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Reading the Bible as a translated text The Presbyterian Outlook
The Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is designed to offer a host of functionalities, which includes scanning and translating text to English or assisting those with dyslexia or other forms of reading difficulties to continue with their reading. This way, the device can also be beneficial for those who’d like to learn or converse in a foreign language other than English. Right now, the device supports translation from English to Spanish and Chinese and vice-versa. Support for Korean and Japanese languages is slated to be added soon.
The pen works on the principle of Optical Image Recognition or OCR for which it comes with an integrated scanning feature. The makers of the device said it has a recognition rate of 99.6 percent and is able to scan text from various surfaces, including those on screen as well. Similarly, it can detect texts of different colors and fonts too.
Thereafter, the Text-to-Speech or TTS feature converts the texts into audio. Users will be able to adjust the volume as well as the playback speed to suit their requirements. The actual translation bit is taken care of by the Youdao Neural Machine Translation (YNMT) which relies on AI-based technology for an accurate and natural translation of the given text.
Those with dyslexia or other forms of reading impairment will find it easy to read books using the Youdao Dictionary Pen 3. Users will just have to scan the portion of the text they are reading, and the pen will do the rest, that is translate the text if needed followed by reading aloud the portion it just scanned. As already stated, the reading volume, speeds, and accent can all be adjusted as per user preferences.
Further, with more than 4 million entries included with the device, it can function just as fine as a mobile dictionary as well. For this, it features multiple built-in dictionaries such as that of Merriam-Webster. After a text portion is scanned, the pen displays both the original as well as the translated version on the display it comes with. Users can then tap on the individual words to get its meaning. This helps in building vocabulary and makes the pen great for learning new language skills.
Coming to the specs, the Dictionary Pen 3 features a 2.47-inch HD touchscreen display made of 2.5D glass. It comes with 1 GB RAM and 16 GB of storage. The integrated battery lasts for around 8 hours and recharges via the Type-C port it comes with. Connectivity options include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi besides being able to work in offline mode as well. It boasts a metallic build that makes it strong and durable.
As for its availability, the Dictionary Pen 3 can be procured from smartyoudao.com or Amazon. It is priced $254.98 though the company is right now offering a 25 percent discount with the promo code SMARTYOUDAO25.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in the world of technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles as well, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. Motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot and maybe I’ll make a film sometime in the future.
Janelle James
LANSING – Advocates are pushing for ballots to be in several languages and for more translation services at state agencies and other initiatives to expand language access in Michigan.
The budget for the state fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, includes $700,000 to make it easier for non-English speakers to access state services and an additional $260,000 to hire coordinators to oversee the expansion.
Expanding language access would allow immigrants and residents whose first language isn’t English to interact with state agencies in the language that they are most comfortable. This could mean offering ballots in several languages and giving people the option to use the language they are most comfortable with when they are at state agencies.
Advocates for the change recommend that the money be spent on hiring more trained state translators and interpreters who are proficient in multiple languages, and training for staff at state agencies on how to interact with people with limited English proficiency.
“What we see a lot of right now is people just entering things into Google Translate,” said Jungsoo Ahn, the interim executive director of Rising Voices, an organization that advocates on the behalf of Asian Americans in Detroit. “Even within language access there is a cultural competency that needs to be addressed.”
Nearly 300,000 people self-identify as having limited proficiency in English, said Simon Marshall-Shah, a policy analyst for the Michigan League for Public Policy. The most popular languages spoken by people whose first language isn’t English in Michigan are Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and other South Asian languages, he said.
Many state agencies, like the Secretary of State offices offer translations, for over a dozen languages on their websites. Other agencies have adopted their own protocols for language access but statewide standards for language access don’t exist, Marshall-Shah said.
“For immigrants to participate in our systems and to actually feel like this is an inclusive democracy, it is absolutely essential that everything is in language” that they understand, Ahn said.
There is also a push to have an advisory board to oversee the implementation of the program to track and report language access needs and address complaints, according to the League for Public Policy.
Hawaii is one of the few states with an advisory council that does such a thing, and the only state to have two official languages: Hawaiian and English.
While new spending will expand access at the state level, organizations like Rising Voices and Voces,a nonprofit organization serving the Hispanic/Latino community in Battle Creek, would like to see language access expanded in schools and hospitals as well.
“If somebody needs a Korean translation for a parent teacher conference, there might not be translators available so we need to make sure that there is a pool of translators available for such things and that there are translators available to translate the materials that go out to families,” she said.
“People in our community also have really, really complained about how insufficient language access has been in hospitals,” Ahn said. It is already difficult enough to care for a loved one in the hospital or to grieve, but to do that and not have accurate translation is even harder, she said.
Jose Orozco, the executive director of Voces, agrees.
A lot of school districts don’t provide translation during their school board meetings, so many parents ask for our help to get their kids in programs that they saw at the meeting, he said.
“The schools are also recognizing the importance of hiring bilingual staff members to be able to diversity and meet the community with those various needs,” Orozco said.
Ahn said expanding language access can be beneficial for immigrants as well as the economy.
“It creates more jobs, more opportunities and more capacity within our system. It creates a much more thriving society and better outcomes in health care, education and in the legal system,” she said.
A new dictionary focusing on the Armenian and Persian equivalents of diplomatic terminology has been published in Iran.
The dictionary, compiled by Vahagn Afyan, was launched at a reception on Saturday at the Armenian Embassy in Tehran.
“Relations between the Iranian and Armenian nations have a long history and diplomatic relations between the countries have expanded over the past few years and will improve in different fields in the future,” Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Safaryan is quoted as saying at the book launch according to the Tehran Times.
Photo (from left): Vahagn Afyan , Armenian Ambassador to Iran Arsen Avagyan and Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Mnatsakan Safaryan the November 19, book launch. (IRNA/Asghar Khamseh).
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Meta released, in early November 2022, SpeechMatrix, a large-scale multilingual corpus of speech-to-speech translations. The goal, according to Meta, is to make the development of speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems easier.
SpeechMatrix was mined from real speech; that is, European Parliament recordings. It contains speech alignments in 136 languages, at an average of 1,537 hours of source speech in each direction, making a total of more than 418,000 hours of speech.
“To the best of our knowledge, SpeechMatrix is by far the largest freely available speech-to-speech translation corpus,” wrote the Meta researchers in their paper.
As mentioned in the Slator Interpreting Services and Technology Report, big tech companies and academia are driving rapid advancements in the area of speech-to-speech translation.
Speech-to-speech translation models can be indirect — via text and machine translation — or. direct, building machine learning models based on audio recordings of speech in source and target languages.
Direct models are attracting more research interest and have many advantages. For instance, they apply to the translation of languages without a well-defined writing script as direct models do not rely on any intermediate text. However, model training is faced with the major issue of data scarcity.
As the researchers explained, “Human-labeled speech data is expensive to create, there are very few data resources providing parallel speech, and the data amount is quite limited.”
To evaluate the quality of the mined data, the Meta researchers trained bilingual speech-to-speech translation models on SpeechMatrix data and reported on translation performance.
Enabled by the multilinguality of SpeechMatrix, they also explored multilingual speech-to-speech translation.
According to the same paper, “There are very few studies of multilingual speech-to-speech translation, partially due to the lack of multilingual speech-to-speech resources. With the massively multilingual data we have mined, we are able to explore multilingual S2ST training.”
As we look to the future of translation, we’re eager to see other researchers use the techniques we pioneered with Hokkien to create their own speech-to-speech translation systems for other written and unwritten languages.
— Meta AI (@MetaAI) October 19, 2022
The researchers discovered that strong S2ST models can be trained with mined data and validated the good quality of speech alignments across languages.
In addition, they demonstrated that model pre-training, sparse scaling using Mixture-of-Experts — an ensemble machine-learning technique where the number of parameters of the model increases in magnitude without sacrificing computation efficiency — and multilinguality can “bring large gains to translation performance.”
The researchers hope that this work can help others develop textless, speech-to-speech translation systems for other written and unwritten languages.
Everything related to SpeechMatrix is open source and accessible for download via the GitHub repository.
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Sudan (MNN) — Over the past year, unfoldingWord trained Sudanese Christians and gave them the tools necessary to translate Scripture. Now, these believers will take their first independent steps.
Arne* oversees the Sudanese Arabic translation project for unfoldingWord. “Last year, we spent a good part of eight months or so training a new network of Sudanese Arabic speakers to deal with the minority languages in Sudan,” he says.
According to Joshua Project, 82 percent of Sudan’s people groups have no access to the Gospel. unfoldingWord seeks to resolve this dilemma in partnership with church planting networks.
Learn more about unfoldingWord’s approach here.
(Photo courtesy of unfoldingWord)
Sudanese believers started the newest translation segment in September. Arne will meet with the church planting network this month to follow up. Once fully trained, believers will be equipped to help 133 unreached people groups translate the Bible accurately for themselves.
“We’re training the Sudanese Arabic network and introducing them to the next step in their journey, which is what we call ‘the equipping journey,’” Arne says.
“We’ll be looking at various topics that all Christians need to know, [something] we call ‘the essentials of the faith.’”
The Sudanese people have repeatedly faced disappointment from Islam and the governments formed by Islamic leaders. Right now, people are open to answers from the Bible.
Give the Gospel to Sudan here. Through the end of December, all giving towards the Sudanese translation project up to $61,000 is eligible to be matched.
Pray for successful collaboration efforts between church planting networks in Sudan and Chad.
“Chad and Sudan share a border, and there are (unreached) people groups right along those borders that spill on either side,” Arne says.
“In the context of training the Sudanese, we borrowed some experts from the Chadian project to help build a relationship between the two. We intend to build connections between church networks in those countries to reach all the lost and unreached people groups within the sub-Sahara.”
*Pseudonym
Header and story images courtesy of unfoldingWord.
