stereotyping

Good post by Mark Liberman on Language Log:

Captain John Dunn, of the Shreveport LA police department, is quoted by CNN as attributing the failure of the speech recognition technology in their new PBX to “Southern drawl and what I call lazy mouth”… Message to Captain Dunn: the fault is in your system’s technology, not in your citizens’ mouths.

I bet a small amount a year ago that the Catalan-Spanish language problem will have disappeared objectively within 20 years. Although the Generalitat manages to waste a huge amount of money producing lousy materials, nominal translation costs have fallen in the past ten years, quality has improved, and the continuing trend to smaller, better, cheaper prosthetic plugins means that we’ll all be able to communicate whatever we want. All we’ll need to do then is pension off the Catalan versions of Captain Dunn and figure out what to argue about next.

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