Pupils pit wits against language puzzles

It might look like Chinese — in fact, it is — but the students who figure out this problem could be making online shopping or computer gaming much easier within a few years.

This is the kind of question that was attempted by 100 teenagers at the finals of a national linguistics competition yesterday. But, rather than being about expertise in languages, the idea is to develop second- level students’ skills in logic and recognising patterns in unknown languages.

The end result of the efforts by the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) at Dublin City University (DCU) should be to find researchers to design computer coding that will allow websites better recognise your buying patterns, or to offer quick and accurate translation of online content from a range of international languages.