Complexli

Season’s Greetings!

thomas — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:09:01 +0000

All the best from everyone at Complexli!

Wishing You a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2012!

exofan

thomas — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:08:26 +0000

We’re proud to announce that a website created by Complexli went live over the week-end.

It’s called exofan and it allows you to support charities by taking part in competitions with the chance to win great prizes.

NordChat

thomas — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:00:31 +0000

As mentioned before, Thomas is currently participating in a Scandinavian language conference in Copenhagen. The direct reason for this is that Complexli sent in a proposal to a competition to win funding for a project.

The winning proposal has just been announced, and unfortunately it wasn’t ours. They received 44, which was many more than they expected, so competition was fierce.

However, now that the decision has been made, we’re happy to make public our proposal (PDF in Danish).

The proposal is in Danish because it deals explicitly with Scandinavian languages. However, it could easily be revised to work for situations where a language closely related to the native language of the students is taught, such as Spanish in Portugal, or Czech in Slovakia.

The idea is to create a website provisionally called NordChat that establishes contact between students in the Nordic (Scandinavian) countries and allows them to chat together in their own languages (but not English), both in a classroom situation and at home. For instance, one student might be writing Danish while their chat partner is writing Swedish, which is ideal because the goal is to teach Danish students a passive understanding of Swedish and vice versa.

In previous generations, Scandinavian students in general found it easier to communicate in their own languages, but recently an improved knowledge of English has meant that this language is taking over. Because of this, NordChat includes an English detector, which refuses to display phrases in English. Hopefully students will be pleasantly surprised by how much they understand and quickly develop a good understanding of the other languages.

NordChat will have at least two ways of functioning:

A supervised chat, intended for teaching situations. The system will automatically connect every student in a class with students in the other Nordic countries, so that pairs of pupils can chat together. The teacher can ask questions in advance, and the students must try to find the answers by chatting. The teacher can also monitor the chat and interrupt if there are problems.
An unsupervised chat which will not be radically different from the many existing chat sites on the Internet. The idea here is that students can continue a conversation that they started at school, and thus forge friendships across national borders.

If you think this sounds like a promising idea, why don’t you get in touch and perhaps we can realise NordChat together?

Copenhagen

thomas — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:39:31 +0000

Thomas will be in Copenhagen from Friday the 7th to Wednesday the 12th in order to participate in the Scandinavian language conference called “Tør du? Du forstår mere, end du tror – hvis du tør” (“Do you dare? You understand more than you think – if you dare”) on Tuesday the 11th.

Get in touch if you’re in Copenhagen, too!

Phyllis’s recent work

thomas — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:37:09 +0000

We were having a quick look at the titles that Phyllis has been working on over the last couple of years, and they include:

Conversion of First Time Spanish to XML for Collins Language
Conversion of Italian-Greek Gem to XML for CL
Conversion of Italian-Portuguese Gem to XML for CL
Lexicographic queries on French Concise 8th edition for CL and Dictionnaires le Robert
Proof-reading of a grammar book for CL
Participation in development of Large English Framework for Chinese for CL
Merging of sources for German-English Gem and Dictionary & Grammar for CL
Merging of sources for French-English Gem, Essential and Dictionary & Grammar for CL
Merging of sources for Italian-English Gem and Dictionary & Grammar for CL
Merging of sources for Portuguese-English Gem and Dictionary & Grammar for CL
Merging of sources for the new edition of Großes Schulwörterbuch English for Langenscheidt
Currently merging sources for three French-Spanish dictionaries for CL

Supplying postcards for Oxfam

thomas — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:34:22 +0000

For a bit of fun Phyllis entered Oxfam’s Glasgow postcard competition back in June, when she happened upon it twelve hours before the deadline. She was one of four winners and she was featured in Glasgow’s Evening Times today.

Sprogkampagnen

thomas — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:27:58 +0000

Complexli today sent in a competition entry to the so-called language campaign (“Sprogkampagnen“) under the Nordic Council of Ministers.

We had expected to know whether we were successful by the end of June, but because of an unexpectedly high number of entries the winner will not be announced till September or October.

A project we can’t tell you about yet

thomas — Sun, 15 May 2011 15:29:07 +0000

Complexli have been working hard on an exciting project this spring, but unfortunately we can’t tell you about it till it goes live, which is due to happen shortly after the summer holidays.

We’re really excited about it and will let you know once it’s live.

XML manipulations

thomas — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 16:32:52 +0000

Although it might not sound very sexy, we’ve had great fun helping a major dictionary publisher with doing some intricate XML manipulations using Perl over the past few months.

Season’s Greetings!

thomas — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 15:31:55 +0000

All the best from everyone at Complexli!

Wishing You a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2011!