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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.
The Rask AI Platform: A Pioneer in AI Video Translation
In today’s world, as it globalizes, video content creators are under increasing pressure to make their creations available to an ever more diverse international audience. It is now much easier to translate videos with the advent of technology mayflies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) rising. We no longer speak of it as being a difficult or hard task. Innovative tools powered by AI, like the Rask AI Platform, are leading the way in this changed scene.
Video creators can, therefore, extend social media by giving their material actual global reach. Through such platforms, a lot of different features are supported: real-time translation, many video platforms, and localizing videos into multiple languages. This happens most strikingly through these functions, which enable creators to overcome language barriers and reach out to a variety of linguistic and cultural communities around the world.
Best Video Translation Apps
Here is the original list of top AI-driven video translation tools, which are aimed at helping content creators bring their video content to the world. These online video software options are based on the latest new techniques in neural networks and designed right from the metal up to do a full translation that is authentic and fast.
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with a nearly USD 4m settlement involving Language Line Services and ongoing disputes in Canada, where freelance interpreters are protesting against unpaid breaks during debates.
Florian highlights a YouTube video about UN simultaneous interpreting and the rigorous standards and working conditions for UN interpreters.
Esther shares a significant procurement opportunity from the UK’s Crown Commercial Service, which plans to issue a GBP 250m tender for various language services.
In tech news, the duo talk about DeepL’s new LLM launch that claims to outperform competitors in translation quality. They also touch on the trend of adding translation features to various SaaS platforms, like Airtable and Happy Scribe.
Beyond academia, computer labs, and localization teams, language AI is making its way into the everyday lives of ordinary people — those without a clear connection to the language industry.
Language AI, defined in the Slator Pro Guide on Language AI for Consumers, is an umbrella term covering any AI-enabled conversion or generation of speech or text. This can include machine translation (MT), automated captions, AI dubbing, speech translation, and AI text generation, just to name a few.
What is particularly striking about language AI’s evolution is that its now widespread use is often seen on both ends of the production cycle. Content creators, for instance, can use language AI tools to make their content more accessible, but end-users, viewers, or listeners often do the same on their end. Talk about leveling the playing field!
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.
DeepL SE, a well-funded translation software startup that leverages customized artificial intelligence models for improved accuracy over traditional platforms, has announced the debut of its most powerful AI model yet.
The startup’s next-generation language model is said to be designed specifically for translation and editing tasks. It’s based on a highly specialized large language model that’s fine-tuned on enormous amounts of proprietary language data. The company says the LLM provides more “human-like translations” with a reduced risk of hallucinations and misinformation.
The new model’s skills were enhanced via a human model tutoring process that involved thousands of handpicked language experts, who were hired to “tutor” the model to ensure the accuracy of its translations.
Germany-based DeepL has emerged as a rival to better-known translation systems such as Google Translate and general-purpose AI models such as ChatGPT, which can perform translations as part of a much wider repertoire of skills. Because DeepL’s systems are laser-focused on translating and creating business content, the company claims its models provide much more accurate and precise translations for enterprises.
Seán Kelly has called for Irish to be treated equally to other European languages
“Immediate and sustained action” is needed by the European Parliament to ensure Irish is treated equally to other European languages.
That is according to the Irish MEP – and former president of the GAA – Seán Kelly.
He claimed that Irish speakers in Northern Ireland, who hold Irish passports, can face problems in applying for jobs with the parliament.
He has also called for it to establish a link with Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in order to recruit more Irish-speaking staff.
Mr Kelly has written to the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, raising his concerns.
Irish language challenges
Irish was recognised as an official language of the European Union (EU) in 2007.
It is one of 24 official languages in the EU, which means that speeches in the parliament and documents are translated to and from Irish.
But since then a shortage of translation staff has meant that the number of EU documents translated into Irish has been limited.
A European Commission report in 2021 said that EU institutions employed 138 Irish speakers, although over half of the jobs were temporary.
It said that although Irish translation had increased, recruiting enough Irish speaking staff was “the main challenge” to providing full services in Irish.
In his English translation of the Hanuman Chalisa, Vikram Seth gives the Chalisa back to those of us who have always loved it and presents it as it should be known and understood to those who are not familiar with it and to those who have been persuaded to misunderstand it.
Representational image: A person dressed as Hanuman for a Ramlila performance. Photo: Satish Krishnamurthy, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
I cannot think of anything better in these times of upheaval and distress than the Hanuman Chalisa given to us in English by Vikram Seth. It was waiting for me when I came home from giving a Ramayana lecture one evening and my heart soared, as if Hanuman himself had come to tell me not to worry, to let him take over the weight of my discomforts and the troubles of the world. He is, after all, the sankata-haran, “crisis dispeller,” as Seth defines him in translation.
The Hanuman Chalisa, Vikram Seth, Speaking Tiger, 2024.
Seth’s translation is pitch perfect – this is no small achievement with a text written in tight couplets with a strict metrical scheme, a text with rhyme and rhythm and a text that is well-known and well-loved. Seth talks extensively in his interviews about the difficulty of confronting the falling, ‘feminine’ metres of the original and finding something equally aurally compelling for the English. You scarcely notice this for Seth’s Chalisa is smooth, bouncy, exuberant, playful, reflecting the sweetness of Hanuman’s nature. But Seth has also found the numen that suggests the presence of divinity and is able to share the overwhelming sense of love and devotion with which the poem is imbued.
The Chalisa is attributed to the Awadhi poet Tulsidas, whose grand composition is the Ramcharitamanas, the story of Lord Ram composed in the 16th century. Tulsidas was a Hanuman bhakt, believing that it was the strong, courageous and big-hearted monkey who was the doorway to Ram’s infinite grace and all-consuming love. For all that Tulsi’s Manas is steeped in devotion to Ram, it is this lyrical and joyous incantation that celebrates the marvellous monkey who is both the paradigmatic bhakt and a metaphor for the human soul’s relationship with the divine. Ram’s perfection might be intimidating, but Hanuman is accessible to everyone – the Chalisa expresses this openness more than any other text.
In a June 19, 2024 paper, researchers from the University of Sheffield, the University of Waterloo, the University of Manchester, the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), and the tech company 01.AI introduced a multilingual dataset for evaluating machine translation (MT) quality of metaphorical language.
This new dataset aims to fill a gap in MT evaluation by focusing on the complexities of translating metaphors, where the intended meaning differs from the literal interpretation.
Metaphorical expressions pose significant challenges for MT systems because their meaning extends beyond individual words. As the researchers highlighted, “metaphor translation is more challenging than literal translation.”
Despite the fact that “metaphorical expressions are widely used in daily life for communication and vivid description,” the challenge of accurately machine translating them remains largely unaddressed due to resource scarcity and difficulties in handling the variation in linguistic forms and cultural norms inherent in metaphors.
Last week, Bureau Works published some serious data about our context-sensitive translation technology. It was a rigorous study that evaluated over 4 million translated segments. Our engineering team works closely with our data scientists to produce good data that will be helpful in advancing our industry. They are scientists through and through, dissecting the data we collect for deep and nuanced insights.
I, on the other hand, am more of a data backhoe. I roll into a mine of potential information, scoop out a rough chunk, and see what I find inside. I do this by asking questions on LinkedIn. They are opinion questions, but opinions and emotions are their own type of data. They are data on where we are as a community, and they tell us what we need to develop in the relational part of the localization business.We often think about how to develop from a business perspective, a tech perspective, or a linguistic perspective, but asking people how they feel tells us where we need to develop from a human perspective. My type of data collection isn’t as refined as my team’s work, but it is useful. It is raw, straightforward, and it points straight at the conversations we need to have.
Although the question is visible above, LinkedIn’s character limits on the polls mean that context is lost in the pursuit of concision. But, this question is supercharged with context, so it is important to clarify.
Basically, since the advent of Machine Translation there have been discussions about the value of post-editing. Translators correctly say that their expertise is still required to arrive at a quality translation, and that they are tapping into this expertise to review MT output.
On the other hand, business leaders are also correct when they recognize that post-editing is often (not always) less time-consuming and cognitively intense than translation. And, that much of the work that goes into post-editing is reading and confirming that the machine translation is correct. As machine translation improves across many languages, the number of edits a linguist is required to make continues to decrease. Business leaders also recognize, as any business leader would, that the price of MTPE is often lower than the price of translation. Right or wrong, that is what the market has done.
Leader in professional translation services notes that imprecise translation of sensitive documents can put national security at risk by creating misunderstandings of policies and methods.
DALLAS, July 9, 2024 (Newswire.com) – Businesses and government agencies in the defense sector work on a global stage and often need to translate highly sensitive and critical documents, such as operational manuals and confidential communications. ASTA-USA Translation Services, Inc., a leader in professional document translation services, advises military agencies, defense contractors and other organizations that using AI translation services or unvetted translators could put national security at risk.
“Entrusting defense sector translations to AI tools or unverified freelancers poses significant risks. Subject matter expert translators are imperative to ensure precision and cultural sensitivity while safeguarding our national interests and the integrity of our defense operations,” said Alain J. Roy, founder and CEO of ASTA-USA Translation Services, Inc.
Defense industry documents, including manuals, legal documents, and security clearances are highly technical, and every word matters. Generalist translators are insufficient for the task. ASTA-USA always uses translators with industry-specific knowledge, who can speak and write not only in the target language but in the specific terminology of the industry, allowing them to translate specialized defense documents in a source language with precision.
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 need for efficient and effective localization has never been more critical to global success. Organizations operate in an increasingly interconnected world – one that offers immense opportunities but also suffers from an explosion in content.
Traditional localization isn’t built for the scale and pace needed by global enterprises today so struggles to keep up with the ever-growing demand for multilingual content. Each efficiency gain, like translation memory or machine translation, seems to be quickly eclipsed by the sheer volume of content requiring translation. Businesses are often forced to choose between cost, quality and speed. Known as the ‘iron triangle’, it’s long been an insurmountable obstacle to quickly delivering high-quality translations at scale.
To overcome this conundrum, RWS has developed Evolve, its flagship Human+AI solution – building on the philosophy of ‘Genuine Intelligence’ – that aims to redefine what’s possible in the world of localization.
In a June 27, 2024 paper, researchers from Unbabel and Instituto de Telecomunicações introduced xTOWER, a large language model (LLM) designed to generate “high-quality” explanations for translation errors and use them to suggest improved translations.
The researchers explained that machine translation (MT) systems, despite their strong performance, often produce translations with errors. “Understanding these errors can potentially help improve the translation quality and user experience,” they said.
Built on top of TOWERBASE — an LLM designed, trained, and optimized for MT-related tasks —, xTOWER offers detailed, human-readable explanations for translation errors and suggests corrections based on this analysis.
Specifically, the process involves inputting a source text and its translation into xCOMET, which annotates the translation with error spans and assigns a quality score. The complete input (i.e., the source text and its translation), the annotated translation, and the quality score are then passed to xTOWER, which generates explanations for each error span and proposes a new corrected translation based on these explanations.
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.
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