This site uses cookies.
Some of these cookies are essential to the operation of the site,
while others help to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.
For more information, please see the ProZ.com privacy policy.
Award-winning writer, poet and translator Professor Makhosazana Xaba used the second annual AC Jordan commemoration lecture to take a stand for women translators, spotlighting the lack of value afforded to their intellectual labours, especially in respect of African languages.
The annual lecture, instituted in 2023 by the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) School of Languages and Literatures and the AC Jordan Chair in Africa Studies, provides a platform for critical reflections and engaging dialogues, highlighting African intellectual histories, scholars and scholarship across the continent, as part of efforts to advance decolonisation efforts at UCT.
The AC Jordan Chair was established at UCT in 1993, named for Professor Archibald Campbell Jordan, an academic pioneer of African scholarship, literature and linguistics, and renowned for his novel Ingqumbo yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors).
Taking to the stage to deliver her lecture at the end of October, Professor Xaba quickly dispensed with the original title of her speech, “On Translating The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu: From Challenges and Pleasures to Epiphanies” – reflections on her recent translation into isiZulu of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba (The Wretched of the Earth).
When it comes to solving climate change, every word counts. From the pitfalls of metaphors to the multiple meanings of the word “energy” – this is how translators at global climate negotiations navigate the language of global warming.
“I remember one morning we returned to our hotel at around 4:00am and slept for two hours. Then we were told that the final document was adopted so we had to rush back to the conference to translate the outcome documents,” says Jianjun Chen, a Chinese language translator at the United Nations, based in Geneva.
He is recounting the frantic hours before negotiators reached a deal at the 24th Convention of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – or COP24 – in Katowice, Poland, in 2018. Chen, who has worked at the UN for 14 years and translated multiple documents from the UN climate talks into Mandarin, isn’t fazed by the long hours or lack of sleep.
This year’s UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be his 13th. As world leaders gather for COP29 in Baku, Chen and 25 other translators are preparing for a slew of new climate vocabulary to enter the discourse – words that will dictate the ways countries and campaigners approach climate action.
The final text is the result of negotiations, sometimes very intense negotiations. So you have to be very careful about the wording – Jianjun Chen
Chen also translated important documents when the landmark Paris Agreement was signed at the UN climate talks in 2015 (COP21), pledging to try to prevent global warming to well below 2C, with a stretch target of a 1.5C limit. (Read more about why 1.5C is a critical threshold in this story by Martha Henriques). “I was called to start working in the middle of the night at 2 or 3am. Since there was always a tight deadline, we didn’t have the luxury to fall asleep,” he recalls.
Google has announced that it has extended AI voice capabilities to over a dozen new African languages across a range of Google services.
Google — which already supports typing with a custom keyboard in Gboard for approximately 200 African languages, and machine translations for over 60 African languages in Google Translate — now supports voice search, talk-to-type on Gboard, and dictation on Google Translate for 15 regional languages.
The development means that the company has more than doubled the number of African languages that enable speech-to-text in Google Translate and has doubled existing voice input support for Gboard and voice search in the region.
Daan van Esch, Technical Program Manager at Google, said that the update “will enable around 300 million more Africans to use their voice to interact with the web.”
Speaking recently to Slator about the challenges and opportunities of the language services market in Africa, Christian Elongue, Managing Director of Kabod Group said, “there is limited training data that many African languages are facing, [and there are multiple initiatives] contributing to creating data sets for various low-resource African languages.”
Translators have raised concerns over Simon & Schuster-owned publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s (VBK) “disastrous decision” to use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate some titles into English.
TheBookseller revealed last week that the Utrecht-headquartered publisher is “working on a limited experiment with some Dutch authors for their books to be translated into English language using AI”. It was later reported in the Guardianthat the “project contains less than 10 titles—all commercial fiction”, and does not include any literary books or titles to which English rights would likely be sold at any point. The story was also followed up on Radio 4’s “Today” programme.
The publisher, which was acquired by Simon & Schuster (S&S) earlier this year, explained that this would include “one editing phase, and [that] authors have been asked to give permission for this”.
Although the Dutch publisher is owned by S&S, The Bookseller understands that the two publishers’ editorial decisions remain separate.
Industry figures have voiced their concerns about the potential “reputational damage” of this move, and the inefficiency that AI could introduce into the translation process.
Louise Rogers Lalaurie, who has translated 15 novels from French and is the author of Matisse: The Books (Thames & Hudson/University of Chicago Press), explained that the “end result” of an AI-generated translation can cost “more than a good human translation first time round” due to the time-consuming “post-editing” process.
Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) aims to deliver real-time translations as a source language, spoken or written. Traditionally, this requires models that control when to “read” more of the source and when to “write” the translation — decisions that rely on intensive model training, complex model designs, and significant computing power.
Now, researchers Libo Zhao, Jing Li, and Ziqian Zeng from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and South China University of Technology have introduced PsFuture, a zero-shot, adaptable read/write policy that enables SiMT models to make real-time translation decisions without additional training.
The researchers said they drew inspiration from human interpreters, who dynamically decide when to listen and when to speak based on evolving contexts. “Interpreters shift from listening to translating upon anticipating that further future words would not impact their current decisions,” they explained.
PsFuture allows translation models to make similar, context-aware decisions, leveraging “the model’s inherent linguistic comprehension and translation proficiency” and eliminating the need for further training.
Simulated Look-Ahead
Rather than relying on a fixed number of source words to determine the right time to start translating, PsFuture allows a model to anticipate what’s coming next. By using pseudo-future information — a simulated, brief “look-ahead” similar to how interpreters anticipate what might come next in a sentence — the model assesses if additional context would change its next translation output. If not, the model proceeds with translating. If more context is needed, it waits to “read” further.
Veen Bosch & Keuning, the largest publisher in the Netherlands, has confirmed plans to trial the use of artificial intelligence to assist in translation of commercial fiction
A major Dutch publisher plans to trial translating books into English using artificial intelligence.
Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) – the largest publisher in the Netherlands, acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year – is “using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of books”, Vanessa van Hofwegen, commercial director at VBK said.
“This project contains less than 10 titles – all commercial fiction. No literary titles will nor shall be used. This is on an experimental basis, and we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future,” she added.
“There will be one editing phase, and authors have been asked to give permission for this,” a VBK spokesperson told the Bookseller. “We are not creating books with AI, it all starts and ends with human action.”
The fact that the publisher is planning to use AI translation only for commercial fiction, rather than literary titles, “assumes those books are purely formulaic and don’t contain many creative elements, which is rather insulting to the authors and readers involved”, said Michele Hutchison, who won the 2020 International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening.
“There’s only so far you can get” with machine translation post-editing – the process by which a human translator reviews an AI-generated translation. “The text might be superficially smooth but it is also likely to be very bland,” she added.
In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), foreign language learning can seem like it’s becoming obsolete. Why invest the time and effort to learn another language when technology can do it for you?
There are now translation tools to understand song lyrics, translate websites and to enable automated captions when watching foreign videos and movies. Our phones can instantly translate spoken words.
At the same time, foreign language programs are closing at New Zealand and Australian universities.
But while technology can translate messages, it misses an important component of human communication—the cultural nuances behind the words.
So, while AI translation might bridge language barriers and promote communication because of its accessibility, it’s important to be clear about the benefits and challenges it presents. Merely relying on technology to translate between languages will ultimately lead to misunderstandings and a less rich human experience.
A stop sign in English, French and Inuktut syllabics is seen in Iqaluit, on April 25, 2015. One of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in this country is now available through Google’s translation service, the first time the tech giant has included a First Nations, Métis or Inuit language spoken in Canada on its platform. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
By Brittany Hobson, The Canadian Press
Posted October 17, 2024 9:00 am.
Last Updated October 17, 2024 4:10 pm.
One of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in this country is now available through Google’s translation service, the first time the tech giant has included a First Nations, Métis or Inuit language spoken in Canada on its platform.
Inuktut, a broad term encompassing different dialects spoken by Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Alaska, has been added to Google Translate, which translates text, documents and websites from one language into another.
The latest addition is part of a Google initiative to develop a single artificial intelligence language model to support 1,000 of the most spoken languages in the world.
There are roughly 40,000 Inuktut speakers in Canada, data from Statistics Canada suggests.
The number of speakers alone is not enough to determine whether a language can be included in Google Translate, said Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer with the platform.
There also has to be enough online text data to pull from to create a language model.
Other Indigenous languages in Canada have “had simply too little data to have any usable machine translation model,” said Caswell.
For example, engineers looked at adding Cree, which is spoken by more than 86,000 people in Canada, but there were fewer websites in the language to pull from.
“We don’t want to put anything on the product which just produces broken text or nonsense,” said Caswell.
Han Kang is lucky to have a translator as gifted and prominent as Deborah Smith, who enabled Han’s works to cross the borders of her country and meet foreign readers.
SEOUL – The news that novelist Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature came as a wonderful surprise to the Korean people. We feel it’s been a long time coming: Whereas Japan already has three Nobel laureates in literature and China has two, Korea had none until last week. At last, Korea has become a country with a Nobel Prize winner in literature.
These days, Korea is well known to the world, thanks to the immense popularity of Hallyu. In a sign of this recognition, McDonald’s sold BTS Meals for some time, and Coca-Cola is now selling a K-wave zero sugar product. In 2020, the Korean movie “Parasite” received six Academy Awards. In addition to the fame of its pop culture, Korea has now impressed the world with its literary works, too, which was acknowledged by the Nobel Prize, thereby accomplishing for Hallyu a “rondure complete,” as Walt Whitman might have put it.
To become universal, literature requires translation, because unlike music, dance or art, it can only be accessed through written language. Therefore, an excellent translation is a crucial prerequisite for a literary work to be read and praised around the world. Indeed, the famous Italian writer Italo Calvino said, “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”
Han Kang is lucky to have a translator as gifted and prominent as Deborah Smith, who enabled Han’s works to cross the borders of her country and meet foreign readers. People say that had it not been for the superb translator Edward Seidensticker, Japanese novelist Yasunary Kawabata could not have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The same thing may apply to Deborah Smith and Han Kang, because no matter how great a writer is, he or she cannot be known overseas without translation.
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has invested heavily in its fast-growing international business as growth slows for its China-focused Taobao and Tmall business.
BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s international arm on Wednesday launched an updated version of its artificial intelligence-powered translation tool that, it says, is better than products offered by Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
Alibaba’s fast-growing international unit released the AI translation product as an update to one unveiled about a year ago, which it says already has 500,000 merchant users. Sellers based in one country can use the translation tool to create product pages in the language of the target market.
The new version is based only on large language models, allowing it to draw on contextual clues such as culture or industry-specific terms, Kaifu Zhang, vice president of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group and head of the business’ artificial intelligence initiative, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“The idea is that we want this AI tool to help the bottom line of the merchants, because if the merchants are doing well, the platform will be doing well,” he said.
Large language models power artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can also translate text. The models, trained on massive amounts of data, can generate humanlike responses to user prompts.
Organisations in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine can apply now and before 11 February 2025 to get funding for the translation, publication, distribution, and promotion of European literary works of fiction. With a budget of €5 million, the EU programme ‘Creative Europe’ will finance about 40 projects under this call.
Interested organisations can apply individually or as a consortium of at least two eligible organisations. Each project must have a sound editorial, distribution and promotion strategy and propose a minimum of five eligible works of fiction written by authors who are nationals of, or residents in, or recognised as part of the literary heritage of an eligible country, including Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.
Applicants can apply with projects of different sizes: small scale (at least 5 translations of eligible works), medium scale (at least 11 translations), and large scale (at least 21 translations).
The deadline for applications is 11 February 2025.
Han Kang’s Nobel Prize in Literature has not only highlighted her works but also shone a spotlight on the importance of translation. Many say that translating from Korean to English can be challenging due to cultural differences and linguistic complexities. Unique cultural elements like honorifics, for example, may be difficult for English-speaking readers to understand.
Deborah Smith, 37, the British translator who translated Han’s “The Vegetarian” (2007), said she always keeps in mind how a book could be comprehended by native English speakers. In an interview with the Daesan Foundation after winning the International Booker Prize in 2016 with Han, she said that English readers may be unlikely to understand Korea’s social order based on the Confucian hierarchy.
To capture the oppressive atmosphere felt by the protagonist of “The Vegetarian,” who is in conflict with her family over her decision to become a vegetarian,Smith altered relational titles like “sister-in-law’s husband” to “Ji-woo’s mother” in her translation.
Smith translated “The Vegetarian” in 2013, just three years after beginning to learn Korean. She has since translated Han’s “The White Book” (2016), “Human Acts,” (2014) and “Greek Lessons” (2011), with the English version of “The White Book” being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018.
For a few years now, AI has been reshaping how audiovisual content is localized and used.
From AI-automated subtitling and captioning to AI dubbing and advancements in sign language, AI-generated audio description, and many other services, audiovisual translation (AVT) presents both exciting opportunities and challenges for language service providers (LSPs).
Data from the 2024 Slator Pro Guide: Audiovisual Translation shows that most established providers of AVT services already use AI tools in their workflow or are considering their implementation in the short to medium term.
In fact, over a third of LSPs surveyed by Slator now offer AI voiceover and subtitling services, with a quarter providing AI dubbing. This trend is driven partly by end clients actively asking for more efficient and scalable solutions.
As Ofir Krakowski, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepdub, aptly pointed out during a SlatorPod episode, we live in an age dominated by audiovisual content.
As it happens, today (October 10), there’s similar shortlist anticipation from another prominent book award, the United Kingdom’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, where executive director Toby Mundy, intends to research and report—on his own choice of timing and criteria after his awards—the impact of a Baillie Gifford Prize win.
In the aggregate, efforts of these kinds—to discern and evaluate the marketplce effects of a prize win—can establish some parameters of expecatation and actual influence, leading, presumably, to more clear-eyed enthusiasm—an honest appraisal of the impact of a “golden sticker” on a book cover, in terms of how much awards actually count.
And with ALTA’s focus on translation, particularly in the United States, it could be instructive to know if and how much an award might influence marketplace perceptions of translated work. The value of translation in literature has never been self-evident to broad swaths of many populations, and having actual numbers on how much an award might impact print-runs, unit sales, and so on, could be invaluable.
Language AI tools are transforming the industry, boosting efficiency, cutting costs, and driving growth – with DeepL usage far outpacing Google, Microsoft and more
COLOGNE, Germany, Oct. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — DeepL, a leading global Language AI company, has been named the #1 most-used machine translation (MT) provider among global language service companies in a new 2024 ALC Industry Survey report by the Association of Language Companies (ALC) and Slator. The company’s rise to market leadership, coupled with its exponential growth – DeepL now serves over 100,000 business and government customers worldwide – highlights the growing significance of AI-powered translation solutions in transforming industries, including language services, manufacturing, legal, healthcare and more.
“This exciting milestone highlights the accuracy and reliability of DeepL’s specialized Language AI platform, which is trusted by businesses worldwide for critical translation projects. It also is a testament to our positive impact on their cost savings, efficiency, and growth,” said Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and Founder, DeepL. “As AI in language services gains in popularity, we are honored to be the industry’s preferred Language AI partner and are committed to providing industry-leading, cutting-edge, specialized tools for translation, AI-driven content creation, and more.”
The new ALC report surveyed 127 language service companies (LSCs) from 28 countries*. The results underscore the expanding role of machine translation in the services offered by LSCS to key industries such as healthcare, law, and education.
The role that interpreters play in health care is complex, difficult and largely unacknowledged. We couldn’t do our job without them.
The first patient arrives, flustered and tightly wound. She’s a refugee six months post-arrival in Australia. The initial flush of finally getting here has started to fade, the winter is getting colder and her children have to take three buses to school. She has increasing requests from her employment services provider to complete English classes and think about looking for work. In the country she left, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate and the messages from family left behind are less frequent but more distressing. She’s ostensibly here to follow up on some outstanding blood results from her new arrival refugee health assessment, but it’s clear from the outset there’s going to be a lot more to manage here.
Like almost all of our consults, this appointment is made possible through the Translating and Interpreting Services (TIS National). We dial in, provide some details and — almost miraculously, within minutes — are connected to someone who speaks English and the language of the patient in front of us.
Communication between the patient and doctor is perhaps the foundation of medicine. International Translation Day falls on 30 September, formalised by the United Nations in 2017 to acknowledge the work of all language professionals and their role in world peace and security. The date was chosen in honour of Saint Jerome, a priest from Northern Italy known primarily for translating the Bible into Latin from Greek and Hebrew and considered the patron saint of translators. We want to celebrate the daily contribution of a largely unacknowledged workforce in the clinical space, the Translating and Interpreting Service (TIS National).
The nature of the refugee health service where we work means we use mostly on-call telephone interpreters rather than pre-booked or face-to-face services. Although the interpreters are rostered on to take calls, they are going about their day — sometimes with washing dishes, barking dogs or pedestrian crossings in the background — when we’re connected by the operator, they step out of their worlds and immediately into the intimacy of a consult room.
Torino’s international book fair presents its fourth annual conference for translators, featuring Italian books ready for business.
On Frankfurt Wednesday Morning
Dall’italiano al mondo means “From Italy to the World,” and this year’s iteration of the translation conference at Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) starts at 9 a.m. on the first day of the fair.
This year in its fourth iteration, the program, which targets translators, is to be an in-person event rather than digital, and the goal is “to support the translation of Italian litrature abroad and to promote networking between translators all over the world.” That of course is perfectly aligned with the mission of Guest of Honor Italy.
And this program has the patronage of CEATL, the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires, which, as our readers know, is now in the middle of its own three-day translation conference in Strasbourg.
Language watchdog insists French labelling requirements apply to all products, including musical instruments.
Xavier Twigg, owner of Twigg Musique Montréal, says instrument companies generally only create one product label in one language, English.(Steve Rukavina/CBC)
The president of a nationwide chain of musical instrument stores says a whole new twist on D-Day is coming to Quebec next June.
That’s when the province has promised to crack down on product labelling, ensuring everything has French wording emblazoned, inscribed or stickered on. The new law, known as Bill 96, requires any label or writing on musical instruments, products or packaging to have a French translation.
“When we get to D-Day, unless there’s some changes, it’s going to be very traumatic for our stores,” said Steve Long, president of Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, which has 100 locations from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
“We won’t be able to operate in Quebec.”
Long & McQuade has 18 stores in the province.
Long is among those raising concerns about the new law’s Article 51. It says every inscription on a product, its container, its wrapping or on any document or object supplied with it — including the directions for use and the warranty certificates — must be drafted in French.
Most of these products are imported, and English is the industry-standard language.
Lilt CEO Spence Green’s observation on SlatorPod that localization has become one of the key use cases to show return on investment in AI is something most people in the industry can agree with. And when some big names like Reddit not only make AI-enabled localization part of their growth strategy, but also make good on their intent, as they announced in September 2024, the skeptics ought to notice, too.
The technology is certainly there for all who wish to open the door to automation of multiple localization tasks.
Transformed content workflows and customization of target outputs via trained/fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) are just two examples of what can now be done. But there is a lot more.
What retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI orchestration can help accomplish, and the ability to process ultra-mega-massive volumes of content using AI, are also great ways to boost that precious ROI… even automating quality assurance to different degrees based on the type of content.
Still, quality assurance remains one of those subjects for experimentation and debate. For that and much more, it is humans who need to get their heads around retooling processes, roles, and the back office so that no new problems are unnecessarily created as AI is implemented.
We asked readers if AI (LLMs included) has changed their day-to-day work in the past 24 months. Over a third of respondents (37.5%) said that has not happened at all (!). A little less than a quarter (23.6%) are on the opposite end of the spectrum saying it has done so radically. The rest, two equal groups (19.4% each respectively), said it has somewhat changed it or just a bit.
NEW YORK (United Nations) — The United Nations celebrates this Monday the International Translation Day, honoring language specialists and highlighting their crucial role in bringing nations together, promoting development and bolstering global peace and security.
Through its resolution 71/288, adopted on 24 May 2017, the General Assembly designated September 30 as International Translation Day, stressing the crucial role of language specialists in bringing nations closer together and promoting peace, understanding and development.
This year’s theme, “Translation, an art worth protecting: Moral and material rights for indigenous languages,” will focus on key ethical issues related to copyright, data collection and the use of translated works.
The event will shed light on the practical challenges our multifaceted global community encounters when collecting data and translating indigenous languages, as well as the strategies employed to tackle these challenges in line with industry best practices.
Professional translation, encompassing written translation, interpretation, and terminology work, involves conveying literary, scientific, or technical concepts across languages. This practice is crucial for ensuring clear communication, fostering a positive atmosphere and driving forward discussions in both international public discourse and personal interactions.
Comments about this article