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In this world of growing online consumer engagement with products, there are greater volumes of content to be translated than ever before. Consumers are demanding more and more product descriptions, reviews, online help and even social media…and corporations would be wise to provide it all in multiple languages. To handle this much content and at the required speed, machine translation (MT) often comes into play.

But is the quality good enough? Raw MT might be acceptable, or post-editing might be needed in order to meet translation quality requirements. Considering the possible variations in translation quality resulting from the various processes, quality is awfully hard to define and assess.

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A survey of over 2,800 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) published by the European Commission revealed nearly 40% of respondents had not used a machine translation tool prior to the study. Moreover, while an overwhelming majority of SMEs still preferred human translation for business activities, such as negotiating contracts and dealing with the public sector in another country, over 70% said machine translation was nonetheless useful for their business.

Continue reading on Slator.

The Translation Talent Development Scheme (TTDS) is a co-sponsorship grant that supports Singaporean translation and interpretation practitioners from the private sector to further develop their capabilities and attain mastery of their skills. TTDS will subsidise 90% of fees associated with capability development programmes such as local and overseas courses, workshops, seminars, webinars and conferences subject to a cap of S$10,000 per recipient.

Learn more here.

When I first met Ameena Saiyid, then Managing Director of OUP (Pakistan) at a literature festival in India many years ago, she said to me: “Aap Karachi Literature Festival mein zaroor aaiye. Asif Farrukhi aap se mil kar bohot khush honge. (Do come to the Karachi Literature Festival. Asif Farrukhi will be very pleased to meet you.)”

Read the obituary here.

A woman has lost a court battle in England over her right to include an Irish language epitaph without an English translation on her mother’s gravestone. A petition was brought to the Consistory Court of the Diocese of Coventry, a type of ecclesiastical court with statutory footing, by the daughter of Margaret Keane.

Mrs Keane, who was born in Ireland but lived in Coventry, was active in the work of the GAA in Coventry and across the UK, performing an “important public service to the Irish community in the United Kingdom”.

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The phrase Black Lives Matter has been translated into many Indigenous languages to show support for the movement over the last week, but the Ojibway language’s term for black people is spurring calls for change. The online discussions kept bringing up the term makade-wiiyaz, which translates closely to “black meat.”

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Parliament of India Recruitment 2020: Parliament of India is hiring candidates for recruitment to the posts of Translator in Lok Sabha Secretariat. Interested candidates holding the Post Graduation Degree in Hindi or English as one of their subject from a recognized University can apply to the post on or before 27 July 2020.

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84000, a non-profit global initiative to translate the words of the Buddha into modern languages, has marked their tenth anniversary with a new video campaign titled “Save Wisdom Now” that tells the story of the project. The organization is working to preserve the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, the world’s largest and oldest collections of writings with 230,000 pages “locked within the fading Classical Tibetan language.”

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In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.

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An outbreak of COVID-19 in Vermont’s most diverse city has highlighted gaps in the health department’s translation services, according to Health Commissioner Mark Levine. There at least 34 reported cases of the disease connected to the outbreak in Winooski, a small, densely populated city that is home to many New American families.

“There may be populations in the city that actually didn’t understand what physical distancing is,” Levine said during a press conference on Friday. “[That] didn’t understand all the helpful information the Health Department tries to get our population to understand and comply with.”

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A number of Google users who accessed the “Download Your Data” tool via Takeout between October 30, 2019 and April 7, 2020 were probably surprised to receive an email saying that their data had been inadvertently sent to another Google user.

“We are writing to let you know that we recently found a technical issue with our ‘Google Translator Toolkit,’ a product we shut down in 2019,” the email from Google began. As reported by Slator last fall, Google Translator Toolkit, or GTT, was discontinued from December 2019. A cloud-based translation productivity (aka CAT) tool, GTT was likely shelved during the periodic clean-up of products that have been in maintenance-only mode for some time.

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The European language technology innovator Tilde launches a revolutionary Dynamic Learning technology for machine translation. Tilde MT Dynamic Learning picks up human corrections in real time, thus significantly boosting the quality of machine translation. This novel technology was made possible thanks to the break-through research of the award-winning Tilde research team.

Read the full press release here.

The world’s most valuable language service provider RWS, on June 9, 2020, announced final results for the six months ended March 31, 2020. Revenue fell slightly to GBP 169.7m from GBP 172.3 (-1.6%). Adjusted pre-tax profits decreased to GBP 33.1m from GBP 35.6m (-7.1%). While the financials came in as expected, the half-year update contained two major pieces of M&A news. RWS announced the acquisition of Dublin-based machine translation provider Iconic Translation Machines as well as that of India-based language service provider Webdunia.com. Both acquisitions were financed from existing financial resources.

Read the full article on Slator

How do we translate trauma? In this essay, Lara Vergnaud reflects on her experience translating scenes of graphic violence and abuse, and shares strategies that may be useful to other translators. — read the full essay here

InterpretCloud announces the launch of its InterpretCloud video remote interpreting solution, the most reliable and high-quality cloud-based solution for on-site and online events and meetings. InterpretCloud helps companies and individuals to communicate with their local and global audiences during live events and online meetings, anywhere, anytime, and in any language.

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From the time Covid-19 was first confirmed to have reached two European Union institutions (i.e., the Defense Agency and the Council) in early March 2020, the EU stepped up teleworking. By month’s end, nearly 100% of those working at EU institutions were doing so remotely.

While such containment measures were unavoidable, so too was the fallout. Among those most badly hit were the more than 3,200 contract interpreters working for EU institutions, about 40% of whom have regular contracts, according to the Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), an international trade union.

Read the full piece on Slator.

In this episode we talk about the mindset of freelance linguists and how this can hinder our success. If you feel that you’re always working and never getting ahead, having to fight machine translation and price pressure, then you might have a mindset that works against your success. I am interviewing Jennifer Nielsen, a Spanish to English translator who has given talks and webinars on the topic of mindset.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

We asked eight indie presses to help us spotlight queer books in translation from all over the world. The resulting list features work from Equatorial Guinea to Peru to Denmark on working-class life, memory, motherhood, and more. We’ve included links to Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. If you can, we hope you’ll purchase a book or two to help support authors, translators, and the independent publishing sector in this time of financial uncertainty.

Read the full list here.

Machine translation is great when it works, but it fails often and in unpredictable ways. What causes bad machine translations and can we catch the resulting issues?  What about bad human translations? Providers and enterprises like Unbabel, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay use “quality estimation”, the automatic prediction of translation quality and risk, to:

• Estimate post-editing effort
• Safely auto-approve raw machine translation for as many segments as possible
• Focus LQA

In this webinar we discuss how this technology works and how reliable it is. We will also cover where can you get this technology and how can you integrate it into your workflow today.

Find more at GALA.