Home/Front: Conversations Across The Civilian-Military Divide : Rough Translation - NPR - Translation

Jamiel Law for NPR

Jamiel Law for NPR

This episode kicks off a new season from Rough Translation called Home/Front. In seven episodes, Rough Translation enlists NPR veterans correspondent Quil Lawrence to help us decode the cultural and communication gap between those who have served in the military and those who have not.

If you've served in the military or know someone who has, you've probably heard of the civilian-military ("civ-mil") divide. It's more than just a language and experience gap between veterans and civilians, it's a separation of social circles. Surprisingly few civilians can claim to have a close friend who has served.

"Home" and "Front" haven't always been so separate. When the US military relied on the draft, almost everyone at home knew someone at the front during times of war. Since 9/11, only 1% of Americans have served in the military.

The civ-mil divide can leave veterans feeling isolated and misunderstood, and civilians feeling powerless to criticize. Is it true that "you can't understand" if you've never been to war? What would it take to have a conversation between civilians and veterans that feels safe and on equal footing?

Seeing the divide is the first step to bridging it. So this season, we're telling stories about ordinary people who show us what is possible when we cross this divide.

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

How Metadata Is Staging the Next Revolution in AI-Enabled Translation Workflows - Slator - Translation

A recent Gartner report states that by 2025, 75% of translation work will move away from creating translations to machine translation post-editing (MTPE or PEMT). Driving this transition are advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.

AI now enables a wider range of new use cases for machine translation (MT) than ever before, and the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated MT uptake across several sectors. Progress was notable in the more creative industries, such as Media & Entertainment and Gaming, because of (a) greater demand as most of the world was in lockdown; (b) there was simply more room to grow, as much of the translation across these sectors was (and still is) done completely manually.

Aside from Media & Entertainment and Gaming, MT has naturally gained much traction over the  past year also in E-commerce, E-learning, Digital Marketing, as well as the Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical sectors.

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And yet, many enterprises still remain unaware of just how powerful AI-enabled translation services have become; and, thus, they fail to leverage MT to achieve greater cost-savings and efficiencies across the production workflow.

Moreover, the same report noted a tendency for translation-related decision-making and processes within the enterprise to be “siloed and disconnected from a broader enterprise globalization and localization strategy.”

Why Enterprises Fail to Take Full Advantage of MT

In one word, metadata. Take, for example, subtitling as a use case. Media and game localizers may not be taking full advantage of the cost and efficiency benefits offered by MT because translation work is still constrained by the limits of popular black-box MT systems. This was highlighted in a recent white paper by AI language technology provider, AppTek, on how machine translation uses metadata to transform subtitling workflows.

Across the broader range of industries, translation and localization providers that deploy MT off-the-shelf will likely find that —

• It lacks customization for a specific domain; or, if customized, it needs to be further tailored to suit specific client tones of voice, etc.
• It may not be easily integrated into certain translation productivity (a.k.a. CAT) tools.
• It needs further integration of glossaries or termbases.
• It lacks control of MT output around factors such as length, gender, etc.

Even after a language service provider (LSP) customizes MT out of the box, that LSP may find they need high-quality MT for 10 different domains or genres. That means having to train, deploy, and maintain 10 separate systems, even when some remain idle for extended periods.

“The result is a high environmental footprint and increased costs. There is also a risk of ‘overfitting’ the training, making it so specific to a particular domain that its performance is worse with different data than it otherwise would be,” the paper explained.

How to Make AI & MT Work for You

For the translator wanting to adopt machine translation (MT), audiovisual localization expert, Dr Yota Georgakopoulou, recommends 10 questions translators must ask themselves before engaging in an MTPE project.

What if customization can be handled by a single MT model equipped with a switch to toggle between style, gender, domain, topic, length, dialect, context, and glossaries?

According to Georgakopoulou, “MT implementation is not easy. It needs to be meticulously planned and executed if it is to be successful.” She then highlights two important factors to ensure that MT works for translators: (1) the quality of MT technology; (2) change management (i.e., homing in on how people interact with MT).

For the enterprise, AppTek proposes a different approach: What if customization across multiple dimensions can be handled by a single machine translation model equipped with a switch to toggle between nuances of style, gender, domain, topic, length, dialect, context, and glossaries?

In Q3 2021, AppTek will launch an MT system that makes use of multi-dimensional metadata inputs to offer deeper customization at the project level, document level, or even at the individual sentence level — thus placing translators in the driver’s seat with more control over editable output during post-editing tasks. 

The Power of Metadata

As mentioned, metadata is the latest trick to deploying a more productive, cost-effective MT system. This is what AppTek is looking to offer translators and the broader enterprise community.

Deploying a single MT system to handle each unique domain and scenario without sacrificing translation quality is the new best practice in modern translation workflows. All the user needs to do to generate the desired translation is add an extra parameter in the API call (e.g., length = short, style = formal).

The metadata can come from a variety of sources, including source provenance (i.e., data on the origin of a translated document).

“Translation is more than just taking one sentence in one language and formulating it in another. Yet, until recently, MT systems were only doing this and nothing else,” said AppTek’s Lead Machine Translation Architect, Dr Evgeny Matusov.

Matusov added, “With the addition of metadata that directly influences MT output, we are able to raise the quality and adaptability of a single MT system to the next level. The metadata provides the system with a little ‘world knowledge’ that professional translators have. It can be specified by MT users, computed from the very text being translated, like genre or topic, or predicted via separate machine learning algorithms, such as the ones that infer the gender of the speaker in case of speech translation.”

So what can be customized with metadata?

• Style – Depending on the context, choose between formal and informal for the tricky pronoun “you,” for example, in its singular or plural forms distinguished in other languages (e.g., Latin / Romance languages)
• Gender – Customize for gendered words in MT output (possibly avoiding gender bias that could render a translation awkward or inappropriate)
• Domain – Adapt to a wide range of genres, such as news, patents, entertainment, etc.
• Topic – Use a more tailored, document-level style and terminology
• Length – Produce shorter or longer translations with minimal information loss or distortion
• Language Variety – Combine parallel training data for related languages or dialects within a single system (e.g., Castilian and Lat-Am Spanish, Canadian and European French) for an improved translation into a desired language variety or dialect
• Extended Context – Use the context of previous or succeeding source sentences for better word sense disambiguation, leading to better translation of pronouns and consistency in term translation between different sentences
• Glossaries – Integrate a glossary or termbase of official words, mandatory translations, or jargon, which an MT system would otherwise translate differently

Deploying AppTek’s technology, which makes better use of metadata, means localization providers can now train just a single model — rather than 10 or more to cover all client domains — reducing the time, effort, and cost of translation.  

Enterprise and off-the-shelf CAT tools and subtitle editors that integrate the technology can now transcend the confines of traditional black-box MT systems with a simple user-controlled “flip of a switch” to the desired metadata. This way, users get more control of the MT output given back to them.

AppTek will offer translation professionals a free trial of its MT technology in Q3 2021. Click here to register your interest.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Term for Korean Traditional Clothing 'Hanbok' Listed in Collins Dictionary - The Korea Bizwire - Dictionary

SEOUL, May 26 (Korea Bizwire) — The Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK), a civic group promoting the country and its history online for an international audience, reported Tuesday that the Korean word “hanbok,” which refers to a Korean traditional garment, has been listed in the Collins English Dictionary.

This recent report comes as a response to China’s encroachment upon Korean culture by calling Korean attire ‘hanfu’, to claim that it originated in China.

VANK has been engaging with the publishers of the Oxford, Collins, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries to request listing the word hanbok.

Currently, searching for the word ‘hanbok’ on the Collins Online Dictionary returns with a definition that says “a traditional style of clothing, characterized by a long high-waisted skirt, worn in Korea for formal occasions.”

Collins, following a month-long review, decided to list the word ‘hanbok’ with clear indication that it is a traditional garment from Korea, VANK said.

Image Credit: Yonhap / Korea Bizwire / photonews@koreabizwire.com

To the Daily: Lost in Translation is not a racist movie - Stanford Review - Translation

Last week, the Stanford Daily published a movie review that criticizes the 2003 film Lost in Translation for “reinforcing a racist worldview” and “contributing to systemic racism.”

Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson, is a story about two Americans who visit Tokyo and bond over their shared culture shock and awkward experiences with the native Japanese population. The film garnered four Academy Award and five Golden Globe nominations, becoming one of the most critically acclaimed films of the early 2000s.

I’m Asian-American, and I’ve seen plenty of Hollywood movies. Lost in Translation is one of my favorites , and I was surprised to find it branded “racist” and “belittling of Asian culture”.

The author accuses the film and its director of several racist missteps, one of which is the film's depiction of native Japanese characters. According to the author, “Coppola clearly wants viewers to side with the ‘normal’ white protagonists'' and “think of the Japanese characters as strange.”

What’s strange is that the author presumes to know what Coppola hoped to achieve with the film. Getting inside a director’s head to brand them racist is truly comical, and the author does this multiple times through the article, going so far as to accuse Coppola of having a “racist narrative design.”  

The author points out that in the film, native Japanese men “frequently shout, dance, and use unnatural vocal inflections” and “read explicit manga on subways and play loud arcade games.” She interprets this to mean that “Asians are the butt of the joke.”

It’s unclear what the joke actually is. How is the presence of explicit manga on subways racist? As for the loud arcade games, Japan, like many other East Asian nations, has a strong video game culture. Depicting this is not racism.

And when the author refers to the native Japanese and their “unnatural vocal inflections” and “switching of Rs and Ls”, I think she is referring to an accent, which almost every non-native English speaker has. My parents are immigrants and they speak English with an accent. I don’t think it’s “unnatural.” On the contrary, if a movie set in a foreign country didn’t feature natives speaking English with an accent, I’d consider that to be whitewashing.

The author then hones in on the racism of “the [American] characters’ frustration with English-speaking Japanese characters”, citing a few scenes in the movie where Bill Murray becomes confused and upset when he struggles to communicate with the native Japanese. The author connects this to “a larger trend of non-native English speakers taking on painstaking burdens to learn English, while Americans remain ignorant of or dismissive towards how the rest of the world caters to them.”

Newsflash: English is recognized as an official language in 67 countries -- and fun fact: the US isn’t one of them!  For better or worse, it’s the global lingua franca. People in the rest of the world aren’t catering to Americans with their painstaking attempts to learn English - they’re simply following a global convention.

The author concludes her analysis with a series of bold claims about what the film actually represents, such as “the world is the white American’s oyster”, “white Americans are the only ones who think and feel interesting things”, and “Lost in Translation disguises its racist underpinnings by parading as a movie about loneliness and unlikely connections.”

That last claim is especially absurd. Once again, the author attempts to get inside the director’s head, this time to argue that the entire storyline of the movie is a farce and it is instead a racist trojan horse. In reality, Sofia Coppola made the movie because she had spent time in Tokyo, grew fond of the city, and wanted to capture her personal experiences. That sounds like quite the racist mastermind.

Even some native Japanese film critics dismissed the notion that Lost in Translation perpetuates a racist view of Japan. Yasuhisa Hirada addressed the accusations of racism surrounding the movie in his review, writing that “In the United States, some people were concerned that the film might appear as anti-Japanese. Despite that fact, the film neither tries to dissolute Tokyo nor investigates it; the peculiarity and wonder of the city is accurately reflected… Above all, there is wonderful humor and breath-taking acting from Bill Murray. We are not so narrow-minded to criticize such a great film.”

“Narrow-minded” is the right phrase to describe those who needlessly attach the label of racism to perfectly innocuous films. Hollywood does have a history of stereotyping Asian-Americans;  films such as The Mask of Fu Manchu and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom exaggerated certain physical features of their Asian characters. But Lost in Translation is not such a film - it’s a film about individuals who encounter an unfamiliar environment abroad and respond with frustration and genuine confusion. Anyone who’s traveled internationally, white or not, has experienced that.

If we keep judging every piece of art through today’s unreasonably woke standards, we are going to miss out on the great deal of artistic and cinematic diversity that the past has given us. So, if you haven’t seen Lost in Translation, I’d highly recommend watching it. You can decide for yourself whether it’s “low-effort and discriminatory.” But my guess is you won’t.

Blocking Basic Dictionary Words is not Enough - Security Boulevard - Dictionary

For many organizations, password security comes down to simply implementing blocks on basic dictionary words from being used in the creation of a user’s password. This is not an effective way to secure passwords and may in fact make the creation of a secure password more difficult. There are many ways to improve password security that go beyond blocking dictionary words that are worth organizations implementing to improve their overall security posture.

Let’s look at why simply blocking dictionary words can become problematic.

First, it does nothing to help identify if there are already compromised passwords being used in the organization. Since compromised credentials are the largest factor in leading to a data breach, this is a significant gap in security planning. Second, blocking the use of dictionary words could eliminate the ability for end-users to create strong passphrases rather than simply creating a password. Long, easy to remember passphrases made up of multiple unrelated words have been shown to be more secure than passwords due to the complexity a long-phrase presents and the fact that they are typically easier for end-users to remember, meaning they won’t write it down anywhere or have to reset it frequently because they’ve forgotten it.

Additionally, if you are only blocking dictionary words, you are ignoring another large attack vector that threat actors use, cracking dictionaries. Cracking dictionaries not only include basic dictionary words, but they also include commonly used passwords and variations of those common passwords. On top of that, a cracking dictionary is capable of cracking the hash on a password by using a list of plaintext passwords and their corresponding hash values and using that to generate a particular hash that will match for a given password.

So, if simply blocking dictionary words isn’t enough then what can help with improving password security within an organization?

Enzoic for Active Directory is the answer that many organizations turn to. The tool has the ability to go far beyond simply blocking basic dictionary words and includes capabilities that protect against attacks involving cracking dictionaries as well.

One of the most important abilities the tool provides is being able to check if a password is already compromised when it is created by a user. Given the fact that end-users tend to reuse passwords between personal sites and business logins, it’s highly possible that a password they use on a personal site has been compromised and is now a risk to the organization if it is being used there as well.

Where does Enzoic goes beyond any other organization in the compromised password space?

The Enzoic database is updated multiple times a day with these compromised passwords and monitors user accounts in real-time to see if passwords have become compromised at any point since creation. Most other organizations are only updating these databases a few times a year and not continuously monitoring user accounts. To further increase how effective Enzoic is at identifying compromised passwords, it has the ability to normalize a password. This means that the tool can switch special characters and numbers that have been substituted for letters into regular letters and then check those against the compromise database as well.

Enzoic for Active Directory can also check for commonly used passwords at password creation. Common passwords are typically contained within a cracking dictionary, which ultimately would make it easy for attackers to quickly gain access to a user’s account through a brute force attack. It also has the ability to block specific custom key words. Organizations can use this blacklist to disallow anything that may be associated with their business, such as the business name or a specific product they may create. This is significant because users tend to create passwords that are easy to remember and will incorporate attributes of the business into these passwords. This is something attackers know and rely upon to find easy targets within a company.

Additionally, Enzoic can enforce policies that require any new password that is created to be at least a certain number of characters different from previous passwords to make sure that end-users aren’t just reusing the same password over and over again.

Utilizing all these different features within Enzoic for Active Directory will have benefits across the organization.

• There will be less end-user friction since combining all these abilities together will mean that a user only needs to reset their password if it is determined to have been compromised since its creation.
• IT staff will have less work on their hands due to the fact they won’t be assisting with password resets so frequently.

But best of all, implementing all these abilities is one of the quickest ways to ensure the organization as a whole is reducing its risk of a costly and time-consuming data breach.

The post Blocking Basic Dictionary Words is not Enough appeared first on Enzoic.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Enzoic authored by Enzoic. Read the original post at: https://ift.tt/3usVqwE

Opinion: “COVIDIOTAS” deserved to enter the dictionary - Q Costa Rica News - Dictionary

RICO’S DIGEST  – It is not necessary to wear yourself out in calling them irresponsible, dehumanized, stupid. Noting them as COVIDIOTAS (COVIDIOTS) is more than enough, the word sounds rude but many people have earned it, if not, it would never have appeared.

From the Real Academia Española – https://ift.tt/2S2Blj6

The new term, Covidiot, coined in the US, is another legacy of the pandemic and describes very well those people who do not respect the rules confinement and put others at risk even though they know people who lost the battle against the coronavirus, who see thousands of families mourning or praying for a family member in an intensive care unit to come home.

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They know that there is no room in hospitals, perhaps they know someone who finds it difficult to make a slight effort, due to the sequela left by the virus, but they reject all health regulations.

“Language is like a box of memories, everything that means something to man, whether good or bad, has a name and deserves to be remembered forever”, explains Víctor Manuel Sánchez, President of the Costa Rican Language Academy., about the emergence of the new word.

Covidiota, according to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (DRAE) is the “person who refuses to comply with the health regulations issued to avoid the spread of covid.”

And we could add another, with a touch of Costanicanism: “CORONAFURRIS”, emerged from the spark of Dr. Marco Vinicio Boza, an intensivist at the Calderón Guardia hospital.

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In contrast to the harsh qualifiers, there is CORONAPLAUSO: “synchronized applause from the population to thank the work of essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic.”

Covidiota word family

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Stratford Rotary Club: Pupils full of words after dictionary donation - New Zealand Herald - Dictionary

St Joseph's School Stratford pupils Deegan Uhlenberg,11, and Kaitlyn Simkin, 13, thanking Stratford Rotary Club president Barrie Smith and honorary member Mary Stanley. Photo/ Supplied

Avon School and St Joseph's Stratford pupils are full of words after a donation from the Stratford Rotary Club.

The recent donation from the local service club of a set of dictionaries means the pupils are probably not just grateful, but appreciative and thankful as well. Even better, they can spell those words too.

While the club is part of an international movement, its main aim is to serve the local community.

One of the ways the club does that is through the Rotary Dictionary Project. The project, which started in 2008 as a joint venture between the Bill and Lorna Boyd Trust and the Rotary Club of Pakuranga, has spread nationwide with most clubs participating.

The aim of the project is to gift Year 4 children (8-to-9-year-olds) a personal copy of the Usborne Illustrated Dictionary. The dictionary contains over 1000 full-colour illustrations and is targeted for children with a reading age of about 9.

President Barrie Smith says the club donated a total of 16 dictionaries.

"We donated 12 to Avon School and the four to St Joseph's for their library. We have donated dictionaries to Avon School every year of the project."

He says the project sits well with the values of the Stratford Rotary Club.

"One of our main focuses is youth education and we will always heavily support that field."