In Lydia Davis’s Work, Writing and Translating Provocatively Commingle - The New York Times - Translation

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In Lydia Davis’s Work, Writing and Translating Provocatively Commingle  The New York Times

Rotary delivers dictionaries to third graders - Lewiston Sun Journal - Lewiston Sun Journal - Dictionary

Rotarians Erin Nelson and Elizabeth Gemme Deliver Dictionaries to Stevens Brook School

BRIDGTON — On Monday, November 22, Rotarians Elizabeth Gemme and Erin Nelson of Norway Savings Bank-Naples and Bridgton delivered 130 dictionaries to the Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, the Stevens Brook Elementary School in Bridgton, and to the new Dodge School on Nulty Street in Bridgton.

In the past 10 years, over 2600 dictionaries have been distributed to third graders by the Bridgton-Lake Region Rotary Club. Again this year, Rotarians were not able to hand the dictionaries to the students directly, but the youngsters will have an opportunity to enjoy their very own dictionary nonetheless. “We have been reminded by high school students that their dictionary from the third grade remains in an honored place on their desk even today. The Dictionary Project is one of the Club’s most important literacy efforts.  We Rotarians love this service project!” remarked Erin Nelson.

Club President Jessica Putnam said, “A big thank you to Erin Nelson for taking the lead on this important Club project for the past 5 years.  It is especially important that Corporate Member Norway Savings Bank is continuing that lead with Rotarian Elizabeth Gemme participating again this year.”

Each year Bridgton-Lake Region Rotary Club has a few remaining dictionaries.  In the past, the Club has made these available to homeschoolers, libraries, and food pantries.  For more information, contact [email protected].

For more information about Rotary and its service projects, check out https://lakeregionrotary.com or the Facebook Page.

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NYC Expands Translation of Special Ed Plans for Parents Who Request Them - THE CITY - Translation

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering public education. Sign up for their newsletters here: ckbe.at/newsletters.

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Parents of students with disabilities who don’t speak English have long struggled to get their children’s learning plans translated into their native language, a crucial barrier to advocating for extra help or ensuring they are receiving the correct services.

Officials are now taking more significant steps to address the issue. Last school year, the education department quietly launched a citywide effort to centrally translate students’ individualized education programs (or IEPs) instead of leaving the process up to individual schools that didn’t always have the capacity to conduct the translations or find an outside vendor to provide it.

The citywide program, which scaled up a small pilot program announced two years ago, will be permanent, officials recently said.

IEPs are essential documents that spell out a student’s individual goals and the services they’re entitled to receive, such as speech or occupational therapy or a smaller class size with specialized instruction. Without translated versions, families may struggle to know whether their children are getting the services they’re entitled to and effectively advocate on their behalf.

But even as advocates said the centralized process is a step in the right direction, the burden is still on families to request that the documents be translated, and families may not know they can request a translation. For now, there is a large gap between the number of families who may need translated IEPs and the requests.

About 78,000 students with disabilities live in homes where English is not the primary language, according to city officials. Last school year, 7,078 IEPs were translated, the first year the centralized translation process was available citywide.

About 1,100 IEPs have been translated so far this school year, a 70% uptick compared with the same period last year, officials said.

It is unclear to what extent the pandemic may have curtailed families’ requests for translated IEPs or how those figures stack up historically, since the education department did not track how many IEPs were translated by individual schools before the process was centralized.

‘Way Overdue’

Nevertheless, advocates said the new translation process represents progress.

“It’s way overdue,” said Lori Podvesker, a policy expert at INCLUDEnyc, an advocacy group that focuses on special education. “If special ed documents are not translated that prevents families from being a part of the decision-making, and that equates to inferior outcomes.”

Relying on schools to translate IEPs resulted in a patchwork system. Individual schools may not have anyone on hand to translate the documents or may struggle to find a translator who can provide high-quality translation of documents that often include jargon and other technical language.

Department officials have argued that centralizing the process would create a more streamlined process and lead to better translations, since the city could use translators with more practice reviewing the highly technical documents and reuse boilerplate language for certain parts, freeing them up to focus on sections that are unique to each student. (The city is using an outside company, Lingualinx, to conduct the translations.)

Paola Jordan, who co-directs Sinergia, an organization that helps Spanish-speaking families navigate special education services, said many families — and even schools themselves — may not know they can request translations.

“I am still seeing Spanish-speaking parents who have [IEPs] in English,” Jordan wrote in an email. “The burden still is on the parent to request the service.” She also raised concerns that families may have to wait several weeks for the documents to be translated.

Education department officials did not immediately indicate how long translations typically take, saying only that they are completed as soon as possible. Nor did they respond to a question about why the city won’t automatically translate IEPs for families who primarily speak other languages.

They did, however, say they are working to get the word out through letters, text messages, and advertisements to “promote the availability of language access services.”

Families who want to request an IEP translation can contact their school, call 718-935-2013, or visit the department’s website.

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Smartling lands $160M to help companies translate their content automatically - VentureBeat - Translation

Join gaming leaders, alongside GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming, for their 2nd Annual GamesBeat & Facebook Gaming Summit | GamesBeat: Into the Metaverse 2 this upcoming January 25-27, 2022. Learn more about the event. 

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As the pandemic drives businesses online, translation is becoming a key part of the digital transformation equation. One large-scale behavioral study in 2014 showed that 75% of consumers are more likely to buy products from websites in their native language. Another, this one by Localize, found businesses that invested in translation were 1.5 times more likely to observe an increase in revenue.

Against this backdrop, Smartling, a self-described cloud translation company, has raised $160 million in a venture capital round led by Battery Ventures. CEO Jack Welde says that the proceeds will be used to expand Smartling’s headcount while supporting product development and marketing efforts.

Smartling, which was founded in 2009 by Welde and Andrey Akselrod, is a language translation company that enables customers to localize content across devices and platforms. Smartling leverages a combination of AI-powered translation tools and human translators, localizing content for particular markets to ensure its intended meaning and connotation remains the same — and isn’t misunderstood.

“Two truisms have emerged about today’s enterprises: all business is global, and content drives global business,” Welde said in a statement. “The third leg of that stool is translation, since nearly all customers want to buy in their own language. This is a tremendous opportunity, and we are excited to realize it together with Battery.”

Localizing content

Smartling uses automation to quickly translate content into different languages. New content on customer sites and apps is flagged for translation and sent to translators for rewriting; when changes to the original language are detected, all foreign-language versions are flagged for translation. The changes are then delivered to front-end users through the backend of a customer’s system, independent of app updates.

In 2017, Smartling launched a mobile delivery network designed to deliver updated translations to smartphone apps decoupled from updates to the app’s core code. The idea is that international users see translated content faster without having to update the app beforehand. Instead, updates and new translations can appear as soon as the user opens the app.

Smartling claims to work with a few thousand translators in addition to an in-house staff of about 160 to provide text and video translation services. Translators perform their work in a computer-aided translation tool, which is followed by a translation review, legal review, and editing process.

Smartling relies partially on machine translation — i.e., AI-powered translation — for “high volume, low priority” content translations. While generally accurate, studies show that machine translation systems can produce text that’s less “lexically” rich than human translations — and more prejudicial. Google recently identified (and claims to have addressed) gender bias in the translation models underpinning Google Translate, particularly with regard to resource-poor languages like Turkish, Finnish, Persian, and Hungarian.

We’ve reached out to Smartling for more information about its AI bias mitigation efforts and will update this article if we hear back.

Opportunity for growth

In a boon for Smartling, the market for online translation services continues to climb steeply upward. According to Statista, it’s doubled in size from 2009 to 2019, reaching $49.6 billion two years ago. The machine translation market alone could be worth $230.67 in the next five years, Mordor Intelligence projects, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.1% from 2021 to 2026.

Underlining the opportunity, over 361 million people around the world participate in cross-border ecommerce. A study by Standard Chartered found that nearly half of U.S. businesses today say that their best growth opportunity is outside the U.S. And according to Common Sense Advisory, 76% of buyers say that they prefer to purchase a product with information in their own language when faced with the choice of two similar products.

Smartling has competition in Language I/O, a startup providing AI technologies for real-time, company-specific language translations. Unbabel and Lilt are among other rivals in the segment. But Smartling has managed to attract “hundreds” of large business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers including InterContinental, Pinterest, Shopify, and SurveyMonkey.

“Enterprises generally succeed on the strength of technology, supply chains, people, and workflows. As content has become essential to go-to-market strategies, content distribution has in some sense become its own supply chain and workflow. And, as that content supply chain extends globally, translation at scale has become the critical last mile for global enterprise growth,” Battery Ventures general partner Morad Elhafed said in a press release.

Smartling has raised over $220 million in venture capital to date.

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NYC expands translation of special education plans - Chalkbeat Colorado - Translation

Parents of students with disabilities who don’t speak English have long struggled to get their children’s learning plans translated into their native language, a crucial barrier to advocating for extra help or ensuring they are receiving the correct services.

Officials are now taking more significant steps to address the issue. Last school year, the education department quietly launched a citywide effort to centrally translate students’ individualized education programs (or IEPs) instead of leaving the process up to individual schools that didn’t always have the capacity to conduct the translations or find an outside vendor to provide it.

The citywide program, which scaled up a small pilot program announced two years ago, will be permanent, officials recently said.

IEPs are essential documents that spell out a student’s individual goals and the services they’re entitled to receive, such as speech or occupational therapy or a smaller class size with specialized instruction. Without translated versions, families may struggle to know whether their children are getting the services they’re entitled to and effectively advocate on their behalf.

But even as advocates said the centralized process is a step in the right direction, the burden is still on families to request that the documents be translated, and families may not know they can request a translation. For now, there is a large gap between the number of families who may need translated IEPs and the requests.

About 78,000 students with disabilities live in homes where English is not the primary language, according to city officials. Last school year, 7,078 IEPs were translated, the first year the centralized translation process was available citywide.

About 1,100 IEPs have been translated so far this school year, a 70% uptick compared with the same period last year, officials said.

It is unclear to what extent the pandemic may have curtailed families’ requests for translated IEPs or how those figures stack up historically, since the education department did not track how many IEPs were translated by individual schools before the process was centralized.

Nevertheless, advocates said the new translation process represents progress.

“It’s way overdue,” said Lori Podvesker, a policy expert at INCLUDEnyc, an advocacy group that focuses on special education. “If special ed documents are not translated that prevents families from being a part of the decision-making, and that equates to inferior outcomes.”

Relying on schools to translate IEPs resulted in a patchwork system. Individual schools may not have anyone on hand to translate the documents or may struggle to find a translator who can provide high-quality translation of documents that often include jargon and other technical language.

Department officials have argued that centralizing the process would create a more streamlined process and lead to better translations, since the city could use translators with more practice reviewing the highly technical documents and reuse boilerplate language for certain parts, freeing them up to focus on sections that are unique to each student. (The city is using an outside company, Lingualinx, to conduct the translations.)

Paola Jordan, who co-directs Sinergia, an organization that helps Spanish-speaking families navigate special education services, said many families — and even schools themselves — may not know they can request translations.

“I am still seeing Spanish-speaking parents who have [IEPs] in English,” Jordan wrote in an email. “The burden still is on the parent to request the service.” She also raised concerns that families may have to wait several weeks for the documents to be translated.

Education department officials did not immediately indicate how long translations typically take, saying only that they are completed as soon as possible. Nor did they respond to a question about why the city won’t automatically translate IEPs for families who primarily speak other languages.

They did, however, say they are working to get the word out through letters, text messages, and advertisements to “promote the availability of language access services.”

Families who want to request an IEP translation can contact their school, call 718-935-2013, or visit the department’s website.

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Conference on translation examines language and power - ASU News Now - Translation

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December 1, 2021

The School of International Letters and Cultures hosted a conference in November, sponsored by Arizona Humanities and Arizona State University, about the theory and practice of translation and interpretation.

“Engaging Translation: Questions of Language and Power in Arizona and Beyond” was held on ASU’s Tempe campus Nov. 12–13. Attendees included professors, students, translation professionals and other community members. The conference’s program included individual presentations, keynote addresses, panel discussions and workshops. The panelists and moderator stand together on stage before their discussion on language and power in Arizona as part of the two-day "Engaging Translation" conference held on ASU's Tempe campus. Photo by Tim Trumble Download Full Image

The two-day event concluded with a panel moderated by Fernanda Santos, a Southwest Borderlands Initiative professor of practice in ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The discussion featured federal public defender Milagros Cisneros, Valencia Newcomer School Principal Lynette Faulkner, The Welcome to America Project Agency Director Mike Sullivan, ASU’s American Indian Studies Director Stephanie Fitzgerald and ASU’s Center for Latina/os and American Politics Research Director Rodney Hero.

The professionals on the panel talked about the various ways language has been used by and against the communities they work with. For example, Sullivan discussed how the refugees served by his nonprofit are supported upon arriving in the United States. The organization’s goal is not for the refugees to assimilate into their new communities, but for them to integrate and interact so that they can experience their new language and culture while continuing to celebrate and share what is familiar to them.

“You’d be surprised how a simple word can open up a door and relax a setting,” Sullivan said.

Similarly, Faulkner described how the multilingual students at her school – which serves young immigrants and refugees who are new to the U.S. educational system – and their families are reassured that their native languages and cultural heritage won’t be swept aside as they learn English and make a new home in the U.S.

“Their culture is strong, and it is celebrated,” she said, noting that in the students’ interactions outside of class, they share their native languages with each other while relying on English as a common tongue.

Fitzgerald connected this to her work at ASU, whose American Indian Studies program includes classes on the Navajo and Oʼodham languages. Many students come into the program unfamiliar with these languages as a result of governmental and educational policies that punished students for not speaking English and displaced Indigenous people from the communities where their ancestors had lived.

Having the opportunity to learn their native languages, Fitzgerald said, “is immensely rewarding, and it provides this emotional connection. It’s beyond words to be able to recapture something that was not available previously.”

All of the panelists agreed that language offers an ability to bridge gaps in society and connect groups of people, whether they are alike or different.

The School of International Letters and Cultures hosted a conference titled "Engaging Translation" last month on ASU's Tempe campus.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Conference attendees listen to the final panel discussion, which dealt with questions of language and power in Arizona.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Jaime Fatás-Cabeza, a member of the conference's planning committee and the director of the Undergraduate Translation and Interpretation Program in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Arizona, presents his research on the second day of the conference.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

The Welcome to America Project Agency Director Mike Sullivan speaks during the panel discussion on language and power in Arizona.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Conference attendees, some of them fellow presenters, listen as the Rev. John Jacob Collins speaks during one of the conference sessions.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Some of the panelists speak with School of International Letters and Cultures Director Nina Berman at the conclusion of the conference.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Associate Professor of Japanese William Hedberg presents his research on the second day of the conference.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Earlier in the day, several School of International Letters and Cultures professors participated in some of the conference’s concurrent panel sessions.

Associate Professor of Japanese William Hedberg gave a talk on “Meiji-Period Translations of Chinese Narrative into Vernacular Japanese” during a session on “Sacred and Vernacular Languages in Asia” that put his work in conversation with that of several scholars from around the world. And Assistant Professor of French Isaac Joslin presented his research on “Multi-Lingual Poetics: Mediating the Mind in Francophone Africa” as part of a session centered on “Orality, Narrativity and Translations of Afro-Diasporic Thought.”

Both their presentations engaged with the tensions between languages when texts are translated from one to another to reach a target audience, or when pieces of one language are included in texts written in another tongue. The question of audience is a long-standing one for African literature, Joslin said, although perhaps not the most important factor for writers to consider.

“Rather than focusing on one’s public, whether one is writing for a global or a local audience, the question should address first and foremost the author, who writes for him or herself as a means of expressing his or her memories, thoughts, emotions and reflections on life,” Joslin said. “The question that follows then is which language is best for accomplishing this feat, again, regardless of the potential audience.”

This emphasis on language as, above all else, a powerful tool for self-expression was underscored in many of the presentations throughout the conference. It is clear that language inflects many facets of everyday life, from conversations with friends and family, to interactions in legal or medical settings, to experiences in educational and governmental environments.

Kimberly Koerth

Content Writer, School of International Letters and Cultures

kkoerth@asu.edu

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ClickLearn and Andovar create new automated translation service - Technology Record - Translation

ClickLearn has partnered with Andovar to launch a new in-app professional translation service, making it quicker and easier for enterprise customers to translate business documents and recordings. 

Andovar, an international translation and localisation firm, uses over 5,000 vetted translators to capture context and subtleties correctly.  

"The whole team at Andovar is excited about our collaboration and this great opportunity to provide professional training translation solutions to ClickLearn's customers,” said Steven Bussey, vice president of marketing at Andovar. “Translation automation is the hot topic in localisation these days, and ClickLearn makes the entire process so simple by providing a translation ecosystem right inside their solution!"  

Users click a button within ClickLearn's app to receive a translated quote from Andovar. Once the users selects a translation, ClickLearn distributes the translations to the correct places across all their recordings and structures. This helps users to save time and money when translating.  

“This is the first time we are making external services available for our customers inside the ClickLearn application,” said Joachim Schiermacher, CEO of ClickLearn. “Having professional translations available at the click of a button can mean a world of difference to many of our global customers.”

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