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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.
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.
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.
Minors who were locked up in adult prisons for people smuggling say they could not understand proceedings and thought they were going home.
Vulnerable Indonesian children say they were either given no interpreter or an interpreter who spoke the wrong language during deeply flawed people smuggling prosecutions, leaving them unable to understand court proceedings before their imprisonment by Australia in maximum security adult jails.
The Australian government last year agreed to pay $27.5m in compensation to more than 200 Indonesians who were wrongfully prosecuted and detained as adult people smugglers while they were children.
The children were found on boats carrying asylum seekers to Australia in 2009 and the early 2010s during the last Labor government.
The majority were from poor fishing villages and many were tricked into joining the voyages by people-smuggling ringleaders.
In the latest edition of Google’s SEO Office Hours video series, a company representative gave an update on the search giant’s take on AI-generated translations for multilingual websites.
The series, led by Google’s Search Relations Team Lead, John Mueller, answers questions from users about website crawling, indexing, and internationalization.
One user asked, “how can one be transparent in the use of AI translations without being punished for AI-heavy content?” Google’s Mueller responded that while there is “no special markup” to label webpages as automatic translations, users should “consider whether translated pages align with the quality bar that you set for yourself.”
Mueller suggested that if the translated content isn’t high quality, users would be better off not indexing the pages for search engines. “Ultimately, a good localization is much more than just a translation of words and sentences, so I would definitely encourage you to go beyond the minimal bar if you want users in other regions to cherish your site”, he concluded.
It will soon be easier to see Facebook and Instagram posts in lesser-spoken global languages, but an expert suggests that to improve the tool Meta should talk to native speakers.
It will soon be easier to see Facebook and Instagram posts in 200 lesser-spoken languages around the world.
Meta’s No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project announced in a paper published this month that they’ve scaled their original technology.
The project includes a dozen “low resource” European languages, like Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Irish, Lingurian, Bosnian, Icelandic and Welsh.
According to Meta, that’s a language that has less than one million sentences in data that can be used.
Experts say that to improve the service, Meta should consult with native speakers and language specialists as the tool still needs work.
Earlier this year, a drumbeat of news headlines played into public anxieties about the safety of human jobs when Duolingo, a language learning app, became a prominent example of a company cutting workers and replacing them with artificial intelligence.
The most eye-catching job cuts were those for translators, who worked on some of the company’s less popular language education courses. Translators and interpreters are often near the top of media listicles as the jobs most likely to be killed by AI. When the stories about Duolingo’s job cuts circulated, they seemed to confirm that the inevitable AI jobs apocalypse had arrived.
In a recent conversation with Planet Money, the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, downplayed the meaning of the cuts. It wasn’t full-time employees. It was only 10% of their contractors. His company’s recent embrace of generative AI only played one part in the decision, and so on. More interesting, considering Duolingo’s official partnership with OpenAI, was von Ahn’s reaction to the company’s recent demonstration of its newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4o.
The Arafat sermon translation project will now encompass 50 languages. (SPA)
The initiative marks the world’s largest project of its kind
Launched in 2018, the project initially offered translations in five languages
MAKKAH: The Presidency of the Religious Affairs of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet’s Mosque announced on Wednesday that the Arafat sermon translation project will now encompass 50 languages. The Saudi Press Agency reported that the initiative, spearheaded by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman, marks the world’s largest project of its kind. Launched in 2018, the project initially offered translations in five languages. This remarkable growth to 50 languages in less than a decade reflects the Kingdom’s dedication to spreading the message of moderation and Islamic values globally. On Sunday, the Presidency said the Arafat sermon for this year’s Hajj season will reach one billion listeners worldwide, fostering greater understanding and promoting peace through the message of the Arafat sermon.
In early January 2024, when many in the language industry were likely pondering how to eventually incorporate AI into their offerings or processes, OpenAI announced its GPT Store. Back then, a few translation GPTs could be found, including one built by Phrase called “Phrase Expert.”
By the time OpenAI launched the store to the general public, there were already more than three million GPTs done by pre-release testers. After the kind of hype seen in late 2022 with ChatGPT and all the drama surrounding the company’s CEO and Board in 2023, the store launch was also a popular subject in the news and on social media.
Then, the announcement of the company’s text-to-video generator, Sora, arrived in February 2024, lest people get OpenAI out of their minds for too long.
In March 2024, we asked readers if they had ever used Custom GPTs since the store was launched, and over two-thirds of respondents (64.6%) said No. Over a combined quarter of readers said they tested GPTs a bit after launch (14.6%) or from time to time (12.5%), and a very small percentage said they have been using them daily (8.3%).
On June 4, the Japan Association of Translators (JAT) released an open statement against a joint initiative by the Japanese government and private sector companies to use AI for high-volume translation of manga. The association cited that AI’s current limitations and lack of oversight would result in badly translated manga being produced en masse. They argue that this would greatly diminish the value of the works themselves, increase demand for better pirated translations and ultimately damage Japan’s soft power.
The initiative that JAT are opposing was announced at the beginning of May. According to The Nikkei, ten companies, including major manga publisher Shogakukan and the Japan Investment Corporation (JIC), which is affiliated with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), have invested 2.92 billion yen in Orange, a start-up company that uses AI to translate manga. The project aims to make manga translation at least 10 times faster, producing around 50,000 works in 5 years. The ultimate goal is to dramatically increase the number of manga exports and to promote the growth of Japan’s content industry.
However, the Japan Association of Translators has opposed this move on several grounds. Firstly, they are concerned that AI is currently unable to correctly infer context. Japanese is a high context language in which information is often left out of sentences- meaning that AI can easily end up coming out with an incorrect translation or getting the tone wrong. JAT explains that “AI translation is extremely unsuitable for translating high-context, story-centric writing, such as novels, scripts, and manga. Quick and easy AI translation not only risks hurting the translation industry or the manga industry, but it is also not in the country’s best interests.”
The Eurobarometer surveyed language trends among EU citizens, focusing on how the use of languages and attitudes towards language learning evolve over time. One of the most notable findings of the latest EU barometer was the prominence of English spoken as a foreign language.
The survey found that almost half of Europeans (47%) speak English as a foreign or second language – up 5% since 2012. A substantial 70% of young Europeans (15-24) can have a conversation in English (+9% since 2012).
Credit: European Union
There has been a considerable drop in the other most widely spoken languages after English: just 11% speak French, 10% speak German and 7% speak Spanish as a foreign language. The growing gap begs the question: is multilingualism on the way out?
In the last 18 months, large language models (LLMs) have fueled a raft of startups and been rapidly injected into language technology platforms. But how have professional linguists responded to this pivotal moment in AI?
A survey of more than 750 translators — conducted in April 2024 for the 2024 Slator Language Industry Market Report — found that AI adoption by professional linguists is now widespread. Two-thirds of translators have used AI in their translation work in the past 12 months.
Whether via AI models (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini), translation management systems, or standalone AI platforms, linguists are actively leveraging AI in new and creative ways to enhance quality and efficiency.
Here, we present the top 10 applications of AI by translators, based on results from Slator’s 2024 linguist survey.
Language is one the greatest gifts our world has ever received. Through language we’re able to communicate with each other and also express our uniqueness.
Languages are a way of seeing things. The way we explain different concepts – or whether the concepts exist in our language at all – provides a vital window to our culture. As Microsoft President Brad Smith put it: “When a community loses a language, it loses its connection to the past – and part of its present. It loses a piece of its identity.”
Te reo Māori is part of Aotearoa’s identity. When Kiwis travel, we communicate with others in English, the international language of business. But when we share what makes us unique, what do we talk about? Thanks to the success of the All Blacks, people know us for the haka. We’re also known for being “Kiwi”, for our celebrities such as Taika Waititi and places like Rotorua, Kaikoura and Waiheke. What all of these people, places and things have in common is a language – te reo Māori.
Growing up, I wasn’t able to express myself in the language of my people, something that’s helped shape who I am and what I do as the founder of a translation technology company today. Not only do we have to be open to using te reo Māori, we have to get smarter about harnessing technology to ensure more New Zealanders have an opportunity to engage with it as they go about their day.
The World Economic Forum is predicting that within the next 100 years, around 1,500 languages could disappear forever. The research found that regionally dominant languages taught in class often overshadow indigenous tongues. Unless they’re used regularly and encouraged to become a part of people’s daily lives, these foundations of our culture get lost. Without them, we lose so much more than just words – we lose what makes us uniquely us.
Are language service providers (LSPs) seizing the benefits offered by generative AI and large language models? An April 2024 Slator study has found that the answer is a resounding “yes”.
The survey of AI adoption across 223 companies found that one in three LSPs have implemented large language models into their workflows. Furthermore, close to 20% of companies have now tested use cases or beta versions.
Just 3% of LSPs told Slator that they have no plans to implement LLMs.
Beyond performing the core machine translation task, LLMs — such as Meta’s Llama 3 and OpenAI’s GPT 4 and 4o — have significant potential to augment and enable language AI services. Key applications include quality estimation, dynamic translation adaptation, and multilingual text generation, among others.
Gabriel Fairman, CEO of Bureau Works, speaking at the opening of SlatorCon London on Wednesday 21 May, emphasized that LLMs represent nothing less than “a new way for humans to relate to machines”.
Mark Harman on Learning to Understand Both the Surfaces and “Subterranean Passages” of Kafka
Kafka claims in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his girlfriend and first translator, that the emotional cohesion of “The Judgment” is evident in “every sentence, every word, every—if I may say so—music.” Kafka could hear that “music” in Jesenská’s Czech translation, although he would have initially preferred to hear the voice of his beloved: “I wanted to hear from you and not the voice from the old grave, the voice I know all too well.”
His high praise of Jesenská’s translation could only have come from a polyglot writer, who spoke Czech in addition to his native German, had a sophisticated understanding of the translator’s task, and whose writing straddles linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Anyone who attempts a new translation of Kafka owes a great debt to the work of Willa and Edwin Muir, who created the remarkably elegant, and, for the better part of the twentieth-century, canonical English-language translations of Kafka. As first translators, the Muirs needed to introduce their unsettling author to English-speaking readers and creatively adapted some of Kafka’s stylistic idiosyncrasies.
A Quebec court judge has declared inoperable a portion of the province’s language law that requires English-language court decisions to be immediately translated into French.
Dennis Galiatsatos wrote in a May 17 decision the requirement for courts to simultaneously provide a French translation of a written decision rendered in English will slow down the legal process for anglophone Quebecers accused of a crime.
A modification to the Quebec language charter scheduled to come into effect on June 1 states that a French translation must be provided “immediately and without delay.”
Galiatsatos says translations can take weeks or months to produce and approve, a process he adds will delay verdicts and force people who opt to be tried in English to wait longer to learn their fate than those who are tried in French.
Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany
Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.
Erpenbeck is the first German writer to win, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The £50,000 prize money will be split equally between the pair.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann. Photograph: PR
Erpenbeck and Hofmann were announced as the winners at a ceremony held at the Tate Modern in London, sponsored by the Italian luxury fashion house Maison Valentino.
Kairos tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany. The novel is a “richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations”, said judging chair and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel.
Hofmann’s translation “captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary”, she added.
In addition to being bilingual, “she has a super sensitive ear for the texts she translates, and she strives to find the right English words and the right register for each book.”
Anyone who has read any books or essays by contemporary Israeli writers has probably encountered the words of Jessica Cohen.
That’s because Cohen is the most in-demand Hebrew-to-English translator working today. In the past year alone, four of her translations have been published: “Professor Schiff’s Guilt,” a novel by Agur Schiff; “Stockholm: A Novel,” by Noa Yedlin; “Every Wrinkle Has a Story,” a children’s book by David Grossman; and “The Hebrew Teacher,” a collection of novellas by Maya Arad. Cohen also translated Grossman’s op-ed on the Israel-Hamas war, titled “Israel is Falling Into an Abyss,” that was published in the New York Times in March.
Over the past 25 years, she has translated more than 30 books and dozens of shorter works by some of the most renowned Israeli writers, including Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon and Nir Baram. In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with Grossman for “A Horse Walks Into a Bar,” and four years later, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
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