One cold December morning, an unlikely leading character, a bumblebee, hears news of the birth of the King of Creation. With great enthusiasm, he sets out for Bethlehem to honor the Child and bring a precious gift to adorn the little King's crown. Along the way, the bee encounters a number of unusual but eager characters who wish to make the journey with him. After seeing the unique and inspired gifts that his new friends bring to honor the King that first Christmas Day, the bee searches his heart and soul to find a special gift of his own. The Christmas Crown is a beautiful, enlightening, and entertaining story for children of all ages. Author Maria G. Martin writes in order to reinforce in children and their parents the importance of growing in virtue to honor God. Look forward to her next book, titled The Easter Crown, where the bee travels to Jerusalem to see the risen Lord. Martin grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives and writes in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Illustrator Kay Stratman is a professional graphic designer and fine artist. She is an award-winning member of the Sumi-e Society of America, specializing in her own interpretation of Asian brush painting. She lives in Wyoming with her husband, where she exhibits, teaches and interprets the great wide open with spontaneous brushstrokes of watercolor and ink on rice paper. Publisher's website: http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheChristmasCrown.html

The Verbmobil System currently under development in Germany would input speech in a source language dialogue, translate it, and output synthesized speech in a target language, all in real time under the conditions of face-to-face dialogue. This preliminary study is an assessment of the state of the art of the speech recognition and machine translation fields, and a frank discussion of the challenges the developers of such a system face. A speech-based machine translation system in effect combines all the technical problems of understanding and generation systems and adds the very special difficulties of translation. The difficulties of translation are illustrated with a variety of examples culled from a number of languages. A general architecture called translation-by-negotiation is proposed. This book is of value not only to students of speech recognition and machine translation, but to anyone interested in natural language processing in general, since computational problems and linguistic approaches at various levels of linguistics and analysis are discussed.