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We stand on the brink of a new era, fueled by the rapid advancement and integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today, the manufacturing industry is poised to undergo a transformation unlike any it has seen before.
While the transition from manual labor to automated processes marked a significant leap, and the digital revolution of enterprise resource management systems brought about considerable efficiencies, the advent of AI promises to redefine the landscape of manufacturing with even greater impact.
Central to this transformation are Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI technologies. These tools are significantly lowering the barrier to entry for subject matter experts and field engineers who traditionally have not been involved in coding or “speaking AI.” The impact of this should not be underestimated. Up to 40% of working hours across industries could be influenced by the adoption of LLMs, a significant shift in workforce dynamics.
AI, and particularly LLMs, will have a profound impact on the manufacturing sector. The opportunities are vast — but there are potential challenges, too.
AI-native language translation application DeepL Translate is launching into Australia and Singapore following regional forays into Japan and South Korea. Founder and CEO Jarek Kutylowski said it is targeting APAC businesses that require more natural language translations.
Tech employees in APAC know working in the region can involve struggles with language. While most cross-border business is conducted in English, there can still be difficulties communicating, which can lead workers to turn to offerings like Google Translate or ChatGPT for help.
Jarek Kutylowski, founder and chief executive officer of DeepL.
The same goes for enterprises looking to win business in the languages of the region. Jarek Kutylowski, founder and chief executive officer of DeepL, said the firm’s natural language processing AI model offers natural language translations in 32 languages, thanks to years of development and fine-tuning since launching in Europe in 2017.
With additional APAC languages on its roadmap for 2024, DeepL is expanding its footprint into Australia and Singapore, with key business use cases including translation for cross-border business growth. Its Pro subscription (starting at US$8.74 per user per month, rising to US$57.49 for an Ultimate package) and API Pro (beginning at $5.49 per month) allow businesses to translate documents at scale or integrate translations within their workflows.
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.
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.
Latin American literature scholar Suzanne Jill Levine receives PEN America award for translation
When you read Latin American literature in English, there’s a good chance you’re reading a translation by Suzanne Jill Levine, who has been plying her craft since the early 1970s. Her versions of books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortazar and Manuel Puig (to name but a few) have enriched the lives of English-speaking readers, and her work has had an impact comparable to that of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust or Constance Garnett’s Dostoevsky — not only literary but cultural. Levine has had the vision and bravado to become a protagonist in the story of Latin American literature in English translation, and to change it in the process, not only publishing a biography and translations, but also creating a mashup of autobiography and scholarship that’s totally original.
“My book ‘The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction’ (Graywolf Press, 1991, Dalkey Archive, 2009) by tracing the process of translating, explicitly shows readers how translation is a creative act and defines what a translator is, and why a translator needs to be linguist, literary critic and poet or novelist all in one,” said Levine, UC Santa Barbara distinguished professor emerita of Latin American literature. “Basically, our concepts of authorship and originality are inadequate to grasp what a translator does.”
Islamabad : Former Federal Secretary and a well-known man of letters, Muhammad Saleem Sethi has come up with a genuinely-crafted literary landmark, the Urdu translation and illustration of the famous Persian poet Fariduddin Attar’s long poem ‘Musibat Nama.’
The book gives a deep insight into the Sufis’ school of ‘Ishq’ which is commonly known as ‘Mysticism.’ It takes the readers to the less-trodden paths of human sufferings and man’s resilience in the face of ordeals. An undertone of curiosity always keeps the flame of spiritualism burning, says a press release.
In the interior parts of old Peshawar city, the Persian ‘kalam’ of Sheikh Saadi and Attar of Nishapur was read out and the family members used to sit silently and listen to the resonating Persian verses of great Iranian poets. It was that rich literary background that made Saleem Sethi undertake the gigantic task of translating Attar.
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.”
Austin, TX – April 9, 2024 – Boostlingo, a leader in language access technology, announces AI Pro – a new AI solution offering real-time captions, transcriptions, translations, and speech features in multiple languages. AI Pro empowers professionals to communicate on conferencing platforms regardless of language or hearing disabilities.
In addition to the AI Pro launch, Boostlingo unveils a new brand identity and website reflecting the company’s expansion of services beyond interpretation technology. The new branding reflects Boostlingo’s commitment to innovation and increased language access.
“Boostlingo’s rebranding was a strategic decision as we are building upon our innovative technology and adding new products that incorporate AI,” shared Morgan Teller, Director of Marketing. “We’re also expanding our technology from just interpretation to being capable of supporting broader language services.”
Health equity and accessing Spanish kidney transplant information continues being a substantial challenge facing the Hispanic community. This study evaluated ChatGPT’s capabilities in translating 54 English kidney transplant frequently asked questions (FAQs) into Spanish using two versions of the AI model, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.0.
Introduction
The concept of health equity involves providing every individual with a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health1. Unfortunately, disparities in healthcare access and the distribution of medical information continue to be significant barriers2. For the Hispanic community, particularly those who primarily speak Spanish, these barriers are often compounded by linguistic challenges, limiting their access to essential healthcare information.
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.”
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