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New words in French dictionaries show ‘great suppleness’ of language The GuardianTuesday, July 26, 2022
The Spanish Group Global Translation Service Expands to 35 Countries - Grit Daily - Translation
INC 500-Ranked Global Translation Company Expands to India, China and Australia
Irvine, CA – July 21, 2022 – The Spanish Group, an INC. 5000-ranked global translation service company offering expert, certified language translations in over 90 languages, has expanded its services to Australia, China and India, bringing the total number of countries The Spanish Group serves to 35.
“Our mission is to help build connections and create understanding through accurate, expert language translation services,” said The Spanish Group CEO Salvador Ordorica. “We are delighted about the fact that we have created rapid global growth through our commitment to excellence in language translations, and we are now serving 35 countries, including China, India, and Australia.”
In addition to working with translators who have a deep cultural understanding of China, India and Australia, The Spanish Group has also ensured a depth of proficiency by providing translation services for languages in high demand by businesses and consumers in these countries, including: Chinese Mandarin (as well as various dialects), Tagalog (Philippines), Vietnamese, and multiple African languages, including Swahili, Yoruba and more.
The Spanish Group have differentiated themselves from other language translation services through their commitment to quality, expertise in key industries requiring specialized translation services and expert, certified translators with native language expertise for the countries they serve. Translation services are offered online and delivered translations are certified, cost-effective and swiftly-produced.
The Spanish Group has earned particular recognition and success for its performance in translation areas such as legal, human resources, manufacturing and other industries, which they have achieved by working with experienced and specialized professionals with certified language proficiency.
About The Spanish Group
Founded in 2013 by CEO Salvador Ordorica, The Spanish Group is an internationally recognized certified translation service offering over 90 languages and unparalleled translation accuracy, localization, cost effectiveness, and efficiency. The Spanish Group’s mission is to further promote understanding and connectivity through language.
The Spanish Group sets itself apart by working with certified, professionally trained linguists all over the globe who are native speakers and deeply experienced specialists in a variety of fields.
Grit Daily News is the premier startup news hub. It is the top news source on Millennial and Gen Z startups — from fashion, tech, influencers, entrepreneurship, and funding. Based in New York, our team is global and brings with it over 400 years of combined reporting experience.
Monday, July 25, 2022
Sunday, July 24, 2022
View: National Language Translation Mission’s Bhashini will accelerate internet access for all Indians - Economic Times - Translation
The intention is to democratise use of the internet in India by allowing people access in regional languages. Officially, India recognises 22 languages with 12 scripts. Clearly, translation in scale for such a diverse set of languages to take internet content to the people is only possible through the application of deep tech - machine translation.
At present, access to the internet is mostly in English, though only 10% Indians are proficient in it. While there are a few startups catering to regional language preferences and some browsers that offer translations access to content on the internet for a non-English user is restricted.
Like all other digital initiatives undertaken by India, this, too, is based on an open digital architecture. As a result, both in scale and scope, the latest digital initiative is the most ambitious ever. It is like a UPI (United Payments Interface) moment for digital inclusion.
For more than a decade after the use of the internet took off, English was the primary language of access. However, by the turn of the millennium, access to the internet had begun to be enabled in other international languages, gradually eroding the hegemony of English. According to Internet World Stats, the two most prevalent languages on the internet are English (25.9%) and Chinese (19.4%). Spanish and Arabic are a distant third and fourth at 7.9% and 5.2%, respectively. No Indian language made it to the top 10.
English Vinglish
The political economy of this is obvious: proficiency in English determines the scale of access to the internet in India, further worsening the existing digital divide. Enabling access in regional languages will, therefore, democratise internet use in the country. In fact, a GoI white paper on Bhashini (bit.ly/3BdMuCg) reveals that more than one in two of those surveyed said they would use the internet if the content was made available in local languages.
The rollout of Bhashini was formally proposed by Nirmala Sitharaman in her 2021-22 budget. 'We will undertake a new initiative - National Language Translation Mission (NTLM). This will enable the wealth of governance- and policy-related knowledge on the internet being made available in major Indian languages,' she told Lok Sabha. Since then, NTLM has acquired the moniker Bhashini and was launched this year on the seventh anniversary of the Digital India week.
To be sure, the idea of deploying machine translation to translate content from English to other languages has been in the making for decades. Though India came late to the party - while the western world launched this effort in the 1950s - researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) had started exploring it from the 1980s with reasonable success. It got wings when the earlier avatar of the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) started funding R&D projects and set up the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) in 1991.
Making Tongues Wag
After 2005, there was a fortuitous convergence of several trends, which provided an unexpected boost to this initiative:
n The advent of neural processing in which computers acquired the ability to refine their output tremendously by being able to process more information using artificial intelligence.
n The launch of smartphones and their proliferation empowered users. In the post-Jio world this meant easy and cheap access to data.
n Broadband connectivity under the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) is now extending its footprint to rural India. As on July 1, 181,216 of the 262,825 gram panchayats in the country are now part of the optical fibre grid.
Throughout most of this period - when the ecosystem was being developed - the research was driven by the TDIL. In fact, there have been several notable successes. The most high profile is the Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software (Suvas). It translates the judgments delivered in English into nine major Indian languages and vice-versa. It has since been adopted by the Bangladesh judiciary, too.
In addition, there exist commercial translation systems offered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Though remarkable, it is nowhere close to the desired levels of scale in universalising content in regional languages. With the launch of Bhashini, NLTM has gone into mission mode to resolve this asymmetry of digital access in India.
Saturday, July 23, 2022
Merriam-Webster Adds Woke Gender Ideology to Definitions of 'Male,' 'Female' - Daily Signal - Dictionary
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary is facing renewed criticism for slipping woke gender ideology into its definitions of “male” and “female.”
“Female,” primarily defined in the online dictionary as “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs,” now includes the secondary definition of “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”
Similarly, the secondary definition of “male” reads “having a gender identity that is the opposite of female.”
The definition entries were originally changed in 2020, but widespread criticism resurfaced after the new definitions recently circulated on social media. Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh and the conservative account Libs of TikTok on Tuesday tweeted images of the expanded definitions as compared to past editions of the dictionary, resulting in a resurgence of overwhelmingly negative responses to Merriam-Webster’s addition.
In addition to including gender identity as a legitimate definition for “male” and “female,” Merriam-Webster added the words “typically has the capacity” to both the original definition of “female” as “the sex that bears young and produces eggs” and the original definition of “male” as “the sex that produces relatively small, usually motile gametes, which fertilize the eggs of a female.”
Those changes suggest agreement with the transgender community’s contention that a person’s gender identity is legitimate, even if that person does not have the same physical characteristics or capabilities as the gender they claim to embody.
Many who criticize Merriam-Webster’s subtle redefinition of “male” and “female” see it ultimately as an attack on the concepts of objective truth and reality, and think it reflects the culture’s dismissal of the biological reality of “male” and “female” as “transphobic” and even “dangerous.”
This redefinition continues Merriam-Webster’s trend of wokeness. In 2019, it chose the pronoun “they,” with one of its definitions as “a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary,” as its Word of the Year in a nod to the nonbinary community, and similarly added gender identity to its secondary definitions of “boy” and “girl” to read “a child whose gender identity is male” and “a person whose gender identity is female.”
The Daily Signal sought a comment from Merriam-Webster, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
Friday, July 22, 2022
AI-based, real-time multilingual translations available - Nation Thailand - Translation
There are still many challenges even with consecutive interpretations. A ministry official said that to improve accuracy in simultaneous interpretation, it is necessary to develop technologies that can infer subjects often omitted in Japanese sentences and anticipate contexts of speech.
Pocketalk, a best-selling translation device in Japan by Pocketalk Corp. in Tokyo, combines translation engines by NICT, Google, and other companies with each other to support 82 languages. The product is increasingly used in the medical field in addition to travel and language learning.
Earphones, glasses
Portable translation devices are the most common on the market. Pocketalk, for example, is a palm-sized terminal about 10 centimetres long and six centimetres wide. The size of such devices can be reduced as technology improves. Google and Chinese information technology companies have also been developing and releasing earphone-type and glasses-type “wearable” translators. Consumers’ options are expanding and convenience is increasing.
The market of machine translation is expected to grow, intensifying development competition.
“Understanding someone who speaks a different language … can be a real challenge. Let’s see what happens when we take our advancements in translation and transcription and deliver them in your line of sight,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at an event in May when introducing a prototype of a glasses-type translator.
Tobishima Corp., a construction company in Tokyo, developed a glasses-type translator with a display screen for one eye and has already put it into use at construction sites. The company said that the device has proved very helpful in communicating with foreign employees who do not understand Japanese well.
A Tobishima employee said, “The device can translate technical terms in the construction field, too. In addition, as translations are displayed on the screen, there is no problem even when it is used in a noisy environment.”
Kazuma Kikuchi
The Japan News
Thursday, July 21, 2022
How Are Words Removed From a Dictionary? - People | HowStuffWorks - Dictionary
Emotions, intentions, thoughts and ideas. We use language to pull abstractions from the ether and transform them into concrete communication tools. How could we progress as a culture unless we shared a common understanding for popular words in the English language, such as book, friend, laugh, think or often, or uncommon words like biblioklept, nauseant or hirquiticke?
But that doesn't mean words don't fall out of fashion. In 2021, nine words were removed from dictionaries, or classified as "archaic," "historical" or "obsolete." Aerodrome, for example, was determined to no longer be applicable to modern life because we collectively call airplane landing fields "airports." Likewise, "frutescent," which refers to an object or person having the appearance of a shrub, was removed from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as was "frigorific," which has been replaced by the more commonly used "frigid."
So who, exactly, makes the decision to remove a word from a dictionary?
The culling of dictionary words is left to lexicographers, who not only decide which words to remove but also add new words and update changing definitions or pronunciations. Lexicographers also are responsible for adding new words. In 2022, for example, "demisexual" and "vaxxed" were new additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, along with "humblebrag," which was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Whether it's the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary — or an exclusively digital version such as Dictionary.com — each type of dictionary has its own process for removing words and this information isn't always publicly available. While some dictionaries don't share the decision-making tree for word removal, the American Heritage Dictionary removes words created before the year 1755 that are only sporadically used in modern life.
When lexicographers remove a word from the dictionary, it doesn't mean that word ceases to exist. It also means that we, collectively, have the power to influence which words stay. If you'd like to return "skedaddle" to popular usage, then you'd better get to it — fast.
Truth is, it's actually quite difficult for a word to lose its place in a dictionary. Lexicographers don't take word-removal lightly. When a word comes into question, dictionary editors will embark on a rigorous examination of meaning, usage and popularity across sprawling language databases that cover a variety of mediums. Often, words that are marked for deletion from printed dictionaries are allowed to remain part of online dictionaries. This culling process for print editions allows dictionaries to remain relevant and, frankly, portable. Without removing words, we'd need a wheelbarrow to move our paper dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains about 600,000 entries — an estimated half of all the words used in the English language.
Despite carefully executed word addition and removal procedures, dictionaries aren't impervious to mistakes. For a time, "redripening" appeared in most dictionaries as one word, when it actually should have been hyphenated, as in a "red-ripening" strawberry.
The lexicographers behind some dictionaries have even wised up to competitors scraping their content and remarketing it as their own. The Oxford English Dictionary once included the fake word "esquivalience," along with the made-up definition of "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities," so they could spot other dictionaries ripping off their copyrighted work.
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