The Cambridge Dictionary of Ancient Greek - Αθήνα 9.84 - Dictionary

After 23 years of scientific research and study, the Ancient Greek Dictionary was released by the University of Cambridge, with 37.000 entries. Christoforos Charalampakis, Professor of Linguistics at EKPA, talks about a great achievement that will revive, worldwide, the interest in classical letters.

Cambridge Greek Lexicon

"And only when an ancient Greek dictionary comes out and in fact from one of the top Universities in the world is it very important, it attracts interest internationally and I believe it comes at the most appropriate time, that is, the time of crisis of humanities and classical letters", he says in Athens 9.84, the professor of Linguistics at EKPA, Christoforos Charalampakis. "Unfortunately, relevant research is not funded as we live in a technocratic age, however, those who formulate research policy worldwide do not understand that humanism is the great issue of our time, resulting in the decline of classical literature."

"The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, was created with 23 years of hard work and revises the views of their ancient Greek dictionary HG Liddell and Robert Scott of 1889, which was used as a basis, however, by the primary research of scientists and the famous Professor James Diggle, Finally, a very useful dictionary was published for man, who wants to get acquainted with ancient Greek in a first stage and to study them. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, is two-volume and contains about 37.000 Greek words, derived from 70 different ancient writers. Due to the English language it is accessible to many and it is a project that will be discussed a lot. The 37.000 words are a large number to approach the ancient Greek language in its classical period. Its price is approx 95 euros. It will revive the interest for the classic letters and also I consider it very important that in relation to other dictionaries it studies in detail the meaning of the words while all the words are genuine of the classic texts ". 

The richness of the Greek language

«In the entry lyo you will find in the dictionary 15 different meanings » notes the professor. "An impressive example is also the variety of concepts that the word lamp, the technological meaning, the lamp that illuminates, from its root, -lyk-, comes the word white, the Latin luna, the moon, the expression "about lamps after", which means when the lamps are lit, is the phrase that identifies the dusk, lamp, the small lamp, lamp maker, lamp holder, lamp bearer, the one who led someone with a lamp, also the ancients did lamp divination. Reading ancient texts you will come across the word biologist. From a papyrus of the 3rd century BC we have evidence that the actor was a biologist, that is, the one who talks about life. As well as what it meant in antiquity manufacturer. He who devises ways to survive. Also in antiquity there were aviators, those who cross the ethers, that is, the birds ". 

"A dictionary is a work of poetry, which offers its readers critical language awareness"

"Through such dictionaries we can make the lesson of ancient Greek attractive", he emphasizes Mr. Charalampakis advising all of us to read at least one entry each day from a dictionary either ancient Greek or modern Greek for the improvement of speech and the development of critical thinking. "A dictionary is a work of poetry, which offers its readers critical linguistic awareness."

"Another impressive dictionary is Modern Dictionary of the Ancient Greek Language, representing a 17-year effort and the collective work of a team of 40 people under his leadership Franco Montanari, Professor at the University of Genoa. With about 140.000 entries covers 1400 years of history of the Greek language "points out Mr. Charalampakis. 

Kalliopi Aslanidou

Shelf Life - Jacksonville Journal-Courier - Dictionary

“The Dictionary of Lost Words” by Pip Williams: Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the “Scriptorium,” a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word “bondmaid” flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means “slave-girl,” she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. She begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

ADULT NONFICTION

“How to Be Human: An Autistic Man’s Guide to Life” by Jory Fleming with Lyric Winik: As a child, Jory Fleming was wracked by uncontrollable tantrums, had no tolerance for people, and couldn’t manage the outside world. Slightly more than a decade later, he was bound for England, selected to attend one of the world’s premier universities. This book explores life amid a world constructed for neurotypical brains when yours is not. The miracle of this book is that, instead of dwelling on Jory’s limitations, those who inhabit the neurotypical world will begin to better understand their own. They will contemplate what language cannot say, how linear thinking leads to dead ends, and how nefarious emotions can be, particularly when, in Jory’s words, they are weaponized.

DVD

“Proxima”: Sarah is a French astronaut training at the European Space Agency in Cologne. She is the only woman in the arduous program. She lives alone with Stella, her 7-year-old daughter. Sarah feels guilty that she cannot spend more time with her child. When Sarah is chosen to be part of the crew of a year-long space mission called “Proxima,” it creates chaos in their mother-daughter relationship.

CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK

“How to Catch a Star” by Oliver Jeffers: Once there was a boy who loved stars. He tried lots of ways to catch one but with no luck. He wanted to give up, but sometimes we discover that things aren’t where or what we expect them to be. Oliver Jeffers is the artist for our Summer Reading Program: Reading Colors Your World! Join us online and for in-person events June 8-July 24!

CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK

: On a rainy day when the house smells like cinnamon and Papa and Luca are asleep, when the clouds are wearing shadows and the wind paints the window with beads of water, I want to be everywhere Mama is.

Did you know?

This year’s Summer Reading Program for Kids and Teens begins June 8 and runs through July 24. Beginning June 8, you may stop by the library to register and see what will be happening this summer, both in person and virtually.

From Google Translate to Amazon Recruiting: When Good AI Goes Bad - EnterpriseAI - Translation

June 4, 2021 by By Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang

The following is an adapted chapter from the book, “Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Responsible Machine Learning,” by Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang.

We all interact with AI almost daily—when we deposit checks through an app, when we talk to Siri and Alexa, when we scroll through our personalized social media feeds.

When AI works well, it makes our lives easier. But when AI goes bad, it can have far-reaching negative effects. Biases in race, gender, class and other markers have made their way through to the output of even the most well-intentioned and thought-out AI systems.

If you are involved in AI, whether as a data scientist building the model or a business decision-maker defining the model’s objectives, you need to understand the ways in which AI can go bad, because the harmful effects are felt not just by the business but by our society. Here are two examples of this phenomenon.

Google Translation: Addressing Gender Bias

Google Translate is arguably the most impressive translation tool we have today, but it is not perfect. The translation software runs on a deep learning model called neural machine translation (NMT). The model learns from hundreds of millions of pieces of data across hundreds of languages, using already-translated bits of text. The problem is that this inadvertently leads to gender bias.

The issue arises because different languages have different treatments for masculine and feminine word forms. This ultimately taught the model to deliver a masculine translation when fed words like “strong” or “doctor” and to deliver a feminine translation when fed words like “nurse” or “beautiful.”

When fed long strings of sentence constructions following the template “[gender-neutral pronoun] is [adjective],” the results are worrying. For example, the adjective “hardworking” will assign a “he.” The adjective “lazy” will assign a “she.”

Google has articulated every correct intention in promoting fairness and avoiding bias in its translation tool, but because its training data is the vast corpus of human language, the model’s lessons are heavily influenced by gender conventions around the world. Arguably, it was not Google’s fault that the AI model was biased; it was the fault of our languages. But because Google is committed to promoting fairness, they wanted to correct this bias anyway.

Because Google cannot alter the input, to fix this issue they focused on curating the output.

In 2018, they launched a targeted initiative to reduce gender bias in the translation software. Their fix was to have the translator react to any gender-neutral input given in English with results that both forms, i.e., “he is ___” and “she is __.” It was a small change, but one with a big impact.

Amazon Recruiting: Abandoning a Biased Tool

Amazon began a project in 2014 that automated job applicant reviews using AI to score candidates on a scale of 1 to 5. With a high volume of applicants and resources required to evaluate them, the need for such an automation tool was high.

After a year of work, Amazon realized there was a problem with its system. The model was trained to evaluate candidates by learning from patterns sourced from résumés submitted in the past ten years. But gender diversity was a relatively new emergence in the field, so most of those résumés had been submitted by men.

As a result, the model learned that male candidates were preferable and penalized any applications that included the word “women’s,” such as mentions of women’s sports teams or extracurricular activities.

By 2017, Amazon had to abandon the tool. There was no data they could use to train the model that would not result in a gender-biased outcome. Instead, the company pivoted to a different solution: they developed an AI tool that spotted current candidates worth recruiting across the internet. To train the model, they fed it past candidate résumés and taught it to recognize certain career- and skill-related terms.

But even after that step. it still resulted in bias. Because the model was trained on mostly men’s résumés, it learned to favor words more commonly used by men to describe their skills and responsibilities. The candidates returned by the web crawler were overwhelmingly men.

Amazon made the ethical decision to shut down the project.

Sometimes it is simply not possible to overcome bias in an AI project. In those instances, it is best to abandon the prejudiced tool, even if there is great demand for it.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

AI represents the largest technological shift many of us will see in our lifetimes. It is transforming the world on every level, from moment-to-moment interactions people have with devices in their homes to large-scale decisions made by global organizations that affect millions of people.

With such widespread power inherent to the technology, it is the responsibility of those creating AI applications and systems to ensure that their AI is ethical, safe and in service to the world—essentially, that it makes the world a better place, not a worse one.

Therefore, it is important to monitor the results of your AI models and adjust as needed, whether that means altering outputs, abandoning biased models entirely, factoring race and other markers into the model or restricting a model’s usage only to its designed setting.

About the Authors:

Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger

Co-author Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is the director of product at Blue Shield of California and formerly served as vice president of AI and data at Appen. She also worked as vice president of product at Figure Eight and was director of product for IBM Watson. She earned a BA in American studies from Trinity College.

Wilson Pang

Co-author Wilson Pang joined machine learning data training company Appen in November 2018 as CTO and is responsible for the company’s products and technology. He previously was the chief data officer of Ctrip in China, the second-largest online travel agency company in the world and was senior director of engineering at eBay. He earned his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University in China.

Their book, “Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Responsible Machine Learning,” is available from Amazon in print or as an ebook.

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No Longer Lost In Translation — Teachers And Non-English Speaking Parents Able To Connect Through New Service - KUER 90.1 - Translation

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For fourth grade teacher Travis Schwartzkopf, who teaches in the Ogden School District, communicating with parents has been tough this year. That’s partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions on in-person meetings, but also because about 70% of his students’ parents identify as non-white and many don’t speak English.

Parent-teacher relationships are key to student success, he said, but they become much harder to establish without a common language. And as Utah — like the rest of the country — becomes increasingly diverse, schools are having to work harder to connect with parents.

“I've seen parents and teachers at odds and butting heads,” Schwartzkopf said. “It would only make that worse if there were a lack of communication. And so I think in order to have that teamwork and that camaraderie that you need to help these students become successful, we have to have outstanding communication back and forth.”

This year, Schwartzkopf’s district began trying something new to help — a translation service. He can now pick up the phone and connect with a licensed translator while the parent is on the other end.

The new system is still a little clunky, but better than the old solutions. He said the district used to ask high school students to come in and translate, or pull from a limited number of staff. Because of the high demand, teachers and parents would sometimes have to awkwardly wait for someone to come before they could speak with each other.

He said the service has been a huge help, particularly when he had to explain to a student’s parents their son was struggling with reading and was going to need extra help.

“I think sometimes those resources have a negative connotation to a family,” he said. “And so I really needed somebody that could help me explain what a benefit this was going to be to their son and all the great things we were going to be able to offer him.“

Other schools like the University of Utah and the Salt Lake City School District use similar services.

“With over 80 languages spoken, there's no way we could manage without help from translation service agencies,” said SLC district spokesperson Yándary Chatwin.

Most of the calls so far in Ogden have been in Spanish, though they’ve also used the service for Arabic, Swahili, Marshallese and Portuguese translations, said district translator Claudia Lopez. There’s even a video function to help parents communicate through American Sign Language.

Lopez said having the new option also takes a burden off the students themselves, who would sometimes become the default translators for their parents. The adults — teachers and parents — were relying on kids to accurately describe what each was saying. It could get uncomfortable, too, as kids needed to translate things about themselves.

“The kid gets to be the kid,” she said. “[They get] to listen and hear for themselves that they're doing great and not having to feel pressured in not finding the [right] word.”

Lopez said as students come to school with a range of needs and from different backgrounds, translation services are just one way schools can help get parents more involved in their kids' education.

4 Simple Ways Businesses of Any Size Can Experiment with Spanish Translations - Entrepreneur - Translation

June 4, 2021 6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

There are more Spanish speakers in the United States than there are in Spain. In fact, about 43 million people in the nation speak Spanish as a first language. What’s more, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that by 2060, the Hispanic population will constitute 28.6% of the nation’s population. This Spanish-speaking populace is, perforce, a hugely important economic group, controlling close to $1.5 trillion in buying power, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth. However, it is estimated that less than 1.5% of websites in the U.S. are translated to Spanish.

Clearly, there is considerable untapped potential and significant opportunity for businesses selling or advertising goods and services to optimize their websites and social media presence to reach more than 60 million Hispanic Americans. Translating a website, app and communications for bilingual users can help grow sales, increase customer engagement and improve brand reputation.

Milestone Localization, of which I am the director, works with companies to help them reach non-English speaking users, and we’ve discovered four simple ways businesses of any size can maximize results with translations:

Translate ads

Translating your entire website and app may seem daunting, so if you’re looking to test the market, you can start by running ads in Spanish. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube let you target users that have set their device language to Spanish. Be careful, though: for ads to be effective, a word-for-word translation won’t work; you will need to find a native speaker to adapt ads in Spanish and effectively transmit the essence of a message. To see real results, stay clear of machine translations and make sure to do extensive Spanish keyword research. Cost-per-click on Google Ads for Spanish keywords is usually a fraction of the cost for the same keywords in English, so you can generate more traffic at a lower average cost. Run those ads on a nominal budget for a few months and study the rate and cost of conversion. 

Related: 6 Reasons Corporate America Misses Out on Trillions of Hispanic Dollars

Translate landing pages

In CSA Research’s 2020 report, “Can’t Read Won’t Buy”, 40% of respondents said they wouldn’t buy a product or service if information about it isn’t available in their native language; 65% said that they prefer reading content in their own language. Therefore, if your ads are in Spanish, your website’s landing page might need to be as well. It is also a good idea to translate any linked pages like “learn more”, “features” and “contact us” pages.

The process of translating your user interface, search engine optimization and content in another language is known as website localization. All content management system platforms have plugins you can download to create a Spanish version of a website. You can choose which languages to display yours in, based on system language or IP geolocation. Translations are usually charged per word, and translating three pages in Spanish will cost you less than $250. Make sure to run your experiment for at least three months to collect enough data to make a decision. If you see positive results, translate more pages on the website and add multilingual customer support.

Social media posts

A 2016 study by Facebook shows that more than 60% of bilingual U.S. Hispanics prefer creating and consuming online content in Spanish. There are three ways of employing multilingual social media posts:

• Double posting — create separate posts in each language for the same content
• Bilingual posts — include a translation in the original post; this works for image-focused posts where you can display the caption in different languages
• Make multiple accounts — operate separate social media accounts for each language

Depending on the size and focus of your business and resources, pick the approach that works best. Small businesses can try both double posting and bilingual posts, then closely monitor user engagement to see what works. Keep in mind that social media posts are often creative and need to be “transcreated” — creatively adapted into another language in a way that captures the flavor, flair and nuance of the culture.

For example, the California Milk Processor Board realized that the “Got Milk?” campaign didn’t work for a Latino audience. To appeal to Latino mothers, they adapted it as "Y Usted Les Dio Suficiente Leche Hoy?" or “Have You Given Them Enough Milk Today?" To craft a message that resonates with your target audience, we recommend working with a professional linguist with marketing experience. Run an experiment for a few months to see if reach and engagement increase. If they do, start translating and localizing other communications.

Related: Marketing to Hispanics: Why It's Not Just About Speaking Spanish

Add a Spanish customer service line

If you get most of your inquiries over the phone, add an option for users to select their preferred language. If you don’t already have a bilingual customer service executive, you can hire a freelancer to answer the phone for the duration of the experiment. This is usually the most cost-effective way to test if translation is right for a business, and is a method of experimentation that works particularly well for local establishments like restaurants, spas or dentists and for B2C service companies like insurance providers and accountants.

Keep track of the number and percentage of people selecting Spanish. If you see that a significant percentage of potential customers prefer it, take this as a green light to further experiment with translations.

Related: 4 Successful Ways Businesses Need to Adapt to a Growing Hispanic Demographic

When you’re doing business internationally or in a multilingual community, translating and localizing communications sends the message that you understand and respect cultural and linguistic diversity. You can use the strategies above to reach more Hispanic users in the U.S., yes, but also French speakers in Canada or Hindi speakers in India. Span the globe, and localize so that your business can be found in translation.

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Facebook open-sources Flores-101 dataset to enable more accurate AI translations - SiliconANGLE News - Translation

Facebook Inc. today open-sourced a dataset called Flores-101 for use in the development of artificial intelligence models that translate text between different languages.

Building an AI model involves training a neural network on a large amount of information until it learns to identify useful patterns. Afterwards, developers check whether the AI generates sufficiently accurate results to be used in production by having it process a test database. Flores-101 is a test dataset for evaluating translation models that contains sentences translated across 101 languages.

The Facebook researchers who worked on Flores-101 say it addresses a major gap in the AI ecosystem. Measuring AI accuracy is an essential part of machine learning projects because without the ability to evaluate processing results reliably, developers can’t determine if a tweak to a model increased or decreased its performance.

However, the test datasets commonly used to perform evaluations for the most part cover only a limited number of widely spoken languages such as English and Spanish. As a result, developers building AI software for translating between other languages often face challenges in assessing their models’ accuracy. 

“Imagine trying to bake a cake but not being able to taste it,” the Flores-101 team explained in a blog post. “It’s near impossible to know whether it’s any good, and even harder to know how to improve the recipe for future attempts.”

Flores-101 consists of text blocks extracted from news articles, travel guides and other sources that have been translated across 101 languages. For more than 80% of those languages, there was previously only a limited number of AI training datasets available or none at all, Facebook’s researchers said.

Over recent years, computer scientists have sought to make AI translation models more accurate by configuring them to analyze words and sentences in the context of the surrounding text. According to Facebook, Flores-101 can support projects that take this approach. “FLORES is constructed to translate multiple adjacent sentences from  selected documents, meaning models can measure whether document level context improves translation quality,” the company’s researchers wrote.

For added measure, the social network also included metadata clues alongside the sentences such as tags explaining the topic of each text bloc. Such information can help machine learning infer the meaning of sentences more easily, which in turn improves the quality of translations.

Facebook assembled the text that makes up Flores-101 through a multistage process. First, the company asked a team of professional translators to translate each piece of text into the supported languages. Then, an editor reviewed each document for errors before handing it over to yet another team of translators, who finalized the dataset. 

“Good benchmarks are difficult to construct,” Facebook’s researchers said. “They need to be able to accurately reflect meaningful differences between models so they can be used by researchers to make decisions. Translation benchmarks can be particularly difficult because the same quality standard must be met across all languages, not just a select few for which translators are more readily available.”

“Efforts like FLORES are of immense value, because they not only draw attention to under served languages, but they immediately invite and actively facilitate research on all these languages,” commented Antonios Anastasopoulos, an assistant professor at George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science.

To encourage the development of AI translation models that support languages for which there are currently limited training datasets available, Facebook has launched a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. and the Workshop on Machine Translation. As part of the initiative, Facebook is sponsoring grants that will enable researchers to use graphics processing units in Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform for their projects. The social network says the grants will provide “thousands of GPU hours” at no charge. 

Photo: Eston Bond/Flickr

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Courtesy Translation: Ban on entering Wiesbaden hospitals stays in effect - DVIDS - Translation

Press Release from the Wiesbaden city government, 02 JUNE 2021
Courtesy Translation: Nadine Bower, Community Relations

Ban on entering hospitals stays in effect

At the weekly meeting of the representatives of the hospitals and clinics as well as the local authorities in the supply area Limburg-Weilburg, Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis and state capital Wiesbaden, the continuation of the general decree ordering a ban on entering hospitals and similar facilities for visiting purposes was discussed on Wednesday, 2 June. The medical representatives of the acute care providers in the state capital Wiesbaden have unanimously spoken out in favor of not suspending the general decree prematurely before Sunday, 20 June.

In view of the still increased number of new infections above the threshold of 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the past seven days and the increased detection of the mutation in Wiesbaden, which has so far been referred to as the Indian mutation and now as the delta variant, the operation of hospitals is still not safe enough to avoid a restriction of services if an infection were to be carried into the hospital. The danger posed by the novel coronavirus is currently evidenced by the case of a fully vaccinated person who has still been infected with the Delta variant and now needs intensive medical care. This shows that even full vaccination cannot guarantee one hundred percent protection and therefore compliance with the corona rules is still imperative. Incidents such as the aforementioned vaccination breakthrough and the still unsustainable relaxed infection situation currently speak from the point of view of acute care providers and the city against opening the hospitals for visitors, even if they have been vaccinated or recovered.

"The functioning of the public health system and the associated safeguarding of comprehensive care for all people is still the most important goal of the fight against the pandemic. In order to protect security of supply, it is therefore unfortunately still necessary to maintain the basic ban on entering hospitals for visiting purposes. Of course, exceptional human situations are still met with a sense of proportion and generosity," explained Mayor and Head of Health Dr. Oliver Franz.

The general decree is valid until Sunday, June 20, and is available on the website of the state capital Wiesbaden under https://ift.tt/3xbmVN1. It will continue to be reviewed regularly to see whether it is still necessary. As soon as this is no longer the case, it will be lifted – even prematurely.

https://ift.tt/34KgVyu

Date Taken:	06.04.2021
Date Posted:	06.04.2021 07:01
Story ID:	398124
Location:	WIESBADEN, HE, DE

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