Mozilla has released the Firefox Translations add-on which lets you translate websites in Firefox without using the cloud. This is the latest development of the ongoing Project Bergamot, which is building machine translation tools to enable Mozilla to offer website translation that operates locally so that no data is sent to the cloud.
Whereas Chrome and Edge have integrated translation facilities, these rely on cloud-based translation services and require that webpage content be transmitted to a third party for translation. Given it's emphasis on trust and privacy and data protection Mozilla wanted a solution that would work locally on the user’s machine, ensuring that no data leaves the user’s computer for the purpose of translation.
In 2019 Mozilla partnered with the University of Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield and University of Tartu in Project Bergamot, a research project funded by the European Union. Last year we reported on the ability to translate from Spanish and Estonian to English and vice versa, and from English to German being introduced into Firefox Nightly.
Now Mozilla has announced the its translations add-on is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release. Firefox Translations provides automated translation of web content. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally, on the client-side, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine.
The languages supported are:
Production
Spanish <-> English
Estonian <-> English
English <-> German
Czech <-> English
Bulgarian <-> English
Norwegian Bokmål -> English
Portuguese <-> English
Italian <-> English
Development
Russian <-> English
Persian (Farsi) <-> English
Icelandic -> English
Norwegian Nynorsk -> English
Mozilla is looking for users’ feedback and the add-on includes a survey that will help Project Bergamot collaborators determine the future direction of the product. Mozilla has also developed a training pipeline to allow enthusiasts in the community to easily train new models, helping expand the add-on reach to more languages.
Why is translation so important for Firefox? Quite simply it needs it to compete with Chrome and Edge, which both offer it as standard. Many simply cannot do without the ability to read webpages in other languages and as such can't use Firefox - until now. In addition the privacy aspects of not needing to access a cloud-based server will make it more attractive than the mainstream alternatives. even if it doesn't support as many languages.
More Information
Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot
Bergamot webite
Bergamot-translator on GitHub
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Firefox Close To Offering Local Translation
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Apple’s iOS has already made our lives a tad bit easier by letting us copy and paste text in our photos. Now, that same live text functionality will extend to videos, as well as its translation app.
If you’re watching a video, you can pause the frame and select the text, like you can currently do in a photo. But for both photos and videos, Apple is giving us more options to interact with our selected text. Soon, we will be able to translate live text into another language or quickly convert currency amounts. This may be helpful when traveling in a country where you don’t speak the language and need to read street signs, or if you want to know whether that lunch special price is actually a good deal or not. To use the feature, users can navigate to Apple’s translation app, which will now host a live camera view.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple also plans to improve dictation features, which can be useful as an accessibility tool. Apple says that dictation is used over 18 billion times each month, since it can be faster that typing ( … unless if you were born after 1995). But we’ve all received a text from an older family member that’s punctuated so awkwardly that you know they used dictation. Now, Apple plans to improve automatic punctuation, plus it will allow you to add emojis with your voice — as they said in the WWDC keynote, “mind blown emoji.”
The new dictation features will also make it easier to switch back and forth between typing and dictation, making the switch between voice and touch a bit more seamless.
But when it comes to sending texts, perhaps the most exciting updates lie in the ability to edit and unsend messages. Now that’s deserving of a mind blown emoji.
Apple also unveiled its plans for the iCloud Shared Photos Library. Up to six users can collaborate on a shared album, choosing to share photos from their existing albums, or toggling to instantly share photos from the camera app (be careful, y’all). Apple’s AI will also recommend photos to share to the collaborative library based on who is in your pictures. All users have the capacity to add, delete, edit or favorite photos in the shared library.
Update, 6/6/22, 2:04 PM ET with information about iCloud Shared Photo Library.
Geetanjali Shree, left, wrote "Tomb of Sand" and Daisy Rockwell, at right, translated it from Hindi. They shared 50,000 British pounds as winners of the 2022 International Booker Prize. Courtesy photo.
How challenging was it for Daisy Rockwell of Bennington to translate “Tomb of Sand,” Geetanjali Shree’s novel, from Hindi to English?
“It's really experimental, and it’s also a very rebellious book and rebellious, in particular, against conventions in storytelling and expectations for what a novel should be,” Rockwell said. “A lot of readers complain that the main character doesn't get out of bed for like the first 200 pages. But I just find that fascinating. You just never really know where she's going.”
Rockwell’s fascination paid big dividends. She and Shree received the 2022 International Booker Prize at a ceremony in London on May 26. The prize honors the best book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. Rockwell and Shree will split the 50,000 British pounds — approximately $63,000 — of prize money they received in conjunction with the award itself.
Shree’s novel follows the journey of an 80-year-old Indian woman to Pakistan. It weaves in themes of womanhood, family and trauma with a narrative centering on the partition of British India. Some of its experimentalism is seen in its ever-shifting points of view, including the perspectives of crows, the sun, and even that of a door and a window.
“Tomb of Sand” is the first novel in an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize and the first Hindi novel to receive a nomination, according to The New York Times. It is Shree’s third novel and her first to be published in Britain.
“They really make sure that there’s lots of suspense, so very few people know who’s going to win — like the judges, a few organizers — so it’s kind of built up and built up,” Rockwell said. “So by the time that it was posted, I was a nervous wreck.”
When they learned their book won, Rockwell and Shree were both in shock. Rockwell compared her response to being on a plane, where they tell you in case of emergency to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you.
“I tried to process it quickly, and then they tell you to have a sample speech in case you win, so I got out my speech and then I went over to (Shree) and she was just completely shut down,” Rockwell said. “I had to kind of tell her what had happened and give her a hug and then bring her up to the stage.”
Rockwell said she had never before won such a prestigious award of this level. She considers the International Booker Prize the highest honor in the English-speaking world of literature.
“It's funny for me because actually none of my books have ever been published in the U.S.,” she said. “Even in the Western translating world, I'm not known at all, so I think it was very surprising to me. We're sort of coming out of nowhere, like the underdogs.”
By now, a U.S. publisher has picked up “Tomb of Sand,” with its official announcement expected momentarily.
Rockwell said she’s been trying unsuccessfully to get her work published in the U.S. for decades, and many of her friends who translate South Asian languages have had similar struggles.
Daisy Rockwell translated "Tomb of Sand," written in Hindi by Geetanjali Shreee, and the book won the 2022 International Booker Prize. Author and translator split the $50,000 prize. Courtesy photo.
“Tomb of Sand” was published in the U.K. in August by a small publisher, Tilted Axis Press, which was founded by Deborah Smith, who won the 2016 International Booker Prize for her translation of “The Vegetarian,” alongside author Han Kang.
“She calls it ‘Tilted Axis’ because her idea is to sort of tilt the axis of the world of translation and literature towards a greater inclusiveness to literatures that haven't been recognized in the West,” Rockwell said. “She mostly publishes translations from Asian languages.”
Smith scouted “Tomb of Sand” while looking for books in India, and Rockwell was selected as the translator by way of another translator’s recommendation, Rockwell said.
“This is my first book to be published outside of India, and I would say very much so, the reason why it's my first is because there is really a strong bias in the publishing world,” she said. “Any type of aesthetic judgment can also be racist or xenophobic.”
Rockwell hopes people in the U.S. will continue to become more open-minded and travel through literature, choosing to read in translation as a means of crossing boundaries.
“Americans are very insular and monolingual, and that brings about a kind of blindness and limitation in perspectives,” Rockwell said.
From the first meeting to future plans
“Fiction is the most intimate of all arts, the only one in which we can truly inhabit another mind,” said Frank Wynne, chair of this year’s panel of judges for the International Booker Prize. “For as long as writers have told stories, translators have brought them to the world.”
Wynne is the first translator to chair the panel.
“Translators matter. This is something that bears repeating in the somewhat solipsistic anglophone world,” he said. “Geetanjali Shree’s joyous cacophony is captured in the playful poetics of Daisy Rockwell.”
Rockwell and Shree did not meet in person until last week for the awards ceremony. Initially, Rockwell planned to visit India to collaborate, but the pandemic interfered with those plans.
“All of our interactions were on email. We didn't even Zoom or talk on the phone,” Rockwell said. “By the time we met last week, we felt like friends.”
Rockwell said she looks forward to working with Shree on additional translations of her work.
“Where would any of us be without Daisy, who has given this book its English incarnation, making it accessible for all of you?” Shree asked her audience at the awards ceremony. “Thank you, Daisy, thank you, thank you.”
Where it all began
Rockwell’s love for languages and translating began when she started studying Latin in seventh grade. She continued her Latin studies in college in addition to taking French and German.
“I decided I wanted to try something really different and challenging,” she said. “So I started to learn Hindi, mostly because it fit in my schedule, and kind of stuck with it.”
She later went to graduate school to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in South Asian languages and literature and became more serious about translating. She also translates Urdu, a South Asian language similar to Hindi.
“I read other South Asian languages but not well enough to translate from them,” she said. “Languages are like people or countries: You gravitate to some of them, some of them you fall in love with, some of them are just not for you. So for me, for some reason, this just became my life partner.”
Daisy Rockwell, left, translated from Hindi "Tomb of Sand," written by Geetanjali Shree, at right. They shared 50,000 British pounds as winners of the 2022 International Booker Prize. Courtesy photo.
Translation philosophies
Rockwell said her process involves a rough first draft with the only primary goal being to get the story out of the original language and into English, which often feels mechanical. After that, the process takes on a more creative lens, in making the story actually “live” in another language.
“But at the same time, I'm in a situation where I'm translating a language, Hindi, from a country that went through colonialism, and I'm translating it into the colonial language, English, so there's a power differential,” Rockwell said.
Rockwell takes care to remain sensitive to that power differential and that she herself is not Indian. She’s found that many of her readers are Indians who cannot read Hindi, so in her translations, she tries to prioritize retaining the intended cultural elements of the Hindi language.
“English is still a huge language in India as well. It has its own style and flavors,” she said.
Still, she struggles with the delicate process of balancing the need for readability and accessibility with the need to preserve the integrity of the original — while keeping all of her readers in mind, from Indians preferring to read in English to American neighbors in Vermont.
Additionally, Rockwell said, she decided to move away from translating literature written by men a few years back when she realized all of her translations up to that point were books by men.
“I started to really be conscious of the fact that women's voices are often not heard or sidelined in books by men,” she said. “There's a lot of objectification obviously, kind of sexualized descriptions of women that don't allow them to come out as well-rounded characters.”
In her free time, Rockwell enjoys painting and spending time with her 13-year-old daughter. She finds she does her best translating work in busy spaces, such as the waiting rooms at her daughter’s dance classes.
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The Crow Dictionary that has more than 10,000 words in it was just published by The Language Conservancy. (Darrell Ehrlick/Daily Montanan)
CROW AGENCY – A drum circle sang songs of victory. A smudging ceremony wiped away the tears. And Crow tribal elders spoke in Apsáalooke (Crow language) about the next generation that has yet to be born.
Friday’s celebration at Little Big Horn College wasn’t just the culmination of a years-long project to capture the words and culture of the Crow people, it was also a testament to saving the words that had been buried deep in many tribal members’ memories, preserving them and making them live again.
On Friday, at a three-hour ceremony, The Language Conservancy, an Indiana-based group focused on preserving languages, especially indigenous tongues, unveiled the “Crow Dictionary,” a massive collection of nearly 850 pages that documents the language and is the first major collection of the language published since 1975.
Not only is the dictionary more user-friendly and modern, it doubles the number of collected words from 5,500 to more than 10,000 – a huge accomplishment for saving a language that had been on the decline, but has recently seen a turnaround as language immersion programs grow on the reservation and a popular phone app has digitized the dictionary.
In many ways, the songs and speeches weren’t just a celebration of the dictionary’s arrival, they were a victory against time itself.
“For other languages, you can go somewhere else in the world to still hear them being spoken,” said Jacob Brien, whose Crow name is Ishkoochìia Chiiakaamnáah. “But this is the only place in the world where you can learn about this and hear it.”
Estimates range on how many people speak Apsáalooke, but many peg the number around 2,000.
Brien is a student at Rocky Mountain College who is spending the summer at The Language Conservancy. His goal is to become a linguist to help preserve the Crow and grow the number of Crow speakers. Even at 19 years old, he understands “without our language, we won’t have our culture.”
He’s spending the bulk of the summer in Bloomington, Indiana – a long way from southern Montana. He’s learning the software and how to continue building upon the Crow dictionary so that when the succeeding editions come out, the number of words will grow and the definitions will become even more precise.
He’s listed in the acknowledgements, and explains that he had a direct part of helping to write the definitions of kinship, which are different in the Crow culture than in many American families. For example, your brother’s children are considered your children, too. And your mother’s brothers and sisters administer discipline and guidance, leaving parents to fill a more nurturing role.
“To be listed next to the names of some of my heroes is a huge honor,” Brien said.
Jacob Brien, a college student at Rocky Mountain College, has been working with The Language Conservancy to preserve, document and promote the Crow language. (Darrell Ehrlick/Daily Montanan)
Brien is happy that the language programs, including in-school immersion, are growing in popularity. Even as he was growing up, he said that many teachers just assumed the kids could speak and understand Crow. He said he knew a few words, but had to learn much of the language in middle and high school.
He said the language isn’t necessarily difficult, but it requires memorizing a lot of compound words, made up of phonemes, or letter/sound combinations that stand for certain words that are put together. For example, the Crow word for coffee, bilishpÃtisshe, is a compound word that translates literally to “black water.”
The effort to preserve the language and print the dictionary was done through the help of nearly 100 volunteer Crow speakers using a method that was invented nearly a century ago called “rapid word collection.”
Bob Rugh, a staff member at The Language Conservancy, helped lead the technical process and trains linguists. He explained that groups of four to six Crow speakers broke out into groups. Each group took a common word (there are 1,800) and were encouraged to think of as many Apsáalooke words related to that English word as possible. From there, they were able to build a more expansive Crow language word list. In the process, many older, lesser used words were collected and preserved.
Shawn Real Bird, the economic development director of the Crow nation, told the crowd of more than 100 people not only would the dictionary help preserve the language, but it would give the future a vocabulary of its own.
“This will maintain the language for our children, our grandchildren and those not born yet. It will give them words for our sun dance, our pipe ceremony, our fasting ceremony,” Real Bird said. “This will hopefully be the beginning for an associate’s, a bachelor’s, master’s and even Ph.D., so I want you to take this and pray about it in whatever ceremonies you use.”
Janine Pease, who has been a towering figure at Little Big Horn College and a key force in developing the Apsáalooke language programs, was honored for her work.
“Language is a gift from the creator,” she said. “These words honor the people who are here and all the others who said them. They were said by people in 1700. They were said by people in 1500 and in 1200. They are voices from our long distant past.”
She rejected the notion that Apsáalooke has been coopted by English because its vocabulary is too old and not robust enough to describe more modern concepts.
“We own our world, and we name our world. People have said that we need English in order to make it work, not so,” Pease said. “We don’t live in someone else’s world, we live in ours.”
Translation is a delicate matter. To iterate that it involves knowledge of two languages is a no-brainer. What’s more important is that this obvious “qualification” of “knowledge of two languages” is clearly not enough. Especially when it involves what is designated as a “literary” text. Meaning of a text is constructed at two levels: the connotative and denotative.
Denotations are the literal meanings that can be accessed through dictionaries, connotative meanings, on the other hand, arise from what words connote and, therefore, rely on deeper knowledge of the language. Literary translations are challenging precisely in that they rely on connotative meanings and figurative language. Sometimes translators need to look at the whole constellation and not just the star: a silent night sky of significance/extended meanings/ingested cultural meanings to fully operate between two languages. So it is ideal that the translator understands both, not only with a felicity but with an intimacy of an insider.
When Geeta Dharmarajan founded Katha in 1988, one of the key points in her manifesto was to set up a publication firm that would facilitate translations of literary texts from and among the many bhashas of India, besides into English. Sahitya Akademi, too, has facilitated this exchange amongst Indian languages since its inception post-Independence.
In more recent times, Rohan Murty has filled that space most ardently with the Murty Classical Library of India in bringing up the line of translated Indian classics by the best known international names in the field.
India being a multilingual country, it is ideal that a constant exchange of literature takes place between languages. That would lead to a greater “understanding” of spaces, India being a unique country in that most of our states were originally carved on the basis of language and each coming with an established literary tradition. South Asia also has the distinction of the succession of an entire nation (Bangladesh) from its parent country on the basis of language. So there are ample signs that language is a grave matter here.
The creative effort made towards serious translations between languages, thus, create a wholesome exchange and is one teeming with endless possibilities. Translations from regional languages to English expand the scope of the book in one go and with that is linked to the larger politics of language. Like with Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjali Shree collaborating on Tombs of Sand, the ambit of the text widens to an international readership owing to translation.
Since literary texts, by definition, are not fixed compositions, they enclose a cultural, symbolic and figurative significance. This is where challenges for a translator abound. It can be daunting to recreate a cultural experience into another language. What is stated as a matter of fact for everybody to understand in the original, is sometimes made into a description akin to a glossary.
So Mulk Raj Anand (one of the trinity of Indian writing in English, along with Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan), shows a certain awkwardness in translating salwar as a “loose trousers held with a string” in The Untouchable (1935). But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Writers today would dispense with such tedium and use the cultural word for what it is, salwar.
In a world today where we are more exposed to experiences of other disparate cultures, we might choose to use original words for cultural items and kinship terms and cooking rather than translate them into oddities that shift the meaning, thereby sounding stilted and awkward, besides puncturing the flow in critical places. But then, there are no fixed rules that can be held out as a talisman. Every single situation calls for a judgement and a decision. Depending upon the suitability of the context, the translator decides upon the ground rules. But really, such decisions are hinged upon the translator’s intimate knowledge of not only the language but also importantly, the language communities s/he deals with.
Literary texts also carry an aura of earlier literatures available in those languages. So when we do a reading of Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat by Faiz in the classroom, the famous nazm that was a watershed in the history of Urdu poetry, one is dealing not only with the black marks on paper that have to be paraphrased but the nazm’s comprehensive significance, complete with the embedded meanings, secondary references and tertiary signification that it precariously carries on its frail shoulders. So my Hindustani-knowing class is never satisfied with the translation alone and that is not a statement on the efficacy of translation at all.
While they accept Agha Shahid Ali’s translation at a cognitive level, at the level of the affective, the reading is not complete without bringing in the soft inflections of the original Urdu culminating in collective sighs and gasps. And that is the only way to complete the reading. They might not fully understand the Urdu, owing to another tragic political decision, but they do feel the nazm more completely once the Urdu version has been read out. It completes their experience of studying the nazm. They understand a more intimate romance flowing from their surroundings, connecting them to older generations—their grandparents, who could have very well known and sung it.
It connects them to popular renditions in Bollywood and its many spin-offs, given the fact that a whole generation of Urdu poets were inspired by Faiz in direct and indirect ways and inserted lines verbatim from this poem as a kind of tribute to the iconic nazm. Agha Shahid Ali had all the credentials of an ideal translator for Faiz: his impeccable Urdu, his poetic sensibility, his liberal ethos, and to stretch the point, even a teenage infatuation for Begum Akhtar that he claimed gave him a lifelong love of ghazal, and yet there are parts where his English translation does not do the trick.
It is not a lack of acumen, it is just the nature of language. In some ways it can’t be helped. He is mindful of this challenge himself and has modestly claimed to undertake the translation in the hope that “something can be borne across to English readers, even if a fraction” (Introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette). This is when one would rate Ali as one of the finest translators of Faiz.
Sometimes, a common experience of reading a translation is a certain vacuum and emptiness. And that is not at the level of the translator not “getting” the poem. Words are all there, but the effect is elusive. Robert Frost goes to the extent of claiming that “Poetry is what is lost in translation”. So when the lines in English “...the sky wherever I looked, was nothing but your eyes” the class was mildly appreciative, but it took its Urdu equivalent, “teri ankhon ke siva duniya mein rakhha kya hai”, to have them swoon over.
So translation is no mean business. While it might have its flip side and share of unsatisfactory attempts, a less than perfect translation is better than no translation. More translations would lead to better translations in course of time. The fine ones would stick and take the translated texts into territories they would never travel in the original. A translation is a bridge. Let people cross over to the other side. More the merrier.
A county in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has withdrawn the country’s most authoritative Chinese language dictionary as local authorities initiated a campaign to “purify the reading environment for minors.”
The 11th edition of the Xinhua Dictionary, along with a few other children’s books, were removed from the shelves in Quanzhou County for including “vulgar content,” according to a now-deleted article posted by the local procuratorate Thursday. Authorities didn’t specify the dictionary entries that were deemed vulgar, but many online had accused the dictionary of using sexist explanations to describe certain words.
For example, the word “tease” was explained using derogatory references to women.
The move came after a county-wide inspection of school textbooks and children’s books on June 1.
Last week, China’s top education authority issued a nationwide review of school textbooks in response to controversial illustrations in sixth grade math textbooks. However, the inspections in Quanzhou were initiated by local authorities instead of the central government.
The deleted article was accompanied by several photos, showing two local procuratorate officials in uniform flipping through a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore and photographing the content deemed objectionable. Many online criticized the action as “performative law enforcement.”
On Sunday, the municipal procuratorate in Guilin, which administers Quanzhou County, determined the action as a “misconduct.” The statement didn’t elaborate further and asked Quanzhou officials to make the dictionary available again in stores.
Editor: Bibek Bhandari.
(Header image: Local procuratorate officials in uniform check a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore in Quanzhou County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 1, 2022. From Weibo)
A conversation both In English and in German-- yet the two having it understanding each other perfectly. All because of the Mental Health Association of South-Central Kansas's new language translation devices.
The technology is bridging what would typically be a big language barrier by allowing people to speak in their native language to each other-- before that language is translated nearly instantly to the other person, in one that they understand.
Eric Litwiller with MHASCK says "A pretty substantial segment of the Wichita metro area population who speak a language other than English primarily in the home now have access to mental health care, where as they really couldn't have before because of the language barrier."
He adds their clinic, like almost every other field, has struggled getting staff, especially bi-lingual therapists, saying "It's hard enough to find therapists in the first place, especially those who are willing to work in the nonprofit sector."
The effort to improve mental health treatment for minority groups here in Wichita, is something that Yeni Telles supports.
"Mental health services definitely are in high need in our community and lately, we have been having a lot of conversations with the immigrant community, refugee community about mental health."
Telles works with both the International Rescue Committee and Sunflower Community Action, so she interacts with people who speak a numerous number of languages.
She says while she has some concerns about the translators, mainly some of the cultural meanings that could get "Lost in translation."-- she believes ultimately, this addresses a major need.
"I think it's important for us to be creative, and innovate, you know, bring different instruments that are going to benefit our community."
