Gained in translation: Subgenome fractionation determines hybrid vigor in maize - Phys.org - Translation

Researchers in China have analyzed a maize hybrid at the multi-omics level to unravel the mechanisms behind this increased hybrid vigor. Credit: The Crop Journal

The adage goes, "Two is better than one." Well, that might be true for endeavors involving human heads, but when it comes to ears, hybrid maize tends to have a superior advantage over the parental stocks in most cases. This phenomenon, called hybrid vigor or "heterosis," has been used by agriculturalists across ages to create higher-yielding, more resistant varieties of maize all over the world.

But what are the factors contributing to the increased hybrid vigor of maize? Several different genetic models have been proposed to explain heterosis in varied crops including maize, but none have hitherto been able to comprehensively unravel the mystery of heterosis.

A possible reason for this may be the complex genetic origin of the present-day maize species—Zea mays. Maize is supposed to have diverged from sorghum during an ancient speciation event, following which there was a duplication of the entire chromosomal materials or the genomic set in the ancestral stock via a process called polyploidization, giving rise to an ancestral tetraploid, or a plant with four genomic sets, i.e., double the usual number. Each genomic set in this tetraploid maize ancestor, called a subgenome, underwent dramatic breaks and fusion to eventually give rise to the current diploid genome (which bears two sets of genetic materials). During this genomic reorganization, redundant copies of genes from both subgenomes were lost through a process called fractionation.

In plants where such fractionation has been identified, including maize, there is a tendency for one subgenome to experience more gene loss than the other—a process called fractionation bias. For instance, the two subgenomes in present-day maize, termed maize1 and maize2, show differential expression of constituent genes, with maize1 typically identified as the dominant between the two.

It could be that differential expression of proteins coded by the maize subgenomes is responsible for the increased vigor of the hybrid maize lines, which are referred to as F₁. However, this has not been clearly established. Until now.

Now, researchers in China have explored the transcriptome (the full complement of protein-coding mRNA molecules derived from information coded in DNA) and translatome (the actual mRNA set that gets translated to proteins in cell) of maize to identify factors that may be potentially responsible for heterosis in maize.

Using the new ribosome profiling technique, the researchers, led by Professor Lin Li of National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, Huazhong Agricultural University, evaluated the maize parental lines B73 and Mo17, and their F₁ offspring. Their findings, published in The Crop Journal, suggest the presence of prominent subgenome bias at the translation level, especially skewed towards translated subgenome maize genes, which had a nonadditive effect on heterosis in F₁ plants.

Furthermore, some genes switched to the dominant form in the hybrid than in the parental lines, quite surprisingly. As Prof. Li observes, "More genes switched the dominant isoforms between the F₁ and the two parents than between the two parents. This observation indicates that the best gene variant is more likely to be selectively utilized in hybrids for a given environment, leading to higher efficiency of protein accumulation in the hybrids."

Moreover, the switched gene isoforms mostly belonged to subgenome maize, while the conserved gene isoforms belonged to subgenome maize1. This knowledge, the researchers suggest, can help in selective breeding for further improving hybrid vigor.

Additionally, the researchers found evidence for additive effects of gene expression at both the transcriptome and the translatome levels in the hybrid. According to Prof. Li, "All these results are in accordance with the 'Goldilocks hypothesis,' suggesting that additive expression is advantageous for both transcriptome and translatome."

These findings suggest the potential role of asymmetric subgenome translation as an important factor contributing to heterosis in maize. These insights can provide crop breeders with effective gene manipulation tools to increase yield of not just maize, but other food crops, which might serve to address the looming food scarcity in face of the growing human population across the world.

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More information: Wanchao Zhu et al, Dynamic patterns of the translatome in a hybrid triplet show translational fractionation of the maize subgenomes, The Crop Journal (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cj.2021.02.002

Provided by The Crop Journal

Citation: Gained in translation: Subgenome fractionation determines hybrid vigor in maize (2021, April 6) retrieved 7 April 2021 from https://ift.tt/3dxRRys

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Their personal Google Translate - The Michigan Daily - Translation

“How many would you like?”

“Ba muốn mấy cái?”

“Please fill this out with your date of birth and address, then sign at the bottom with today’s date.”

“Má phải điền vô ngày sinh, địa chỉ nhà, ký tên rồi viết bữa nay là ngày mấy.” 

This is how a lot of shopping trips, doctors visits and phone calls go for my family. Someone asks my parents something. My sister or I translate it. My parents respond to us. We translate back. 

And I hated doing this. Like, hated it. It was embarrassing for 10-year-old me. I felt like a burden to the workers and thought I was slowing everything down. So every time my mom told me to order food over the phone, I’d feign busyness just so I wouldn’t have to. She’d tell me to sit with her while she’s on the phone with the doctor’s office, and I would grumble and sigh.

I’ve always been proud to have grown up in a bilingual environment, being immersed in two languages that come naturally to me. And I knew that it made my parents proud too, especially when other Vietnamese parents would compliment me and my sister’s seemingly native Vietnamese fluency. Adults would ask us if we were born in Vietnam, and I knew my parents were beaming with pride behind their humble smiles.

I liked talking to my parents in Vietnamese when we were out and about because it made me feel like we were telling a secret no one else would hear, but not when someone was waiting on the other end for a response. I dreaded the deafening silence of someone standing and anticipating a response as I translated what they said to my parents, waited for my parents’ response and formulated their words back to English. 

Thinking about it now, I can’t pinpoint an exact reason for having felt that way. Was it because I was afraid someone was going to mock me as some kids did in elementary school? Or was it because I had yet to understand how my translations gave my parents a sense of security?

When I asked her why she would have us translate, my mom told me that it made everything easier, but she emphasized how it made her more comfortable. She feared people would assume our family was “fresh off the boat,” as people say, and hated the feeling of asking employees to slow down their speaking. Her past experiences taught her to expect that these “inconveniences” would be met with impatience and rudeness. Having my sister and I speak up would signal to people that we know just as much English as any other American, though that should not determine whether or not we are treated with respect. 

As I got older, I learned more and more about my parents’ immigrant stories. For years, my mom sat in her evening ESL class after tirelessly working multiple jobs during the day, trying to perfect her “th” sounds and the “r” in words like “earth” (which still require my gentle guidance). My dad failed many writing assignments because he could never fully express in his writing what he wanted to say. He can still picture himself sitting in the library studying until midnight while his classmates played football outside, solely because he couldn’t understand what he was reading. Once I put myself in my parents’ shoes, I began to understand their immigration experience with broken English and their constant “uh”s, “um”s, and “oh, never mind”s when talking to English speakers. The “Where I go?” instead of “Where do I go,” or the “Look nice” instead of “That looks nice.” They were foreigners doing their best with the English they knew, but what they didn’t know created another challenge for surviving in the United States.

I’ve learned the best I can do is help ease any burden my parents may feel. Now, I embrace translating for my parents by taking initiative with small gestures I know they appreciate, even if they don’t voice it. I call the doctor’s office instead of just sitting there and only interjecting when I have to. I order the food without my mom asking. I see my dad having difficulty explaining what he’s looking for and jump in for him instead. 

I think speaking Vietnamese has done more for me than simply helping me communicate. It has allowed me to understand and value things my parents keep close to them. My mom radiates happiness when she sees me reading her cookbook filled with scrawls and scribbles from her attempts to perfect each recipe. My dad sits back with a nostalgic look on his face as I read notes he used to write for my mom when they were dating. Without a language barrier, my sister and I are able to stay in touch with my grandma and older relatives. 

It’s as if we have become our parents’ own personal Google Translate, and that’s not such a bad thing. 

I love you.

Con thương ba má.

MiC Columnist Hannah Nguyen can be reached at hannahnn@umich.edu.

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Who should translate Amanda Gorman's work? - The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines - Translation

Aron Aji, a literary translator and professor at the University of Iowa, runs a Facebook group called Literary Translation with more than 4,300 members from 99 countries. For the most part, the group is an active, amiable one where linguaphiles help one another with translator minutia. A post, for instance, asking for the English equivalent of the French word 'banlieusard” yielded 177 responses. (There was no real consensus, but suggestions included 'the hood,” 'projects” and 'ghetto.”)

But events last month sent the Facebook group - and the little known, underappreciated world of literary translation - into commotion, resulting in heated exchanges about issues of race and equity in the business.

It stemmed from news regarding the commissioned translations of Amanda Gorman's 'The Hill We Climb.” After the young Black poet recited her stirring poem at President Biden's inauguration in January, the rights were picked up by Penguin Random House, and the poem is set to be translated into more than a dozen languages.

In March, news broke that two of Gorman's selected translators would no longer be working on the project. The Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, stepped aside after critics questioned why someone with an identity closer to Gorman's was not selected. Shortly after, Gorman's Catalan translator, Victor Obiols, was informed his completed translation would not be used, because, as a White man, he 'was not suitable to translate it,” he told Agence France-Presse.

'The upper echelon of the translation industry or the translation market quickly fixed the problem, right? Pull somebody out, put somebody in,” said Aji, who translates from his native Turkish to English. 'They're already done with this, but we are now churning inside ourselves.”

On his Facebook group, Aji found himself moderating like he never had before. There were 1,600 comments within a week, a handful toxic enough that he removed them. Debates ensued about whether the choice of a translator should be only merit-based or whether identity should play a part. Another thread was about publisher practices and how translators are chosen. Some White translators who have spent their careers translating writers of color into other languages questioned their own pursuits.

'They asked, am I not supposed to be doing this. Am I wrong?” Aji said.

Achy Obejas, a Cuban American translator said that although there are no easy answers, there is also no question that a translator's identity has an impact on the translation.

A few years ago, she discovered a Spanish translation of Toni Morrison's 'Beloved,” published by DeBolsillo and bought the $5.99 Kindle version; the word 'slave” is translated as 'serviente” - 'servant.” The N-word is rendered as 'Negros” or 'blacks.”

'That is major,” said Obejas. 'That is not a detail. That is not a minor point.” Moreover, Obejas found that Morrison's African American vernacular was completely erased in the Spanish translation.

'There's no possibility of understanding from hearing these characters talk that they're Black, and this is so essential to any Toni Morrison story,” she said. The book names no translator, but someone who had more familiarity with the Black communities of the Spanish-speaking world may have better preserved Morrison's voice, Obejas said.

Obejas, who was sought out by the writer Junot Diaz to translate his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2007 novel, 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” said she thinks carefully before taking on a project, assessing first whether she can do the translation authentically.

'You may be utterly fluent in Spanish, you may be a master speaker, you may be a member of the Royal Academy. Doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that you can translate a book featuring Peruvian drag queens,” she said.

Diaz, who is Dominican American and of African descent and reads Spanish fluently, said that he liked the Spanish translation of his first book, a story collection, but he knew he wanted a Caribbean translator the second time around for 'Oscar Wao.”

'I said, listen, I want a Caribbean. They can be from Jamaica, they can be from Puerto Rico, but it has to be someone who has lived the Caribbean experience,” he said. 'An immigrant, all the better, a person of African descent, all the best.”

While working on the book, Obejas listened to Dominican talk radio daily and consulted both Diaz and Dominican friends about specifics. The translation, Diaz said, was a successful one.

A good translation conveys the 'untranslateables,” or what is being conveyed without actually being explicitly written, Diaz said. 'What I'm always looking for is someone who has the depth that comes from experience.”

Unlike Diaz, most authors have no control over selecting their translators. The rights are sold, and the publisher abroad handles the rest. The writer R.O. Kwon, who is Korean American, said she loves the idea of people closer to her own identity translating her work, though the task of identifying someone might be challenging.

'Finding a translator who is Korean Polish is less likely,” she said. 'That said, I love it. Maybe that's something with the next book I'll say, just find someone.”

One of the major publishers of translated literature is Amazon Crossing which, since its launch in 2010, has published 400 books by authors from 44 countries writing in 26 languages. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

'It's always wonderful when the translator has a personal connection to the creative project,” said Gabriella Page-Fort, editorial director at Amazon Crossing. The French-English translator Lara Vergnaud, who was born in Tunisia and raised in the United States, connected with her family roots while translating Yamen Manai's novel 'The Ardent Swarm,” Page-Fort said.

Ilan Stavans, the publisher of Restless Books, a small publishing house that focuses on translating world literature for English-speaking audiences, said translators should be selected based on sensibilities, not their identity.

'In fact, to me that seems to be antithetical to the very approach of translation,” Stavans, himself a translator, said. 'Translation is an attempt to bridge beyond identity, beyond cultures, bringing someone, something that is very different from us, into our own ecosystem”

Still, he agreed that it is important to provide opportunities to translators from underrepresented groups.

And the very White landscape of literary translation in America is something that no one can deny. A recent survey by the American Literary Translators Association found that, out of 362 responding members, 73 percent of translators identify as White.

'The reasons for that are structural,” said Elisabeth Jaquette, a translator and the executive director of the association, who pointed to an industry that does not tend to pay well. 'White translators who are in positions of privilege can take on unpaid work at the beginning to make a name for themselves.”

This puts heritage speakers - those who might acquire language skills informally through their immigrant parents - and translators of color at a disadvantage.

This gap makes itself apparent in the formal pathways to translation. Since 2015, the MFA in literary translation program at the University of Iowa has offered a diversity fellowship but, in the fellowship's history, only one student - an Asian American - has availed of the fellowship, even though Aron Aji, who directs the program, advertises the fellowship as widely as he can, including on his Literary Translation Facebook group. This coming fall, an African American student will hold the fellowship for the first time.

In the fall of 2022, Aji and his colleagues also will launch a free-standing bachelor's program in literary translation at Iowa. Currently, most American universities that offer literary translation at the bachelor's level do so only through a certificate or a minor.

Aji and his colleagues plan to recruit at high schools across Iowa and beyond, where he says there is an untapped market of future translators - the children of immigrants.

'Many of them are first-generation American students,” Aji said. 'They have been serving as amateur translators to their families, taking them to the hospital or doctor or driver's license exam. Translation is not unknown to them, it comes naturally.”

books-translations

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman speaks at the inauguration of President Joe Biden on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images/TNS)

Amazon Looks to Further Automate Quality Checks in Subtitle Translation - Slator - Translation

4 hours ago

Companies operating in the digital entertainment space have come up with some interesting innovations to reduce production costs. One area they have focused on is dubbing, which offers great potential for increasing the market share of such streaming platforms as Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime.

Among these innovations, Synthesia’s lip-sync dubbing tech and Papercup’s synthetic dubbing tool stand out in recent memory. Of course, there is also subtitling — which is the use case of a paper published by Amazon researchers on April 1, 2021.

Authored by Prabhakar Gupta, Ridha Juneja, Anil Nelakanti, and Tamojit Chatterjee, “Detecting over/under-translation [OT/UT] errors for determining adequacy in human translations” proposes a new approach to flagging errors during the quality evaluation of translated subtitles.

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The group did not limit their research to machine translated (MT) output, but also specifically targeted instances with professional subtitlers in the translation pipeline. “The goal of our system is to identify OT/UT errors from human translated video subtitles with high error recall,” they said.

Moreover, according to the authors, their model was able to detect OT/UT in human translations “without any access to reference translations” — that is, they trained the model on synthetic data. The researchers added that this dataset of “synthetically introduced errors” performed well, “achieving 89.3% accuracy on high-quality human-annotated evaluation data in 8 languages.”

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Defining translation quality as capturing “both the fluency of the translation and its adequacy relative to the source,” the researchers also raise the possibility of reducing production costs by flagging errors very early on.

They wrote, “Translated subtitles often require human quality checks that are as expensive as acquiring translations […] To reduce post-editing quality checks costs, we could flag errors as the translations are typed in with the QE serving as a guardrail.”

They compare this system to apps that flag spelling or grammatical errors on the fly. Of course, the kind of translation tech the authors describe is nothing new (see: predictive / adaptive machine translation via Lilt). However, not all MT quality checks are created equal — and what may be unacceptable for, say, translated marketing copy could very well work for subtitles.

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“For video subtitles […] it is possible for a translation to be linguistically incomplete and be acceptable during post-edits,” the authors pointed out. “This is due to the fact subtitles are required to follow a set of technical constraints limiting the choice and number of words in translation.”

They cite an example (“There is a green tree in the park” translated into “Green tree in park”) as passing a subbing quality check because a viewer would understand the context.

The Amazon researchers concluded by saying that they still plan to work on their model by “improving error patterns through tighter coupling with human translators” and by limiting errors to tokens within a sentence instead of flagging the entire sentence.

SoA and Translators' Association call for racial equality in translation - The Bookseller - Translation

The Society of Authors and members of the Translators' Association have called for greater "transparency, accountability and inclusivity in publishing processes" following a row over Amanda Gorman's poem “The Hill We Climb”.

Both organisations issued a statement following criticism of Dutch publisher Meulenhoff's decision to have Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's translate the poem.

Journalist and activist Janice Deul's article, published in Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, had led criticism of publisher Meulenhoff's actions, asking why a translator who was like Gorman, a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”, had not been selected.

Rijneveld subsequently resigned from the assignment, saying it was "not their place" to work on the poem, which was read at Joe Biden's inauguration. Other editions, including a version by Victor Obiols, a Catalan poet and musician have also been pulled after publisher Univers received word that the author's US agency would prefer a young woman activist and poet to translate, who is "preferably African American", the Times reported.

The SoA and members of the Translation Association said identity should not be a "limiting factor" in publishing, but flagged the need for proactive intervention to overcome structural racism, which excludes Black and ethnic minorities from the profession as a whole.

"This debate has reminded us of the urgent need for more openness and opportunities in publishing, more visibility of translators of colour and more proactive intervention to help dismantle the institutional barriers faced by early career translators," the organisations said.

Both called on the publishing industry to hire diverse editorial staff, freelance translators and editors, but also to reach out to schools, and be invested in translator training.

The organisations said: “This debate reminds us of the importance of extending opportunities to a much broader intake of emerging translators, including translators of colour and translators from communities, backgrounds or identities who have been and continue to be marginalised and underrepresented in the publishing landscape.”

Members of the Translators Association committee who led on the statement were Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, William Gregory, Sawad Hussain, Rosalind Harvey, Rebecca DeWald, Vineet Lal, Marta Dziurosz, Natasha Lehrer, Kari Dickson and Christina MacSweeney.

The statement in full reads:

Literary translation has had a rare moment in the spotlight last month following criticism by Janice Deul of Dutch publisher Meulenhoff’s decision to commission author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to translate Amanda Gorman’s "The Hill We Climb".

The ensuing discussion about structural racism and access to publishing has at times been marred by speculation and acrimony, and we condemn the hurtful, racist comments expressed in some quarters. We have heard calls to limit who can translate whom, for translators to be chosen on the basis of their identity.

At the Society of Authors we believe an individual’s identity should never be a limiting factor. But this debate has reminded us of the urgent need for more openness and opportunities in publishing, more visibility of translators of colour and more proactive intervention to help dismantle the institutional barriers faced by early career translators.

Race and class strongly influence who has access to work in the arts, and who gets excluded or overlooked. In the week the UK Government has published a high-profile report playing down the impact of structural factors on ethnic disparities, which many will take as a signal to do nothing, to maintain the status quo, it is more important than ever that we find ways to change the environment in which we work.

The controversy around commissioning translators for the work of Amanda Gorman has been a timely reminder of the need to identify and confront barriers within education, academia and publishing processes to enable equitable access to publishing generally, and literary translation in particular.

It is time to improve transparency, accountability and inclusivity in publishing processes. This means hiring diverse editorial staff, and freelance translators and editors, but it also means much earlier interventions in the training of translators, as well as outreach in schools to dismantle implicit barriers to language learning and literature.

Literary translation has long been dominated by word-of-mouth recommendations, with opportunities afforded too often to those with connections as well as financial and educational privilege.

This debate reminds us of the importance of extending opportunities to a much broader intake of emerging translators, including translators of colour and translators from communities, backgrounds or identities who have been and continue to be marginalised and underrepresented in the publishing landscape.

At the Society of Authors, we are committed to improving inclusivity in publishing and in literary translation, while recognising that much remains to be done to level the playing field. We are listening and learning, and exploring ways we can achieve more through our SoA-wide inclusivity network, and in partnership with other organisations.

English translation of the Hieroglyphic song at the Golden Parade of ancient Egyptian mummies - Egypttoday - Translation

Soprano Amira Selim sings Reverence for Isis at the Golden Parade on April 3, 2021 - Youtube still

CAIRO – 6 April 2021: The Hieroglyphic song performed at the Golden Parade of ancient Egyptian royalty has stuck in the minds of many, leaving them curious to know the meaning of the lyrics.

The lyrics are extracted from Isis Reverence Hymns found in Shelwit Temple in Luxor under the supervision of Dr. Maissara Abdallah Hussein, a professor in the Faculty of Archeology, Cairo University.

Modern people know to an extent how the language was pronounced from Rosetta Stone, which unlocked Hieroglyphics for having a Greek translation below an ancient Egyptian text. It translated words but not names; they were written the way they were pronounced in ancient Greek. That is how we can imagine how ancient Egyptians produced sounds.

Below is the song’s lyrics in English after being translated from Arabic as posted on Dr. Hussein’s Facebook page.

O people and gods above

She is the only lady

Reverence for Eset (Isis)

She gives birth to the day

Reverence for Eset

The lady of the west and the two lands

Reverence for Eset

She is the great eye of Ra in the provinces

Reverence for Eset

You offer the dear and precious for the king of Egypt

Upper and lower

O my only lady

Reverence for thee

Google Translate has been downloaded 1 billion times on the Play Store - HT Tech - Translation

Google Translate is one of the easiest translation apps to go to for quick and easy translations. And it is also free and easy to use, thus its popularity is understandable as far as downloads are concerned. 

It’s been a little more than a decade since Google Translate was introduced as an Android app (it was launched in January 2019) and over time the app has been updated with a whole bunch of new features and UI iterations.

Google Translate has reached a milestone after 11 years and three months since its release - it has crossed 1 billion downloads on the Google Play Store.

Google Translate has crossed more than 1 billion downloads on the Play Store.  (Play Store )

These more than 1 billion downloads are from users and not OEMs since the Google Translate app is not a part of the mandatory Google Mobile Services core apps package. That means that people with Google Translate on their phones all went to the Play Store and downloaded the app from there.

Given that it’s been more than a decade since Google Translate’s Android App was pushed out, this one billion figure is not surprising. However, time is not the only factor that worked in Google Translate’s favour. There are literally no other translation apps, free or paid, that can wholly trump Google Translate and it continues to sport a 4.5 star rating on the Play Store. 

Google Translate currently supports 109 languages as of now along with support for pronunciation, transcription, offline translation, camera translation, dark mode etc and Google is also constantly adding more features to it.