Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Oral Language Archive (OLA)

All you may have read in your books, OLA is a rather relevant project in the 90ies dealing with spoken discourse. Could you find any differences or similarities with new projects like these: language exchanges , audiopal, englishaddicts, subdub, europodians project, etc


2 comments:

Rosa M. Portilla said...

The most important differences between OLA and other new projects like these are the flexibility in its use, because you can not only listen but also read or do exercises about some theme you choose, and the access to up-to-date contents.
The contents are constantly update for the users.
With MIXXER, for example, you can speak with language learners or teachers with SKYPE online. Audiopal can play any text you write with different voices in a very realistic way.

Captain Gavilain said...

From all the pages, applications, etc., Mixxer has a similar objective and, despite being a little bit restrictive as rosa pointed before, quite a similar performance. The rest are more particular applications, useful for advertising, accent practice, translation, etc. Related to subtitles translation, I'm a constant user of subtitles sources for my TV series and films. When i started Filología Inglesa i begun to consume all my multimedia in English, be it video, audio or books. The habitual practice in tv/movies subs is sometimes so fast that one wonder if people does the translation in real time while watching the movie. If one selects one of the most useful pages for subtitles its evident the multitude of countries and users that do participate, but rather downloading than uploading. As usual, the hard work is carried out by a few, selected, users, while the others, i'm included, behave like leeches.