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Non-English speakers can face big communication challenges in medical settings: being unable to convey personal information, understand medical jargon and follow treatment instructions. These challenges can result in misunderstandings, or worse, in misdiagnoses. Phoenix hospitals work at preventing problems like this by providing interpretation and translation services in many different languages.
About 2 million Arizonans speak a language other than English, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, although it is not clear how many would be considered non-English speakers. Over 1.3 million speak Spanish; more than 130,000 speak another Indo-European language; 150,000 speak an Asian or Pacific Island language; and 160,000 speak other languages.
Phoenix hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic, Valleywise Health, Abrazo Health and Banner Health, have established services for interpretation that can cover dozens of different languages. When a hospital’s language department is unable to directly provide interpretation and translation services, third-party providers will step in.
Two medical professionals shared their experiences on how language services change health care accessibility for many underserved people who could fall through the cracks.
Classicist Emily Wilson illuminated the intricacies of translation in her lecture “Re-translating Homer: Why and How” held Thursday. The event delved into the challenges and significance of reinterpreting ancient texts for modern audiences.
The lecture was divided into four main topics: defining translation, explaining Wilson’s background and priorities in translation, demonstrating a case study and answering the question of why Homer is still relevant today. Julia Marvin, the chair of the department of the program of liberal studies, introduced the talk.
“The past is a foreign country,” Marvin said. “They do things differently there, and the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
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%).
Dr Hilary Brown will be leading a project over 2024-25 which will explore what feminist translation means in practice in the twenty-first century.
Dr Brown has been awarded an AHRC Networking grant, together with her co-investigator Dr Olga Castro (University of Warwick/Barcelona), and will be establishing a “Feminist Translation Network” which will bring together researchers, practitioners and educators to discuss feminist approaches to contemporary literary translation in English. The Network will ask questions such as: What is feminist translation (e.g. how does it differ – or not – from translations by women/of women or from queer translation/gender-inclusive translation)? Is feminist translation a matter of identity or a matter of practice? What are the goals of feminist translation and whom is it for?
The Network will address these themes at a series of free public events held over 2024-25, beginning with a translation ‘slam’ and roundtable discussion at the Birmingham Literature Festival in October 2024.
The Network’s activities will be overseen by a steering group which includes former DoML staff member Dr Gaby Saldanha.
International holidays are set to return so we asked experts to test some of the top translation apps
SPRING HAS SPRUNG, and the summer is fast closing in, and – more importantly – international travel is returning in the coming months. This means the opportunity to immerse yourself in different locations, languages and cultures, and we’re here to assist you with that endeavour.
While learning some local lingo before you go, or picking some up along the way broadens the mind, a language translator app can be a great tool for helping you along the way – whether it’s assisting in a jam or lending a hand with learning the language.
Language translation apps are ten a penny these days, with many being free alongside some premium options. In some cases, you may not even have to download a new app, with Google and Apple getting in on the game with their own versions. Microsoft has its free offering, and lesser-knowns like SayHi and iTranslate are also making their case. We’ve tested them all to find the best one to take with you as you satisfy your 2021 wanderlust.
Climate Cardinals is a youth-led nonprofit that’s accomplished quite a bit with almost no funding: translating 2 million words in four years to make scientific literature more accessible to non-English speakers.
Earth Day 2024 marks a turning point for the group, leaders say, with $400,000 in backing from the philanthropic arm of Google.
The nonprofit plans to use the funding to expand its translation capacity from 500,000 words per year to a least 1 million and as many as 3 million words per year, says Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, Climate Cardinals’ vice president and deputy executive director.
“This is our anchor funding, though we have several grants from L’Oréal and National Geographic, among others,” says Hayakawa, also a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts.
“We began with a $500 budget and have largely functioned with a near-zero budget with volunteers spending their time on Climate Cardinals between work, sleep and study.”
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.
On April 20, we celebrate the United Nations Chinese Language Day, a day chosen to honor Cangjie, the legendary inventor of the Chinese script. In light of this, I propose that the term hanzi be officially adopted as the translation for the symbols of the Chinese script.
For far too long, we’ve relied on the term “Chinese character” as the English equivalent of hanzi. However, given the evolving nature of language, it is imperative to reevaluate this lexical equivalence and adopt a more nuanced perspective. Particularly during the celebration of Chinese Language Day, let’s spread the use of the Pinyin-transliterated term, hanzi.
The Chinese script stands as one of the oldest writing systems in the world. It is an invaluable cultural treasure for the Chinese people, a symbol of national identity, and a bridge that connects people of diverse ethnic backgrounds. But its influence doesn’t stop there. The Chinese script has had a profound impact on the languages of Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and Vietnam.
Translation has consistently been a central focus at London Book Fairs. Translators’ and scouts’ perspectives shape publishing decisions for translations. Nonetheless, their impact on the UK publishing market is limited to 3-6% of the market, which mostly belongs to anglophone writers. Over the last two years, Japanese manga made it clear: the foreign literature segment is poised for growth.
In 2023, the UK witnessed a surge in popularity for manga and cozy novels, with Japanese writers leading the market for translated titles. Seventeen of the top 30 translated authors in Britain hailed from Japan, contributing to nine out of the 20 bestsellers being originally written in Japanese. Kentaro Miura, the manga creator who tragically passed away in 2021 at the age of 54, led the pack of translators. An overwhelming 95% of manga sales came from titles originally published in Japan. Among the top 10 authors in translation who generated over £1 million in sales last year, seven were Japanese, with five of them being manga creators. The only non-Japanese names in the top 10 were Thomas Erikson (3rd) and Andrzej Sapkowski (10th).
The top 20 lists featured familiar names such as Elena Ferrante, Jo Nesbo, Paulo Coelho, and Haruki Murakami. Additionally, new faces emerged in the charts, including Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov.
While AI tools have been used by some translators to support their work, three-quarters of those surveyed believe the emerging technology will negatively impact their future income
More than a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI, a survey by the Society of Authors (SoA) has found. More than four in 10 translators said that their income has decreased because of generative AI, while more than three-quarters believe the emerging technology will negatively affect their future income.
The SoA, the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, ran the survey in January. It found that 37% of translators had used generative AI to support their work, and 8% used it because they were asked by their publisher or commissioning organisation.
Thomas Bunstead, whose translations from Spanish include The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo, said it is important to draw a distinction between literary translators and “commercial” translators. “Though a third of translators have responded to the SoA survey saying they think they’ve lost work to AI already, literary translation remains in the hands of humans,” he said. “The work that has presumably been handed over to AI will be the kind of uncomplicated bread-and-butter stuff which doesn’t require so much nuance,” such as instruction manuals.
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.
The National Library and Archives will host the fourth edition of the International Translation Conference at its headquarters in Abu Dhabi from 17 – 18 April 2024. Held under the theme Pushing New Boundaries: Translation and Building Knowledge Societies, the conference will discuss more than 35 research papers.
His Excellency Abdullah Majed Al Ali, the Director-General of the National Library and Archives, said: “We are pleased to announce the completion of the necessary preparations for the Fourth International Translation Conference, which attracts intellectual elites in the UAE and abroad, as they will be able to acquaint themselves with a variety of new research papers and innovative ideas that represent a significant addition in the field of translation in several languages. The convening of this conference will add to the tangible benefits achieved in the previous three conferences in which many experts from around the world presented research papers, which now become important references for translators and scholars in the field of translation.”
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.
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.”
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..
The “beta” session of a new online course Beyond the Basics of Freelancing will be launched May 14th. The course focuses on various topics for the intermediate/advanced freelancer, such as writing different marketing materials for agencies and direct clients, identifying potential direct clients and ways to make contact with them, and how to set rates for various freelance services. More.
The translation news daily digest is my daily 'signal' to stop work and find out what's going on in the world of translation before heading back into the world at large! It provides a great overview that I could never get on my own.
susan rose (X)
United States
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