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The relentless pace of software companies rolling out translation AI as a feature continues unabated. Video hosting and sharing services provider, Vimeo, has announced the release of AI-enabled video translation and voice cloning features to its video platform.
The company’s new AI-enabled translation functionality promises to “leverage generative AI to translate video, audio and captions into dozens of languages – while replicating the original speakers’ voices.”
The functionality, which also allows users to add and edit automatically generated captions, is the latest in a series of AI enhancements designed to boost the video-for-business enterprise user base. As part of the release, Vimeo allows enterprise users to generate a free, 30-second sample of the translations, after which it charges on a per-minute basis.
Users can upload videos with multiple speakers and can rate the quality of the translation by selecting a thumbs up or thumbs down icon for each language.
Ashraf Alkarmi, Chief Product Officer at Vimeo said that the company’s AI translation solution “goes beyond simple transcription.” He added that the tool allows users to “maintain the original speaker’s authentic nuances and tone […] in any language.”
The company did not reveal, however, if it is working with a third-party commercial AI translation provider to power the technology.
Star Wars: A New Hope is rocketing back into theatres – in a completely new way.
For the first time ever, Star Wars has been translated and re-dubbed into Ojibwe.
“To translate all these futuristic terms into our language, which is very ancient, that was a huge challenge,” said Pat Ningewance the lead translator for the project. “But also very exciting!”
The translators couldn’t simply just use The Force to make the translation happen – it also required a rebel alliance so to speak!
Officials say the idea was pitched to Lucasfilm back in 2021, and a number of people worked to translate the iconic script into the Ojibwe language.
“The word for hyperdrive in English has two parts, the hyper which is super, super crazy. And then there’s the drive part. So we, we basically just broke it down the same way,” said Aandeg Muldrew, a translator on the project and the voice of Luke Skywalker.
Bringing those words to life was a different challenge for the voice actors. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are silver screen icons with very distinctive interpretations of the characters.
Theresa Eischen, the voice actor for Princess Leia, said she took her lead from the Hollywood stars.
“I recorded each line that Princess Leia said, as Carrie Fisher said them,” said Eischen. “And then I would automatically say them in English first to get the sound, the way she sounded. Then I would say them in Anishinaabemowin. And it just came together after that.”
The result is a new take on the galaxy far, far away — one that people involved in the project believe will resonate with Indigenous audiences.
Trados, the industry-leading translation platform by RWS, has recently launched an innovative ‘AI Essentials’ add-on, simplifying the integration of AI into translation workflows. AI Essentials combines two groundbreaking capabilities introduced earlier this year – Generative Translation and Smart Review – designed to enhance translation quality, speed up time-to-market, and cut translation costs. With no separate LLM subscription required, this add-on empowers organizations to customize their Trados solutions in line with their unique business needs, unlocking new possibilities to translate everything efficiently.
Additionally, we have also released a collection of new enhancements to The Trados platform. Here are just a few of our latest innovations:
Improve quality and reduce turnaround times withbetter translation management
PerfectMatch for efficient translation: We have now introduced PerfectMatch in the browser as a new step in the workflow, bringing this powerful capability to the entire Trados portfolio.
Previously only available in the desktop application, PerfectMatch is a form of context match that compares source files to existing bilingual files rather than to a translation memory. By identifying matching segments from the previous document and considering the surrounding context, it can provide a perfect match.
Readers might recognize Aida Salazar’s name as the author of award-winning middle grade novels, such as The Moon Within andThe Land of the Cranes, and even her most recent Caldecott Honor winner, Jovita Wears Pants, illustrated by Molly Mendoza (2019, 2020, 2023, all Scholastic). But Salazar wears another hat in the children’s publishing sphere. She’s also a translator of books, including Isabel Quintero’s La panza de mamá, the Spanish-language edition of Mama’s Panza(both Penguin, 2024)—both SLJ stars. The picture book by Morris Award–winning Quintero, illustrated by Iliana Galvez, is about a little boy who expresses his appreciation of the comfort of his mother’s belly. It is a tribute to mother’s bodies and all the love and security that can be found there.
Salazar’s journey into translating happened in the most unexpected of ways. During the pandemic, a publisher requested that she translate Peace by Miranda Paul and Paul Baptiste (NorthSouth, 2021), an ode to peace, from English to Spanish. “They asked me to translate this 300-word poem in rhyme, which was a huge, beautiful puzzle and an incredible challenge,” says Salazar.
COCONUT CREEK, FL. – MotionPoint, the leading website translation and localization platform, announces the official date of AdaptiveCon 2024! The ultimate event for exploring the latest breakthroughs in translation technology for websites will take place virtually for free on August 7th, 2024, at 12 PM ET.
Why Attend AdaptiveCon 2024:
Cutting-Edge Technology Revealed: MotionPoint will introduce groundbreaking advancements in website translation technology. Don’t miss the opportunity to be among the first to witness these innovations.
Industry Insights: Our event is designed for marketing leaders and web developers eager to stay at the forefront of website translation technology. If you’re looking to harness the latest AI advancements to optimize your translation budget, streamline processes, and enhance quality, this event is for you.
Key Learnings:
Maximize your translation budget by identifying which pages require post-edit translation with groundbreaking AI.
Leverage Brand-Voice AI to improve style-guide adherence, and glossary adherence.
How multinational companies can balance marketing messaging in different countries from Subway’s globalization leader after doing so in over 100 countries.
Manga is a 14 billion-dollar industry for Japan, but it would be even bigger if it weren’t for online sites offering stolen versions of the comics. A Tokyo start-up hopes artificial intelligence will ride to the rescue. Its specialized AI system can translate manga into multiple languages in just days, getting the latest volumes into fans’ hands quickly and providing a powerful weapon to fight the pirates.
Unofficial translations are estimated to cost Japanese publishers as much as 5 billion dollars a year, and also pick the pockets of the manga artists who survive on their royalties. Pirates take advantage of the time lag in translating works to rush their versions online before the licensed ones can be released.
The demand for translations now far outstrips the supply. At the New York branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, manga fans scour the shelves for the latest additions to their collections.
But only a fraction of Japanese manga titles are available in translation. The store has a sign informing customers which manga have yet to be released in English.
Nagai Yasunobu, a manager at Kinokuniya New York, says manga’s popularity is surging. If this trend continues, he says that translating more work will be crucial.
Works across different genres—and in 10 languages—have won English PEN’s flagship translation awards, PEN Translates.
The books selected demonstrate outstanding literary quality, and are also judged on the strength of the publishing project and their contribution to the UK’s bibliodiversity.
PEN Translates is supported by Arts Council England, and the award was launched with the aim of encouraging UK publishers to acquire more books from other languages, helping them to meet the costs associated with translation. It funds up to 75% of these costs for selected projects, but PEN also considers supporting up to 100% of translation costs in cases where a publisher’s annual turnover is less than £500,000.
Two of the books awarded—a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, and The Aquatics by Osvalde Lewat, translated from the French by Maren Baudet-Lackner—were projects supported through English PEN’s grant for sample translations, PEN Presents. They were subsequently acquired by And Other Stories and Cassava Republic Press, respectively.
Mushtaq’s collection of short stories has also been supported through a ring-fenced fund for Indian literature in translation in partnership with the British Council. This partnership was established as part of the India/UK Together Season of Culture, and included the inaugural round of PEN Presents in 2022, of which Mushtaq and Bhasthi were winners.
This global convening offers invited artists, writers, and scholars whose work re-imagines the experiences of migration, challenges normative xenophobic ideas and undermines a politics of fear to generate new discourses, aesthetics, and structures of knowledge. Our world is characterized by the movements of people, diasporas, and relocations: far from a temporary or “crisis” phenomenon, human beings globally and historically have always left their homes to escape war, to avoid persecution, for work, for security. We have been uprooted, stolen, trafficked, enslaved; they have been displaced from land despoiled of resources and habitats lost to extreme weather patterns and climate change. We have moved and migrated for deeply private and personal reasons – to reach potential freely, to lead meaningful lives, to secure a future for ourselves and our families. An account of the migration is the totality of many stories. We seek to capture the breadth of experience. Translation is critical to any genuine comprehension of our contemporary world. Literature and art open us to abundant cultures carried by human beings when they migrate. This alternative critical language leads us to think expansively about memory, belonging and identity, familiar and unfamiliar, borders and home, objects and affects, self-imagining, family and loss. Panels include: Perspectives on Migration, Migration and Translation, Black Rest in Translation, MacX Fellows and Migration Projects. We hope you can join us in Paris for what is going to be an unforgettable convening.
Red Cross volunteers getting ready to deliver the mission. Photo illustration by Juan Carlos Molina Padilla/American Red Cross
The American Red Cross Multicultural Communications team announces the launch of its innovative Translator Hub. This cutting-edge platform is designed to bridge the language gap and ensure effective communication with non-English speaking audiences. By utilizing a custom machine translation system complemented by rigorous human reviews, the hub offers accurate and culturally sensitive translations for all text and materials.
The Translator Hub is a significant milestone for the American Red Cross, reflecting its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Users within the organization can now translate a wide range of documents, ensuring vital information reaches diverse communities. Whether it’s press releases, social media content, or educational materials, the hub ensures these messages are understood by everyone, regardless of language barriers.
The key to the hub’s success is its dual approach to translation. Initially, a custom machine translation system generates a preliminary document. This is then meticulously reviewed by human translators to guarantee accuracy, contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness. This two-step process ensures that the final output is not only linguistically correct, but also resonates with the target audience.
The Société française des traducteurs (SFT), a French union for professional translators and interpreters, has released a statement on the use of AI translation and GenAI.
The SFT published the statement in mid-June 2024, following a survey of members between November-December 2023, and now encourages all professionals — members and the unaffiliated alike — to share the statement. (The SFT reported 1,648 members as of June 2020.)
The statement acknowledges that the translation industry has already been impacted by major technological upheavals; namely, the introduction of neural machine translation (MT) in 2016. Since then, clients and language service providers (LSPs) alike have largely adopted this technology.
Still, the statement posits, that the output [of machine translation] remains unreadable in its raw state, and requires humans to correct it via post-editing: “But 70% of our member translators who responded to our survey considered PE (and by extension AI) a threat to their profession.”
More specifically, the SFT calls for the respect of human expertise and strongly recommends against replacing human language experts with AI tools, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.
In a June 12, 2024 paper researchers from Tencent AI and the Harbin Institute of Technology introduced TasTe, a method for teaching large language models (LLMs) to translate through self-reflection.
The key idea is to enable LLMs to generate preliminary translations (i.e., drafts), self-evaluate their own translations, and make refinements based on the evaluation.
The researchers explained that LLMs have shown exceptional performance across various natural language processing tasks, including machine translation (MT). However, their translations still do not match the quality of supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems.
To address this, the authors proposed the TasTe framework (translating through self-reflection), which improves the translation capabilities of LLMs by incorporating a self-reflection process.
Durrow man translates Heartstopper – the queer love story everyone is falling for. – into Irish.
Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin (foilsitheoir) James Kavanagh (a sheol an leabhar), Eoin Mc Evoy (aistritheoir)
It was a full house in An Siopa Leabhar, 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2 on Thursday evening for the launch of Heartstopper – the queer love story everyone is falling for.
Written by Alice Oseman, the series is a global hit on Netflix and the books are available in more than 36 languages.
And now, thanks to the superb translation by Eoin McEvoy, the first book in the best-selling series of graphic novels is also available as Gaeilge.
From Durrow, Eoin is a translations and creative writing lecturer in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, UCD.
Google LLC said today that it’s bringing 110 new languages to its web and smartphone translation app using the power of artificial intelligence, making it more comprehensive than ever with 243 languages in total.
This is the largest expansion to date for Google Translate since 2022, when the company brought 24 new languages to the app using zero-shot machine translation. That’s where a language model learns to translate a language without ever seeing an example.
The company employed PaLM 2, a transformer-based large language model AI developed by Google Research that first powered Bard, Google’s AI chatbot. It eventually evolved into Gemini, which is now powered by the company’s AI model of the same name. Differing from Gemini, PaLM 2 was trained on Pathways, a vast dataset of human language containing more than 1.56 trillion words and 250 billion parameters.
Given the size of this dataset, Google said, PaLM 2 can attain unprecedented fluency with written languages and demonstrated an impressive ability to perform linguistic tasks during testing including understanding idiomatic phrases. However, unlike Gemini, PaLM 2 cannot understand or generate images or work with audio.
Copenhagen, Denmark – June 27 2024 – EasyTranslate, an AI-powered language operations platform, has launched HumanAI, designed to transform the translation industry.
The translation market has long been split into two segments: technology providers and service providers. This separation has created a gap, as there has not been a single solution that combines both. The rise of the LangOps Platform addresses this issue by integrating services and technology into one cohesive solution, eliminating the need for separate TMS and service providers. This innovation fills a crucial gap in the market, streamlining multilingual content management and service delivery in one cohesive solution – Language Operations Platform.
HumanAI combines advanced AI models with strategic human intervention to deliver unparalleled quality, speed and cost-effectiveness, making it a powerful tool for businesses looking to improve on-brand global communication.
Evriviadis Sofos received the best translation award. Credit: LEA
Translator Evriviadis Sofos received the best translation award at the 16th LEA (Literature in Athens) Festival which aims to form cultural and literary bridges between Latin America, Spain, Greece and Portugal through words and letters.
Organized under the auspices of the Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and supported by the Libra Group and Libra Philanthropies, the event was attended by guests from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico and Uruguay.
At the main festival event which place earlier this week at the Amphitheater of the Acropolis Museum, Sofos was awarded for his translation from Catalan of the book “Uncertain Glory” by Spanish writer Joan Sales, published by Agra Editions in 2023.
The LEA Festival inaugurated the literary translation prize in 2021 with a symbolic prize of 1,000 euros. This year, 35 books were submitted to the LEA festival for judging.
In a June 4, 2924 paper researchers from Google Research and Google DeepMind presented SimulTron, a model designed for on-device, real-time speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) built upon the Translatotron architecture.
The researchers highlighted the ongoing evolution of S2ST technology while emphasizing the persistent challenge of achieving accurate, real-time, on-device simultaneous translation. They noted that existing simultaneous translation models are not adequately optimized for the unique constraints of mobile devices, underscoring the significant challenge of achieving seamless real-time translation on mobile devices.
“Today, with smartphones and tablets being central hubs for personal and professional interactions, on-device S2ST is crucial,” they said.
In response to this challenge, they introduced SimulTron, a model that leverages the strengths of Translatotron while incorporating key modifications specifically tailored for the on-device, simultaneous translation scenarios.
ORLANDO, FL — Even if the equipment is confiscated or destroyed, if the unthinkable happens, the translation work -weeks or months of translation progress- is protected. Wycliffe Associates provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the biblical translation.
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ORLANDO, FL — Even if the equipment is confiscated or destroyed, if the unthinkable happens, the translation work -weeks or months of translation progress- is protected. Wycliffe Associates provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the biblical translation.
Wycliffe Associates, one of the world’s leading bible translation organizations, provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the translation of scriptures.
The organization announced the development of bible translation acceleration kits for translators living in isolated areas without internet connectivity.
In the last few years, technology has allowed the bible to reach millions of people in new and innovative ways.
Bill McDonald – Regional Development Director:
At Wycliffe Associates, we accelerate Bible translation work by empowering national translators to provide the Word of God in their own language. We partner with the local church to guide and safeguard that translation, and then involve people from around the world to provide resources, technology, training, and especially support for Bible translation.
Wycliffe Associates, one of the world’s leading bible translation organizations, provides translators living in remote regions with the necessary technology to protect and accelerate the translation of scriptures.
The organization announced the development of bible translation acceleration kits for translators living in isolated areas without internet connectivity.
In the last few years, technology has allowed the bible to reach millions of people in new and innovative ways.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2024 — Unbabel, an AI-powered Language Operations (LangOps) platform that helps businesses deliver multilingual customer experience at scale, recently announced the launch of TowerLLM, the first Large Language Model (LLM) designed, trained, and optimized for translation, resulting in the best performing translation LLM commercially available. Unbabel customers using TowerLLM will significantly improve machine translation accuracy, reducing errors and cost, and will benefit from a more cost-effective price than popular LLMs.
TowerLLM provides superior translation quality to leading LLMs like GPT-4o and GPT-3.5, while consistently outperforming Google and DeepL, because it was made from scratch to be multilingual. Built on a large public data set, then trained only on best-quality translation data filtered out and curated by Unbabel’s quality LLM, COMETKiwi, TowerLLM demonstrates that LLMs are the next step in the evolution of AI translation.
“Despite the doubts from some in the industry, TowerLLM clearly demonstrates that LLMs are the best solution for machine translation,” said João Graça, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Unbabel. “We’ve invested years into developing LLMs, so we’re not surprised to see TowerLLM outperform GPT-4o. This is the second multilingual LLM we’ve released after COMETKiwi, and we’re just getting started.”
Publishing Scotland’s fund supports translation of Scottish writings by international publishers, and has opened a new application round.
Deadline for This Round of Applications: August 12
Among international translation funds, the Publishing Scotland program has long been familiar to Publishing Perspectives readers.
The program offers financial support for the translation of Scottish books into other languages, and publishers outside the United Kingdom are eligible. Funding is offered in the form of a grant, and it’s for translation costs only.
Today (June 6), the fund’s administrators have notified us that they’re opening the first round of applications in their 2024-’25 sequence.
Launched in 2015, the translation fund has facilitated the translation of Scottish works into dozens of languages, including Ukrainian, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, German, Simple Chinese, and Georgian. The offices ‘ personnel in Edinburgh point out that as the fund’s popularity has grown, it has continued to provide funding to international publishing houses and literary agents interested in Scottish writings.
Guests attend a symposium on world literature and China at Renmin University of China in Beijing on Friday. WANG JING/CHINA DAILY
Renmin University of China announced the establishment of the Center for Translation and Study of World Literature in Beijing on Friday, the first of its kind in the country that aims to explore universal human values and the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind from the perspective of the translation and study of world literature.
The center will build three major platforms to promote the translation and study of foreign literature as well as cultural communication and exchanges.
In a speech at the opening ceremony, Lin Shangli, president of RUC, said that the universal human values proposed by President Xi Jinping are not only the core themes of literary works across different eras and nations, but also the foundational context for humanities and social sciences research in the era of globalization.
He said that for individuals literature is a spiritual sanctuary, and for a nation it’s the foundation for its people’s sense of belonging and identity.
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