Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

June 07, 2009

Getting my hands dirty again - my SL6B booth

People have been complaining that I was rather uncommunicative the past couple of days, did only reply sparsely to GTalk, did not show up a lot on Plurk and was rather busy in-world. The reason is that I was busy building my SL6B booth, and I am quite pleased with the process and result so far.

The theme of this year's SL Birthday Celebrations is "The future of virtual worlds". While exhibitors are encouraged to give their vision of the future, the nature of the 20 sims assigned for the expo are somewhat limiting. A barren, volcanic rock - supposed to be an asteroid - with dark ground textures. An sky featuring permanent starry night. And a grid of roads and paths reminding of the Bladerunner movie.

I initially had a different idea for my exhibition space, trying to build a futuristic version of the tower of Babel. But at the same time I wanted my contribution to be educational, so I needed some display room. Seeing my assigned plot and the atmosphere of the sims, the ideas started to float and almost automatically this type of museum-style building emerged.

One key feature about my building is the concept of "floating words". I chose the words "Language", "Culture", "Context" and "Understanding" in the major languages of second Life and have them floating around my space like bubbles in sparkling water. They are small enough and few enough to (hopefully) be not annoying.

Here is a closeup of me with some floating words around me. So this is what kept me busy the past days, and now I need to work on what I will show on the 32 display panels. What? Thirty two? PANIC!!!

April 01, 2009

One journey ends, the next journey begins


The journey of Peter Stindberg has come to an end. This morning's email brought the final confirmation - the account will be put on hold. My journey will continue though - as Peter Linden.

Based on my experience with translation work in Second Life, I will coordinate the multilingual efforts of Linden Lab. This includes proper localization of the viewer into the major SL languages, creating multilingual versions of the Linden Lab blogs, creating language specific portals for each country and working closely with the communities in-world for those languages, but it will also focus on adding multilingual capacities to the Linden Scripting Language. Part of this will include work with the metrics group to determine a resident's language more reliably through behavioral patterns (which sims get visited, what language gets used in open chat and IM's) than the simple viewer language detection.

I thank all my friends and readers for their support so far, and I hope they will extend their friendship to Peter Linden as well.

Good bye - and hello!