CEERES-region languages on Google Translate

I just read on the Official Google Blog that they recently added seven new languages to Google Translate making the grand total of languages available now 41! The exciting thing about this is four of these new seven languages are CEERES-region languages: Albanian, Hungarian, Estonian and Turkish! 

Anyways, Google Translate already has a bunch of other language spoken in our region available as well, including Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian, to name a few. Just thought this might be interesting to some of our blog readers! 

Weekly CEERES news roundup!

The New York Times did an excellent piece on Moscow's mayor Luzhkov and his propensity for creating foreign policy. They followed it up by translating many of the comments the post received on their Russian language blog and picked out some specifically to write a follow-up article talking about how Russians feel about Luzhkov.

Georgia's President Saakashvili announced he would be replacing the Prime Minister. (BBC)

Monday, the IMF said it would offer loans to both Ukraine and Hungary as the two Eastern European countries have both been hit hard by the global credit crisis. (BBC)

While not completely current, two weeks ago Azerbaijan's president Aliyev was re-elected with 89% of the vote. Many of the opposition parties boycotted this election, which caused many international observers to remark on the lack of real competition. (BBC, EurasiaNet)

This piece that the BBC did on Albania's "sworn virgins" is very interesting and offers an interesting look at a phenomenon that's dying out.