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This global convening offers invited artists, writers, and scholars whose work re-imagines the experiences of migration, challenges normative xenophobic ideas and undermines a politics of fear to generate new discourses, aesthetics, and structures of knowledge. Our world is characterized by the movements of people, diasporas, and relocations: far from a temporary or “crisis” phenomenon, human beings globally and historically have always left their homes to escape war, to avoid persecution, for work, for security. We have been uprooted, stolen, trafficked, enslaved; they have been displaced from land despoiled of resources and habitats lost to extreme weather patterns and climate change. We have moved and migrated for deeply private and personal reasons – to reach potential freely, to lead meaningful lives, to secure a future for ourselves and our families. An account of the migration is the totality of many stories. We seek to capture the breadth of experience. Translation is critical to any genuine comprehension of our contemporary world. Literature and art open us to abundant cultures carried by human beings when they migrate. This alternative critical language leads us to think expansively about memory, belonging and identity, familiar and unfamiliar, borders and home, objects and affects, self-imagining, family and loss. Panels include: Perspectives on Migration, Migration and Translation, Black Rest in Translation, MacX Fellows and Migration Projects. We hope you can join us in Paris for what is going to be an unforgettable convening.
Red Cross volunteers getting ready to deliver the mission. Photo illustration by Juan Carlos Molina Padilla/American Red Cross
The American Red Cross Multicultural Communications team announces the launch of its innovative Translator Hub. This cutting-edge platform is designed to bridge the language gap and ensure effective communication with non-English speaking audiences. By utilizing a custom machine translation system complemented by rigorous human reviews, the hub offers accurate and culturally sensitive translations for all text and materials.
The Translator Hub is a significant milestone for the American Red Cross, reflecting its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Users within the organization can now translate a wide range of documents, ensuring vital information reaches diverse communities. Whether it’s press releases, social media content, or educational materials, the hub ensures these messages are understood by everyone, regardless of language barriers.
The key to the hub’s success is its dual approach to translation. Initially, a custom machine translation system generates a preliminary document. This is then meticulously reviewed by human translators to guarantee accuracy, contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness. This two-step process ensures that the final output is not only linguistically correct, but also resonates with the target audience.
The Société française des traducteurs (SFT), a French union for professional translators and interpreters, has released a statement on the use of AI translation and GenAI.
The SFT published the statement in mid-June 2024, following a survey of members between November-December 2023, and now encourages all professionals — members and the unaffiliated alike — to share the statement. (The SFT reported 1,648 members as of June 2020.)
The statement acknowledges that the translation industry has already been impacted by major technological upheavals; namely, the introduction of neural machine translation (MT) in 2016. Since then, clients and language service providers (LSPs) alike have largely adopted this technology.
Still, the statement posits, that the output [of machine translation] remains unreadable in its raw state, and requires humans to correct it via post-editing: “But 70% of our member translators who responded to our survey considered PE (and by extension AI) a threat to their profession.”
More specifically, the SFT calls for the respect of human expertise and strongly recommends against replacing human language experts with AI tools, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.
In a June 12, 2024 paper researchers from Tencent AI and the Harbin Institute of Technology introduced TasTe, a method for teaching large language models (LLMs) to translate through self-reflection.
The key idea is to enable LLMs to generate preliminary translations (i.e., drafts), self-evaluate their own translations, and make refinements based on the evaluation.
The researchers explained that LLMs have shown exceptional performance across various natural language processing tasks, including machine translation (MT). However, their translations still do not match the quality of supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems.
To address this, the authors proposed the TasTe framework (translating through self-reflection), which improves the translation capabilities of LLMs by incorporating a self-reflection process.
Durrow man translates Heartstopper – the queer love story everyone is falling for. – into Irish.
Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin (foilsitheoir) James Kavanagh (a sheol an leabhar), Eoin Mc Evoy (aistritheoir)
It was a full house in An Siopa Leabhar, 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2 on Thursday evening for the launch of Heartstopper – the queer love story everyone is falling for.
Written by Alice Oseman, the series is a global hit on Netflix and the books are available in more than 36 languages.
And now, thanks to the superb translation by Eoin McEvoy, the first book in the best-selling series of graphic novels is also available as Gaeilge.
From Durrow, Eoin is a translations and creative writing lecturer in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, UCD.
Google LLC said today that it’s bringing 110 new languages to its web and smartphone translation app using the power of artificial intelligence, making it more comprehensive than ever with 243 languages in total.
This is the largest expansion to date for Google Translate since 2022, when the company brought 24 new languages to the app using zero-shot machine translation. That’s where a language model learns to translate a language without ever seeing an example.
The company employed PaLM 2, a transformer-based large language model AI developed by Google Research that first powered Bard, Google’s AI chatbot. It eventually evolved into Gemini, which is now powered by the company’s AI model of the same name. Differing from Gemini, PaLM 2 was trained on Pathways, a vast dataset of human language containing more than 1.56 trillion words and 250 billion parameters.
Given the size of this dataset, Google said, PaLM 2 can attain unprecedented fluency with written languages and demonstrated an impressive ability to perform linguistic tasks during testing including understanding idiomatic phrases. However, unlike Gemini, PaLM 2 cannot understand or generate images or work with audio.
Copenhagen, Denmark – June 27 2024 – EasyTranslate, an AI-powered language operations platform, has launched HumanAI, designed to transform the translation industry.
The translation market has long been split into two segments: technology providers and service providers. This separation has created a gap, as there has not been a single solution that combines both. The rise of the LangOps Platform addresses this issue by integrating services and technology into one cohesive solution, eliminating the need for separate TMS and service providers. This innovation fills a crucial gap in the market, streamlining multilingual content management and service delivery in one cohesive solution – Language Operations Platform.
HumanAI combines advanced AI models with strategic human intervention to deliver unparalleled quality, speed and cost-effectiveness, making it a powerful tool for businesses looking to improve on-brand global communication.
Evriviadis Sofos received the best translation award. Credit: LEA
Translator Evriviadis Sofos received the best translation award at the 16th LEA (Literature in Athens) Festival which aims to form cultural and literary bridges between Latin America, Spain, Greece and Portugal through words and letters.
Organized under the auspices of the Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and supported by the Libra Group and Libra Philanthropies, the event was attended by guests from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico and Uruguay.
At the main festival event which place earlier this week at the Amphitheater of the Acropolis Museum, Sofos was awarded for his translation from Catalan of the book “Uncertain Glory” by Spanish writer Joan Sales, published by Agra Editions in 2023.
The LEA Festival inaugurated the literary translation prize in 2021 with a symbolic prize of 1,000 euros. This year, 35 books were submitted to the LEA festival for judging.
In a June 4, 2924 paper researchers from Google Research and Google DeepMind presented SimulTron, a model designed for on-device, real-time speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) built upon the Translatotron architecture.
The researchers highlighted the ongoing evolution of S2ST technology while emphasizing the persistent challenge of achieving accurate, real-time, on-device simultaneous translation. They noted that existing simultaneous translation models are not adequately optimized for the unique constraints of mobile devices, underscoring the significant challenge of achieving seamless real-time translation on mobile devices.
“Today, with smartphones and tablets being central hubs for personal and professional interactions, on-device S2ST is crucial,” they said.
In response to this challenge, they introduced SimulTron, a model that leverages the strengths of Translatotron while incorporating key modifications specifically tailored for the on-device, simultaneous translation scenarios.
ORLANDO, FL — Even if the equipment is confiscated or destroyed, if the unthinkable happens, the translation work -weeks or months of translation progress- is protected. Wycliffe Associates provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the biblical translation.
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ORLANDO, FL — Even if the equipment is confiscated or destroyed, if the unthinkable happens, the translation work -weeks or months of translation progress- is protected. Wycliffe Associates provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the biblical translation.
Wycliffe Associates, one of the world’s leading bible translation organizations, provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the translation of scriptures.
The organization announced the development of bible translation acceleration kits for translators living in isolated areas without internet connectivity.
In the last few years, technology has allowed the bible to reach millions of people in new and innovative ways.
Bill McDonald – Regional Development Director:
At Wycliffe Associates, we accelerate Bible translation work by empowering national translators to provide the Word of God in their own language. We partner with the local church to guide and safeguard that translation, and then involve people from around the world to provide resources, technology, training, and especially support for Bible translation.
Wycliffe Associates, one of the world’s leading bible translation organizations, provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the translation of scriptures.
The organization announced the development of bible translation acceleration kits for translators living in isolated areas without internet connectivity.
In the last few years, technology has allowed the bible to reach millions of people in new and innovative ways.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2024 — Unbabel, an AI-powered Language Operations (LangOps) platform that helps businesses deliver multilingual customer experience at scale, recently announced the launch of TowerLLM, the first Large Language Model (LLM) designed, trained, and optimized for translation, resulting in the best performing translation LLM commercially available. Unbabel customers using TowerLLM will significantly improve machine translation accuracy, reducing errors and cost, and will benefit from a more cost-effective price than popular LLMs.
TowerLLM provides superior translation quality to leading LLMs like GPT-4o and GPT-3.5, while consistently outperforming Google and DeepL, because it was made from scratch to be multilingual. Built on a large public data set, then trained only on best-quality translation data filtered out and curated by Unbabel’s quality LLM, COMETKiwi, TowerLLM demonstrates that LLMs are the next step in the evolution of AI translation.
“Despite the doubts from some in the industry, TowerLLM clearly demonstrates that LLMs are the best solution for machine translation,” said João Graça, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Unbabel. “We’ve invested years into developing LLMs, so we’re not surprised to see TowerLLM outperform GPT-4o. This is the second multilingual LLM we’ve released after COMETKiwi, and we’re just getting started.”
Publishing Scotland’s fund supports translation of Scottish writings by international publishers, and has opened a new application round.
Deadline for This Round of Applications: August 12
Among international translation funds, the Publishing Scotland program has long been familiar to Publishing Perspectives readers.
The program offers financial support for the translation of Scottish books into other languages, and publishers outside the United Kingdom are eligible. Funding is offered in the form of a grant, and it’s for translation costs only.
Today (June 6), the fund’s administrators have notified us that they’re opening the first round of applications in their 2024-’25 sequence.
Launched in 2015, the translation fund has facilitated the translation of Scottish works into dozens of languages, including Ukrainian, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, German, Simple Chinese, and Georgian. The offices ‘ personnel in Edinburgh point out that as the fund’s popularity has grown, it has continued to provide funding to international publishing houses and literary agents interested in Scottish writings.
Guests attend a symposium on world literature and China at Renmin University of China in Beijing on Friday. WANG JING/CHINA DAILY
Renmin University of China announced the establishment of the Center for Translation and Study of World Literature in Beijing on Friday, the first of its kind in the country that aims to explore universal human values and the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind from the perspective of the translation and study of world literature.
The center will build three major platforms to promote the translation and study of foreign literature as well as cultural communication and exchanges.
In a speech at the opening ceremony, Lin Shangli, president of RUC, said that the universal human values proposed by President Xi Jinping are not only the core themes of literary works across different eras and nations, but also the foundational context for humanities and social sciences research in the era of globalization.
He said that for individuals literature is a spiritual sanctuary, and for a nation it’s the foundation for its people’s sense of belonging and identity.
The Korea Times invites translators from around the world to participate in the 55th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards.
Since 1970, The Korea Times has been dedicated to recognizing excellence in literary translation and promoting Korean literature to a global readership through this annual competition. Many of the leading translators and scholars working in the field today began their careers as winners of the Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, and The Korea Times looks forward to ushering in a new generation of talent in the years to come.
The annual competition awards English translations of works of contemporary Korean literature in two categories: fiction/drama and poetry.
In a May 16, 2024 paper, Jared Coleman, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, and Khalil Iskarous from the University of Southern California, along with Ruben Rosales from California State University introduced a new approach for machine translation (MT) that is “particularly useful” for no-resource languages, which lack publicly available bilingual or monolingual corpora.
This approach, named LLM-RBMT (LLM-Assisted Rule-Based Machine Translation), combines the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and rule-based machine translation (RBMT) techniques.
The researchers highlighted the exceptional capabilities of LLMs in MT but noted their limitations in low-resource or no-resource language scenarios. “There have been many efforts in improving MT for low-resource languages, but no-resource languages have received much less attention,” they said.
Despite the perception of RBMT as a “relic of the past”, the researchers emphasized ongoing research and development in RBMT systems tailored for under-resourced languages.
Japanese manga localization tech company Orange raised JPY 2.2bn (USD 19.5m) in what they called a “pre-Series A” financing, the company announced in a May 6, 2024 press release.
Manga publisher Shogakukan led the financing round. Other participants included the Japanese government’s Japan Industrial Innovation Investment Corporation, Globis Capital Partners, ANRI, SBI Investment, JIC Venture Growth Investments, Miyako Capital, Chiba Dojo Fund, Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and GFR Fund.
Orange, founded in 2021, uses computer vision and NLP, including AI translation, to translate manga titles in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.
The company claims that it can translate, from Japanese to English, up to 500 manga titles per month — a figure Orange pegs at about five times the current industry rate.
The company’s ultimate goal: translate 50,000 manga titles in the next five years. Orange will use some of the funds raised in this round to launch a digital manga store called emaqi in summer 2024. The store will reportedly feature recommendations from manga influencers — as well as AI-generated suggestions.
It will also support AI dubbing and subtitles on LinkedIn, Coursera, Bloomberg, and more.
Microsoft Edge will soon offer real-time video translation on sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Coursera, and more. As part of this year’s Build event, Microsoft announced that the new AI-powered feature will be able to translate spoken content through both dubbing and subtitles live as you’re watching it.
So far, the feature supports the translation of Spanish into English as well as the translation of English to German, Hindi, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In addition to offering a neat way to translate videos into a user’s native tongue, Edge’s new AI feature should also make videos more accessible to those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Edge will also support real-time translation for videos on news sites such as Reuters, CNBC, and Bloomberg. Microsoft plans on adding more languages and supported websites in the future.
Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany
Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.
Erpenbeck is the first German writer to win, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The £50,000 prize money will be split equally between the pair.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann. Photograph: PR
Erpenbeck and Hofmann were announced as the winners at a ceremony held at the Tate Modern in London, sponsored by the Italian luxury fashion house Maison Valentino.
Kairos tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany. The novel is a “richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations”, said judging chair and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel.
Hofmann’s translation “captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary”, she added.
The German startup has been rivalling giants such as Google Translate
DeepL, the Cologne-based unicorn that has been rivalling machine translation giants such as Google Translate, today announced a new investment of $300mn (€277mn), reaching a $2bn valuation.
Born from online dictionary Linguee, the startup was founded in 2017 by Jarek Kutylowski, who’s also serving as the company’s CEO.
DeepL offers free and premium AI translation services, with a special focus on B2B products, where the company sees the biggest demand.
It now covers 32 languages and counts 100,000 business users. A list that includes the likes of Nikkei, Coursera, and Deutsche Bahn.
The investment follows a period of significant growth for DeepL. Within the last 12 months, the startup has opened its first office in the US and added Arabic, Norwegian, and Korean to its language portfolio. It has also launched new products for businesses, such as the DeepL Write Pro AI assistant.
Future Trans Sets the Stage for AI Excellence, Exploring Ai-IoT Integration, Ethical AI for Seamless Global Connectivity
Showcasing The Pinnacle of AI Innovation at the AI World Congress 2024
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Future Trans, a leader in translation and localization services, is set to showcase its expertise at the AI World Congress 2024 in London. This prestigious event will gather industry giants, innovators, and thought leaders to discuss cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies and their applications across various sectors.
AI World Congress 2024: A Hub for Technological Advancements
The AI World Congress is renowned for its focus on the integration of AI technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT). This year’s congress promises to highlight advancements in smart cities, healthcare systems, automotive technology, and more. Attendees can expect a robust agenda filled with keynote addresses, interactive panels, and hands-on workshops.
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