Literary Notes: Little-known Pakistani language Shina gets a bilingual dictionary - DAWN.com - Dictionary

PAKISTAN is a linguistic paradise from a linguist’s point of view as in just two of its regions — Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral — some 30 languages are spoken.

There are over 75 languages and dialects spoken in Pakistan and many of them are not only little-known but also endangered: some of them may become extinct pretty soon. These endangered languages include Badeshi, also known as Badakhshani, believed to be spoken by hardly a few hundred native speakers and some experts put the figure much below — as low as less than 100.

What perturbs one is the fact that research on these Pakistani languages is being carried out mostly by foreigners and many Pakistanis do not know even the names of many languages that their fellow Pakistanis speak. It is a fact that research on languages spoken in Pakistan’s north and adjoining areas was initiated by some western scholars much before creation of Pakistan, in an era when these areas were almost inaccessible.

For instance, Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893), a British army engineer who later on became archaeological surveyor of India — as mentioned by C. E. Buckland in his Dictionary of Indian Biography — wrote a book on Ladakh, describing historical and physical facts about Ladakh and the adjoining areas. In this book, titled Ladak: Physical, Statistical, Historical with Notices of the Surrounding Countries (1854), Cunningham described the basic facts about languages spoken in Hunza and Nagar, including Burushaski. He has also given a select vocabulary of some languages of the regions.

Linguistic Survey of India, a monumental work by George Abraham Grierson (1851-1941) in 19 volumes recorded some 175 languages and over 500 dialects spoken in the British India. Working on these languages between 1898 and 1928, Grierson gave, in part II of volume VIII, details of languages known as Dardic or Pisacha languages, a group of languages closely related to Indo-Aryan family of languages spoken in what is today’s North and North-West Pakistan, Kashmir and some parts of Afghanistan.

Another scholar, who single-handedly worked on many languages spoken in the northern parts of British India, was D. L. R. Lorimer (1876-1962). Though an officer in British Indian army, Lorimer was a linguist and served as political agent at Gilgit between 1920 and 1924. He knew several local languages and carried out research on Pashto, Khwaar, Wakhi, Shina, Burushaski, Domaki and Badakhshani. His work on Burushaski’s history, grammar and vocabulary is in three volumes and was published from Oslo in 1935.

Other scholars from the west who have carried out research on Pakistani languages include: Henry George Raverty whose work on Pashto is well-known; Hermann Berger who is known for his research on Burushaski; Max Arthur Macauliffe’s work on Punjabi, especially Sikh scriptures, is appreciated; Mansel Longworth Dames did some pioneering work on the Balochi language and poetry; and Ernest Trumpp’s work on Sindhi language and literature, especially Shah Jo Rislao, are but a few examples of how these western scholars devoted their time and efforts for local languages.

Shina is among those little-known Pakistani languages that have attracted attention of some foreign scholars and Ruth Laila Schmidt has worked on it. Shina is also called Shinaki. It is an Indo-Aryan language and, according to Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com), Shina is spoken in Gilgit, Diamer, Chilas, Haramosh, Lower Hunza, Astore, Kharmang, Kachura, Satpara, some scattered villages in Yasin and some other areas of Gilgit-Baltistan.

In Kashmir, Shina is spoken in Neelam district of Azad Kashmir and in Kargil in India-held Kashmir. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, it is spoken in Kohistan and Sazin areas. But some scholars have mentioned some other areas as well where Shina or its dialects are spoken, such as, Chitral, Swat and Dir. Shina’s dialects are: Gilgiti, Astori and Chilasi Kohistani. Some believe Gilgiti is the standard dialect.

Shina is a Dardic language and Dardic languages do not have a very long history of written texts. Until recently, Shina, too, did not have a script and its orthographic system was conceived a few decades ago. It is written in Arabic script and since 1960s different suggestions for representing Shina phonology in Arabic script have been under consideration. However, native speakers of Shina have been working on the task and Muhammad Amin Zia published in Urdu script Shina Qaida Aur Grammar. Zia also compiled a Shina Lughat (Shina dictionary) with a phonetic scheme.

Now Abdul Khaliq Taj, a writer and scholar of Shina and an office-bearer of Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Zauq, Gilgit, has published Taj-ul-Lughaat, a Shina-Urdu dictionary. Shina words are written in Shina script (naskh) and Urdu equivalents are given in Urdu script (nasta’leeq).

This may work as a catalyst for further research on Shina and may encourage other scholars to work for preservation and promotion of the language.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2022

Adblock test (Why?)

How AI could help translate extreme weather alerts - Axios - Translation

Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios

A startup that provides AI-powered translation is working with the National Weather Service to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the U.S.

The big picture: Gaps in language access to emergency alerts during extreme weather events have led to missed evacuations, injuries and loss of life for non-English speakers. Machine learning could mitigate that.

Driving the news: AI-translation service Lilt has recently started working on a pilot project with the weather service to help produce more comprehensive weather warnings.

How it works: Incorporating a mix of software and human translators, the service learns from linguists in real time using a neural network, or a computer system modeled loosely on the brain — which gets smarter with each use.

• The team behind Lilt, which earlier this year raised a $55 million Series C, markets its speed of translation at the rate of at least three times the speed of other translation services, while also picking up slang and regional dialects.
• The software gets used by human forecasters at the NWS forecasting office, with the AI engine suggesting translation for the translators to work with, while actively storing all of their input.

What they're saying: Phil Stiefel, solutions lead at Lilt, told Axios there is a longstanding need for better translation at the weather service.

• "If there's a translation error in a translated weather report, and somebody takes the wrong action based on that missed translation, then somebody could get hurt or even killed because of that," Stiefel told Axios.
• According to data by the Migration Policy Institute, in 2019, 22% of U.S. residents over the age of five spoke a language other than English at home.

The backstory: Past translation problems during floods, wildfires and tornadoes point to a legacy of language barriers within federal, state and local emergency weather alerting systems.

• In 2017, nearly all of the people in New York City to die from flash flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida were Asian and spoke limited English or Spanish, which the New York Times reported may have led to those residents not receiving warnings to evacuate.
• Seven members of a Guatemalan family in Oklahoma died from flash floods in 2013 after leaving their home to seek shelter in a storm drain upon hearing a tornado warning. NBC News reported "they hadn't heard or understood there had also been storm and flood warnings."
• And a 2020 study found that emergency warnings during California's 2017-18 Thomas Fire were initially only available in English. As a result, Latino residents living in the two most heavily impacted counties missed information about evacuation areas, road closures, unsafe air and boil water notices.

The intrigue: This isn't the only way the NWS is working to improve translation issues in the alert system.

• A 2021 research article published in the American Meteorological Society looked at issues in English-to-Spanish translation of weather alerts that didn't account for dialects, which led to "inconsistent risk messaging," in Spanish-language alerts.
• The NWS/NOAA has since updated the language it uses in hazardous weather communication, adopting "dialect-neutral" terminology suggested by the study authors, as reported by Noticias Telemundo.

The bottom line: Monica Bozeman, the automated language translation lead at the NWS Office of Central Processing, told Axios in an email that the agency has developed experimental pilot projects looking to introduce automation to translation — Lilt being one of them.

• "From these projects, we hope to learn the feasibility of applying automation to gain efficiency with translation turnaround times while reducing the burden of translation on our personnel, especially during critical hazardous weather events," Bozeman wrote.

Adblock test (Why?)

Rotary dictionary donation | Education | thecentralvirginian.com - The Central Virginian - Dictionary

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Rotary dictionary donation | Education | thecentralvirginian.com  The Central Virginian

Mandla App Introduces Dictionary to Transliterate African Languages, Revives Near-Extinct Languages - StreetInsider.com - Dictionary

FREE Breaking News Alerts from StreetInsider.com!

StreetInsider.com Top Tickers, 10/20/2022

October 20, 2022 5:42 AM EDT

---

News and research before you hear about it on CNBC and others. Claim your 1-week free trial to StreetInsider Premium here.

---

As part of its plans to leverage technology to preserve African languages, Mandla dictionary translates words into 100 languages for a start

New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - October 20, 2022) - Mandla is pleased to announce the introduction of the Mandla Dictionary, the first multilingual, multidialectal, multiscriptual, and audio-supported online parallel dictionary for African languages.

Mandla

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://ift.tt/SsADy9M

Mandla dictionary is designed to revive disused African scripts like the Adlam, Bamum, N'ko, and Osmanya, one at a time starting with N'ko. This includes giving life to once-dead African writing systems like Nsibidi, Tifinagh, Kassena logograms, and Meroitic.

It also provides users with the translation of African languages as well as the transliteration of these languages from Latin and English through the use of writing scripts, voice recognition, and pictorial representation.

The Mandla Dictionary uses data sourced openly which is made available to users for free. It features definitions in each language both in a chosen native language and Latin scripts as well as English.

Mandla gives users free membership in the platform with the option of allowing members to add new words and examples to the dictionary, including suggesting edits to existing words and examples. Updates are sent to members on the status of words they contributed via email.

As part of its all-inclusive plan of African languages, the Mandla Dictionary currently translates words from 100 languages including Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu, Xhosa, Twi, Akan, Amharic, Moore, and many others, highlighting even some dying languages in its mission of digital preservation to avoid language extinction shortly.

Since the younger generation of Africans has lost touch with their mother, and some others struggle to find a platform that's all out to teach these languages, Mandla App has taken the lead in making learning these languages easier for them.

It also encourages people of non-African descent, especially tourists to the African continent to take advantage of the app and learn how to communicate fluently with locals. The Mandla Dictionary simplifies words and adds the origin of such words.

"While this is just the beginning, we hope to by the end of 2022 have the largest existing dictionary dataset for every major African language with transliterations of N'ko script as well as each language's native script," concluded Wenitte Apiou, CEO and Founder of Mandla.

The Mandla Dictionary is available at https://ift.tt/rLAShyW

Wenitte Apiou, CEO and Founder of Mandla

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://ift.tt/0Gy5z2H

About Mandla Dictionary

The Mandla Dictionary is an online word-translating platform that allows users to find out the original spelling, pronunciation, and tonation of 100 African languages by digitizing these words in incorruptible format with the use of the internet. Since its inception, it has grown to include contributors from different regions in Africa as well as Africans in the diaspora.

Mandla dictionary has revived the use of ancient writing scripts and systems in Africa with ongoing efforts to revive more.

About Wenitte Apiou

Wenitte Apiou is the CEO and Founder of Mandla. His mission to help other Africans who seek to know and learn their original languages inspired the birth of his company, Mandla. For two years, he has researched and worked with ten other members of his team to digitize dying languages, especially in Africa for future generations.

Media Contact

Company name: Mandla
Contact person: Wenitte Apiou
Email: [email protected]
Country: United States
Website: https://mandla.ai

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://ift.tt/nTvb72K

---

Serious News for Serious Traders! Try StreetInsider.com Premium Free!

---

You May Also Be Interested In

Adblock test (Why?)

Meta's New AI-Powered Speech Translation System Pioneers a New Approach For Unwritten Languages - Analytics India Magazine - Translation

Listen to this story

Until today, AI translation has primarily focused on written languages. Yet around half of the world’s 7,000+ living languages are mainly oral – without a standard or widely used writing system. Thus, it’s impossible to build machine translation tools using standard techniques requiring large amounts of written text to train an AI model. 

To address this challenge, Meta has built the first AI-powered translation system for a primarily oral language – Hokkien – which is widely spoken within the Chinese diaspora. Meta’s technology allows Hokkien speakers to hold conversations with English speakers as the language lacks a standard written form. 

THE BELAMY

Sign up for your weekly dose of what's up in emerging technology.

The open-sourced AI translation system is part of Meta’s Universal Speech Translator (UST) project, which is developing new AI methods that would eventually allow real-time speech-to-speech translation across all extant languages, including primarily spoken ones. The company believes that spoken communication can help break down barriers and bring people together wherever they are – even if located in the metaverse.

Source: Meta 

To develop the new system, Meta’s AI researchers had to overcome many complex challenges from traditional machine translation systems, including model design, data gathering, and evaluation. The blog reads, “We have much work ahead to extend UST to more languages. But the ability to speak effortlessly to people in any language is a long-sought dream, and we’re pleased to be one step closer to achieving it. We’re open-sourcing not just our Hokkien translation models but also the evaluation datasets and research papers, so that others can reproduce and build on our work.”
Moreover, the techniques can be further extended to many other written and unwritten languages. Meta is also releasing SpeechMatrix – a large corpus of speech-to-speech translations – mined with the data mining technique, called LASER. Researchers will then be able to create their own speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems and build on the Meta’s work.

Adblock test (Why?)

Using AI to Translate Speech For a Primarily Oral Language - Meta - Translation

AI-powered speech translation has mainly focused on written languages, yet nearly 3,500 living languages are primarily spoken and don’t have a widely used writing system. This makes it impossible to build machine translation tools using standard techniques, which require large amounts of written text in order to train an AI model.

To address this challenge, we’ve built the first AI-powered speech-to-speech translation system for Hokkien, a primarily oral language that’s widely spoken within the Chinese diaspora but lacks a standard written form. We’re open-sourcing our Hokkien translation models, evaluation datasets and research papers so that others can reproduce and build on our work.

The translation system is part of our Universal Speech Translator project, which is developing new AI methods that we hope will eventually allow real-time speech-to-speech translation across many languages. We believe spoken communication can bring people together wherever they are located — even in the metaverse.

A New Modeling Approach

Many speech translation systems rely on transcriptions. However, since primarily oral languages don’t have standard written forms, producing transcribed text as the translation output doesn’t work. So, we focused on speech-to-speech translation.

To do this, we developed a variety of methods, such as using speech-to-unit translation to translate input speech to a sequence of acoustic sounds, and generated waveforms from them or rely on text from a related language, in this case Mandarin.

Looking to the Future of Translation

While the Hokkien translation model is still a work in progress and can translate only one full sentence at a time, it’s a step toward a future where simultaneous translation between languages is possible. The techniques we pioneered can be extended to many other written and unwritten languages.

We’re also releasing SpeechMatrix, which is a large collection of speech-to-speech translations developed through our innovative natural language processing toolkit called LASER. These tools will enable other researchers to create their own speech-to-speech translation systems and build on our work. And our progress in what researchers refer to as unsupervised learning demonstrates the feasibility of building high-quality speech-to-speech translation models without any human annotations. This will help extend those models to work for languages where there isn’t any labeled training data available to train the system.

Our AI research is helping break down language barriers in both the physical world and the metaverse to encourage connection and mutual understanding. We look forward  to expanding our research and bringing this technology to more people in the future.

Learn more about our AI-powered speech translation.

Adblock test (Why?)

Virginia state delegate trolls liberals, suggests new dictionary word: 'Libinition' - Washington Examiner - Dictionary

One of Virginia’s Republican state delegates has suggested that “libinition” be added to the dictionary to represent how woke liberals are “applying alternative definitions to words.”

In addition to providing the definition, Del. Tim Anderson, who represents Virginia’s 83rd District, offered examples, including “if you disagree with me, that is a threat” and “creating new felonies for actual criminals is bad, but parents who don’t affirm their child’s gender are definitely felons.”

The Republican’s Facebook post followed several others that slammed liberals attacking him for speaking out against a Virginia bill set to be introduced by Democratic Del. Elizabeth Guzman that would assign felony charges to parents who do not affirm their child’s sexual orientation under an expansion of the definition of child abuse.

Virginia Republican Delegate Tim Anderson suggested the word "libinition" be added to the dictionary with a given meaning that describes how liberals are “applying alternative definitions to words.”

(Screen capture/Tim Anderson)

YESLI VEGA SAYS PUSH TO ‘STEAL OUR CHILDREN’S INNOCENCE MUST STOP’

Guzman has reportedly since backed down from introducing the bill, according to Just the News. The bill gained national attention, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeting his disgust.

“Utterly horrifying,” Cruz wrote. "These zealots think they are your children's parents, and they'll put you in jail if you disagree."

In Virginia, Anderson told WRVA that the bill represents the dangers of Democrats, saying “they’re that crazy” to make a huge spectacle of criminalizing parents.

Anderson has since taken heat on social media, with some calling him an “idiot” and a “disgrace to Virginia.”

In response, Anderson said, “To the trolls and haters … bring it on,” and posted photos of the comments to Facebook along with his replies, noting that such comments are his “North Star.”

“As long as what I am doing continues to offend you to your core — I know I am going in the right direction,” Anderson wrote. “Thanks for helping me — daily. Absolutely love you are my Top Fan. We don’t hand those out to just anyone. Only to the people who engage every single day.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Another post called for Anderson’s arrest, to which the delegate shared a photo of him at a state event, along with a “melting snowflakes” hashtag.

“I am in a room full of police and sheriffs with the Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, and local leaders from across the Commonwealth,” Anderson wrote. “You can let the police know where to find me.”

Adblock test (Why?)