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Are you a translator who wants to play with Al and don’t know where to start? Here’s an opportunity to learn the basics of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and so on, for immediate application in your translation projects.
Ideal for Al newbies, curious hearts or colleagues and students wary of Al systems, this will be a mostly practical workshop; with some theory where it’s needed, but not much.
The forthcoming language translation component won’t even require a drawn circle. Google says people will just have to long press the home button or the navigation bar and look for the translate icon. It’ll do the rest. The company showed the tech quickly translating an entire menu with one long press. Google Translate can already do this, though in a slightly different way, but this update means users won’t have to pop out of one app and into another just to check on something.
Samsung continues to break down language barriers and innovate communication for more users through Galaxy AI
Samsung Electronics today announced the upcoming expansion of three new languages for Galaxy AI: Arabic, Indonesian and Russian, as well as three new dialects: Australian English, Cantonese and Canadian French. In addition to the 13 languages1 already available, Samsung empowers even more Galaxy users around the world to harness the power of mobile AI. In addition to these new languages and dialects, Samsung plans to add four more languages later this year, including Romanian, Turkish, Dutch and Swedish, as well as the traditional Chinese and European Portuguese.
“Committed to democratizing mobile AI for all, Galaxy AI’s language expansion this year will allow even more Galaxy users to communicate beyond language barriers on a scale that is completely unique to Samsung,” said TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to innovate our technology and pioneer premium mobile AI experiences so that even more users are equipped with the right tools to unleash their unlimited potential.”
For the first time in history, a single language dominates global scientific communication. But the actual production of knowledge continues to be a multilingual enterprise.
The use of English as the norm poses challenges for scholars from regions where English is not widely spoken. They must decide whether to publish in English for global visibility, or publish in their native language to make their work accessible to local communities. And when they work in English, they end up expending more time and effort writing and revising papers than their native English-speaking peers.
As gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, academic publishers play a key role in helping or hindering the participation of a multilingual scientific community. So how are they doing?
Google Meet has upgraded its service with AI note-taking and translation capabilities — although it requires an extra subscription cost.
Unveiled at this week’s Google Cloud Next, “Take notes for me” is now in public preview and allows users to engage with the conversation rather than having to manual take down notes or minutes.
Meanwhile, “Translate For Me” is coming in June and will automatically detect and translate captions in Meet. This includes support for 69 languages (equal to 4,600 language pairs), assisting users to feel more confident and connected to their colleagues, regardless of language.
“Workspace customers can already turn on translated captions during video calls and select their preferred language, helping Meet users around the world easily communicate,” said Aparna Pappu, Vice President and General Manager at Google Workspace.
A handy new translations feature is in the works for Mozilla Firefox that should help speed up translating short snippets of text from one language to another.
Firefox 118 introduced a privacy-respecting web page translation feature, and Mozilla devs have continued to improve on it in subsequent releases
But sometimes you don’t need or want to translate an entire web page just a portion of text on the page.
Plus, given that Firefox translations take place locally to preserve privacy the task of translating every bit of a text visible on a web page can be a little on the slow side (on my machine it is, anyway).
As San Francisco-based OpenAI just unveiled on Friday its Voice Engine tool, which can replicate people’s voices, in small commodity hub Yiwu, East China’s Zhejiang Province, people adopted a similar domestic artificial intelligence (AI) application to help engage with foreign traders in 36 different languages as early as in October 2023.
Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices, uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles that of the original speaker, said the company in a statement released on Friday.
Translation algorithms have greatly improved in recent years, but can they work on literature? Human practitioners of the art are not convinced
‘Translators are stage horses of enlightenment,” the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in the margin of one of his manuscripts. Two centuries later, the political scientist Steven Weber similarly compared translation to transportation: not of people and goods but of ideas and knowledge. Just as the world swapped horses for mechanical means of transport, multilingual communication has accelerated too – and now, with the use of AI tools, translation can happen faster than ever.
But faster doesn’t always mean better – the use of AI comes with various risks. This week the European parliament adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first comprehensive piece of AI legislation. It requires developers to be transparent about the data used to train their models, and to comply with EU copyright law.
The Ethical and Quality Concerns Raised by Improper Data Acquisition
In a digital world teeming with data, the art of language learning and its integration into the fabric of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands as an eclectic fusion of human insight and technical precision. As giants of the AI arena seek to harness the power of linguistic diversity, one mammoth challenge rears its head – the flood of web-scraped, machine-translated data that inundates the datasets of large language models (LLMs).
These data sources can potentially impact the sanctity of language learning, calling education technologists, AI data analysts, and business leaders to rally against the detrimental effects of opaque data origins in our AI future..
Sunnyvale residents who don’t speak English have a new way to engage and participate in city meetings.
The city is piloting an artificial intelligence-based translation service upon request for public meetings through Wordly. The technology offers live translation in more than 50 languages. Using AI is more cost effective and efficient than human translators, according to city officials.
“We have such diversity from cultures as well as language that trying to make sure we can overcome those barriers … is a great step forward in showing what cities can do to include residents who in the past have been left out,” Mayor Larry Klein told San José Spotlight.
On its website, Wordly advertises its work with a handful of other cities, such as Gilroy. Residents attending a Gilroy government meeting in person can scan a QR code to access Wordly translations in more than 30 languages.
NHS interpreting service problems contributed to patient deaths
The BBC has found interpreting issues were a contributing factor in at least 80 babies dying or suffering serious brain injuries in England between 2018 and 2022.
BritishMuseum agrees to pay translator whose work it used without permission
By Jessie Yeung, CNN
Published 3:07 AM EDT, Wed August 9, 2023
A translator whose work was used by the British Museum without her permission won a victory this week after reaching a settlement with the institution, following two months of negotiations and online campaigning — with a little help from the fans of K-pop superstars BTS.
Now in 2023, CSA Research is running a survey that will be used to publish a follow up to that initial study. The survey takes between 10 and 20 minutes to complete. Please consider adding your input. The resulting report will be made publicly available, just as the first one was.
Foreign Influence Part 2: How the world had a say in Hong Kong’s ‘English’ street names
Most local English-language street names are transliterations of the Cantonese, while some commemorate governors or other colonial empire-builders. But data analysis shows that around a tenth of the non-Cantonese names originate from languages and cultures outside the UK.
Renato Beninatto: “For the world at large, after a thorough explanation of LangOps, their reaction might just be the classic: “Oh, you are talking about translation!””
Hanya satu kata: Terjemahan. Mau pelokalan, internasionalisasi atau “LangOps” atau apa pun itu. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Semua tergantung pada gantungannya. Mau itu anggaran, lingkungan, atau kepemipinan, ketiganya dinamis.
Foreign influence Part 1: Lost in translation, Hong Kong’s weird and wonderful street names
Hong Kong’s Rednaxela Terrace – originally intended to be Alexander Terrace – is just one example of the city’s bizarre transliterations. Our data analysis examines how the city’s place names came to be.”
As previously reported, “Machine translation (MT) and adjacent language technologies are driving industry-wide demand for natural language processing (NLP) engineers and machine learning researchers.”
However, as the same article pointed out, more traditional roles at various companies also need to be filled. So what skills are perceived to be the most important for these language-related positions?
Paquet began his subtitle translation career by proofreading English translations and also sometimes co-translating with a Korean friend. “It was about ten years ago that I felt my Korean was at a level where I could do first drafts,” he said. “And even today I have a lot of people review my work.”
Translating subtitles is unlike any other kind of translation, says Pacquet. “The audience can hear the actors speaking, they can get a lot of emotion from the screen. The translation has to compliment that. I watch the performances really closely as I’m translating. It often feels like I’m translating a performance rather than text. You also have to be aware of issues like timing.”
Paquet is the author of New Korean cinema : breaking the waves, which covers the industry from the 1980s to 2000s. He wrote the book in 2009 and notes that one of the obvious ways the industry has changed since then is the increasing level of international interest.
But the biggest change might be the growing number of independent films now being produced in Korea. To celebrate those indie films Paquet founded the Wildflower Film Awards, an independent film festival.
“The independent sector is very dynamic,” he said. “Producing at least 100 features a year with some incredible acting performances. Exciting new talent comes out every year, but inevitably they get somewhat overlooked. This is a time each year when we can celebrate the achievements of these filmmakers.”
“Living in Korea I got to know a lot of directors,” he said. “Both through subtitle work but also as a journalist and at film festivals. Eventually, I came across a director who needed a foreign actor quite urgently, so I stepped into the part. So, when other directors saw that, they said, oh, Darcy. Whenever anyone needs an undemanding not-too-expensive foreign actor, they give me a call.”
Building an AI speech translation system for Hokkien was no easy task. These tools are usually trained on large quantities of text. But for Hokkien, there is no widely known standard writing system. Furthermore, Hokkien is what’s known as an underresourced language, which means there isn’t much paired speech data available in comparison with, say, Spanish or English. Also, with few human English-to-Hokkien translators, it was difficult to collect and annotate data to train the model.
To get around these problems, Meta researchers used text written in Mandarin, which is similar to Hokkien. The team also worked closely with Hokkien speakers to ensure that the translations were correct. “Our team first translated English or Hokkien speech to Mandarin text, and then translated it to Hokkien or English — both with human annotators and automatically,” said Meta researcher Juan Pino. “They then added the paired sentences to the data used to train the AI model.”
The researchers will make their model, code, and benchmark data freely available to allow others to build on their work. While the model is still a work in progress and can currently translate only one full sentence at a time, it’s a step toward a future where simultaneous translation between many languages is possible.
On October 11, 2022 at Google Cloud Next ’22, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced the launch of Translation Hub, the company’s enterprise-scale document translation service.
Pichai described Translation Hub as “Google Cloud’s AI agent that helps companies translate content in over 135 languages.” He added, “It takes full documents including images and translates them while preserving layouts and formatting.”
Among those targeted by the service, according to the Google CEO, are researchers who want to share their findings with a global audience, product and service providers that want to reach underserved markets, and governments.
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