The first-ever dictionary of SA’s Kaaps language has launched – why it matters - Eyewitness News - Dictionary

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

ALSO READ: 'Trilingual Kaaps dictionary gives legitimacy to way people speak'

It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood Project. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.

WHAT IS KAAPS AND WHO USES THE LANGUAGE?

Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people. It could be argued that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans). Traders and sailors would have passed through this region well before formal colonisation commenced. Also consider migration and movement on the African continent itself. Every intercultural engagement would have created an opportunity for linguistic exchange and the negotiation of new meaning.

Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working class speakers on the Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town where many disenfranchised people were forcibly moved by the apartheid government. It’s used across all online and offline contexts of socialisation, learning, commerce, politics and religion. And, because of language contact and the temporary and seasonal migration of speakers from the Western Cape, it is written and spoken across South Africa and beyond its borders.

It is important to acknowledge the agency of people from the global South in developing Kaaps – for example, the language was first taught in madrassahs (Islamic schools) and was written in Arabic script. This acknowledgement is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in later years.

For a great discussion of Kaaps and explanation of examples of words and phrases from this language, listen to this conversation between academic Quentin Williams and journalist Lester Kiewit.

HOW DID THE DICTIONARY COME ABOUT?

The dictionary project, which is still in its launch phase, is the result of ongoing collaborative work between a few key people. You might say it’s one outcome of our interest in hip hop art, activism and education. We are drawn to hip hop’s desire to validate black modes of speech. In a sense, this is what a dictionary will do for Kaaps.

Quentin Williams, a sociolinguist, leads the project. Emile Jansen, Tanswell Jansen and Shaquile Southgate serve on the editorial board on behalf of Heal the Hood Project, which is an NGO that employs hip hop education in youth development initiatives. Emile also worked with hip hop and theatre practitioners on a production called Afrikaaps, which affirmed Kaaps and narrated some of its history. Anthropologist H. Samy Alim is the founding director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language at Stanford University and has assisted in funding the dictionary, with the Western Cape’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport.

We’re in the process of training the core editorial board in the scientific area of lexicography, translation and transcription. This includes the archiving of the initial, structured corpus for the dictionary. We will write down definitions and determine meanings of old and new Kaaps words. This process will be subjected to a rigorous review and editing and stylistic process of the Kaaps words we will enter in the dictionary. The entries will include their history of origin, use and uptake. There will also be a translation from standard Afrikaans and English.

WHO WILL USE THE DICTIONARY?

It will be a resource for its speakers and valuable to educators, students and researchers. It will impact the ways in which institutions, as loci of power, engage speakers of Kaaps. It would also be useful to journalists, publishers and editors keen to learn more about how to engage Kaaps speakers.

A Kaaps dictionary will validate it as a language in its own right. And it will validate the identities of the people who speak it. It will also assist in making visible the diverse cultural, linguistic, geographical and historical tributaries that contributed to the evolution of this language.

KAAPS WAS RELEGATED TO A SLANG STATUS OF AFRIKAANS?

Acknowledgement of Kaaps is imperative, especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in order to create the dominant version of the language in the form of Afrikaans. A ‘suiwer’ or ‘pure’ version, claiming a strong Dutch influence, Afrikaans was formally recognised as an official language of South Africa in 1925. This was part of the efforts to construct white Afrikaner identity, which shaped apartheid based on a belief in white supremacy.

For example, think about the Kaaps tradition of koesiesters – fried dough confectionery – which was appropriated (taken without acknowledgement) and the treats were named koeksisters by white Afrikaners. They were claimed as a white Afrikaner tradition. The appropriation of Kaaps reveals a great deal about the extent to which race is socially and politically constructed. As I have said elsewhere, cultural appropriation is both an expression of unequal relations of power and is enabled by them.

When people think about Kaaps, they often think about it as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure’ (‘onsuiwer’). This relates to the ways in which they think about ‘racial’ identity. They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded; that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters. This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist.

Of course, geneticists now know that there is not sufficient genetic variation between the ‘races’ to justify biologically essentialist understandings. Enter cultural racism to reinforce the concept of ‘race’. It polices culture and insists on standard language varieties by denigrating often black modes of speech as ‘slang’ or marginal dialects.

CAN A DICTIONARY HELP OVERTURN STEREOTYPES?

Visibility and the politics of representation are key challenges for speakers of Kaaps – be it in the media, which has done a great job of lampooning and stereotyping speakers of Kaaps – or in these speakers’ engagement with governmental and educational institutions. If Kaaps is not recognised as a bona fide language, you will continue to see classroom scenarios where schoolkids are told explicitly that the way in which they speak is not ‘respectable’ and will not guarantee them success in their pursuit of careers.

This dictionary project, much like ones for other South African languages like isiXhosa, isiZulu or Sesotho, can be a great democratic resource for developing understanding in a country that continues to be racially divided and unequal.

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Charges in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo - The New York Times - Translation

The three prisoners were to be charged for the first time, 18 years after their capture. Translation problems mean they wait one more day.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Translation and interpretation problems on Monday delayed by one day military efforts to formally charge three Southeast Asian men — held by the United States for 18 years — with conspiring in deadly terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.

Prosecutors accuse the three prisoners — Encep Nurjaman, who is known as Hambali; Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep; and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin — of murder, terrorism and conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people, and the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta, which killed at least 11 people and wounded at least 80.

Defense lawyers have called them torture victims who spent about three years in the secret C.I.A. prison network where agents used waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, painful shackling and other now outlawed “enhanced interrogation” techniques to extract information from their captives.

In 2003, a C.I.A. interrogator told Mr. Hambali that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you,” according to a study of the C.I.A. program that was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014.

Monday’s formal charging was meant to be a crossroads of sorts, the start of proceedings in a case that was approved by a Trump administration appointee on Jan. 21, the first full day of President Biden’s administration — and postponed by six months by pandemic restrictions.

The proceedings ended up being the latest example of the delays that have plagued Guantánamo’s justice system nearly 20 years after it was chosen to hold detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks and in the global effort to track down terrorists.

At least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity. The CIA placed detainees in ice water "baths." The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because "we can never let the world know what I have done to you."

The prisoner known as Hambali made his first court appearance at Guantanamo on Monday, despite a vow by a C.I.A. interrogator back in 2003 that he would never be allowed to do so.

Read the full document

All three men have been in the custody of the United States since 2003, and have been held at Guantánamo as members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group. Mr. Hambali, who is Indonesian, is accused of allying himself with Osama bin Laden’s global jihad, and sending Mr. Bin Amin and Mr. Bin Lep, former architecture students who met in college in Malaysia, to train in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Translation and technical issues were evident at the outset. One lawyer pointed out that a prisoner had mentioned “Google” in a remark in Malay for the judge, but the court interpreter did not mention the search engine in an English translation. The Indonesian translator turned “legal training” in English into “training legal” in Bahasa Indonesian.

Defense lawyers said with alarm that all three defendants recognized a “Mr. Singh,” a translator with whom they each had confidential conversations as they prepared to seek release through a review board hearing, sitting beside the lead prosecutor in court on Monday, now working for the prosecution.

Lawyers for the three prisoners also told the judge that the court’s official Indonesian translator had in 2020 offered the opinion that “the government is wasting money on these terrorists; they should have been killed a long time ago,” and added that they had a sworn affidavit from a witness who heard the remark. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences in the case.

Mr. Bin Lep’s lawyer, Brian Bouffard, declared the Indonesian American contract translator “irretrievably biased.” Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, Christine Funk, questioned why the prosecutors needed an interpreter at the arraignment hearing in the first place: “Are they spying on us? I don’t know.”

Brian Bouffard, a lawyer for Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, with Christine Funk, a lawyer for Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, on Monday at Guantánamo Bay. Alex Brandon/Associated Press

The trial judge, Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen, tried to mend the problems. He gave the official court translation team 10-minute breaks every 20 minutes. He told defense lawyers to file legal motions if they believed there were interpretation problems that required remedies. And he postponed until Tuesday the reading of the charges, which was the reason for Monday’s hearing.

Defense lawyers, both civilian and military, and all paid by the Pentagon, described the case as still in its infancy. Prosecutors, they said, had provided perhaps 2 percent of the pretrial documents that could be used in the case, including accounts of interrogations the F.B.I. did in 2007 with the prisoners soon after their transfer to military custody from the C.I.A. Prosecutors declined to comment.

Mr. Hambali’s lawyer, James R. Hodes, called the case “absurd,” in part because of the length of his client’s detention and the nearly two-decade delay in bringing charges against him. He told reporters before the hearing that Mr. Hambali had been “brutalized” and spent at least half of his detention in solitary confinement. He said the prisoner was owed “an apology” and repatriation, “not to be held in a cage in a Caribbean island.”

Hearings at Guantánamo have been mostly held between English and Arabic, but have also suffered translation problems. In 2015, one of the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks blurted out the name of a translator in court — and disclosed that the linguist had previously worked for the C.I.A. at a black site, exposing his identity and derailing a week of hearings.

Finding U.S. translators with top-secret security clearances who speak Southeast Asian languages has apparently proved even more of a challenge. The Senate study of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program cited a January 2004 cable from a secret detention site that reported that Mr. Bin Lep’s “English is very poor, and we do not have a Malay linguist.”

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Africa: Sudanese Translator Adil Babikir Recipient of Global Africa Translation Fellowship - AllAfrica.com - Translation

Khartoum — Sudanese translator, copy writer, Adil Babikir, has received the Africa institute Global Africa Translation Fellowship, among a group of translators from around the continent in recognition of his creative effort to acquaint the World with treasures of Sudanese literature.

A statement published on the occasion has read: The Africa Institute is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Global Africa Translation Fellowship launched as part of its African Languages and Translation Program.

It said Mr. Adil Babikir was awarded the fellowship for his translation of Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin's book Samahani from Arabic into English.

It said grants in the range of $1000 to $5,000 are offered annually to support the completion of translations of original works from the African continent and its diaspora, into Arabic and/or English. Selected works may be retranslations of old, classic texts, or previously untranslated works, collections of poetry, novel, prose, or critical theory.

In addition to Mr. Babikir the fellowship winners were Ms. Reem Abou-El-Fadl, for translation and editing of the Arabic-language memoir of Egyptian intellectual and activist Helmi Sharawy, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiya (An Egyptian African Story), which was first published in 2019 by independent Cairo press Dar Al-Ain, Claretta Holsey, for the translation of four scholarly essays from René Ménil's Tracées: Identité, Négritude, Esthétique aux Antilles from French into English. David Shook, for the translation of Francisco José Tenreiro's collected poems from Portuguese into English, including his seminal 1942 debut Ilha de Nome Santo (Island with a Holy Name).

Congratulations to ArabLit contributing translator Adil Babikir, to translator and scholar Reem Abou-El-Fadl, and to all the awardees of the 2021 Global Africa Translation Fellowships, which were announced today, said the Institute.

Mr. Babikir's achievement was received with high acclaim at home here from some of the country's renowned writers.

Wrote writer, advocate and former chairman of the Sudanese writers union, Mr. Kamal Aljizouli, who formerly wrote the foreword of Sakin's thriller "The Jungo -Stakes of the Earth, a novel depicting the tiresome life of daily farm workers in Sudan, which was published in the USA:

Adil Babikir was bent throughout the previous years on the translation of much of the fruit of Sudanese literature, prose and poetry, to the English language and vice versa. In addition to Sakin's Samahani and the Jungo Stakes of the Earth, he also translated the book Mansi, written by international Sudanese Novelist Tayeb Salih, which is a sort of biography written in narrative form. He also translated a collections from a selection of Sudanese poets he entitled "Modern Sudanese Poetry". He also translated some of the works of Southern Sudanese writers. In this derive he also translated a selection of narrative writings from Sudanese and Southern Sudanese writers, entitled "Literary Sudans, fore-worded by Professor Taban Lo Liyong.

Also wrote Poet Fedaily Jamma'a:

A piece of cultural news carried by the news agencies and the social media in different languages says some of the African translators who conveyed African literature into some of the most widely spoken languages of the World were awarded the Global Africa Fellowship for 2021, including the skillful Sudanese writer and translator Adil Babikir, for his translation of Sudanese writer Baraka Sakin's novel Samahani.

Mr. Adil Babikir has taken it all upon himself to do the huge institutionalized translation of several works of verse and fiction by Sudanese writers.

This spectacular success of one of our creative writers was carried by the news agencies and praised by Africa's cultural institutions. We congratulate translator Babikir for this deserved award and we also congratulate our country that brought his like of talented persons.

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Nebraska City shares The Dream Switch with Spanish language translation - Sand Hills Express - Translation

NEBRASKA CITY – The Dream Switch concert at Nebraska City this weekend was the first to include a Spanish-language interpretation.

The dual-language lyrics depict a narrative of a young person leaving the state before learning she could achieve her honorable goals right in her hometown.

The Nebraska City Community Foundation Fund asked Andrea Hincapie of the Heartland Workers Center at Nebraska City to participate and translate the message.

Hincpapie: “The Dream Switch wants to grow out the community so we come together with the Latino community so the Latino community can understand the concert today.”

Doug Friedli of the Nebraska City Community Foundation Fund said the Heartland Workers Center is a great partner for the community.

Friedli: “We’re so anxious and happy to be able to work with them and be an entire community and communicate.”

Jeff Yost,  president of the Nebraska Community Foundation, said The Dream Switch is a tool for economic development.

Yost: “The Dream Switch is an opportunity to help us change the narrative about where young people’s honorable futures exist.”

Yost: “The only people who can build a community are the people who live and work in it, so our role is really to support people and initiate conversations about what is possible.”

The Dream Switch was held at Ord and Auburn before the pandemic and playwright Becky Boesen of Blixt Locally Grown said Nebraska City is a great setting for the new season.

Boesen: “I think Nebraska City continually, in spirit, offers this invitation that anything is possible. The pride of place, the way you see innovative buildings popping up, the tourism here, the ability to feel like you’re at home on main street or at an exotic vacation out at Lied Lodge. There’s just a little bit of everything that makes Nebraska City special and unique.”

Returner Denise Davis said a positive community discussion followed and the Latino residents in attendance felt welcomed.

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Lost in translation - The Manila Times - Translation

LAST week, the controversial Manila Bay beach was in the news again after President Rodrigo "Come and sit on Daddy's lap" Duterte testily defended the project during another one of his late-night bull sessions.

The beach has been roundly criticized for its P389-million (and counting) price tag, an expense not unreasonably considered unnecessary in the midst of a pandemic, along with several environmental issues connected with the mine in Cebu that supplies the material as well as its unnatural introduction to the location fronting the Manila Baywalk. Duterte dismissed these concerns, opining the aesthetic improvement to the bay shore was reason enough to pursue the project.

Unfortunately, he could not help but undermine that otherwise viable point of view by putting it in the sort of skeevy terms his adolescent support base finds charming and the adult world finds cringe-inducing.

"Tingnan mo ngayon ang Boracay. Noon, maraming mga magagandang babae na naliligo. Noong pinaganda, mas lalong pinakamagandang babae sa buong mundo, nandiyan na. Ayaw mo pa 'yan? (Look at Boracay. Many beautiful women used to bathe [there]. After it [the Manila Bay shore] was rehabilitated, all of the most beautiful women in the world are now here. Don't you want that?)" he said.

"What is beautiful is beautiful. Period. Dolomite is beautiful to the eyes. Period," he added.

I would be willing to bet real money no one else would cite, "it will attract pretty girls" as a reason to install a beach in downtown Manila, and upon hearing or reading Randy Rod's comments, thousands of Filipino women reflexively crossed their arms over their chests and checked to make sure no one was standing behind them.

One of the most annoying things about Duterte is his penchant for reducing everything to absurdity; even if his comments aren't crude or creepy, he never fails to emphasize the lowest common denominator. It is seriously off-putting, because despite what Duterte apparently believes, only mentally defective people are enervated by being spoken down to. More importantly, however, it can warp the way issues are reported and discussed, because it preemptively deflects more substantial inquiry about government policy and actions.

The dolomite beach issue is a good example. Duterte's ultimately vacuous comment on the matter was the focus of most news reports following his latest midnight matinee, but the substance of what that comment was offered in response to, a self-congratulatory update on the ongoing Manila Bay rehabilitation program by Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu, was almost entirely missed. Apart from the Philippine News Agency, I could find only one media outlet that reported on Cimatu's short briefing to the president, and then it was seriously misinterpreted.

Cimatu highlighted the overall wonderfulness of the dolomite beach, as he would be expected to do as it was his department's blue-sky idea in the first place, but the main point of his briefing was the progress in reducing fecal coliform bacteria levels in the bay since the rehabilitation project began. The bay water's concentration of the bacteria, which is not the only pollutant the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) needs to be concerned about, but is probably the most serious health risk, has been reduced from several million parts per 100 milliliters to about 7,000. In the area of the dolomite beach, the concentration is down to about 140, close to the 100 parts per 100 milliliters considered safe for swimming.

The news story about Cimatu's comments drew a connection between "beach nourishment" and "cleaning the water," and attributed it to the DENR secretary. The implication was the crushed dolomite is somehow acting as a filter, removing the harmful bacteria and thus "nourishing" the bay.

My initial reaction was, "Ha, what an idiot. That's not at all what 'beach nourishment' means." Beach nourishment is the addition of sand (or fake sand, as the case may be) to a shoreline to create or maintain a beach. It has nothing to do with cleaning the water; if anything, it creates additional turbidity. Upon further review, however, it turns out Cimatu did not actually say the dolomite was cleaning the water, and in fact, didn't say anything that could be construed that way. The reduction in harmful bacteria, he explained, is attributable to the new treatment facilities to which the water from the Abad, Padre Faura, and Remedios outfalls is being diverted, as well as the overall cleanup effort ongoing elsewhere in the bay and its tributaries.

Thus, on one hand, the story was grossly misreported; but on the other, Duterte encouraged that by seizing on the least important aspect of Cimatu's report. Again, whether he did this because it amuses him to be a troll or because his management communication skills are actually a lot worse than most people assume is still an unanswered question. It would have cast the Manila Bay rehabilitation effort in a far more positive light if the largely unseen work that has had practical, substantial results had been highlighted instead.

And as for the polarizing dolomite beach? In a general sense, it is not a bad thing; the city has a critical lack of green and open spaces, and creating one as a purely aesthetic improvement is a worthy enough objective. The timing, cost and environmental impact from mining the dolomite in Cebu province are all debatable, but the job having been done, that ship has already sailed, so to speak; the serious question now is whether it would do more harm than good to stop maintaining it.

[email protected]

Twitter: @benkritz

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Sanas Launches World’s First Real-Time Accent Translation Technology to Help the World Understand and Be Understood - Yahoo Finance - Translation

Backed with $5.5 million in seed funding, Sanas' accent-matching solution makes it easier for people to understand each other in customer care centers, remote tech support, education, telemedicine and more

PALO ALTO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / August 30, 2021 / A major challenge and frustration in global communications, even when people are speaking in the same language, is understanding an unfamiliar accent. This accent mismatch situation can become a major inefficiency in business and risks serious misunderstandings. To foster seamless communication in all areas of business, education, telemedicine, entertainment and more, Sanas will officially roll out the world's first real-time speech accent translation technology. Their solution will be used by seven BPOs (Business Process Outsourcers) globally starting in the fall of this year. Today, the company is also announcing its $5.5 million seed round of funding.

With no noticeable lag and edge deployment, the patent-pending Sanas software intercepts audio and converts accents through a speech-to-speech approach, building a virtual bridge between the audio device and the computer, and then sending the new signal to whichever communication app (Zoom, Hangouts, etc.) is in use. Almost instantly, the accent of a customer care representative, for example, will be matched to the accent of an incoming caller.

Top venture funds investing in the company's $5.5 million seed round include Human Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and DN Capital. Speech industry veterans joining Sanas' Board of Advisors include Wendell Brown (Co-founder, Liveops, Teleo, eVoice) and Steven G. Chambers (former President of Nuance). The funds will be used to expand the engineering team and to introduce the software in more global markets.

"The world has shrunk, and people are doing business globally, while at the same time they have real difficulty understanding each other. Even getting Google Home or Alexa to understand accents accurately is extremely important," said Sanas' CEO, Maxim Serebryakov. "Digital communication is critical for our daily lives. Sanas is striving to make communication easy and free from friction, so people can speak confidently and understand each other, wherever they are and whoever they are trying to communicate with."

Sanas was created by a team of Stanford student engineers and top speech machine learning experts. The first application for the technology is in customer care centers, an industry where accent issues can be particularly problematic.

"As an immigrant from Turkey, I've always felt that getting rid of the accent barrier was a critical next step for a more fair and prosperous world," said Baris Akis, president and co-founder, Human Capital. "It's been amazing to partner with a team that's so mission driven and pushing the edge of speech technology to make that a reality."

Research by external sources revealed that by eliminating this accent barrier, companies enjoy increased customer satisfaction, sales, communication efficiency. Further, internal studies from Sanas showed increased foreign language learner fluency, as well as decreased word error rate (15% on industry-leading automatic speech recognition devices or ASRs).

The idea for Sanas was inspired by the experience of three international friends from Russia, China, and Venezuela, all of whom have very different accents. They witnessed firsthand the communication struggle due to accents, and saw a mutual friend quit his job because of this challenge. They realized that there had to be a better way to communicate.

"We plan to introduce the accent-matching technology to a range of industries and environments far beyond customer care and technical support, which are two very obvious use cases," said Serebryakov. "There are also creative use cases such as those in entertainment and media where producers can make their films and programs understandable in different parts of the world by matching accents to localities. We are also exploring how machines can better interpret what people are saying. We've only begun to explore the possibilities."

Media files, images here: https://ift.tt/3kEIAYX

About Sanas

Sanas was established by three Stanford students coming out of the renowned Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) with the aim of helping the world understand and be understood, and an end goal of unlocking potential through increased understanding and efficacy of communication in digital conversations. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Sanas' members and advisors include some of the top speech machine learning scientists in the world. For more information, visit sanas.ai.

Media Contact:
Erica Zeidenberg
erica@hottomato.net
925-631-0553 office
925-518-8159 mobile

SOURCE: Sanas

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NASA Awards Translation Contract Worth Up to USD 59m to TechTrans International - Slator - Translation

3 hours ago

On August 16, 2021, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a translation contract worth up to USD 59m to TechTrans International (TTI).

The contract, Russian Language and Logistics Services 2 (RLLS2), covers translation, interpreting, language training, and international logistics to support space station operations in Russia and Kazakhstan.

CEO Beth Williams founded the company in 1993 specifically to provide services to NASA for the International Space Station (ISS). The language service provider (LSP) is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in Russia, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Colombia.

In addition to ISO 9001:2015 certification and NASA-relevant specializations, including aerospace, defense, and global security, TTI offers one decidedly unusual service: the “Train Like a Cosmonaut” Experience in Star City, Russia.

Guided by TTI staff, clients stay at the Russian Space Agency’s primary training center, near Moscow. Participants meet Russian and US astronauts, tour the Yuri Gagarin Museum, and try their hand at wilderness survival, spacesuit training, and negotiating a space station mockup.

Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report

Data and Research, Slator reports

80-pages. Market Size by Vertical, Geo, Intention. Expert-in-Loop Model. M&A. Frontier Tech. Hybrid Future. Outlook 2021-2025.

According to USAspending.gov, which tracks contracts awarded by federal agencies, TTI’s business with NASA stretches back more than 20 years. The first contract, also for Russian language and logistics services, ran from October 1999 to December 2003 for USD 45.7m. 

In 2010, TTI scooped up three more contracts, one for a security overseas seminar (USD 13,390) and two for Japanese language tutorials (USD 37,750 combined). The largest to date, worth USD 89.5m, is a nine-year contract related to Russian language and logistics services that ends September 30, 2021. 

The phase-in period for RLLS2 begins September 1, 2021, followed by a two-year base period beginning October 1, 2021, at which point NASA will have the option of extending the contract by three months, nine months, or one year.

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