on a CD-ROM, and eventually graduated to a web-based service. But in the age of Wikipedia, where even the Encyclopedia Brittanica allows users to suggest edits, it looks like Microsoft either can't or choose not to compete. The company is pulling the plug on Encarta later this year.

On October 31st, the company will turn off all of its Encarta web sites except for Encarta Japan for some reason, which will shut down a few months later. Microsoft will stop selling Encarta software by June. Microsoft will continue releasing updates for the software versions of Encarta until it shuts down the internet service.

Users who have paid for Encarta subscriptions will be refunded for the unused portion of their subscription.

[via Ars Technica]

Last month Grant, Christina and I checked out a couple of screencasts from Pragmatic Programmers' Bill Dudney. Specifically, we watched "Coding in Objective-C 2.0." We took a look at part one mostly, which is an introduction to the Objective-C syntax and structure, culminating in a basic application. Part two covers memory management in depth. Since then they've added a part 3 on debugging, and the plan is to continue adding more. Part one covers classes, objects and messages and, like the other portions in the series, costs $5. One thing I love about Pragmatic Programmers is that they offer a wide choice of formats, including versions tuned for iPhone viewing and Theora Ogg format.

It's important to note that while Objective-C is the language you'll use for iPhone development, these screencasts alone won't make you an iPhone developer. For one, there are differences in memory management on the iPhone versus desktop apps (iPhone apps don't do garbage collection). Also, iPhone interactions require the use of Cocoa Touch, and that isn't covered in these. If you are looking to move from another OOP language to Objective-C, however, this is a great way to get started. Plus, you really need to understand Obj-C to make solid iPhone apps. The side bonus is that you will also be able to write Mac desktop apps.

These screencasts are particularly useful if you are an audio-visual learner and have some background in programming. Don't expect to come up to speed if you have a slight understanding of a basic scripting language. That said, these are very clearly explained and the structure is great. If you watch the videos and do the exercises, I have little doubt you'll be learning the basics of Objective-C in no time. Listen to the audio as we discuss who these are for and what could be done better.

Want your kid to love Linux as much as you do, but worried that he or she might be learning too much about Windows and OS X on the streets (or at school) to feel comfortable with an open source operating system? Qimo is here to help.

Qimo Linux is based on Ubuntu, but it's designed for children over the age of 3. It features large cartoon-like program icons and comes with a bunch of open source and educational games including Tuxmath, Tuxpaint, Tuxtype (a typing game) and even some games that don't have Tux in them like GCompris and Childsplay.

Unlike Edubuntu, Qimo is designed for home use, not classroom use. The operating system can be run from a LiveCD or installed. Qimo uses a simple interface based on Xfce.

[via instant fundas]

I don't have a good history with YouTube sites for kids. My first experience was with TotLOL, where I found the selection of videos lacking and had my wits nearly destroyed by that green gummi bear video. Today I decided I had recovered enough to brave the wilds of the kid-vid genre and check out Kideo Player.

I have to admit, it totally won me over.

Kideo Player is curated by a father of two, and his taste is videos is a lot better than the spotty results you get from community moderation. The curator has a stake in the videos he selects, because his own kids watch them. Minimizing parental annoyance seems to be a priority, too: think Sesame Street, not nightmarish gummi bear. The library of videos seems to lean heavily toward educational material: I saw sign language, Spanish lessons, and animal vids when I was watching.

Kideo Player also has a more attractive, more kid-friendly design than Totlol (the dog and cat mascots are seriously adorable), and controls that even a two-year old can use by himself. Hitting spacebar skips to the next video. That's the only thing a kid has to learn to use the site. All in all, this is exactly the video site I would have wanted if YouTube had been around when I was a little kid, and probably the site my parents would have wanted, too.

I wish Cramberry had been around when I was in high school. All those introductory classes, with their requirements of rote memorization, were totally exhausting. Carrying around massive stacks of flash cards with the Latin names of trees written on them is no longer necessary, though. Now you can put your flashcards online with Cramberry.

Cramberry supports multiple sets, and you can make them public, in case you've got study partners you want to share with. To make a card, just enter the text for the front and back. Sorry, art history students, but there's no image support yet. Once you've got your cards set up, Cramberry will quiz you. The best feature is that the cards you're getting wrong most often show up more frequently, to give you extra practice. Cramberry threw a few php errors during my test, but it works smoothly for the most part, and it's a great concept.

If you're not familiar with it, the HeliOS project is an effort to get computers into the hands of kids who might not otherwise be able to afford them. To date this year, they've distributed over 300 machines. Apparently that's not enough to keep them from making an enemy.

A middle school teacher named Karen observed one of her students demonstrating the abilities of his Linux-powered laptop to his classmates. What a great thing, a student exposing his peers to technology they probably weren't familiar with before....Right?

Wrong. Karen sprang into action, confiscated the CDs the student had brought to share, and unleashed the Spanish Inquisition.

Who is the charlatan who convinced this poor, misguided student that "free software" is something that actually exists?

Who could be so evil as to distribute non-Microsoft software to children? How can that person expect our children to survive in an MS-powered world? Once she had her answer, she sent Ken an email.

In her own words:

At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline.

Having knowledge of more than one language (and to be clear, this is about spoken and written languages, not programming languages) is an increasingly important and valuable skill. The problem is of course, the older we get, the harder it can be to pick up another language.

This is why the Internet is so awesome. It can make the challenge of learning a new language or even picking up a few key phrases much easier and more intuitive.

In that vein, last week, Tokyo-based Cerego launched content creation tools for its open language platform, iKnow! to the public. These tools allow users to create learning modules in 188 languages of study and then collaborate with other users to make corrections, add additional items and discuss the process.

iKnow! isn't just about lists of words and phrases, flash card style. It also leverages the semantic web and lets you "remix" the web. You can add content from Google, Flickr and YouTube to supplement the items you are studying -- a picture from Flickr to represent a term, a video from YouTube to help show something in use -- making the process more engaging. There is also text to speech translation, so you can hear how something sounds and then select the correct context and usage.

There are also courses, although right now they are limited to English and Japanese, that let you study terms. You select what level language you are and what format you want to use and a number of items to study. The web app will then show you words, let you hear them, define them and then move on. After a few words, you will be asked if you "know" a word and you are quizzed and asked to choose what a word means and what it means in the context of a sentence. Very cool stuff.

The biggest players in the online translation game are Yahoo! Babelfish and Google Translate. They both have their unique charms, but a site called Frengly might offer a little competition. Its selection of languages isn't quite as extensive as Google's -- you won't find Hindi, Latvian or Catalan, for example -- but it does offer more languages and more combinations than Babelfish. Frengly's killer feature is auto-detection, though.

Frengly's language detection is even cooler than Google's, for a couple of reasons. First, you don't have to select auto-detection from a language list, like you do in Google Translate. If it's automatic, why should it take an extra step?
Second, you don't have to select a target language from a menu. You can just click it, and the original text remains on screen. If you want another language, just click again.

Frengly doesn't do webpages, and doesn't have a bookmarklet. If that's the bulk of what you want to do, stick with Google for now. On the other hand, it does save a list of your translations. If you're looking for a translator to help you do homework or understand a few words in a book you're reading, look no further.