[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Book of Matthew Released in Zambian Sign Language JW NewsTuesday, July 11, 2023
Seychelles Creole Academy Publishes First Monolingual Creole ... - AllAfrica - Top Africa News - Dictionary
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Seychelles Creole Academy Publishes First Monolingual Creole ... AllAfrica - Top Africa NewsMonday, July 10, 2023
Seibu Railway tests new translation device to boost communication - The Japan Times - Translation
Seibu Railway started testing a new translation device at Seibu Shinjuku station on Monday as part of efforts to be more welcoming to foreign tourists and those with difficulty communicating.
Developed by printing company Toppan, the Voice Biz UCDisplay is a transparent window-like device that can create real-time translations that appear as text bubbles when two people converse on either side of the screen. It is currently placed next to the express ticket office at the station.
This futuristic device allows users to converse while remaining face-to-face, which means small nuances of body language and facial expressions can be still be conveyed — things that are often lost when conversing through translation apps.
In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.
Sunday, July 9, 2023
6 best translator apps: How Artificial Intelligence can help break communication barriers - Moneycontrol - Translation
The majority of people can only imagine travelling with their smartphones. We use our smartphones as GPS, cameras, and communication devices.
When travelling abroad, you can use your smartphone to interpret signs, locals, and yourself. Translation applications and devices are frequently promoted in the context of assisting travellers while abroad. However, the range of requirements for cross-language communication is significantly broader.
Ethnologue lists about 7,000 languages with distinct traits. Every culture has its sayings that can only be understood in context. Bad translations in business, particularly in healthcare, can have catastrophic implications. Globalisation and the internet's ever-expanding reach have linked people worldwide. However, the linguistic barrier remains a hindrance.
Communication and comprehension among people speaking different languages are now more accessible thanks to many language translation apps and services. Several low-cost choices are accessible if you founded your LLC in another nation or merely need to translate some papers. Your phone can become your translator with the help of simple software. On your next adventure, these best language translation apps for Android and iOS will have you covered.
What is AI translation?
AI is evolving at an incredible rate and is revolutionizing the translation industry. The automated conversion of one language to another is known as machine translation or MT. Machine translation software transforms text from a source language to a target language equivalent passage. Machine translation quality varies, with some programmes producing more accurate translations than others.
The following are top translation applications accessible today, which stand out among all language translator systems.
Google Translate
By a wide margin, the most popular translator is Google Translate. Everyone has been using it for quite some time now. The free online machine translation tool can translate text, documents, and websites. Google Translate is the most accessible AI translation application to utilise. It's easy to use; select the languages you need, type in the text, and click "translate." The AI system was educated with data provided by native speakers, and it now supports more than a hundred languages.
iTranslate Translator
Nearly half a million people have found iTranslate Translator helpful, making it one of the most popular translation apps. The augmented reality tool lets you translate text, speech, visuals, and your immediate environment. However, there are a few extras that cost money to access. Even if you're just a free user, you can still access the Phrasebook. The Phrasebook is an indispensable tool for any traveller because it collects all the basic questions and requests you're likely to have in different countries.
The phrases are organised into various subheadings, such as "On the Road," "Need Assistance," "Eating Out," and so on. The phrases are sorted into subsections within each category. Phrases for using public transportation and purchasing tickets are included in the While Travelling section, for instance.
Alexa Translations
Alexa Translations is another well-known AI translation technology, and it has been a market leader in language services since 2002. It is a top legal, financial, technical, and commercial document translator.
Alexa Translations provides one of the quickest AI translations currently accessible, in addition to various premium machine learning services. This technology is typically used in tandem with human translators.
Bing Microsoft Translator
Microsoft Translation is a machine-translation service that is hosted in the cloud. Microsoft created Bing. It's part of Microsoft's Cognitive Services suite, including Bing, Office, Edge, Skype, and Visual Studio, among other products.
The cloud-based Microsoft Translator supports over a hundred languages and includes 12 voice translation algorithms to facilitate live interaction. Microsoft Translator stands out since it can translate text, audio, video, and hyperlinks.
DeepL
DeepL, an AI translation tool used by businesses and individuals, is one of the technologies that is rapidly expanding in use. The programme has gained a good reputation for its accurate translations.
DeepL's accessibility and compatibility with Macs and iPhones have earned it widespread praise. The programme provides extensive control over the automated translation process and allows you to change the translations. One of the many great things about DeepL is that it preserves the original document's formatting.
Reverso Translation
To help its users expand their vocabularies, Reverso provides accurate and thorough translations in context. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, German, and many more are just some of the languages it supports.
Since Reverso's translations include basic pronunciation guidelines and relevant examples, users can quickly learn to write, read, and speak the target language. When using Reverso, you'll learn foreign words in context, which will help you speak like a native much more quickly.
Saturday, July 8, 2023
Revisiting 'Bridget Jones's Diary' Plus the Art of Literary Translation - The New York Times - Translation
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | How to Listen
On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to Juliana Barbassa and Gregory Cowles about the Book Review’s special translation issue, and to Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan about the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” which was published in the U.S. 25 years ago this summer.
What makes translation an art? How does a translator’s personality affect their work? Why do we see so many translations from some countries and almost none from others? These are just some of the questions addressed in a recent translation issue of the Book Review, which came about after Cowles noticed “a heavier than usual concentration of very strong literature in translation coming down the pipeline.”
This dovetailed with Barbassa’s interest in translated literature. Before coming to the Book Review, she spent years reporting and editing international news, and says, “I would often find myself turning to the fiction produced in that place” to really get a sense of it.
Also on this week’s episode, Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan discuss “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” published in the U.S. 25 years ago this summer. “I discovered, looking back at back into Bridget’s life on the eve of my 50th birthday, she was not as funny to me as she used to be,” says Egan, who wrote an essay about the novel called “Bridget Jones Deserved Better. We All Did.”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
New AI translates 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly - Big Think - Translation
Translation isn’t simply a matter of swapping one word for a corresponding word in another language. A high-quality translation requires the translator to understand how both languages string thoughts together and then use that knowledge to create a translation that maintains the linguistic nuances of the original, which native speakers effortlessly understand.
As difficult as that process is, it’s nothing compared to the challenge of translating an ancient language into a modern tongue. These translators must not only resurrect extinct languages from written sources but also have intimate knowledge of how the cultures that produced those sources evolved over centuries. If that weren’t enough, their sources are often fragmented, leaving crucial context lost to the ages.
Because of this, the number of people capable of translating languages from antiquity is small, and their best efforts are often outpaced by the volume of texts unearthed by archeologists.
Take ancient Akkadian. This early Semitic language is one of the best attested from the ancient world. Hundreds of thousands, by some accounts more than a million, Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them.
To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.
Akkadian lost (and found)
Akkadian was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. As a spoken language, Akkadian would eventually split into Assyrian and Babylonian dialects before being completely supplanted by Aramaic early in the first millennium BC. Today, it is a truly extinct language, without even daughter languages to carry on its legacy.
As a written language, however, Akkadian proved more enduring. The empire borrowed the cuneiform script of its predecessor, the Sumerian civilization. This writing system used a reed stylus to impress wedge-shaped glyphs into wet clay tablets before baking them (hence the name cuneiform, which literally means “wedge-shaped” in Latin). Even after Aramaic supplanted Akkadian as the common language of the region, scholars continued to write in Akkadian cuneiform into the first century AD — even in antiquity, it seems, scholars and academics were incredibly stubborn.
This traditional mindset had an unintended benefit for modern archeologists, too. While cuneiform could be written on papyrus, it was more often scribed onto clay or stone. These materials stand up much better to the fires and floods that ravaged their pithy peers. And while time is cruel to all things — archeologists rarely discover cuneiform tablets in mint condition — this is one reason why Akkadian writing may be so well-attested in the historic record.
“Ironically, destructive conflagrations have preserved some of ancient Mesopotamia’s greatest libraries — because they were made of clay. In contrast, all of ancient Egypt’s papyrus libraries have burnt or crumbled to dust, though many individual codices survive,” linguist Steven Roger Fischer writes in A History of Writing.
Even with such linguist riches, properly translating these ancient libraries is no small feat. Beyond the challenges already mentioned, the Akkadian language is polyvalent. That is, its cuneiform signs can have several different readings depending on how each one functions in a sentence. There are many reasons for this development, but according to Fischer, one reason the Akkadians never simplified was that they “appeared to be bound to tradition and a self-imposed efficiency.” That traditional mindset led them to continue using Sumerian script for a language very different from Sumerian. (When it comes to historical scholarship, you win some, you lose some.)
As such, translating Akkadian is a two-step process. First, scholars must transliterate the cuneiform signs. That is, they take the cuneiform and rewrite it using the similar-sounding phonetics of the target language. An example most readers will be familiar with is the Arabic word الله, which translates into English as “God” but transliterates as “Allah.” This transliteration is the closest the Latin alphabet can get to producing the word as it sounds in Arabic. Scholars then take their transliteration of the text and translate it into a modern language.
Fast-acting AI for instant results
As you can imagine, that can be a long and laborious process — one that takes years of training and dedication to learn to do well. To help speed things along, the research team developed a neural machine translation model for Akkadian cuneiform, the same technology under the hood of Google Translate.
The team trained the AI model on a sample of cuneiform texts from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus and taught it to translate in two distinct ways. First, the AI model learned to translate Akkadian from transliterations of the original texts. It also learned how to translate cuneiform symbols directly. More specifically, it translated Unicode glyphs of cuneiform texts that were generated by another time-saving tool that automatically produces Unicode from an image of an original tablet.
The AI model then had to figure out how to handle the nuances of the sample’s various genres — for example, the difference between literary works and administrative letters — as well as how to handle the changes found in cuneiform script over the millennia it was used. The AI model was then tested using the bilingual evaluation understudy 4 (BLEU4), an algorithm used to appraise machine-translated text.
In its transliteration to English test, the team’s AI model scored 37.47. In its cuneiform to English test, it scored 36.52. Both scores were above their target baseline and in the range of a high-quality translation. And there was a surprising result: The model was able to reproduce the nuances of each test sentence’s genre. While this wasn’t one of the researcher’s goals, they note in the study that it may open possibilities for uses beyond translation.
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday
“In almost every instance, whether the [translation] is proper or not, the genre is recognizable,” the team writes. “A promising future scenario would have the [model] show the user a list of sources on which they based their translations, which would also be particularly useful for scholarly purposes.”
The team published their results in the peer-reviewed PNAS Nexus. They also released their research and source code on GitHub at Akkademia.
The past’s future looks brighter
As promising as the initial results are, there is still work to be done. In both cases, some of the test sentences were mistranslated. And like other AI models, this one is prone to hallucinations — moments where the response has no connection to the source. In one instance, the human translator produced the sentence “Why should we (also) conduct the lawsuit before a man from Libbi-Ali?” The AI’s translation: “They are in the Inner City in the Inner City.” (A bit off.)
All told, the AI model works best when it is translating short- to medium-length sentences. It also does better with more formulaic genres, like royal decrees and administrative records, than literary genres such as myths, hymns, and prophecies. With more training on a larger dataset, the researchers note in the study, they aim to improve its accuracy. In time, they hope their AI model can act as a virtual assistant to human scholars. The AI can provide the raw translation quickly, while the scholar can refine it with their knowledge of historic languages, cultures, and people.
“Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them,” the team writes in the study.
“This is another major step toward the preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia.”
In this article
USC researchers use AI to help translate Bible into very rare languages - The Washington Post - Translation
Out of the 7,100 languages that exist, the Bible has been translated into more than 700, making it the most-translated book in the world. Yet, those remaining languages — many of them extremely rare — have vexed Bible translators for decades. Two scientists are looking to new advancements in artificial intelligence to help close the gap.
“We want to reach all the languages on Earth; the goal is to reach everyone,” said Joel Mathew, a research engineer who alongside Ulf Hermjakob recently launched the Greek Room, an AI-powered technology to help streamline the highly technical process of biblical translation.
Combining Hermjakob’s long experience with natural language processing and Mathew’s field knowledge of Bible translation, the two researchers at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute developed the technology to target “very low-resource languages that are not even in the top 500,” Mathew said.
The Greek Room includes three main tools: spell-checking; world alignment, which ensures consistency in translation; and Wildebeest, used to detect improper characters in a script.
The two scientists met in 2015 when Mathew joined USC to complete a master’s degree in computer science. There, he encountered Hermjakob in the AI division of the Information Sciences Institute. They bonded over a shared passion for languages and their Christian faith.
Mathew, the son of two Bible translators, has observed firsthand the difficulties that come with manual translation by local church members. In his hometown, New Delhi, he took notes on all the tasks that technology could accomplish.
Spell-checking usually requires many people and time, he explained. In the context of translation into rare languages, only local church members are qualified, and they don’t have technology to back up their work.
“These are not trivial problems; these are very hard problems. But big companies are not interested in solving them; it’s not their business model to target very rare languages,” he said.
When Mathew shared with Hermjakob some of the problems Indian translators faced on the ground, he jumped at the opportunity.
“I always had this feeling to know how, at some point, I could apply my skills to my faith,” said Hermjakob, who earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Texas.
With their project, Mathew and Hermjakob want to work on languages that don’t even have a written system, grammar codes, dictionaries or spell-checkers.
“We are thinking of languages like Uyghur or Oromo,” said Hermjakob. Oromo is spoken in Ethiopia and northern Kenya.
Recently, they have been approached by an Indian consultant interested in the spell-checking and world-alignment tool for Bible translation in Kolami, a language in western India that counts 130,000 native speakers.
The Greek Room also aims to change the traditional model of Bible translation. Historically, translations were done by Western missionaries, who could work on only two languages at most in their lifetime, explained Hermjakob. With the Greek Room, the two researchers encourage a local church-driven model.
“Local churches and local language communities are asking for translations of the Bible in their heart language,” explained Mathew, adding that in a multilingual context, the heart language is the one in which people express their deepest feelings and is usually their native language.
This first version of the Greek Room focuses on quality control so that translators can prioritize other tasks requiring more judgment, such as finding a way to translate a concept that doesn’t exist in a given language. In the next version, the two researchers want the tool to suggest better translations.
Now that their codes and data are available on GitHub, they hope other users will integrate their research into the tools and innovate further.
Their initiative, supported by the Wycliffe Bible Translators USA organization, is part of a broader program directed by Every Tribe, Every Nation that hopes to make the Scripture available in every language by 2033.
— Religion News Service
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)