translation

A short animation from the DNA Learning Center showing how mRNA carries a gene's message to the ribosome, where tRNA and codons are used to assemble amino acids into a protein.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

Chai Jing's 104-minute documentary on China's smog, with full English subtitles. A former TV anchor, she investigates what smog is, where it comes from and what can be done, prompted by her daughter's health problems.

Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition and translation system, built on deep neural networks, that turns his spoken English into Chinese speech in 2012.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in March 2023 whether GPT-4 and similar models could translate literary and popular fiction. He gives his assessment of Japanese-to-English quality.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

The Monty Python sketch in which a man uses a mistranslated Hungarian phrasebook with absurd results, followed by the courtroom scene.

Tom Scott explains why subtitles often differ from dubbed dialogue, covering how translation, timing and reading speed shape each. It features translators and voice talent working in several languages.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

The Monty Python sketch "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook", in which a faulty phrasebook yields lines like "My hovercraft is full of eels".

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Andrew Ng presents unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, showing how algorithms can learn representations from unlabeled data instead of hand-designed features. He gives examples in vision and audio, including visualizations of features learned by successive layers.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language. Fry argues against grammar pedantry and for the way language evolves, including the verbing of nouns.

Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.

Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's head of AI, presents at ScaledML 2020 on how Tesla builds full self-driving using vision-based neural nets and fleet data collection. He covers training custom detectors and neural nets gradually replacing traditional code.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

Martin Gorner's Devoxx talk introduces deep learning with TensorFlow, walking through neural networks for MNIST, how to choose an architecture and how to diagnose networks that fail to train.

A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

CGP Grey explains why "Indian" is often preferred over "Native American" in the United States, especially near reservations, and how many tribes exist in the US. He draws on conversations with people who identify as Indian.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 demo of dual photography from Stanford, which swaps the roles of projector and camera to render a scene from the light's point of view. It includes the reveal of a hidden playing card.

A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.