Thao dibbly todge-bellied yawnups was tiggling down Widgington passage chasing goolybugs
No its not some new geekspeak you'll end up having to buy the "dummies" guide for but some of the local dialect vocabulary we want to celebrate as part of our quest to localise Microsoft Office. Kudos to the first person that can translate the title of this post..
Today, on St.Georges day and as it happens, the birth and deathday of Shakespeare, we began our project to create local custom dictionaries for Microsoft Office. It was a privilage to meet Johnny Robinson (below and right), the curator of English accents and dialects at the British Library. Johnny and I were doing a series of interviews (I think about 20!) with local radio stations today to enlist the help of people all over the UK with the project.
Do you know a word that people use from wherever you are from in the UK that we could add? if so please will you email the word, a definition and where in the UK it is used to dialect@microsoft.com
We'll be gathering in all these amazing and interesting words over the next few weeks until the end of May and Johnny will be judging which words should go into a set of custom dictionaries we will then create. These will be available to download in June which will mean Microsoft Office will understand your local dialect, spell checking words correctly instead of giving you the red wavy line.
We'll also be giving away 5 copies of Microsoft Office to a random selection of entries - there is no limit to the number of times you can enter.
We should be proud of the rich heritage in local language dialect we have in the UK - for 1500 years, these variations have been developing and changing. It's been 50 years since the last survey of this type was done in the UK and it took 11 years to complete. Now by using new technology we are going to try and do it in about 6 weeks. I was so impressed by Johnnie's knowledge and his ability to do pretty much any accent thanks to his detailed knowledge of phonetics. It was great to hear the range of locals who phoned in - including one caller from Norfolk who sounded like he was actually driving his tractor at the time and had to shout "SORRY!" to some passerby during his call :-) The lead story on Norfolk radio today was regarding a coffin that had been found left in Norwich high street. We also had "Ugly Phil" on Kerrang! radio making jokes throughout and Radio Belfast quizzing me on my Norn Irn phrases learnt growing up with my irish parents.. (I hope I didn't let down the side there!)
Comments
Anonymous
April 23, 2007
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April 23, 2007
I am very impressed Bart! I hope you'll be sending us some choice Wycombese!Anonymous
April 23, 2007
That will be difficult Darren! I translated is using Live search! :-) http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Thao+dibbly+todge-bellied+yawnups+was+tiggling+down+Widgington+passage+chasing+goolybugs&src=IE-SearchBox It gave me one hit that gave me all the words I needed... Cheers, BartAnonymous
April 23, 2007
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April 23, 2007
This one is hard! I, as an non native speaker, tried using Live search, but there is no direct hit for the whole sentence.... So I'm passing the Kudos for this one! BartAnonymous
April 23, 2007
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April 23, 2007
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May 10, 2007
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May 10, 2007
Well Darren, you as Microshaft;s UberLugnerSturmbahnfuhrer, well, you are in need off some additional propganda training. Your lying has worn out, It has becoming boring an predictable.Anonymous
May 15, 2007
so which bit of the "covenant not to sue" was hard for you to understand? It does not wrap the old format, it is a total rewrite. Go read the documentation before making silly statements. 10 billion is the revenue not the profit by the way. Apart from you being ill-informed and rude, what do you bring to the blogging conversation? You can't even seem to leave your comment on a relevant post.. your spelling and grammar could do with some work too by the way, if your productivity suite offers that feature of course..Anonymous
May 15, 2007
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May 15, 2007
you are rude. I am a person. A person with integrity and someone who is open to understanding other points of view. We may disagree but don't come on my blog anonymously and start this kind of vitriol if you are not prepared to even tell us who you are. I'm happy to discuss things with anyone on my blog but not if you are personally insulting and want to do that with no accountability. In the end, this is my home and you will treat it, the other guests who debate here, and me with basic respect. I am not Microsoft and I will not defend everything the company does and has done. You seem to be saying that Microsoft will be able to sue you as soon as Ecma updates the standard? That is not true. We can't use ODF because a) it was not sufficiently defined for the 2007 dev cycle and b) it does not cater for the backwards compatibility use case which Open XML was specifically designed to address. We also fully supported the ratification of ODF through the OASIS process. I guess we could use the config tags in ODF to literally dump all the MS capablities not defined in ODF but there is no sematic richness in doing that and it ends up being much like a binary in a cdata block. That doesn't help solve the problem of backwards compatibility or fully describing office docs in XML. I'm sorry you feel so personally agrieved by Microsoft that you can't separate me from my employer. I'm not engaging with you further from here, I'm sorry, until you have the courage not to be anonymous. I hate to do that but you leave me no choice if you are intent on being so personally offensive.Anonymous
May 17, 2007
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May 21, 2007
Sure, disagree with what Microsoft is doing, but don't do it in an insulting, cowardly anonymous way, otherwise you are no better than whatever it is you are complaining about.Anonymous
July 09, 2007
Microsoft is often synonymous with the classic big American firm but as I'm proud to work for MicrosoftAnonymous
July 09, 2007
Microsoft is often synonymous with the classic big American firm but as I'm proud to work for Microsoft