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Established in 2018, the US National Book Awards’ newest category, Translated Literature, this year drew 141 submissions.
The Second of Five Categories’ 2024 Longlists
With its rate of submissions in this category running a bit lower than might have been expected, the United States’ National Book Foundation‘s second-released 2024 longlist is for Translated Literature.
This is the most important of the five categories for our international professional readership at Publishing Perspectives. In 2023, this category drew 141 entries from publishers, the lowest number since the 2020 competition and the second-lowest since the 2018 establishment of the Translated Literature award.
Last year’s competition drew 154 submissions, by comparison to this year’s 141. The 2022 competition drew 146. Indeed the largest year for submissions so far in Translated Literature was 2021, when publishers made 164 entries. Even in the opening year, 2018 was slightly higher than this year’s input, at 142. Only one year’s number of entries has been lower than this year’s, and that was the pandemic year of 2020, when there were just 130 submissions.
While the differences in these numbers are not large, the longtime struggle of translated literature among American consumers is a perennially painful and frequently embarrassing point for many in the States’ book community and industry. Perhaps there’s some work to do on the part of the foundation in encouraging more submissions in this still-young category.
In 33 years, the initiative has published Brazilian works in 45 languages
The Brazilian National Library Foundation (FBN) is launching a programme to support the translation and publication of Brazilian authors abroad. This is reported by Toda Palavra, a partner of TV BRICS.
The programme will provide US$1 million to publishers who want to translate and publish books by Brazilian authors in other languages.
Applications will be accepted until 6 October 2024.
For example, the programme, which has been in existence for 33 years, has helped publish more than 1,200 Brazilian books in 45 languages.
Financial support is provided in two stages: the first installment is paid after the contract is signed, and the second after the translated book is published.
The aim of the programme is to increase access to Brazilian literature abroad and to promote the national literary heritage.
The shortlist for the 2024 Medal for Excellence in Translation, administered by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), has been announced.
The shortlisted translators and their works are:
Stephanie Smee for On the Line: Notes from a Factory (Joseph Ponthus, Black Inc.)
Josh Stenberg for For a Splendid Sunny Apocalypse (Jiang Tao, Zephyr)
Kevin Windle and Elena Govor for Voices in the Wilderness: A Digest of the Russian-language Press in Australia 1912–1919 (Australian Scholarly Publishing).
Established in 2016, the medal ‘recognises outstanding achievement in translation and the vital role of translators and translation in Australian culture and scholarly discourse’, and is awarded biennially for a book-length translation into English of a work of any genre.
The winner of the 2024 medal will be announced on 30 September, which is also International Translation Day.
Researchers and people from the deaf community have teamed up to co-create a sign language machine translation (SLMT) app.
The research team designed a theatrical performance in sign language, seen through the eyes of artificial intelligence (AI).
“Historically, deaf people have been excluded from the development of automatic translation technologies,” explains Shaun O’Boyle, Research Fellow in the School of Inclusive and Special Education (Dublin City University DCU).
“This has often caused backlash and resistance from deaf communities, as the projects were designed and developed without any input from the very end-users they intended to serve—resulting in a technology no one wanted to use and a big waste of money,” adds Davy Van Landuyt, Project Manager at the European Union of the Deaf (EUD).
For this research, the team decided to reverse the standard approach, with O’Boyle, Van Landuyt, and the other partners of the European project SignON —including the Vlaams GebarentaalCentrum (Flemish Sign Language Centre) — asking participants “If we were to introduce an AI to Shakespeare texts in Irish Sign Language, which extracts would we choose first?
This engagement with the AI allowed them to connect with the audience and gather their opinions about the technology.
In a July 29, 2024 paper, researchers from Apple and the University of Southern California introduced a new approach to addressing gender bias in machine translation (MT) systems.
As the researchers explained, traditional MT systems often default to the most statistically prevalent gender forms in the training data, which can lead to translations that misrepresent the intended meaning and reinforce societal stereotypes. While context sometimes helps determine the appropriate gender, many situations lack sufficient contextual clues, leading to incorrect gender assignments in translations, they added.
To tackle this issue, the researchers developed a method that identifies gender ambiguity in source texts and offers multiple translation alternatives, covering all possible gender combinations (masculine and feminine) for the ambiguous entities.
“Our work advocates and proposes a solution for enabling users to choose from all equally correct translation alternatives,” the researchers said.
For instance, the sentence “The secretary was angry with the boss.” contains two entities — secretary and boss — and could yield four grammatically correct translations in Spanish, depending on the gender assigned to each role.
The researchers emphasized that offering multiple translation alternatives that reflect all valid gender choices is a “reasonable approach.”
Unlike existing methods that operate at the sentence level, this new approach functions at the entity level, allowing for a more nuanced handling of gender-specific references.
The process begins by analyzing the source sentence to identify entities (such as nouns or pronouns) with ambiguous gender references. Once identified, two separate translations are created: one using masculine forms and another one using feminine forms. The final step integrates these translations into a single output that maintains the grammatical integrity of the target language.
AI video creation platform D-ID is the latest company to ship a tool for translating videos into other languages using AI technologies. However, in this case, D-ID also clones the speaker’s voice and changes their lip movements to match the translated words as part of the AI editing process.
The technology stems from D-ID’s earlier work — which you may recall from the viral trend a few years ago where users were animating their older family photos, and later those photos were able to speak. On the back of that success, the startup closed on $25 million in Series B fundraising in 2022 with an eye on serving its increasing number of enterprise customers in the U.S. who were using its technology to make AI-powered videos.
With the company’s now-launched AI Video Translate tech, currently being offered to D-ID subscribers for free, creators can automatically translate their videos into other languages to help them expand their reach. In total, there are 30 languages currently available, including Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish and French, among others. A D-ID subscription starts at $56 per year for its cheapest plan and the smallest number of credits to use toward AI features and then goes up to $1,293 per year before shifting to enterprise pricing.
D-ID suggests the new AI video technology could help customers save on localization costs when scaling their campaigns to a global audience in areas like marketing, entertainment, and social media. The technology will compete with other solutions for both dubbing and AI video.
In a July 30, 2024 research paper, Otso Haavisto and Robin Welsch from Aalto University presented a web application designed to simplify the process of adapting questionnaires for different languages and cultures.
This tool aims to assist researchers conducting cross-cultural studies, enhancing the quality and efficiency of questionnaire adaptation, while promoting equitable research practices.
Haavisto and Welsch highlighted that translating questionnaires is often costly and “resource-intensive,” requiring multiple independent translators and extensive validation processes. According to the authors, this complexity has led to inequalities in research, particularly in non-English-speaking and low-income regions where access to quality questionnaires is limited.
In questionnaire translation, maintaining semantic similarity is crucial to ensure that the translated version retains the same meaning as the original. As the authors noted, “semantic similarity is more important than word-by-word match.” According to the authors, cultural nuances and colloquial expressions can further complicate this process, making it difficult to achieve accurate translations.
To address these challenges, they developed a web application that allows users to translate questionnaires, edit translations, backtranslate to the source language for comparisons against the original, and receive evaluations of translation quality generated by a large language model (LLM).
The Mexican embassy in Egypt has announced the second edition of its translation competition dedicated to Mexican literature, in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, in a spirited celebration of cross-cultural cooperation.
The ceremony, held on 11 August at the National Centre for Translation (NCT) in the Cairo Opera House, aimed to promote Egyptian translators, showcase the richness of Mexican literary works, and strengthen cultural ties between the two nations.
Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim Owaida emerged as the top prize winner, receiving $1,000 for his exceptional translation. The competition attracted 150 participants and resulted in 18 complete translations.
The event, launched in January at the Cairo International Book Fair, underscores the growing interest among Egyptian scholars and enthusiasts in Mexican literature.
Owaida’s winning translation is of El Dragón Blanco y Otros Personajes Olvidados (The White Dragon and Other Forgotten Figures), a collection of short stories by the acclaimed Mexican author Adolfo Córdova.
The book reimagines secondary characters from classic children’s literature as protagonists in their own stories and won the 2015 Juan de la Cabada Fine Arts Award for Children’s Stories. This prestigious award, named after Mexican writer Juan de la Cabada, honours exceptional contributions to children’s literature and celebrates storytelling that engages and inspires young readers.
Córdova’s work, which retains the essence of the original tales while adding fresh narratives, was praised for its powerful and insightful storytelling.
The cross-party House of Lords Public Services Committee has today launched a short inquiry into Interpreting and Translation Services (ITS) in the Courts.
The inquiry seeks to understand the experience of procuring ITS in the courts, policy recommendations for supporting service providers, and the potential role of technology in enabling ITS. The Committee is inviting written evidence on topics including;
The extent to which the current ITS provided in court meets the needs of defendants, prosecutors, witnesses and legal professionals;
The key issues in the provision of ITS and how they impact the running of the courts, public trust, interpreters and translators, including whether there is any data on miscarriages of justice in relation to ITS;
The qualifications and experience of interpreters and translators and the recruitment process, including any barriers to recruitment;
Quality assurance and complaints procedure in relation to ITS;
The potential role of new technology (such as artificial intelligence, machine translation and the digitisation of court proceedings) in the future of interpreting or translation services in the courts; and
The current capability and accuracy of market leading artificial intelligence and machine translation tools in relation to ITS.
The Committee has invited written evidence to be submitted by 30 September 2024 and expects to report on its findings towards the end of the year.
Women in Translation Month (WIT Month) is an annual celebration held in August, dedicated to promoting and honoring women authors who write in languages other than English and the translators who bring their voices to a broader audience. This movement was initiated in 2014 by Meytal Radzinski, a blogger and translator passionate about addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature. Her efforts have spotlighted the critical yet often underrepresented contributions of female authors and translators worldwide, raising awareness and appreciation for their work.
Through August, we are all invited to celebrate women in translation in some way. Here are some fun and meaningful ideas:
Reading challenges: organize or participate in a reading challenge focused on books by women writers in translation. Share your progress and reviews on social media using the hashtag #WITMonth.
Book club discussions: host a book club meeting featuring a female author in translation. Engage in discussions about the themes, cultural contexts, and the translation process itself.
Author and translator interviews: arrange interviews with female authors and translators to share insights into their work, challenges, and the impact of translation on their stories.
Online events and webinars: attend or organize online events, webinars, and panel discussions featuring women writers and translators. These can provide valuable perspectives and foster a sense of community.
The relentless pace of software companies rolling out translation AI as a feature continues unabated. Video hosting and sharing services provider, Vimeo, has announced the release of AI-enabled video translation and voice cloning features to its video platform.
The company’s new AI-enabled translation functionality promises to “leverage generative AI to translate video, audio and captions into dozens of languages – while replicating the original speakers’ voices.”
The functionality, which also allows users to add and edit automatically generated captions, is the latest in a series of AI enhancements designed to boost the video-for-business enterprise user base. As part of the release, Vimeo allows enterprise users to generate a free, 30-second sample of the translations, after which it charges on a per-minute basis.
Users can upload videos with multiple speakers and can rate the quality of the translation by selecting a thumbs up or thumbs down icon for each language.
Ashraf Alkarmi, Chief Product Officer at Vimeo said that the company’s AI translation solution “goes beyond simple transcription.” He added that the tool allows users to “maintain the original speaker’s authentic nuances and tone […] in any language.”
The company did not reveal, however, if it is working with a third-party commercial AI translation provider to power the technology.
Star Wars: A New Hope is rocketing back into theatres – in a completely new way.
For the first time ever, Star Wars has been translated and re-dubbed into Ojibwe.
“To translate all these futuristic terms into our language, which is very ancient, that was a huge challenge,” said Pat Ningewance the lead translator for the project. “But also very exciting!”
The translators couldn’t simply just use The Force to make the translation happen – it also required a rebel alliance so to speak!
Officials say the idea was pitched to Lucasfilm back in 2021, and a number of people worked to translate the iconic script into the Ojibwe language.
“The word for hyperdrive in English has two parts, the hyper which is super, super crazy. And then there’s the drive part. So we, we basically just broke it down the same way,” said Aandeg Muldrew, a translator on the project and the voice of Luke Skywalker.
Bringing those words to life was a different challenge for the voice actors. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are silver screen icons with very distinctive interpretations of the characters.
Theresa Eischen, the voice actor for Princess Leia, said she took her lead from the Hollywood stars.
“I recorded each line that Princess Leia said, as Carrie Fisher said them,” said Eischen. “And then I would automatically say them in English first to get the sound, the way she sounded. Then I would say them in Anishinaabemowin. And it just came together after that.”
The result is a new take on the galaxy far, far away — one that people involved in the project believe will resonate with Indigenous audiences.
Trados, the industry-leading translation platform by RWS, has recently launched an innovative ‘AI Essentials’ add-on, simplifying the integration of AI into translation workflows. AI Essentials combines two groundbreaking capabilities introduced earlier this year – Generative Translation and Smart Review – designed to enhance translation quality, speed up time-to-market, and cut translation costs. With no separate LLM subscription required, this add-on empowers organizations to customize their Trados solutions in line with their unique business needs, unlocking new possibilities to translate everything efficiently.
Additionally, we have also released a collection of new enhancements to The Trados platform. Here are just a few of our latest innovations:
Improve quality and reduce turnaround times withbetter translation management
PerfectMatch for efficient translation: We have now introduced PerfectMatch in the browser as a new step in the workflow, bringing this powerful capability to the entire Trados portfolio.
Previously only available in the desktop application, PerfectMatch is a form of context match that compares source files to existing bilingual files rather than to a translation memory. By identifying matching segments from the previous document and considering the surrounding context, it can provide a perfect match.
Readers might recognize Aida Salazar’s name as the author of award-winning middle grade novels, such as The Moon Within andThe Land of the Cranes, and even her most recent Caldecott Honor winner, Jovita Wears Pants, illustrated by Molly Mendoza (2019, 2020, 2023, all Scholastic). But Salazar wears another hat in the children’s publishing sphere. She’s also a translator of books, including Isabel Quintero’s La panza de mamá, the Spanish-language edition of Mama’s Panza(both Penguin, 2024)—both SLJ stars. The picture book by Morris Award–winning Quintero, illustrated by Iliana Galvez, is about a little boy who expresses his appreciation of the comfort of his mother’s belly. It is a tribute to mother’s bodies and all the love and security that can be found there.
Salazar’s journey into translating happened in the most unexpected of ways. During the pandemic, a publisher requested that she translate Peace by Miranda Paul and Paul Baptiste (NorthSouth, 2021), an ode to peace, from English to Spanish. “They asked me to translate this 300-word poem in rhyme, which was a huge, beautiful puzzle and an incredible challenge,” says Salazar.
COCONUT CREEK, FL. – MotionPoint, the leading website translation and localization platform, announces the official date of AdaptiveCon 2024! The ultimate event for exploring the latest breakthroughs in translation technology for websites will take place virtually for free on August 7th, 2024, at 12 PM ET.
Why Attend AdaptiveCon 2024:
Cutting-Edge Technology Revealed: MotionPoint will introduce groundbreaking advancements in website translation technology. Don’t miss the opportunity to be among the first to witness these innovations.
Industry Insights: Our event is designed for marketing leaders and web developers eager to stay at the forefront of website translation technology. If you’re looking to harness the latest AI advancements to optimize your translation budget, streamline processes, and enhance quality, this event is for you.
Key Learnings:
Maximize your translation budget by identifying which pages require post-edit translation with groundbreaking AI.
Leverage Brand-Voice AI to improve style-guide adherence, and glossary adherence.
How multinational companies can balance marketing messaging in different countries from Subway’s globalization leader after doing so in over 100 countries.
Manga is a 14 billion-dollar industry for Japan, but it would be even bigger if it weren’t for online sites offering stolen versions of the comics. A Tokyo start-up hopes artificial intelligence will ride to the rescue. Its specialized AI system can translate manga into multiple languages in just days, getting the latest volumes into fans’ hands quickly and providing a powerful weapon to fight the pirates.
Unofficial translations are estimated to cost Japanese publishers as much as 5 billion dollars a year, and also pick the pockets of the manga artists who survive on their royalties. Pirates take advantage of the time lag in translating works to rush their versions online before the licensed ones can be released.
The demand for translations now far outstrips the supply. At the New York branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, manga fans scour the shelves for the latest additions to their collections.
But only a fraction of Japanese manga titles are available in translation. The store has a sign informing customers which manga have yet to be released in English.
Nagai Yasunobu, a manager at Kinokuniya New York, says manga’s popularity is surging. If this trend continues, he says that translating more work will be crucial.
Works across different genres—and in 10 languages—have won English PEN’s flagship translation awards, PEN Translates.
The books selected demonstrate outstanding literary quality, and are also judged on the strength of the publishing project and their contribution to the UK’s bibliodiversity.
PEN Translates is supported by Arts Council England, and the award was launched with the aim of encouraging UK publishers to acquire more books from other languages, helping them to meet the costs associated with translation. It funds up to 75% of these costs for selected projects, but PEN also considers supporting up to 100% of translation costs in cases where a publisher’s annual turnover is less than £500,000.
Two of the books awarded—a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, and The Aquatics by Osvalde Lewat, translated from the French by Maren Baudet-Lackner—were projects supported through English PEN’s grant for sample translations, PEN Presents. They were subsequently acquired by And Other Stories and Cassava Republic Press, respectively.
Mushtaq’s collection of short stories has also been supported through a ring-fenced fund for Indian literature in translation in partnership with the British Council. This partnership was established as part of the India/UK Together Season of Culture, and included the inaugural round of PEN Presents in 2022, of which Mushtaq and Bhasthi were winners.
This global convening offers invited artists, writers, and scholars whose work re-imagines the experiences of migration, challenges normative xenophobic ideas and undermines a politics of fear to generate new discourses, aesthetics, and structures of knowledge. Our world is characterized by the movements of people, diasporas, and relocations: far from a temporary or “crisis” phenomenon, human beings globally and historically have always left their homes to escape war, to avoid persecution, for work, for security. We have been uprooted, stolen, trafficked, enslaved; they have been displaced from land despoiled of resources and habitats lost to extreme weather patterns and climate change. We have moved and migrated for deeply private and personal reasons – to reach potential freely, to lead meaningful lives, to secure a future for ourselves and our families. An account of the migration is the totality of many stories. We seek to capture the breadth of experience. Translation is critical to any genuine comprehension of our contemporary world. Literature and art open us to abundant cultures carried by human beings when they migrate. This alternative critical language leads us to think expansively about memory, belonging and identity, familiar and unfamiliar, borders and home, objects and affects, self-imagining, family and loss. Panels include: Perspectives on Migration, Migration and Translation, Black Rest in Translation, MacX Fellows and Migration Projects. We hope you can join us in Paris for what is going to be an unforgettable convening.
Red Cross volunteers getting ready to deliver the mission. Photo illustration by Juan Carlos Molina Padilla/American Red Cross
The American Red Cross Multicultural Communications team announces the launch of its innovative Translator Hub. This cutting-edge platform is designed to bridge the language gap and ensure effective communication with non-English speaking audiences. By utilizing a custom machine translation system complemented by rigorous human reviews, the hub offers accurate and culturally sensitive translations for all text and materials.
The Translator Hub is a significant milestone for the American Red Cross, reflecting its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Users within the organization can now translate a wide range of documents, ensuring vital information reaches diverse communities. Whether it’s press releases, social media content, or educational materials, the hub ensures these messages are understood by everyone, regardless of language barriers.
The key to the hub’s success is its dual approach to translation. Initially, a custom machine translation system generates a preliminary document. This is then meticulously reviewed by human translators to guarantee accuracy, contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness. This two-step process ensures that the final output is not only linguistically correct, but also resonates with the target audience.
The Société française des traducteurs (SFT), a French union for professional translators and interpreters, has released a statement on the use of AI translation and GenAI.
The SFT published the statement in mid-June 2024, following a survey of members between November-December 2023, and now encourages all professionals — members and the unaffiliated alike — to share the statement. (The SFT reported 1,648 members as of June 2020.)
The statement acknowledges that the translation industry has already been impacted by major technological upheavals; namely, the introduction of neural machine translation (MT) in 2016. Since then, clients and language service providers (LSPs) alike have largely adopted this technology.
Still, the statement posits, that the output [of machine translation] remains unreadable in its raw state, and requires humans to correct it via post-editing: “But 70% of our member translators who responded to our survey considered PE (and by extension AI) a threat to their profession.”
More specifically, the SFT calls for the respect of human expertise and strongly recommends against replacing human language experts with AI tools, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.
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