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Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their usefulness for streamlining workflows, optimizing linguistic assets, and shortening quality assurance cycles, among many other applications.
Through LLMs, AI is not just automating tasks, but also reshaping how language service providers (LSPs) and localization divisions at the enterprise operate, deliver value, and grow their businesses.
These changes and the overall impact of AI in translation are being felt across the language industry, and the second edition of Slator Pro Guide: Translation AI captures new and updated use cases illustrating this rapid evolution.
The guide examines not only impact, but also value, implementation effort, technology involved, business opportunities, and user perspectives for 20 use cases.
Highlighting the wide-ranging applications of AI in translation, from core machine translation (MT) to sophisticated production and linguistic tasks, a few primary business areas appear to be influenced by AI, though its impact is certainly not limited to these.
Our film editor takes a look at the tangled art of international film titles translated for the German screen.
Hot Fuzz: Zwei abgewichste Profis (2007, d. Edgar Wright). IMAGO / United Archives
Occasionally I search my press emails for an upcoming film, and I’m confused when it doesn’t show up. I search the director and actors’ names, find the poster with their faces. But it turns out the movie is called something else entirely.
This happened to me this month; while writing about the Luis Buñuel retrospective upcoming at filmkunst66. I was confused by the title The Strangling Angel – a Buñuel I had missed during film school? No, it was in fact just the German title for his masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (in the original Spanish, El Ángel Exterminador). The altered name gives off a totally different mood and feeling – more calculating than constraining.
The title of a film bears a lot of weight. Like an elevator pitch, it gives one a sudden burst of understanding, or it plays with you viscerally. Often the title is translated as literally as possible into new languages, but different countries have different film markets and audiences – what works in one area may not land in the same way elsewhere.
Sometimes distributors decide against the original title, renaming it or adding a long sentence that wouldn’t pass for the byline for the picture. In the comparatively verbose German tongue, the straight-up translation method doesn’t work as easily.
WALTHAM, MA, UNITED STATES, September 10, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Lionbridge, a global leader in translation and localization solutions, has published a new eBook, “AI and Language Strategy in Life Sciences.” This comprehensive guide explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on language outcomes within the Life Sciences industry. It provides the latest guidance for safely embracing AI to enhance language capabilities across the drug and medical device lifecycle.
Life Sciences companies are adopting AI, but are understandably cautious about trusting Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI to translate regulated content. Lionbridge’s eBook addresses how to achieve trust and control when deploying AI-powered language services. It also offers guidance on where and how LLMs can be utilized for cost efficiency without compromising language quality and compliance.
“As a leader in life sciences language services, Lionbridge is at the forefront of understanding how new language technologies are transforming the industry.”
— Pia Windelov, VP Life Sciences Strategy and Product Marketing
Authored by industry experts Pia Windelov, Vice President of Life Sciences Strategy and Product Marketing at Lionbridge, and Camilla de Villiers, Managing Director of Life Sciences at Lionbridge, the eBook bridges the trust gap and clarifies potential applications of LLMs to produce reliable language outcomes.
In this age of instantaneous tech, a lack of language skills is still putting global business success on mute. How can marketers avoid getting lost in translation?
Going global is increasingly on a CEO’s and a CMO’s to-do list. In the UK alone, 87% of those businesses who trade internationally are planning on expanding their overseas operations this year, with a further 10% aiming to step outside the UK for the first time.
That’s a lot of cross-market communication campaigns. But, despite emerging technologies helping business bridge borders more easily than ever before, they’re still being held back by language barriers – to the tune of almost £50bn per year in the UK.
When words cost business
We’re living in a turbo-CX age. From hyper-personalization to customer-centric, data-driven campaigns – consumers increasingly expect their needs to be understood and met. And that means that language, more than ever, is not just about words. It’s about making a deep, personal connection with someone based around cultural nuances. But these cultural nuances are often missed in generative AI’s word churn, jeopardizing audience engagement in an era where building trust is everything.
Without this richer understanding of language, marketing messages are misinterpreted. That makes brands seem distant and out of touch. And that makes customers feel dissatisfied and disengaged.
When companies don’t localize the buying experience, they risk losing around 40% of their target market. But when trading partners use similar languages, trade can shoot up by 72%.
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 game “Black Myth: Wukong” owes its popularity among gamers around the world to refined graphics, difficult gameplay, storytelling and, perhaps most of all, to the English translations of the texts.
Developed by China-based Game Science, the game doesn’t use the traditional translation of the ancient Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” on which the game is based. Rather, it uses pinyin – the most common Western alphabet transcription of the sound of Chinese words.
For example, the main character, the Monkey King, is translated as Wukong, his Chinese name. The Black Bear Monster is “Black Bear Guai,” with guai the abbreviation of yaoguai, which means “monster.”
The video game “Back Myth Wukong” has become a hit, piquing the interest of gamers around the world about ancient Chinese myths.
It is interesting that while most Western players are helping each other with the texts online, their Chinese counterparts are arguing whether the translation sets the bar too high for foreign players.
“It’s too confusing, and I believe they should at least unify pinyin or English words,” said one user on Weibo.
That raises some interesting questions. What is good translation? How should we pursue translations – by adhering to original meaning as much as possible or compromising a bit to make them more understandable to foreigners?
The answers are complicated.
Hugo Tseng, professor of English and college dean at Sanda University, told Shanghai Daily that there is no “standard, correct translation.”
He explained, “You can translate ‘Black Bear Monster’ as such or by its pronunciation ‘Hei Xiong Guai.’ The latter will definitely be more confusing to foreigners, but it is the more accurate one. ‘Black Bear Guai’ combines the two, and it has both pros and cons.”
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.
On August 20, 2024, researchers from Northeastern University, Jinan University, Harbin Engineering University, and NiuTrans Research published a comprehensive overview of the challenges and advancements in the field of simultaneous speech translation (SimulST).
The authors describe SimulST as “especially beneficial in scenarios that require fast and smooth communication,” such as live conversations and voice conferencing.
Given its critical role in real-time communication, the field has received significant attention and made notable progress in recent years. However, it remains a “demanding task,” according to the authors, who identified and outlined four key challenges that complicate SimulST:
SimulST models must effectively handle lengthy and continuous speech inputs while maintaining high translation accuracy and low latency.
These models also face the challenge of “deciding” when to start translating without having access to the complete input, balancing the risk of premature outputs — leading to incomplete translations — against delays that increase latency, as both can negatively impact the user experience.
Achieving the right balance between translation quality and latency is complex, as no single evaluation metric effectively addresses both aspects simultaneously.
SimulST suffers from a lack of annotated training data, making it difficult to train models effectively and achieve optimal performance.
“These factors collectively contribute to the intricate nature of the SimulST task,” the authors noted.
While previous studies have proposed solutions to these challenges, a comprehensive overview summarizing these practices has been missing. With this paper, the authors aim to fill that gap by providing “a more complete and comprehensive introduction to SimulST.
At this year’s Anime NYC, we had the opportunity to, alongside other members of the press, speak with manga translator and historian Fred Schodt about his storied career, influential works, thoughts on the evolving industry, and perspective on translation as a career. Mr. Schodt is known for his translations of works including Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix and Astro Boy (the latter of which being featured on his shirt), The Rose of Versailles, The Four Immigrants, and many more. His most well-known work (among a long list of them) is Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, published in 1983. The industry has changed a lot since he first entered it, but at all times he’s been a pivotal figure within.
Popularizing Manga in the West
The landscape of manga consumption in the West was nowhere near what it was now just 40 years ago. At that time, most non-Japanese people had never heard of manga, so the demand for Japanese manga translated into English simply wasn’t there. Fred Schodt wrote Manga! Manga! mainly because he loved manga and Japanese comics and wanted to share them with the rest of the world. The work became a seminal text in the study of manga and was a crucial reason that Japanese manga was brought to the Western world at large. Mr. Schodt described his experiences in releasing Manga! Manga! during a time when manga itself was barely a concept in the greater North American consciousness.
In 2023, the Hollywood actor strike that paralyzed a number of localization activities in film, TV, and gaming productions, among others, allowed for dubbing work to continue. The July 2024 SAG–AFTRA union’s strike would require members to stop working altogether in video games, specifically, as covered by the union’s “Interactive Media Agreement.”
“Localization for foreign video games covered under the Interactive Localization Agreement (ILA) is struck work,” says a statement published by the union.
The list of services becoming off limits to members includes acting; singing; “voice acting, including performing sound-alike voice services;” and “authorizing the use of your voice or likeness (which includes integration or reuse of work already performed)” in video games.
The latest strike highlights a key point of contention: the use of AI in voice acting. SAG-AFTRA aims to protect its members from being replaced by AI technology, just as game studios are ever more tempted by the potential of AI dubbing to lower costs and shorten production timelines.
We asked readers if they think the video game actor strike will be a net positive for voice actors, and over a third (36.8%) believe that will be the case. A group of about the same size (34.2%) thinks it is probable, while less than a quarter (23.7%) find it unlikely and the rest (5.3%) think it will not be so.
Dr. B.J. Woodstein, Professor, Translator, and Writer, joins SlatorPod to talk about translation theory and its implications for literary translators, while also shedding light on the professional challenges, nuances, and ethical considerations.
B.J. discusses her upcoming book, “Translation Theory for Literary Translators”, where she aims to demystify translation theory and make it accessible to translators. She highlights the need for translators to understand and engage with translation theory to enhance their work and make informed decisions in their practice.
The author shares insights on the market dynamics of literary translation, including how translators are selected, rates are set, and the challenges faced in the industry.
She highlights the importance of human intervention in translation, especially in handling linguistic nuances, cultural concepts, and editorial decisions that go beyond what AI or machine translation can achieve.
B.J. reflects on the linguistic and cultural challenges in translating from Swedish to English, such as dealing with different language structures and cultural nuances that may not easily be translated. She also explores the complexities of translating sensitive or explicit content, where decisions need to be made to maintain cultural authenticity while adapting for the target market.
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.
Lawyers are often disliked for their excessive attention to detail, but every word truly needs to be justified and carefully considered in international documents.
There are already several examples in Ukrainian legislature where the translation of international treaties have errors that distort their meaning.
Moreover, Ukraine has ratified a flawed translation of the Rome Statute.
The issue of translating international legal acts into Ukrainian has become increasingly relevant in Ukraine since 2014.
But significant steps to address this problem have yet to be taken.
It’s strange when Ukraine is convincing the world that Russia is violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, while not having an official Ukrainian translation of this convention.
Moreover, many documents ratified by our state (especially those ratified by Soviet Ukraine) still do not have official Ukrainian translations.
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.
Continuing the celebration of Women in Translation Month and taking advantage of the few days left in August, I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Chantal Wright, Professor of Creativity and the Language Industry at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences and, none other than the founder of The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, now coordinated by Holly Langstaff. And when I say “I had the pleasure…” I really mean that it was an honor and a privilege to chat with someone I personally admire greatly for her work, who is also incredibly kind.
For those who don’t know her, Chantal was born in Manchester, England, and she is a translator of literary and academic material from German and French into English. She is also the author of Literary Translation (Routledge, 2016), recipient of the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation (2012), and of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant (2009), among many other accolades.
I’m excited to share the delightful conversation we had a few days ago as part of the ProZ.com Women in Translation initiative and Women in Translation Month, where she talks about how the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation addresses a significant gender imbalance in the field, discusses how translation studies have evolved over the years, particularly with the increasing focus on gender and diversity, and shares some advice for women aspiring to enter the field of literary translation.
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 translation industry, like many other fields, thrives on the collective support and collaboration of its members. For women in this sector, building a nurturing community can greatly benefit both their personal and professional development.
In honor of Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), which focuses on celebrating and advancing the contributions of female translators and the works of women in translation, this article explores how women can create a supportive network to uplift and promote each other’s achievements.
Here are some strategies for women to strengthen their connections and enhance each other’s success in this dynamic field:
The power of honest praise
Women in translation are the majority in the line of work, but (maybe not so?) surprisingly, the most visible and heard voices still relatively stay the domain of male colleagues. Women in the workplace need more positive encouragement to step into the spotlight than male colleagues. By being supportive and encouraging colleagues to each other, women can hope to see more women step up and shine.
To do this, female linguists can openly and honestly praise each other for their achievements. Some women rarely receive positive feedback as a “cog in the machine” of the language services providers’ world. Women can do it for each other, though!
In May 2024, researchers emphasized the crucial role that emotions play in human communication and introduced a new dataset designed to enhance speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation by integrating emotional context into the translation process.
In July 2024, Alibaba incorporated speech emotion recognition (SER) into its FunAudioLLM to retain original emotions in AI-powered interpreting.
Building on this, an August 6, 2024, paper by Charles Brazier and Jean-Luc Rouas from the University of Bordeaux demonstrated how to integrate emotional context into large language models (LLMs) to condition translation and improve quality.
They argue that “conditioning the translation with a specific emotion would use a suitable vocabulary in the translation.”
This research builds on the authors’ previous work, which was the first to explore combining machine translation (MT) models with emotion information. Their earlier study demonstrated that adding emotion-related data to input sentences could enhance translation quality. In this latest study, Brazier and Rouas take the concept further by replacing the MT model used in their prior work with a fine-tuned 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.
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