You can now use the best of Yahoo! Answers as a Typing Of The Dead dictionary - Rock Paper Shotgun - Dictionary

Yahoo! Answers announced this past week that it was closing down. This is bad news to those who used the question-and-answer website to learn about the world, but doubly bad news for the much larger population of people who liked to laugh at the dumb questions and dumber answers posted there.

To mourn the site's approaching closure, the operator of the YahooAnswersTXT Twitter account has created a custom dictionary for Typing Of The Dead: Overkill. So now you can kill zombies by typing, "What does Bigfoot want??".

Other questions highlighted in the screenshots include, "Would it be OK to spank my date on the first date?" and "I need a Badass, yet Sexy Gamer Name ;)?". The unusual capitalisation presumably makes it trickier to not get eaten by the undead.

Yahoo! Answers will stop accepting new questions on April 20th, and will shut down on May 4th. The site's archives will be inaccessible from that point and users will have until June 30th to request their data. If you never used the website yourself, you might still have come across some of the memes unwittingly generated by its users. Perhaps most famously, it's where "how is babby formed?" originated.

Typing Of The Dead: Overkill, meanwhile, is a game in which you shoot zombies by accurately typing words and sentences. It added support for user-made dictionaries back in 2015, and when I wrote about the addition I suggested that someone should make an RPS dictionary featuring popular words, phrases and running jokes from the site's history. None of you did it, to my eternal disappointment.

You can grab the Yahoo! Answers dictionary via the Steam Workshop now.

Win a copy of The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams in this week’s Fabulous book competition... - The Sun - Dictionary

IN 1887 Oxford, Esme’s dad is working on the first English dictionary with a team of other men, while she hides under the table.

As they discard potential entries on slips of paper, she treasures these “lost” words and decides to start her own dictionary.

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D.C. says long-awaited translation of vaccine website is coming this weekend - The Washington Post - Translation

The District’s efforts to make its coronavirus vaccine website accessible to non-English speakers — including translations through an automated Google Translate button, not the professional translations that the city promised earlier — did not meet the standards set forth in the law, advocates have argued.

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Assistant City Administrator Jay Melder said at a D.C. Council meeting on March 17 that professional translations would probably be completed within 10 days.

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After city lawmakers and community members complained that those translations have yet to appear, the D.C. health department said on Twitter that “accurate and culturally competent” updates are nearly ready.

“I think D.C. is not following the law here,” said Kathy Zeisel, an attorney at the Children’s Law Center, one of many organizations involved in enforcing the 2004 law.

Those groups sent a joint letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on Thursday asking for better translations.

“It’s especially concerning because we know that immigrants in D.C. have really been disproportionately affected” by coronavirus cases and deaths, Zeisel said.

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Her nonprofit law firm, which represents children as well as their guardians, sent a message in Spanish to its adult clients informing them about coronavirus vaccines. Many wrote back, Zeisel said, saying that they wanted a shot but couldn’t navigate the city’s website to register for one.

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Laura Camarata, a staffer at the law firm who speaks Spanish, called those clients and filled out the forms for them so that they could get vaccinated, Zeisel said.

The Google Translate option on the registration form caused several problems for non-English speakers, advocates said. Error messages popped up in English, not Spanish, for example, and the phrase “Book your appointment” used the Spanish word for a physical book, not the word for schedule.

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Similar problems have occurred in other jurisdictions. In Maryland, the state’s Spanish-language vaccine registration page initially used the word for car race in the section that asked people for their race, sex and ethnicity. Because of a Google Translate error, the Virginia health department’s online Spanish-language FAQ at one point stated that vaccinations were not necessary — when officials meant to say that no one would be forced to get a shot.

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In the District, language issues go beyond the registration website. Camarata said that although she indicated on the form that each of the patients she helped would prefer responses from the city in Spanish, four out of five people she recently signed up got emails or calls from the city offering them appointments in English.

One woman called Camarata, saying: “I think I got a phone call from them, but it’s in English. I have no idea what it’s saying.”

When Camarata went to get her own shot at a D.C. recreation center, she found herself acting as an impromptu translator for some of the other patients, who wanted to ask the pharmacist if their medications could cause any unsafe interactions with the vaccination.

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D.C. vaccination site workers have access to a telephone translation service, though some advocates have said sites don’t offer the option to patrons or make clear that it’s available.

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Latinos in general, and the District’s Spanish-speaking community, have been hit hard by the virus. As of Friday, just under 20 percent of all D.C.’s reported cases involved Hispanic residents, who make up just 11 percent of the city’s population.

D.C. has more than three times more non-Hispanic White residents than Hispanic residents, but more Hispanic people than non-Hispanic White people have died of covid-19. And while racial and ethnic data on vaccinations remains very incomplete, White residents are far ahead of their Latino and Black counterparts.

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The District reported 136 new coronavirus cases Friday and two deaths from the virus. Maryland reported 1,840 new cases — the most in a single day since January — and 14 deaths, and Virginia reported 1,542 cases and 15 deaths.

New translation reveals the delights - and flaws - of the classic Chinese tale » Borneo Bulletin Online - Borneo Bulletin Online - Translation

Michael Dirda

THE WASHINGTON POST – What do you do when a book – a classic, no less, and one beloved by millions of readers – proves disappointing?

I had expected to love Monkey King the new translation and abridgment by Julia Lovell of the episodic 16^th-century Chinese novel, Hsi-yu chi also known as Journey to the West. The book was first published anonymously, and its authorship is consequently uncertain, though usually attributed to a minor poet and littérateur named Wu Cheng’en.

Today, Journey to the West is said to be the most popular book in East Asia, as well as a seed-text for children’s stories, films, anime and comics.

Appropriately, then, Lovell’s translation carries a foreword by Gene Luen Yang, MacArthur-Award-winning author of the graphic novel American Born Chinese which draws on this rumbustious fantasy.

The marvel-filled narrative – 100 chapters in the original – derives from popular tales and dramas about a shape-changing trickster and proto-superhero who happens to be a talking monkey. Its other characters, as Lovell – professor of Chinese at the University of London – notes in her excellent introduction, include “deities, demons, emperors, bureaucrats, monks, animals, woodcutters, bandits and farmers” – in short a cross-section of Ming-era imperial China.

The opening chapters depict the mysterious birth of Monkey, his early religious training under a Taoist Immortal, his acquisition of a supernatural fighting staff, and the trouble this simian upstart causes when, in his quest for the secret to eternal life, he disrupts the celestial court-in-the-clouds of the Jade Emperor. There he offends virtually everyone, devouring the Jade Empress’s life-extending peaches and drinking the immortality elixirs of Laozi, the Taoist patriarch.

Exiled back to Earth, Monkey and his armies battle the celestial forces successfully until the Buddha finally imprisons him under a mountain. His adventures, however, are just beginning.

All these initial chapters of Monkey King” exhibit a rollicking exuberance, somewhat like Rabelais’s hyperbolic accounts of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. Monkey consistently acts with crude outrageousness – at one point he actually urinates on the Buddha’s hand.

Because the novel’s Chinese vernacular is both vulgar and linguistically playful, Lovell’s translation adopts a snappy contemporary vibe. Heaven, we learn, “runs a
cashless economy”.

The welcome sign outside the Underworld reads, “The Capital of Darkness: A Fine City”. A hermit, asked how he’s doing, answers, “Oh, same old, same old.” Some of Lovell’s descriptive epithets even recall the comic sententiousness of Ernest Bramah’s tall tales about the resourceful Kai Lung.

The Pillar of Ultimate Peace, for instance, refers to the execution block.

I wanted to like the book more. Even abridged to a quarter of the original, its long central section struck me as repetitive, tedious and cartoonishly crude.

Overall, Monkey King lacked the charm of Western fairy tales, medieval chivalric romances or The Arabian Nights, each of which it occasionally resembles. Neither was there any of the wondrous eeriness or poignancy of Pu Songling’s slightly later classic, Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio.

Google Explains Why App Can’t Translate Most Native American Languages - Voice of America - Translation

WASHINGTON - Bill Waawaate is Indigenous, smart, educated, and the millionaire-founder of a highly successful snowmobile company. He also is a comic book superhero from a First Nation in Canada.

"The aim here is to help Canadians understand Indigenous culture and to erase the stereotypes about First Nations communities," said Joseph John, the Montreal-based designed and publisher of the Citizen Canada comic book series.

Graphic shows Cree-speaking comic book superhero Bill Wawaate ("Northern Lights"), featured in the "Citizen Canada" comic book series by Montreal designer/publisher Joseph Johns.

Johns wanted his feather-caped superhero to speak English, French and Cree, a language spoken by more than 95,000 First Nations people in Canada. He assumed he could rely on Google Translate for help.

But the app, which supports 109 languages, does not offer Cree or any of the other roughly 150 Indigenous languages spoken today in North America.

So Johns started up an online petition urging Google to add Cree to its translation engine. That petition has so far received nearly all the 7,500 signatures he had hoped for.

"For me, it just doesn’t make sense," John told VOA. "Google Translate does offer Maori, the Indigenous language of New Zealand, which is spoken by only about 50,000 persons. How can a company with 135,000 people working for it in 40 nations across the globe not find the resources to add Canada's most widely spoken Indigenous language?"

Cree A close up of a proof from a freshly made Cree-language typeface. Cree, like many other indigenous languages, uses syllabics rather than the Latin alphabet.

VOA posed the question to Google.

"Indigenous languages are incredibly important to us," Google spokesperson Justin Burr said via email. As it turns out, though, Cree is a "low resource" language, which means there aren’t enough written translations of Cree documents to populate and "train" automated translation systems like Google’s.

Burr said Google is actively working toward adding more low resource languages.

"One of those ways is we lean heavily on our contributor community, which allows native speakers to add valuable feedback, verify translations, et cetera, to languages that we do support, as well as languages we have yet to support," said Burr. "Beyond that, we are working on new machine learning techniques that allow us to support the low resource languages with less training data."

University of Colorado linguist Andrew Cowell specializes in Indigenous-language documentation. He explained to VOA some of the challenges for a machine to translate Indigenous languages.

Group of Woodland Cree people, Fort George, James Bay, Quebec, 1893

"Most of the world’s languages aren’t written. They are spoken as household or community languages that are not regularly used in any kind of literate way," said Cowell. "The pattern all over the world is that someone speaks one language at home and then they write in the national language. And so that language isn’t represented online. And even if it is, there won’t be any standardized writing system because people make it up as they go."

Adding a language to Google Translate requires the input of "hundreds of millions of words," according to Cowell. "And it needs to be what's called 'clean data,' which means that you have the same spelling and grammar conventions."

Cree is actually a series of dialects that gradually change across Canada.

"Cree is actually considered to be multiple different languages by linguists -- East Cree, Wood Cree, Swampy Cree, Plains Cree, et cetera," said Cowell. "Even within those languages, there is a good deal of regional variation. So, the 'Cree language' is more complex — and each community of speakers is smaller — than would be suggested by statements that '95,000 people speak Cree.'"

Projects in the works

Google says plans are under way to add Guarani, an Indigenous language spoken in Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia; plus Inukitut, spoken across the North American Arctic and in Greenland; and Tsalagi, the Cherokee language, which has plenty of translated material.

Portrait of Sequoyah, who in the early years of the 19th Century developed the first Cherokee language syllabary.

In the early 1800s, a Cherokee named Sequoyah developed a Tsalagi syllabary, a traditional writing system made up of symbols. In 1828, the tribe began publishing the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper. All historic materials, including religious texts, the Cherokee constitution and laws, use Sequoyah's syllabary, and today, learning materials are still being written in syllabics.

The Cherokee Nation’s Language Program department spent nearly two years working with Google to translate more than 50,000 technology terms into Cherokee and developed a syllabary font that Google already has added to its search engine, as well as Gmail, Chromebooks and Android.

But adding Tsalagi to Google translate will take more time — and money.

"We are just researching the amount of resources and manpower it will require," said Roy Boney, manager of the Cherokee Nation’s Language Program, in an emailed statement to VOA. "Currently, we are consulting with linguists at the University of New Mexico and University of Mexico City and also exploring grant opportunities in order to expand our research base."

In the meantime, Cherokee linguists are studying and documenting Tsalagi grammar and syntax, with the goal of pairing it up with already translated texts.

Photo, front page of February 28, 1828 edition of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

"This will help us develop the proper Cherokee language data to start training machine translation engines," Boney said.

As for Cree—and many other Indigenous languages—Cowell says speakers will have to wait, adding, "I think there are going to be increasing number of communities starting to write with some kind of standardized orthography, I'm hopeful that additional Indigenous languages will be added to translation engines like Google in the future."

Don’t let vaccinations get lost in translation - The Globe and Mail - Translation

A video screen provides a feed to a live Cantonese language translator for a couple who were about to receive the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, March 13, 2021, on the first day of operations at a mass vaccination site at the Lumen Field Events Center in Seattle.

Ted S. Warren/The Associated Press

Amy Chyan is a journalist and podcast producer.

I’ve been the household translator for my parents ever since I can remember – calling into telecom companies and deciphering government forms on their behalf – so switching between English and Mandarin is second nature to me. Translating medical lingo for strangers in what could be considered a matter of life of death, however, was new.

When a friend told me about a volunteer opportunity to help a mobile COVID-19 vaccine clinic serving low-income seniors, I jumped at the chance. Within my own family, I’ve seen the distress a language barrier can cause for the aged. And I know that as variants contribute to a third wave of the virus in a number of provinces, there’s an urgency to get vulnerable older populations vaccinated.

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Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table recommends that seniors living in naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) – various types of housing that have a dense population of older adults – be vaccinated through mobile clinics. Toronto has 489 buildings that are classified as NORCs and they’re home to 70,013 adults over the age of 65. Of that population, 30,346 are over the age of 80. Many of these communities have residents who aren’t fluent in English or have mobility issues, as well as various disabilities. The translation needs include Greek, Serbian, Polish, Russian, Somali, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean.

The apartment complex I was assigned to fit this description. One of Toronto Community Housing’s more than 80 seniors-designated buildings, the majority of residents are 55 and older. I recognized the building, as I’d been there before to help deliver groceries to 95-year-old man through the Friendly Neighbour Hotline, a University Health Network OpenLab initiative. From our previous conversations – I’d call to double check his grocery requests, which are often lost in translation – I knew he’d been living there for almost 10 years, and which brand of chicken dumplings and rice vinegar he prefers.

Since COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on our daily lives, I have turned to my local community in order to compartmentalize my anxiety and preserve my sanity. I’m a small-potato-nobody compared with our front-line and essential workers, but I believe in lending a helping hand. My most cherished part of humanity is when we offer what we can – and for me that is language interpretation. It’s my superpower.

“When you are able to speak directly to someone in the same language, it’s really powerful,” said Craig Madho, a research analyst at the UHN OpenLab who has been co-ordinating vaccine outreach and volunteers for mobile clinics. “It helps provide comfort to the person you’re speaking with, the clarity of understanding, and it’s somewhat about trustworthiness as well.”

All of which was much needed on my volunteer day. Out of all the seniors I met, only three could speak English or fill out any forms on their own.

Residents began pacing outside the building’s activity room as soon as the hospital team started setting up. I explained we’d be going floor to floor, all 14 in the building, so it was best to go home and wait. I could sense their excitement and restlessness; no one wanted to miss out. A few people even came by with their health cards in hand, ready to roll up their sleeves. But there was more to the process than a simple jab to the arm. There was paperwork. And a lot of it.

The arduous consent form, sprinkled with medical jargon, became a pain point, as it had to be translated and completed by volunteers before the vaccine could be administered. This slowed the progress of the clinical teams – each comprising one doctor, one medical scribe and one translator.

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As we worked our way through the floors, it was clear that translators are crucial to the process. Being asked whether you’re allergic to polyethylene glycol and polysorbate isn’t a common question for most people, never mind seniors who don’t understand the terms. Out of the eight doctors present that day, only two spoke another language that was useful to the building’s residents. At times I was running up and down the hallway to help with translation needs.

What I witnessed during my eight-hour shift confirmed what Mr. Madho and the Friendly Neighbour Hotline had already learned from 12 months of grocery deliveries: Language can be a serious obstacle to a person receiving essential services and care.

Based on feedback from the vaccination clinical teams and volunteers, he told me, they’re working on shortening the provincial consent forms. Some hospital teams have already moved on to verbal consent only.

As vaccine supply improves and mass vaccination clinics ramp up, people working behind the scenes and on the front line will need more support than ever. Empathy and patience is going to be paramount. If you have the bandwidth and the language skills, consider volunteering. Regardless of disability, language or technology barriers, everyone deserves dignity and comfort when it comes to receiving health care.

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Global Translation Management Software Market Excellent Growth Scope Witnessed in the World – ROUGH Magazine - ROUGH Magazine - Translation

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• North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)

• Europe (Germany, France, UK, Spain, Italy & Others)

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Key players in the global Translation Management Software market covered in Report:
Ginger Software
Lionbridge
BaccS
Pairaphrase
Text United Software
Welocalize
Kilgray Translation Technologies
Plunet BusinessManager
Wordbee
Across Systems
SDL
Moravia IT
Translation Exchange
Bablic
memoQ

On the basis of types, the Translation Management Software market from 2015 to 2025 is primarily split into:
On-Premise
Cloud

On the basis of applications, the Translation Management Software market from 2015 to 2025 covers:
PC Terminal
Mobile Terminal

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