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Macquarie Dictionary celebrates 40 years of ‘unashamedly’ Australian English The Guardian AustraliaMonday, September 20, 2021
Pixel 6 Live Translate will combine Google's best translation features - SlashGear - Translation
Although Google serves many users on many platforms, it often shows preferential treatment to Pixel phone owners. Some of those exclusive features eventually find their way to other Android phones, but the best of the best remains a highlight for Google’s own phones. One such feature might be Live Translate that’s going to be exclusive to the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, pooling together some of Google’s best work when it comes to AI-powered translation services.
Google’s translation service on the Web existed a few years before Android phones even became fashionable. Since then, the company has flexed its machine-generated translation muscles in other products, from Google Lens to live translation via the Pixel Buds. The Pixel 6 will put these under one “Live Translate” feature and integrate it seamlessly with other Google and Pixel features, like Gboard, Assistant, and Live Caption.
Alluded to before by Google itself, XDA’s Pixel 6 Pro source was able to snag a few screenshots of the said feature. Like Google Translate itself, it will require users to download language packs for what they want to translate. The choice of language will determine which translation features will be available.
English, for example, supports translating Live Captions, Messages, translatable text seen by the Camera, and a real-time audio interpreter. Japanese, on the other hand, only supports Messages, Live Caption, and Camera. Mandarin has even fewer supported features, namely Messages and Camera.
While the services that power these translations are mostly available on other phones, Live Translate itself might be exclusive to the Pixel 6 and no other phone. Part of that might be due to its reliance on Google’s Tensor chip to process the data on the device. That also means that translations are done locally to avoid leaking data like messages through the Internet.
KU teacher gets SahityaAkademi Prize for translation of Tagore's poems into Kashmiri - Rising Kashmir - Translation
Posted on Sep 20, 2021 | Author RK News
Srinagar, Sep 20: SahityaAkademi New Delhi has awarded Dr Shafqat Altaf, noted writer and faculty member at the Department of Kashmiri, University of Kashmir, with its annual award in the translation category.
The SahityaAkademi or National Academy of Letters announced its annual awards on September 18 for the year 2020.
Dr Altaf won the award for the translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s 101 poems from English into Kashmiri.
“Rabindranath Tagore has inspired generations of people through the poems which I have translated into Kashmiri. Tagore was much ahead of his time and his poems were loved not only in India but across the world,” Dr Altaf said.
Dr Altaf has been instrumental in rendering the poems without compromising their sensitivity and originality in the target language.
A noted teacher of Kashmiri language and literature, Dr Altaf possesses a productive zeal to write and express through his writing (in more than one language).
This Is How Automatic Speech Recognition & Machine Translation Are Revolutionizing Subtitling - Slator - Translation
Subtitling has relied on template-based workflows for more than two decades. The use of templates (a.k.a. subtitle files) has been called “one of the greatest innovations in the subtitling industry at the turn of the century.”
Today, two cornerstone technologies are making an impact on the subtitling market and, once more, changing the way workflows are run: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT).
Historically, a subtitling task comprises two steps, transcription and translation. In the transcription step, a template in the language of the original audio is created. If the original audio is in English, then this would only require a time-coded transcription of the dialogue. If the audio is in a language other than English (LOTE), a typical approach would be to transcribe the LOTE audio and then translate it into an English subtitle file.
The English template is then translated into all the target languages required by the project, while adhering to space and reading-speed parameters. However, recent advancements in ASR and MT have transformed these once time-consuming steps of transcription and translation into more efficient post-editing tasks.
Moreover, training an ASR and / or MT engine on subtitling data can ensure better quality subtitles. This is what ASR and MT tech provider, AppTek, specializes in.
According to AppTek Managing Director, Dr Volker Steinbiss, “Our AI engines have been trained specifically on subtitling data from massive libraries of transcribed and translated media subtitle files as well as other language data. In fact, AppTek is one of the few providers of both ASR and MT technology built ground-up inside the company’s own platform, whose engines have been vetted by the world’s leading language service providers for the media vertical.”
And, of course, as more companies look to deploy customizable ASR and MT technologies into their workflows, privacy of client data remains a top concern.
“Our AI engines have been trained specifically on subtitling data from massive libraries of […] media subtitle files as well as other language data.” – Dr Volker Steinbiss, Managing Director, AppTek
Asked how their AI systems are protected in terms of security when training on existing video content libraries, AppTek CTO Steve Cook explained, “In addition to our ASR and MT engines, which can be deployed in secure on-premise environments, we provide the ability for the end-user to customize their models using their own media libraries — which remain protected on-site and keep the ensuing models private to them.”
Commercial Impact of ASR on Subtitling Market
Research has shown that using ASR results in subtitling productivity gains; and that commercially available ASR tools are, in general, both cost-effective and secure. “Even the tool that performed most poorly still saved some time. And the one that performed better saved an impressive 46 minutes,” wrote Mara Campbell, ATA-certified linguist and founder of Latin American subtitle provider, True Subtitles.
“We provide the ability for the end-user to customize their models using their own media libraries — which remain protected on-site and keep the ensuing models private to them” — Steve Cook, CTO, AppTek
She also noted the robust security and competitive pricing of ASR tools available in the market. Since Campbell’s study was published in 2019, ASR has naturally advanced even more on all fronts.
As proof of ASR’s commercial impact, one company that has partnered with AppTek is Super Agency TransPerfect, ranked #1 on the Slator 2021 LSPI. TransPerfect recently deployed AppTek’s ASR technology to accelerate subtitling workflows by creating a first-pass subtitle file to work from, either from a provided script or directly from audio.
How Machine Translation Was Specialized for Subtitles
At the world’s biggest conference on Machine Translation, WMT, back in 2019, AppTek shared its research on customizing MT for subtitling with the scientific community, highlighting two new developments, as follows:
- Intelligent Line Segmentation (ILS) – an AppTek tool based on what researchers described at the time as “a novel subtitle segmentation algorithm that predicts the end of a subtitle line given the previous word-level context using a recurrent neural network learned from human segmentation decisions.” Prior to ILS, all other approaches to segmentation had been very manual.
- Subtitle Edit Rate – this metric accurately captures the edit distance in post-edited subtitles, including line-break errors, something previous metrics did not account for.
The result is an MT system highly specialized for subtitle translation. At the time of the study, the system already resulted in productivity gains of up to 37% compared to previous methods. Check out this video that explains how the AppTek system works.
Experts Test Drive AppTek’s MT for Subtitles
Subtitler and Technical Translator, Damián Santilli, ran parts of the popular Mexican telenovela, Te doy la vida (I give you life), through both AppTek’s subtitling-specialized MT and Google’s state-of-the-art, general-purpose MT.
The test was meant to assess how “specialized” AppTek’s tool truly is for translating subtitles — in this case for a language pair (i.e., Latin American Spanish into English) in high commercial demand in entertainment media.
Santilli’s candid and transparent assessment (he fully disclosed how he had “been collaborating with AppTek in recent months”) showed that AppTek performed better than Google 57% of the time based on machine translating over 800 subtitles, and 25.9% vice-versa; and both did about the same or “were useless” in the remaining 17.1% of subtitles.
According to Santilli, “AppTek did a better job” based on a test that evaluated four factors: segmentation, translation of names and places, formal / informal treatment, and miscellaneous cases.
“As for my choice of MT service, I think it’s obvious that AppTek did a better job, and I believe that’s mostly because it is an MT specialized in subtitling” — Damián Santilli, Subtitler and Technical Translator
Meanwhile, Media Localization Specialist, Stavroula Sokoli, published a study in the June 2021 ATA Deep Focus newsletter that showed the results of a test using the TV romcom, Christmas Wedding Planner, and using the SubtitleNEXT platform where AppTek’s MT had been deployed.
Sokoli wrote, “I was able to use almost one third of the proposed [AppTek] MT subtitles, i.e., 393 out of 1,225 subtitles, without modifying them. Many of them were simple greetings, negations or affirmations, but there were pleasant surprises such as the successful treatment of omission” when translating from English into Greek.
Additionally, Sokoli was also able to use “a bit more than one third” with minor post-editing, such as “changes involving a few key-strokes, like deleting text and punctuation, editing a single word, or adding a space.”
“I was able to use almost one third of the proposed [AppTek] MT subtitles, i.e., 393 out of 1,225 subtitles, without modifying them” — Stavroula Sokoli, Media Localization Specialist
AppTek’s subtitling specialized ASR and MT models are now integrated in subtitling platforms widely used in the video localization and media entertainment industries, both proprietary and commercially available ones, such as OOONA, Stellar, and SubtitleNEXT.
Relevant customization of the user interface of subtitle editors will, of course, make a significant difference to the extent that translators will be able to benefit from the capabilities of the MT integrated into the tool, as Sokoli pointed out in her article.
Want to perform your own test drive of AppTek ASR and MT? Contact info@apptek.com for details or visit this link to sign up for a free trial today.
From the Archives, 1981: A dictionary by Australians, for Australians - Sydney Morning Herald - Dictionary
Forty years ago, we finally had a dictionary to call our own. But the Macquarie was a lot more than a collection of Australian slang, as author Thomas Keneally found out when he browsed through it.
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on September 24, 1981
Dictionary puts bluetongues, dipthongs in their place
English gentlemen arriving in Australia in the first 40 years of its European occupation remarked on the physical appearance and the speech of the Australian-born currency children.
The first generation of native-born European Australians spoke a barbarous argot taken partly from their experience of Australia and partly from the flash talk of transported criminals. Their vowels assaulted the civilised ear. In their debased hands, the civilised English language was a hostage.
Most Australian children - except perhaps migrant children, who have different battles to fight - have grown up bearing the stigma of the currency children.
Herald staff member Val Hopwood with a copy of The Macquarie Dictionary on September 23, 1981Credit:Gerrit Fokkema
Teachers, commentators, visitors to Australia - all of them told the Australian child that its English was debased, that it had been born in the wrong garden, that it suffered from linguistic original sin.
We could make only two responses to this attitude - one, to become defiant and to speak a more outrageous Australian still; the other, to attempt to pick up something like a South British pronunciation, an effort which - because of our fallen origins - could not hope to bring convincing success in any case.
In language, the life of all us currency children of the 40s, 50s, even the 60s, was a matter of fragments. In our reading, we encountered for the most part English idiom and usage - to an extent which always seemed to distance the characters from us.
On Saturday afternoons we paid our ninepence and, in darkened picture houses, spent three hours with the American language.
Television increased the time we spent in alien idioms, but it did not entirely free us from our rugged and unregenerate attachment to our own language.
Last Saturday at a Sydney football ground, I saw two boys of about 10 kicking a football to each other. After catching a punt, one of them said to the other, “Hang on, I want to go the dunny.”
It was like being at Pratten Park or Kogarah Oval in the 40s. Not all those weekly hours of watching MASH and The Brady Bunch had taught the child to say, “Hold it, I have to go to the john.”
The time has come for the child - both in his idiom, his vowels, his dipthongs - to be honoured for his linguistic impenitence. This week, an Australian dictionary appeared.
If at first hearing this does not sound like a significant event, let me be quick to say that The Macquarie Dictionary - as it is called - will, for the first time, declare that Australian English is not a bastard convict but a legitimate heir.
As the linguists who prepared it claim, it is the first reference dictionary in which “all the pronunciations, all the spellings, and all the definitions of meaning are taken from the use of English in Australia, and in which Australian English becomes the basis of comparison with other national varieties of English.”
It is not merely a dictionary of Australian slang - the Bondi tram, which shoots through in the idiom of most people over 35, is there, but it shares the same page as bonne femme, a French cooking term in currency among the cuisine-crazed middle class. The Macquarie is in fact an attempt to show the way English is used in Australia, in all the complexities of Australian society, in politics, newspapers, science, the arts.
For the first time in our history - the linguists at Macquarie University claim - we will be able to use a dictionary without having to edit it in our minds to fit Australian usage.
Arthur Delbridge, the editor-in-chief, says in an introduction to the dictionary that while many English words in world-wide use have constant meanings, there are others which have Australian usages not catered for by the great dictionaries of the English-speaking world, the Oxfords and the Websters.
He mentions station, yard, track, house, terrace, flat.
“This dictionary,” he says, “tries to do justice to the distinctiveness of Australian usage.”
Cartoon by staff.Credit:SMH Archives
To a dictionary user of no specialist training - to writers that is, and journalists and students - the range of this work will be the first thing to impress. From alternative cultures We have the flowerchild and the Jesus freak, both included despite the fact that Delbridge admits they may be “ephemeral manifestations.” Similarly the rugger-bugger gets a guernsey as an identifiable species in the life of Sydney and Brisbane, and the Ocker has a place, though his derivation is uncertain.
The trades, some of them with distinctive Australian meanings, are included, and peripherally but more importantly, the Australian cuts of meat, which have never appeared comprehensively or exactly in any other dictionary.
Words which had meaning earlier in Australian history - assignment system, brickfielder, budgeree, croppy, emancipist, are defined, as well as words which have changed in usage - bludge, cove, creek, galah, hot, mulga, muster, run and selection.
Australian plants and animals, so sketchily covered in other English dictionaries, inhabit the pages. The blueberry ash, for example, and the messmate, entirely missing from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), are exactly defined.
The bluetongue, so common in Australian backyards but absent from the SOED, infests the same page of The Macquarie Dictionary as the bluenose, the blue-ringed octopus, the blue swimmer and bluey, a Queensland soubriquet for the rainbow lorikeet.
In the SOED, a bluenose is a purplish potato grown in Nova Scotia, a nickname for a Nova Scotian, or a kind of clam fish shell.
In The Macquarie it is a fish common in southern Australian and Tasmanian waters which grows to a length of 50 centimetres.
Bluenose, therefore, illustrates perfectly the need for an Australian dictionary. Imagine a city-dweller listening to Eden fishermen discussing the catch, hearing the term used, and going home to his SOED to find out that the pros on the jetty had been discussing potatoes.
The Macquarie is just as extensive in its definitions of Aboriginal words which have entered Australian English and been modified in the mouths of European Australians.
Mulga, for example, is not found in the SOED, either in its botanical sense or in the usage “up the mulga,” meaning “in the bush.”
In fact page 1142, the page on which mulga is defined in four senses as a noun and one as an adjective, is a good illustration of the comprehensive nature of The Macquarie.
On this page you will find mulga wire, a colloquialism for bush telegraph. You will also find such as esoterics as mullenise, to clear scrubland by pushing back the undergrowth with a roller, a verb transitive deriving from Mullens, an Irish settler near Adelaide.
But you discover as well mulligan stew, a US term, and - from the East Indies mulligatawny, along with the most respectable of universal Latinate adjectives, such as multicoil, multidentate, multifarious, multifid, multilaminate, multilingual, multilobular.
The way from column one to column two, however, is salted with delightful words of peculiarly Australian usage. Mullock, for example, which is in the SOED in the sense of mine refuse but not in the sense of poking mullock at someone, of ridiculing.
Advertisement for the Macquarie Dictionary, September 30, 1981.Credit:SMH Archives
And in front of multicellular, we find that old friend of our schooldays, that grateful visitor to the batting crease, the mully-grubber. But perhaps just as usefully as the word and Australian words, The Macquarie provides some 1,000 distinctively New Zealand words and usages.
The Macquarie is revolutionary also in that it legitimises not only the mullygrubber but Australian pronunciation as well.
The linguist J. R. L. Bernard says that except in one case - the vowel “i” as in hill - Australian pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs is distinctive not only among speakers of what he calls Broad and General Australian, but with speakers of Cultivated Australian as well.
Our induced self-consciousness about the way we speak has meant that many of us try during our lifetimes to move away from Broad Australian towards whale we think of as superior diphthongs of South British English.
Some of us have achieved Modified Australian, which Bernard defines as “more cultivated that Cultivated.” You will also find all the varieties not only in most social groups but even in the one family and, at various stages of his or her life, in the one Australian.
Generally, it seems, that with greater national maturity and - for some at least - affluence, we have been engaged in a flight from Broad.
But the struggle has not been entirely successful. “All the varieties,” says Bernard, “show characteristically Australian intonation, rhythm and stress patterns.”
The other fascinating aspect of Australian speech is that there are no truly regional differences of pronunciation in Australia, so that the pronunciations given in The Macquarie are universal national pronunciations, capable of interpretation by speakers of all grades of Australian language, either in Cooktown, Burnie, Esperance, or anywhere else.
They are nationally universal pronunciations in a way that the pronunciations in the Oxford and Webster’s dictionaries could never hope to be. For in Britain and the US, regional class differences make for a Babel of pronunciation.
Manning Clark deftly contributes to the introduction of The Macquarie and speaks about the change, which has been progressing in Australia in the twentieth century, from a European-centred to an Australian-centred way of looking at the world.
He says that The Macquarie will be not only an important landmark but a tool in this progress.
When we have got over the almost improper and self-conscious thrill of seeing such lusty idiomatic Australianisms as drongo given floor space in a scholarly lexicon, then this dictionary is sure to become, in its successive editions, a cultural resource.
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OpenGLAM translation sprint - News | Europeana Pro - Translation
Last year, the Europeana Copyright Community and Creative Commons joined forces to organise a translation sprint, which resulted in 34 translations of Europeana’s public domain related documentation. This was a great opportunity to connect useful OpenGLAM-related materials to a wider audience, both through the engagement of those translating and the resulting language accessibility.
This year, we are joining the Hack4OpenGLAM initiative to do the same.
Our aim
At Europeana, our goal is to have the Public Domain Charter, the Rights Labelling Flowchart, and OpenGLAM survey presentation material available in all official EU languages, as well as other languages, which are of course very welcome.
Having these open sprints means documents are translated by those who will be using the material. It is an opportunity for you to get to know more about it, improve your knowledge, and share this valuable information with wider audiences through your own local, regional and national networks. Ultimately it means more people get to use these documents in their own language.
We are inviting cultural heritage professionals and OpenGLAM supporters that are eager to immerse themselves in the world of OpenGLAM to help us share the message of the value of opening up digital cultural heritage.
When
The Creative Commons Summit and Europeana Conference gather many OpenGLAM advocates, so they present a great opportunity to engage the right audiences with these materials. That is why this year’s translation sprint will kick-off at the Creative Commons summit, and will last through to the end of Europeana 2021.
You can join the Hack4openGlam session at the CC summit on Monday, September 20 from 6:00pm - 7:30pm UTC and at Europeana 2021 (day and time to be confirmed) to find out more about the process and the documents we’re hoping to have translated.
However, you don’t have to wait! If you want to get on with it and work on a translation you can do so without attending one of these sessions. See the ‘How to participate’ section below for details.
The rest is up to you: you can decide the pace at which you do the translation, as long as it is between 20 September and 12 November 2021.
How to participate
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Indicate on this spreadsheet the language and document you intend to translate. Make sure no one else has selected that document and language combination already. Also, please note that the Public Domain Charter is already available in Bahasa Indonesia, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish.
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Make a copy of the translation template for the document you intend to translate:
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Replace the “[LANGUAGE]” space to the one you are going to be translating and fill in the translation spaces.
Once you’re done, share your copy of the document with scannopolis@gmail.com and ariadna.matas@europeana.eu.
Lost in translation: language biggest barrier for newcomer families navigating school system - Toronto Star - Translation
Nour Al Masri was so excited to go back to school that she couldn’t sleep the night before.
She hugged her new backpack close as she lay in bed imagining what her first day of school will look like. Her younger brother Aktham proudly said he was the only one of his siblings who didn’t take his new backpack to bed.
The parents are happy their five children have the opportunity for an education. But the school year is always a stressful time for the Syrian family who came to Halifax almost three years ago.
“The school sent us the supply list and we didn’t know what to buy,” said Mohammad Al Masri, Nour’s father.
Mohammad and his wife Fatema speak very little English and Google Translate, said Fatema, is useless most of the time.
Figuring out what supplies to get is one task made more difficult by the language barrier for newcomer families with school-aged children. Communicating with the school bus or the principal when a child can’t come to school can also become a burden with no one to help.
During their first year in Halifax, a miscommunication almost cost Fatema and Mohammad their children.
At the time, the family found themselves between a rock and a hard place when Nour fell ill and was hospitalized. Mohammad had to be with her at the hospital leaving Fatema, who was pregnant with their fifth child, alone to care for Aktham and his younger sisters Salsabeel and Rital.
“I was new to the country. I didn’t know anyone,” said Fatema.
Mohammad’s absence meant Fatema was the one responsible for taking the children to school. The family’s efforts to get them a spot on the school bus were fruitless. With Rital being a toddler and Fatema suffering from exhaustion, the transit trip to school seemed impossible some days.
“It’s not that we didn’t want the children to go to school. We were so happy they could go,” said Mohamad. “(But) there were days when we couldn’t take them.”
An interpreter who worked with the family in the past called the school to explain why the children were not coming. But Fatema could tell there something was lost in translation when she was told that child welfare might get involved.
“I was having a hard time … but instead of giving me hope, they were disappointing me. It was too much,” said Fatema.
It wasn’t until Fatima went to her children’s school and met with the YMCA school settlement worker Zobeida Al-Zobeidy that the confusion was cleared up.
“They helped us so much. Without them, I don’t know what our situation would have been.”
Al-Zobeidy is now the family’s lifeline at school, said Mohammad, and her presence is important for many Syrian families around him.
She was the first person they thought of when they needed someone to translate the school supply list and they were not disappointed. Fatema said she was relieved when Al-Zobeidy sent them photos of items whose names they didn’t recognize.
She was also one of few resources the family could access to understand the ever-changing public health information and school guidelines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
The YMCA’s school settlement program has been a resource for newcomer families navigating the school system since 1992. The program, which started as a homework club, expanded to include 17 workers stationed in 37 schools across the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Settlement workers work at the schools during the day, providing a link between parents and their children’s school. One worker could be responsible for one or more schools depending on how many newcomer children there are.
Close to 1,000 clients are registered in the program for 2021, according to Achala Hewaarachchi, the program’s acting coordinator.
“Language is the most common barrier for quite a bit of newcomer families we receive,” she said.
The technological gap was also a hindrance for families registering their children this school year. Hewaarachchi said school settlement staff worked with clients through the online registration process and explained the documents needed.
The lack of access to computers, Wi-Fi, and the knowledge required to use them put many families in a difficult position during the pandemic.
Habtom Gebremariam’s family was one of those without computers when schools went online in 2020. Originally from Eritrea, they were refugees in Ethiopia before coming to Halifax in February 2019.
The YMCA provided them with two laptops that the children used to attend class and do their homework. The only remaining obstacle was the spotty Wi-Fi, which only seemed to work well in the living room.
“My father had an online class too… So, all of us were here. We can’t hear what my teacher was saying, and they couldn’t hear what their teacher was saying,” said Filmawit, the family’s eldest daughter.
The laptops came in handy when the Gebremariams’ school settlement worker, Darinka Kapor, invited them to join an online reading club to help newcomer children improve their English.
The children now share one laptop. The limited number of laptops, which were donated to the YMCA a couple of years ago, means many families don’t get one, said Kapor.
She said more donations are needed to fill the demand.
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