How do you transliterate that?

I am thinking of using google’s English to Hindi translation and hooking it to a Hindi to Urdu transliterator to get an approximate English to Urdu translation. The Hindi to English transliteration provided by google has some errors which might not be there if we convert directly to Urdu. For example, on translating the sentence It can be used in Urdu too, we get the Hindi translation यह उर्दू में इस्तेमाल किया जा सकता है ...

January 21, 2010

What do you tweet about? : A shell script for getting most frequent words for twitter

There are a lot of web apps around which report your twitter stats. But at times, it’s better to do things yourself. I haven’t done any fun coding for ages now so last night, I finally got around to making a small program to gather twitter word statistics. The fun part was to do everything using unix tools. Here’s a small script file which displays the 10 most used words in the tweets for any twitter id. I have only tested it under cygwin so this is probably the best place to say “USE AT YOUR OWN RISK”. ...

December 18, 2009

5 minutes of FM ads

I get to listen to some FM radio ads every now and then (don’t ask why) but today’s line up was rather interesting. !ہر چیز میزان میں، اچھی لگتی ہے (append more ridiculously childish lyrics here) Warid is asking us to start using our SIMs again by uttering the spell “کھل جا SIM SIM”. Not a bad techie pun even though its a bit corny. Junaid Jamshed is telling us that its ok to get Lays (no ungrammatical pun intended). Apparently he has done the research himself and was ‘surprised’ to find out that they were made in Pakistan! (no really? wow! ہم کتنی ترقی کر گٰے ہیں) Also that they are 100% حلال (with all stress on ح ، حلق سے). Personally, I prefer Slanty. The Prime Minister has established a new “Special Fund for Victims of Terrorism”. Perhaps its a step towards not using the three lettered acronym (IDP). I was wondering if this makes people from US and UK eligible as well. All this happened while “Miss Recheal Goodluck” was dropping me an email telling me that she is interested in me *blush* *blush* ...

June 4, 2009

NCA shows off its students

[caption id=“attachment_27” align=“alignleft” width=“151” caption=“BBC heading gone wrong (again)”] [/caption] I am sure BBC Urdu never does this intentionally but every once in a while, they put up an ambiguous heading. This one, roughly translated, can either mean ‘Exhibition of students from NCA’ or ‘Exhibition by students from NCA’. (You may NOT comment about the font problem here :> )

January 24, 2009

CLT 2009

The Conference on Language and Technology (CLT) 2009 is starting from tomorrow. Its a 3-day event consisting of invited talks, workshops, paper presentation and some other stuff as well. I hope to catch at least some of the workshops barring time overlap with classes and the session on Semantics and Information Retrieval if possible. Details can be viewed on http://www.crulp.org/clt09.

January 21, 2009