Study assesses the quality of AI literary translations by comparing them with human translations - Tech Xplore - Translation

Credit: Thai et al.

Recent advancements in the field of machine learning (ML) have greatly improved the quality of automatic translation tools. At present, these tools are primarily used to translate basic sentences, as well as short texts or unofficial documents.

Literary texts, such as novels or short stories, are still fully translated by expert human translators, who are experienced in grasping abstract and complex meanings and translating them in another language. While a few studies have investigated the potential of computational models for translating literary texts, findings in this area are still limited.

Researchers at UMass Amherst have recently carried out a study exploring the quality of literary text translations produced by machines, by comparing them with same text-translations created by humans. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, highlight some of the shortcomings of existing computational models to translate foreign texts into English.

"Machine translation (MT) holds potential to complement the work of human translators by improving both training procedures and their overall efficiency," Katherine Thai and her colleagues wrote in their paper. "Literary translation is less constrained than more traditional MT settings since translators must balance meaning equivalence, readability, and critical interpretability in the target language. This property, along with the complex discourse-level context present in literary texts, also makes literary MT more challenging to computationally model and evaluate."

The key objective of the recent work by Thai and her colleagues was to better understand the ways in which state-of-the-art MT tools still fail in the translation of literary texts when compared to human translations. Their hope was that this would help to identify specific areas that developers should focus on to improve these models' performance.

"We collect a dataset (PAR3) of non-English language novels in the public domain, each aligned at the paragraph level to both human and automatic English translations," Thai and her colleagues explained in their paper.

PAR3, the new dataset compiled by the researchers for the scope of their study, contains 121,000 paragraphs extracted from 118 novels originally written in different languages other than English. For each of these paragraphs, the dataset includes several different human translations, as well as a translation produced by Google translate.

The researchers compared the quality of human translations of these literary paragraphs with the ones produced by Google translate, using common metrics for evaluating MT tools. Concurrently, they asked expert human translators which translations they preferred, while also prompting them to identify issues with their least preferred translation.

"Using PAR3, we discover that expert literary translators prefer reference human translations over machine-translated paragraphs at a rate of 84%, while state-of-the-art automatic MT metrics do not correlate with those preferences," Thai and her colleagues wrote in their paper. "The experts note that MT outputs contain not only mistranslations, but also discourse-disrupting errors and stylistic inconsistencies."

Essentially, the findings gathered by Thai and her colleagues suggest that metrics to evaluate MT (e.g., BLEU, BLEURT, and BLONDE) might not be particularly effective, as human translators did not agree with their predictions. Notably, the feedback they gathered from human translators also allowed the researchers to identify specific issues with translations created by Google translate.

Using the human experts' feedback as a guideline, the team ultimately created an automatic post-editing model based on GPT-3, a deep learning approach introduced by a research group at OpenAI. They found that expert human translators preferred the literary translations produced by this model at a rate of 69%.

In the future, the findings of this study could inform new studies exploring the use of MT tools to translate literary texts. In addition, the PAR3 dataset compiled by Thai and her colleagues, which is now publicly available on GitHub, could be used by other teams to train or assess their language models.

"Overall, our work uncovers new challenges to progress in literary MT, and we hope that the public release of PAR3 will encourage researchers to tackle them," the researchers concluded in their paper.

More information: Katherine Thai et al, Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2210.14250

Journal information: arXiv

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TranslateLocally: local translations as an Extension and Desktop app - Ghacks - Translation

TranslateLocally is an open source browser extension and desktop application that promises local translations. It's source is the same that the official Firefox Translations extension uses: Project Bergamot.

Project Bergamot is a EU-funded project to create a privacy-friendly and open translation service. Browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge had an edge over other browsers for a long time, as they could leverage the translation services of their parent companies.

Both Google Translate and Microsoft Translate are cloud-based services, that require an Internet connection. Information is submitted to Google or Microsoft whenever content is translated.

Firefox Translate changes that by moving translations to the local system. The extension works really well already, but lacks support for the majority of languages.

TranslateLocally

TranslateLocally's origin dates back to Project Bergamot, just like Firefox Translations. Project Bergamot funding ended in June 2022, but a new project, High Performance Language Technologies, received funding already.

TranslateLocally is available as an extension for the Firefox web browser and as a desktop app. Since it is not as deeply linked to Firefox as Firefox Translations, it may in theory also be made available for other browsers. An experimental Chromium extension is already in development.

The desktop app is a standalone application that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux devices. It appears to be powered by Electron. Once started, it requires that you download at least one language pair to enable offline translation support.

The list of language pair that is supported is identical to that of Firefox Translations:

Bulgarian ? English
Czech ? English
Estonian ? Engish
French ? Engish
German ? English
Polish ? English
Spanish ? English
Ukranian ? English
Icelandic ? English
Norwegian Bokmål ? English
Norwegian Nynorsk ? English

You may type or paste text into the upper text field to have it translated automatically by the program. All translations happen locally.

The TranslateLocally extension for Firefox may be used independently or in conjunction with the desktop app. It adds an icon to the Firefox toolbar that displays the translation options when it is activated. You may also right-click on a text selection to have it translated directly.

The extension works similarly to Firefox Translations, but there are differences between both implementations:

• Supports in-page translations, not just full page translations.
• Is powered by a button in the interface as non-Mozilla extensions have no access to the area that Firefox Translations uses.
• Lacks form field translations (for now).
• May use models that Firefox Translations does not use.

One of the interesting features of TranslateLocally, besides being able to translate individual words, sentences or paragraphs, is that it may work in conjunction with the desktop app, which improves the translation performance. Another advantage is support for importing other translation models, provided that these support Marian.

Firefox Translations development continues as well. The next version will introduce support for translating text selections. Both projects will benefit from the new EU project as more language pairs will be produced in the coming three years.

Closing Words

Should you use Firefox Translations or TranslateLocally? There is no definitive answer to that, as both offer features that the other does not offer. Support for the translation of text selections is a much requested Firefox Translations feature, but differences exist even after that feature lands.

Now You: which translation service do you use? (via Sören Hentzschel)

Summary

Article Name

TranslateLocally: local translations as an Extension and Desktop app

Description

TranslateLocally is an open source browser extension and cross-platform desktop application to translate text locally on user systems.

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Martin Brinkmann

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Ghacks Technology News

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13 Food Rules That Can Get Lost In Translation - Tasting Table - Translation

Hospitality, explains Rough Guides, is at the heart of Turkish culture, so someone will likely invite you to drink tea at a teahouse or at their house. In fact, if you're invited to dinner at someone's home, it's considered a true honor. To make a fine impression, remember to remove your shoes when arriving. You may notice that some homes have low tables with cushions around them (instead of tables and chairs); if this is the case, make sure your feet remain hidden under the table.

Your hosts will probably offer multiple servings, and you should try to accept as many as possible, says Cultural Atlas. Expect dinner to be a slow, relaxed affair. Turks like to enjoy their meals and sometimes even stop between courses for a drink or a cigarette.

During your visit, you may come across some unexpected delicacies, such as kokorec (stuffed intestines), Iskembe Corbasi (tripe soup), or Tavuk Gogsu (chicken dessert). This last one may sound confusing, but it's a creamy dessert with milk, sugar, rice flour, and shredded chicken breast. It has a fascinating history, dating back to the Ottoman Empire. 

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A Dictionary Of Weed Slang: Leafly's Leafy Lexicon - Benzinga - Dictionary

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A Dictionary Of Weed Slang: Leafly's Leafy Lexicon  Benzinga

Lost in translation, no more: Two writers capture Montreal's unique linguistic identity - The Globe and Mail - Translation

Illustration by Wenting Li

Montreal is a city of translators, the novelist Sean Michaels once observed.

Residents make the mental journey between French and English countless times every day. Sometimes they do it resentfully (when they’re served by a McGill student barista) and sometimes they do it badly (the grocery store display for poulet de ferme/hard chicken). More often, they translate by second nature, like the softball player who yells “heads up … attention” after an errant foul ball.

It’s probably no wonder that Montrealers are doing such interesting things with literary translation, the refined and formalized expression of this local mental habit. The recent collaboration between two writers on a novel about a luck-obsessed stand-up comedian shows how creatively some people are able to bridge the linguistic gap.

The writers are Michaels, a Giller Prize winner and most recently author of The Wagers; and Catherine Leroux, a novelist and translator who rendered that book into French as Les coups de dés, published last year.

Author Sean Michaels.Julie Artacho

The practice of translation is often discussed in terms of its difficulties (think: “lost in”). That is doubly true in Montreal, where language forms the divide between the city’s two historic solitudes. Literary translator Linda Gaboriau has talked about the trickiness of making playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s grandiloquence sing on the English stage; the French-from-France translation of Mordecai Richler made the faux pas of calling Maurice Richard La fusée instead of the “Rocket,” as he was known by both anglophone and francophone Quebeckers.

Even someone as skillful as Leroux – who was just nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Les coups de dés – finds herself tripping over certain language barriers, she acknowledges. Elegant conjugations in her version of the book, such as attendirent and apparut (wait and appear), give certain passages a classical quality they lack in the looser original English. Written French is intrinsically more formal than its spoken counterpart, she explains – even more so than written English.

Or take “plum,” a significant word in a book populated by a family of grocers. Translating it literally as prune robs the word of its plummy assonance, Michaels points out, replacing a ripe, rounded sound with something more desiccated.

Both writers prefer to dwell on the possibilities of translation than on its problems, however – especially the possibilities that reveal themselves in a city blessed with what the poet A.M. Klein called a “double-melodied vocabulaire.”

In Montreal, author and translator are more likely to consult each other on stylistic decisions such as how to capture the evocative power of the word “plum.” When Michaels has been translated into other languages, such as Czech, he has let go of the reins completely. Here, the process is more of a back-and-forth.

He and Leroux were already friends when she signed on to translate Us Conductors, the novel for which Michaels won his Giller. When they met up at a café to discuss the project, one of her first questions was, When do these characters start to tutoie? That is, when do they start to use the informal second-person pronoun tu rather than the more formal vous – a question that doesn’t occur in English, with its neutral “you.”

Author and translator Catherine Leroux.Audrée Wilhelmy

Leroux was sensitive to the different inflection points that tip a relationship towards intimacy in English and French. When she first dated an anglophone, she stumbled into an embarrassing situation after saying “I love you” too early in the relationship, not realizing it was more charged than je t’aime, which can indicate both love and like.

Michaels was thrilled to hear all of this verbal nuance packed into the simplest of phrases.

“That was the moment with translation where I was like, ‘This is cool,’” he said. “I felt in that moment that what Catherine is doing definitely does not need to be this watered-down bad photocopy.”

With The Wagers, they agreed to do something even more ambitious. Because the book was about an unnamed city that could only be Montreal, the translation would be cultural as well as linguistic. For one thing, Leroux proposed making the French spoken by the characters distinctly Québécois. That sometimes meant leaving some English words in the text to replicate authentic franglais – loafers and cupcakes.

But Leroux went further, too, changing certain cultural references from English Canadian to francophone Quebecker. While in The Wagers the mother of the main character listens to Ideas on the CBC, she listens to the everyman public intellectual Serge Bouchard on Radio-Canada in Les coups de dés.

That decision would be unthinkable in a book about a unilingual city. The characters in Anna Karenina don’t suddenly read the Manchester Guardian in English translations. But even in bilingual Montreal, Leroux’s act of cultural transplantation was a dramatic choice, subtly changing the demographic background of the central Potiris family by turning the dial on their radio.

Michaels had faith in this unusual “loss of control” over his characters because he trusted Leroux. Leroux believed it would work because of The Simpsons. When she was growing up, most of the American movies and shows were dubbed into French with a French accent. The Simpsons was one of the few dubbed by Québécois actors with local cultural references. When characters in the original were meant to be talking about Oprah, they might mention Quebec TV personality Claire Lamarche instead.

“It just made it so much more funny,” Ms. Leroux said. “I now realize that I had that background in the back of my mind; that this had been done before, and it worked great.”

The interplay between French and English isn’t always so seamless and sparkling in literary Montreal. Anglophone and francophone writers often inhabit different worlds. “The solitudes and separations there, and the way we don’t see each other, living our lives and doing our work on the same streets, is sort of sad,” said Michaels.

He and Leroux want to show a different way, translating well in a city of translation. Last fall, they took part in a rare bilingual book talk at a bookstore near the border between culturally anglo Mile End and francophone Outremont. The friends joked about plum versus prune and CBC versus Radio-Canada. The conversation meandered between English and French as gamely as a softball player calling out “heads up … attention.”

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Spanish translation services to be offered at 2022 Arkansas Election polls - KFSM 5Newsonline - Translation

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Spanish translation services to be offered at 2022 Arkansas Election polls  KFSM 5Newsonline

Grab these real-time translation earbuds if you're planning to travel soon - Mashable - Translation

TL;DR: As of Oct. 29, you can grab the Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds(opens in a new tab) for just $157, down from $220. That's a savings of 28%.

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Whether you’re traveling for a vacation or living abroad, it’s tough to connect to people when you can’t actually talk to them. Sure, you could carry around a translation dictionary or hope Google Translate doesn’t lead you to ask your new German friends where to drink a nice cold "bear". Or you could try a more modern translation solution. Mymanu CLIK S are translation earbuds(opens in a new tab) that can translate speech in real-time in over 37 languages, and they’re on sale for $157. 

A wearable real-time translator 

Around 1.35 billion people speak English as their primary or secondary language. That leaves well over six billion people that you can’t communicate with if you only speak English. Learning a new language is time-consuming and difficult. Instead of as a supplement, you could rely on a more convenient solution. 

The CLIK S pairs with the MyJuno app to enable speech-to-text and text-to-speech translation(opens in a new tab). Your earbuds listen, and the app translates. Read the translation directly from your phone, or play it in your ear and repeat what you hear. CLIK S can translate one-on-one conversation or small groups, though it can only do speech-to-text when there are multiple speakers. You may even start to pick up the languages you’re translating. MyJuno lets you keep a phrasebook and dictionary of frequently used phrases. 

The CLIK S supports a diverse set of languages from around the world including Arabic, Chinese, Czech, German, French, Japanese, Finnish, Turkish, and more. They also work great as regular wireless earbuds. With the push of a button, you can switch from translation to music or from music to calls. 

Listen to music, podcasts, and people with these earbuds 

Normally, a pair of Mamanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds(opens in a new tab) would cost $220, but for a limited time, you can get them for $157. 

Prices subject to change.

Credit: Mymanu

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