I often find myself promoting the fact that Nexidia supports more than 35 languages world wide, including different “language packs” for both American and British English. People wonder why we bother with this; aren’t they essentially the same language? And since Nexidia is capturing the phonemes why can’t we just have a standard English language pack and be done with it?
Well, Yanks and Brits can certainly understand each other (for the most part) on each side of The Pond. But that’s because the human brain has an amazing ability to adapt and recognize patterns and nuances and put things into context on the fly. So when an American says “aluminum” but a Brit says “aluminium” most people realize right away they mean the same thing. But these two words do sound different, especially when you factor in the vastly different accents and dialects across the UK. So the reason we have two different language packs for essentially the same language goes back to this: we need to accurately capture the sounds made by speakers of each language, and we need to support the search and retrieval of those sounds using the common text expressions that represent those words and phrases.
Here’s a classic illustration. Let’s ponder the word “advertisement”. It’s spelled the same in both the US and the UK (and Canada…let’s not forget our northern neighbors). But it’s pronounced quite differently.
In the US, it’s ad-ver-TISE-ment.
In the UK, it’s ad-VER-tiz-ment.
So in order to provide the most accurate search possible, the Nexidia engine first captures the spoken sounds (phonemes) that are used to represent this word in a recording. Then, when the user enters the text expression to search, we convert this text back into the appropriate sounds that are representative for the accents and dialects for a particular language and find all the matches. In the North American English language pack, we know to look for ad-ver-TISE-ment, while in the UK English language pack we look for ad-VER-tiz-ment.
I haven’t even touched on the fact that we have yet another English language pack for our Aussie mates (or should I say “Ozzie mites”?). I suspect that Down Under, the word for advertisement is “Fosters,” beer being the most popular consumer product. (And yes, I know that Fosters isn’t actually popular in-country…but if I said “Four X” or “Tooheys” the rest of the world wouldn’t get my joke.)
This was obviously just one example of the literally hundreds of thousands of permutations and differences that exist even between what are essentially the same language. But it helps you better understand the work Nexidia has put in to make sure that this is all transparent to the end user. With that, I’m off to pop open a bottle of Bud, put some prawns on the barbie and settle in to watch some soccer…I mean, football!
