Three billion people could speak English by 2015: study
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Global understanding could improve dramatically over the next 10 years through the simple fact that by 2015, a good proportion of the planet's population will be able to speak English, according to a recent study.
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SHANGHAI: A city forecast shows the third baby boom is expected in the next 10 years with annual newborns expected to reach a peak of 160,000 in 2014 and 2015.
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(InfoWorld) - AÂ word processor developed by the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and based on OpenOffice.org 2.0 could make life easier for bilingual communities around the world. The translation software, Agored,Â which means open in Welsh, contains prominent buttons to switch the language of the user interface between English and Welsh. Similar buttons change the language used by the spelling checker, either for the whole document or for one paragraph. There's already a Welsh-language version of OpenOffice, but the application interface only shows one language at a time, and changing it involves delving into the menus. Much of the bilingual functionality that Agored adds to the interface is already present in OpenOffice, but not readily accessible, said David Chan, a programmer who worked on the project. Agored makes it easier for users to sit down in front of a computer and switch the application to their strongest language, he said. Wales, one of the four constituent nations of the U.K., has two official languages with equal status, Welsh and English, and local government bodies and other public organizations must issue documents in both languages. Almost one in four of the country's 2.8 million inhabitants speak, read or write Welsh, according to the latest national census , but there are few exclusively Welsh-speaking communities left. "Those people need bilingual software, not Welsh software," Chan said. In addition to the coding, a lot of work went into the translation of Agored's menu items, dialogs and numerous help files -- around half a million words in all, according to Diarmuid Johnson, who worked on the translation. The University of Wales at Aberystwyth developed Agored with funding from the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh public television channel S4C and the Welsh Language Board. Some of the computer-related terms had already been defined by the Welsh Language Board in a joint project with Microsoft Corp. in 2004 that led to the creation of a Welsh language interface pack for Office 2003 , Johnson said. In the three days following Agored's release on Nov. 16, it was downloaded 200 times, Chan said. The functions that Agored adds to OpenOffice could interest many more people than that, though. Chan said the project team took care to make their code changes useful to other bilingual communities, groups that could include speakers of English and Irish Gaelic in Ireland; of French and Dutch in the Belgian capital of Brussels; of French and German in Switzerland, and of Basque and Spanish or of Catalan and Spanish in Spain. Chan said he had already been contacted by Catalan speakers during Agored's development. Speakers of Catalan and Welsh have another IT interest in common: Internet top-level domains (TLDs) to promote their languages and cultures. Domain name registry FundaciÃ³ puntCAT won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the dot-cat TLD for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community in September 2005. One year later, FundaciÃ³ puntCAT said it had registered 17,500 dot-cat domains. Inspired by the Catalan success, a Welsh group has launched a campaign for a Welsh TLD , dot-cym. (The y in cym rhymes with the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "hood.") The campaigners hope that dot-cym will stimulate the use of Welsh on the Web in the same way that the creation of the dot-cat TLD led to the creation of sites written in the Catalan language. Earlier this month, members of the National Assembly of Wales voted to support the dot-cym campaign.
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By the year 2050, nearly one in five Americans will be foreign born, 29 percent of the population will be Hispanic, and non-Hispanic whites will become a minority, accounting for only 47 percent of the population, according to a report released today.
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SHANGHAI, China  - China's population, now the world's largest at 1.3 billion, will peak at just under 1.5 billion in about 30 years, the country's head of population planning was quoted on Monday as saying.
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Ninety-six percent of Finns have access to broadband Internet and 50 percent to third-generation (3G) mobile telephony, a study published by the communications ministry showed.
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Researchers are hoping to help the federal government sort through data in various languages by developing software that can quickly cull and analyze text and speech.
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The number of Britons who own a second home abroad has nearly doubled in the last two years and now stands at three percent of the population.
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Global mobile phone use will pass the 3  billion mark -- equivalent to half the world's population --  for the first time in 2007 as cell phone demand booms in China,  India and Africa, a survey said on Wednesday.
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Children&#39;s brains are hard-wired to learn languages and, in some cases, to improve upon them. That&#39;s the conclusion of a new study that followed several generations of
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People wanting to live permanently in Britain will have to prove their proficiency in the English language and demonstrate their knowledge of life in the country from next year.
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English high schools may teach Mandarin or Arabic instead of EU languages in new curriculum proposals.
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A new report recommending English become a compulsory subject in all schools in France has stirred heated debate in the country, with teachers' unions and proponents of linguistic diversity clenching their jaws ...
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The number of people 60 years of age and older may nearly triple to 2 billion by 2050, accounting for nearly a quarter of the expected 9.2 billion global population, a U.N. report warned on Tuesday.
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New Microsoft program smoothes transition from Chinese to English.
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Whether English is America&#039;s &quot;national language&quot; or its national &quot;common and unifying language&quot; was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate.
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Burnsville police have begun using an electronic device that translates English into 15 languages in just a few seconds, hoping to save time when questioning the city's Somali, Spanish, Russian and Southeast Asian communities.