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An international conference on the translation of the Quran has been launched in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, Abna news agency reported yesterday.
The three-day event, organized by the Libya Quran Assembly and sponsored by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), focuses on the theme “Precise translation of the Quran’s concepts, a means for promotion of Islam.”
Scholars, researchers, and religious figures from various countries are participating to discuss existing Quran translations, translation challenges, and ways to produce accurate and easily understandable renderings of the holy book in different languages.
German startup DeepL, known for its AI-powered machine translation, is making a foray into the realm of writing where it adjusts the style of the sentences according to user preference with an emphasis on business application.
The startup launched the service, powered by its own large language model (LLM), in Korea on Friday. It is available in English and German with a plan to expand the number of languages supported.
The style of the sentence can be selected from four style options — business, academic, simple and casual — and four tone options — friendly, diplomatic, confident and enthusiastic.
“Words matter, and language can be the competitive edge that moves the needle for global businesses,” said Jarek Kutylowski, the company’s founder and CEO.
“DeepL Write Pro is our first product powered by our own LLMs, and is the culmination of years of research and innovation that has set us apart from other tech giants.”
‘Shōgun’is a refreshing reminder that in a time where the power of the ‘one-inch tall barrier’ still seems distastefully under contention, sometimes you need to revive the literal Tokugawa Shōgunate to bridge the cumbersome gap between worlds
In its grand finale, FX’s captivating rendition of James Clavell’s historical epic Shōgun gracefully bows out with a rendezvous with mortality.
“Please split your belly open by sunset,” and “Have a good death” echo some of what we hear with the casualness of a tea sip. Yet, to truly grasp the weight of seppuku’s socio-historical significance, honour the richness of its source material, and deftly navigate the intricacies of translation, the series stands alone in its unparalleled achievement. Shōgun employs a three-pronged approach, replete with cross-cultural exchanges, verbal fencing, and the delicate dance of understanding in an era poised on the precipice of profound change.
In early January 2024, when many in the language industry were likely pondering how to eventually incorporate AI into their offerings or processes, OpenAI announced its GPT Store. Back then, a few translation GPTs could be found, including one built by Phrase called “Phrase Expert.”
By the time OpenAI launched the store to the general public, there were already more than three million GPTs done by pre-release testers. After the kind of hype seen in late 2022 with ChatGPT and all the drama surrounding the company’s CEO and Board in 2023, the store launch was also a popular subject in the news and on social media.
Then, the announcement of the company’s text-to-video generator, Sora, arrived in February 2024, lest people get OpenAI out of their minds for too long.
In March 2024, we asked readers if they had ever used Custom GPTs since the store was launched, and over two-thirds of respondents (64.6%) said No. Over a combined quarter of readers said they tested GPTs a bit after launch (14.6%) or from time to time (12.5%), and a very small percentage said they have been using them daily (8.3%).
This year’s zodiac symbol has been retranslated from ‘dragon’ to ‘Loong’
After mainland Chinese official media outlets started calling 2024 “the Year of Loong” instead of the Year of the Dragon, the word “loong” and its homophones have become a popular meme among Hongkongers on social media, representing the government’s shift toward nationalistic policies and language.
The Year of “Loong”
This year, major Chinese state-affiliated media outlets have abandoned the term “dragon” and adopted the word “loong”, an uncommonly used transliteration of the Chinese word 龍 (dragon in English), to refer to the 2024 Chinese Zodiac. The alteration was later explained in numerous media commentaries, including the Chinese state-sponsored China Daily.
These commentaries argued that in Chinese culture, the image of the mythological animal is very positive and divine, while its Western counterpart is a negative “monster”. They also contended that the mistranslation of the Chinese word into “dragon” is a cultural distortion and misinterpretation.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the body in charge of developing and publishing international standards, has published a new standard on evaluation of translation output.
ISO 5060 is the result of four years of work conducted by the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 technical committee for translation, interpreting and related technology, and the 18th document of this kind published by the unit (with a further seven being currently under development). Numerous experts on translation and quality evaluation formed part of the working group, with participants from more than 30 countries contributing to the creation of this new standard.
ISO certification brings an array of benefits for companies deciding to pursue it: increased sales and revenue, heightened efficiency, and improved quality of operations are usually expected as a result of certifying against a selected standard. Language service providers (LSPs) and others recognize compliance with ISO norms as a competitive advantage, allowing them to position themselves among top players in the industry.
Imagine your mother has cancer. You just heard about a promising new experimental treatment and want to enroll her in the study. However, your mother immigrated to the U.S. as an adult and speaks limited English. When you reach out to the research team, they tell you she is ineligible because they are recruiting only English speakers.
Unfortunately, this is an all too likely outcome of a scenario like this, because non-English speakers are frequently excluded from clinical trials and research studies in the U.S.
How would you translate these phrases into another language? “There are those who know how to fill a dishwasher, and those who don’t care” and “¡El chat GPT me ha hecho una paella!”
Bursting with translation anticipation, a quirky UN contest has had translators, interpreters, students, and lovers of a good multilingual idiom challenge submitting entries from around the world to the 2023 St. Jerome Translation Contest.
On hiatus for three years, the contest is back and participants from across the world were limbering up for a new bout of linguistic gymnastics.
AI beware
A panel of expert judges have combed through entries for each language, looking for accuracy in conveying not only the meaning of a frustrating household task, artificial intelligence (AI), and a traditional Spanish dish, but also the nuances of the source text, as well as style, submitted by students to seasoned translators.
The goal as always is to make sure nothing is lost in translation.
“In spite of the rise of Google and AI, which are threatening the very existence of our profession, there is continuing interest in translation,” said one of the judges, a senior text revisor in the Russian section of the UN Office at Vienna.
“We were very pleased with the liveliness of the language of many translations; it seemed like most of the contestants had had the same kind of problem loading dishwashers, and some of them seem to have PTSD when recalling those feats,” he told the audience in Vienna at the official award ceremony on Wednesday.
Bipartisan group supports addressing ‘strategic disadvantage’ and understanding adversaries who pose ‘serious threat to American national security’
Open Translation Centre tasked with training analystsand linguists comes amid challenges getting accurate information out of China
A bipartisan group of US lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday that would establish a research centre charged with creating publicly accessible English translations of open-source materials from China.
The initiative, to be known as the Open Translation Centre, would also train analysts and linguists to specialise in China and other countries, a full list of which will be determined later.
“The United States can’t afford to be in a position where our competitors know more about us than we know about them,” said Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas, the bill’s sponsor.
“For generations, Congress supported open-source translation programmes that helped Americans understand both our allies and our adversaries. As our investment in those programmes [has] declined, countries like China and Russia have accelerated their own – putting us at a strategic disadvantage,” he continued.
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.”
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..
LONDON: Translators will for the first time be eligible for a Man Booker prize from 2016.
The world’s most famous international literary prize has for the first time now, opened up to translations.
The Booker Prize Foundation announced on Wednesday that the Man Booker International Prize will be awarded annually on the basis of a single book, translated into English and published in the UK from 2016 rather than every two years for a body of work.
In a major push to translation, the £50,000 prize will be divided equally between the author and the translator.
Each shortlisted author and translator will receive £1,000. This brings the total prize fund to £62,000 per year, compared to the previous £37,500 for the Man Booker International Prize. Interestingly, from next year, both novels and collections of short stories will be eligible. More.
(…) One of the most rewarding things as a programmer is the fact that you can build things others can use. This process of creating useful features and getting the user interface intuitively right is a creative and stimulating process.
I also liked the conceptual challenges programming offered. Even more so than for written text, you have to make sure your programs are structured logically. In theory a computer executes code in a linear fashion, but in practice it jumps from one piece of code to another and some pieces (called functions) get executed more than once, depending on the results of other functions, etc. A programmer therefore has to organize his code in modules, so that he (or colleagues also working on the program) can still understand the code a couple of weeks later. Structuring your code logically was one of the most difficult, but also most interesting things I came across.
And there are other similarities to translating. As a translator making spelling mistakes is bad for business, but at least your text is still comprehensible if you happen to misplace a comma or semicolon (at least, most of the time). In programming a missing comma usually means that the entire program fails to execute. And if you’re a beginner it’s often difficult to figure out why the web browser is showing a blank page, where you were expecting your fully functional application. More.
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator. By Jean Findlay. Chatto & Windus; 368 pages
“Chasing Lost Time” is the first comprehensive biography of Scott Moncrieff. Written by his great-great-niece, Jean Findlay, it sheds light on an “elusive, swift-minded and faun-like” man. In doing so it also describes the genesis of one of the definitive translations of the 20th century. More.
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susan rose (X)
États-Unis
I read the daily digest of ProZ.com translation news to get the essential part of what happens out there!
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