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One of the Internet’s great promises is that it’s the ultimate democratizer. It’s open to everyone and allows all people to communicate.

But, so far, there have been several hitches in that plan. Not everyone has access to a computer and a broadband connection. Some governments still censor the Internet. And of course, we don’t all speak the same language.

For the World Wide Web to be truly global, shouldn’t Chinese speakers be able to chat online with people who only speak Spanish? And why should an English speaker be barred from reading blogs written in Malagasy or Zulu?

Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. are two Web companies trying particularly hard to make this happen, and they’ve released a number of updates to their translation services in recent weeks.

The two online giants are going about the process in different ways.

Facebook aims to translate the Web using an army of volunteers and some hired professional translators. Meanwhile, Google plans to let computers do most of the work.

Which method will ultimately prevail remains to be seen.

But for now, here’s a look at the latest language features from both companies, and some background on how their translation services work. (Feel free to add your own Internet translation tips — and fun translation bloopers — in the comments section at the bottom of the story):

Facebook’s human translation. Many tech bloggers think Facebook’s method of human translation seems promising. After all, the American-born social networking site introduced non-English languages for the first time only in January 2008. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s 300 million users are outside of the United States.

How it works: Real people are at the heart of Facebook translation plan. They suggest translated phrases and vote on translations that others have submitted. These crowd-sourced edits — which work kind of like Wikipedia — make Facebook’s translation service smarter over time. Go to Facebook’s translation page to check it out or to participate.

Size: More than 65 languages function on Facebook now, according to Facebook’s statistics. At least another 30 languages are in the works, meaning Facebook needs help working out the kinks on those languages before they’re put to use.

What’s new? Facebook announced in a blog post on September 30 that the social network has made its crowd-sourced translation technology available to other sites on the Web. The update allows sites to install a translation gadget on their sites through Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users sign in on other Web pages.

Facebook also added some new languages, including Latin and “Pirate,” which translates the Facebooky word “share” as “blabber t’yer mates!”

Pros and cons: People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things.

Also, Facebook’s site is available in many languages, but its human translators don’t touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don’t share a common language with you. People who use Facebook Connect to translate their sites can choose which text they want users to help translate, according to Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

Craig Ulliott, founder of whereivebeen.com, said he’s excited about Facebook’s translation application, but it would be too much to ask his site’s users to translate user-submitted material.

Google’s ‘mechanical’ translation

Google uses mathematical equations to try to translate the Web’s content. This fits in line with the company’s mission, which is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to all.

How it works: Google’s computers learn how to be translators by examining text that’s already on the Web, and from professional Web translations posted online, said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google. The more text is out there, the more Google learns and the better its translations become. The search-engine company currently translates documents, search results and full Web pages.

Size: Google claims to be the largest free language translation service online. It covers 51 languages and more than 2,500 language pairs. The site’s interface has been translated, with the help of Google users, into 130 languages.

What’s new?: Google recently created a widget that any Web developer can put on his or her page to offer up Google translations. So, say you’re a blogger who writes about music. You might get some Brazilian readers if you offered up a button to translate your site into Portuguese.

Google also recently unveiled a translation service for Google Docs, which lets anyone upload a document to the Web and have it translated into a number of languages for free. And there’s a new Firefox add-on from Google to help people translate the Web more quickly.

Och said real-time translation of Internet chats is on the horizon, as are more languages and increased quality as Google’s computers get smarter.

Pros and cons: Google’s computerized approach means it can translate tons of content — and fast. But computers aren’t quite up to speed with ever-evolving modern speech, so reports of translation errors are fairly common.

On the plus side, the service has been vastly improved in the last five years, Och said. Also, Google lets people spot translation errors, suggest new wordings and translate its interface into languages Google’s computers don’t speak just yet.

From landlocked farms in the Franconia region of Bavaria to fishing villages on the coast of Scotland or the Shetland Islands, regional dialects throughout consolidated and globalized Europe are something of an endangered cultural resource.

The task of preserving them goes in part to dialect poets, including two Germans and two Scots who have been involved in a project to translate regional verse.

Last year they held a workshop in Fife, Scotland, where they communicated through oral translators and were provided with literal “gloss” translations in both languages of each other’s poems. Today, they say the experience has had a lasting effect on how they view their poetry.

Ties to the land

The sentiments of dialect poems are often expressed through rustic and geographically-bound language. While Franconian poets often work with imagery and idiomatic expressions based on a life of farming, the Scots poets do so with a life of fishing in mind. In some instances, this makes literal translation impossible and forces the poets to search for comparable literary devices.

Isabel Cole organized the workshop and edits a Berlin-based journal of German literature in English translation called “no man’s land.” She said dialect is less accepted in Germany as a form of literary expression than it is in Scotland.

“I think if people are open-minded about literature, dialects or non-standard literature, it is a real enrichment,” said Cole. “That’s something I actually miss in standard German literature. One thing I like about Germany is how many dialects there are, and how people cultivate their dialects. They have really different ways of expressing themselves.”

The personal element

Fitzgerald Kusz, a Franconian poet from Nuremberg, said that in translating Scots poems he was surprised to discover traces of that dialect’s Germanic roots. Kusz has spoken Franconian since childhood and regards his dialect as an intimate and comfortable form of communication.

“On one hand, globalization continues strengthen its hold,” he said, “High German, the unified language, can be heard on television in every village. But there is, in fact, a movement among the people to keep their languages alive.”

And that is one primary goal of dialect literature, he added.

One of Kusz’ Scots counterparts, Alexander Hutchison, said “a shift into the dialect makes things much more personal… for me it’s just a different instrument.”

Although Hutchison, who lives in Glasgow, is not optimistic about current attempts to cultivate dialect in Scotland’s schools, he said that in poetry the Scots dialect is every bit as viable a form of self-expression as standard English.

“If people don’t understand the dialect, they can’t connect,” he said. “But if they do understand it, then there’s an immediacy – a personal element – that you cannot get in the parent language. There’s just as much possibility of a lack in the parent language as there is in the dialect. They operate in different dimensions to me.”

The flip-side of globalization

Franconian poet Helmut Haberkamm, who grew up in a farming village not far from Erlangen, told Deutsche Welle in an email interview that Franconian is “deeply and unmistakably connected to my childhood and the early emotions and experiences which formed me, predetermined parts of my life, and arranged my existence.

“Franconian is inextricably dissolved in my person. It is my language of emotion and intimacy,” he added.

Haberkamm has translated the works of Shetlandic poet Robert Alan Jamieson. Although the environments of Sheltand and Franconia vary greatly, Haberkamm said he found striking similarities in the way nature is woven into the lives and languages of both regions.

In translating Jamieson’s poems, he said he wanted “to bring out the simple, gripping way these people express themselves.”

Haberkamm described regionalism as the “necessary flip-side of globalization,” adding that “people without an understanding of their roots and concrete values are easily manipulated.”

Endangered by mobility

Although Hutchison expressed similar sentiments while speaking about his desire to preserve Scots and see it flourish, he compared the dialect to a “threatened habitat,” endangered by time and changing patterns of human behavior. Having lived for years in North America, Hutchison said he understands the pressures modern existence exerts on local cultures.

“People move around, people move off, people don’t stay in one place long enough to develop it,” he said. “There are new dialects springing up all the time. If there’s enough settled community, they’ll find a language.

“I’m always wary of standardization, of people trying to impose things. As a poet, I never want to make rules for other poets.”

When Andrew Jackson University, an online university with several criminal justice degree programs, first offered to provide English-Spanish witness translation cards free of charge to law enforcement agencies it never expected the level of interest the offer would eventually elicit. With translation help forthcoming from FBI offices, foreign consulates, the U.S. State Department, and various law enforcement agencies, the number of translations available mushroomed to eleven. And requests for additional translations are pouring in.

Keith Schmoke, Andrew Jackson University’s law enforcement liaison, has received requests from across the country and around the world for Pashtu, Hindi, Tagalog, and Creole translations, among others. “When word got around that we had free witness translation cards available in seven languages the card requests flooded in,” said Schmoke, who with the university’s director of admissions Tammy Kassner, has been fielding the requests.

Schmoke had some success contacting consulates and embassies for help with the Tagalog (Filipino), Armenian and Pashtu translations. “Despite the natural disasters occurring in the Philippines, Brinerdine G. Alejandrino with the Thomas Jefferson Information Center at the Embassy of the United States of America in Manila e-mailed me the Tagalog translation, and even apologized for taking too long to do it,” Schmoke stated. It seems that the embassy had to wait for the power to come back on after being hit by a typhoon.

Other translation help came from the resident agent in charge of the Sioux City FBI office, who asked his wife, a native Albanian and professional translator, to provide the Albanian translation. This cooperation and assistance has resulted in witness translation cards in eleven languages now available through Andrew Jackson University.

When asked how the university became involved with providing the popular witness translation cards, Schmoke said a school executive read where perpetrators were apprehended minutes after a crime was committed because responding officers used the original English-Spanish version to quickly obtain a description of the criminals from witnesses who only spoke Spanish. Since the university has degree programs in criminal justice, the executive thought offering the cards to law enforcement departments would be a way to help make their prospective students’ jobs a little easier.

An accredited, wholly online institution ranked No. 1 nationally for online degree programs by Online Degree Reviews, Andrew Jackson University and its Jeffrey D. Rubenstein College of Criminal Justice and Public Safet cater to students who are already employed in law enforcement. Tammy Kassner said these “CJ” students like the 24/7 availability of online courses and the fact that degrees earned at her university are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. This recognition makes the degrees acceptable by the vast majority of state and local, as well as all Federal law enforcement and military agencies.

Currently available translations include Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, German, Arabic, Tagalog, Armenian, Pashtu and Albanian. “Our offer still stands,” said Schmoke, “and to repeat, the translation cards are free. Just send an e-mail to me at kschmoke@aju.edu and we will send you a PDF of the requested card or cards. You can then duplicate them as needed. We know they’ll help.”

An upcoming version of Adobe’s Creative Suite developer tools will let Flash developers export their projects as iPhone apps, Adobe announced at their MAX conference on Monday.

The new developer suite doesn’t solve iPhone users’ biggest Flash problem, which is a lack of Flash support in the Web browser creating gigantic blank spaces in some Web pages. But it provides a path for Flash application developers to sell their programs as individual apps through the iPhone’s app store. The new tools will run on Windows and Mac PCs. A public beta will arrive later this year, with a final version arriving next year.

“All we’re doing is enabling output from our tools to a native iPhone app,” Adobe Director of Technical Marketing for Mobile and Devices Anup Murarka said.

Most computers and devices run a Flash interpreter from Adobe, which takes a package of code from a Flash developer and converts it into native code on the fly. Apple prohibits that kind of translation on iPhones. To get around Apple’s prohibition on interpreters, the new Flash Professional CS5 will output iPhone native apps with no interpretation happening anywhere within them.

This differs from Adobe’s approach on every other major handheld platform. Adobe announced Monday that it would develop full Flash 10.1 interpreters for every other major, current smartphone OS.

While the upcoming Flash 10.1 for handhelds will deliver plenty of features that are ideal for iPhone apps, such as multitouch and accelerometer support, Murarka acknowledged that CS5 won’t be able to support all of the iPhone’s features. For instance, Flash apps won’t be able to access the iPhone’s dialer or mapping application.

“We’re not trying to invent completely new features on the Flash side that would otherwise be specific to the iPhone. This is really about bridging the gap, enabling [developers] to deliver their first set of iPhone apps,” he said.

Murarka also underscored that Adobe doesn’t intend to hold developers’ hands through the sometimes-painful Apple App Store submission process.

“We’re not playing an aggregation role, we’re not playing a certification role; this is really about tooling and workflow,” he said.

That said, Adobe is publicly showing off seven games built with Flash tools which have already been accepted to the Apple App Store.

Flash may yet be coming to the iPhone browser. When asked about whether Adobe is in contact with Apple about making their products work together, Murarka didn’t deny that the two companies are talking. He didn’t confirm it, but he didn’t deny it – which, when you’re dealing with Apple, can be almost as good as confirming it.

“I’m not able to comment on any of our direct dialogue with Apple,” Murarka said.

Versified Bosnian translation of the Divan of Hafez was introduced during the ceremony on Hafez National Day in Shiraz on Monday.

Published by the Ibn Sina Research Institute in Sarajevo, the divan was first translated into prose by Basir Jaka, but a group of Persian literature scholars of Bosnia turned it into poetry, said an official from the institute Mohammad-Hossein Abbasi.

He noted that the divan has been ready for publication since two years ago. “We preferred to publish the book in Iran, but there wasn’t much interest or support in the country. So we negotiated with several publishing houses in Bosnia and finally came to an agreement with a firm there that gave us a good discount. It is interesting to note that the director of the publishing house stated that publishing book wouldn’t be profitable, however it would give them the honor of publishing a great masterpiece.”

The Bosnian translation of the divan has been warmly received in Bosnia. Dr. Mustafa Ceric, the Reisu-l-Ulema of Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina regards the work as a great success there.

Abbasi later expressed his appreciation to all the Iranian and Bosnian scholars who assisted the institute in the publication of the great work.

Every year, Hafez experts and scholars from across the country and abroad gather at the Hafez Mausoleum on October 12 to mark Hafez National Day.

This year, Bosnian scholar Nusret Isanovic, the director of Zenica Islamic Pedagogic Academy participated in the ceremony and delivered a speech entitled “Hafez in the Mind of the Bosnian People of Today”.