Quezil - News on Language & Technology

The European Parliament has decided to organise, on the basis of Article 29(1) of the Staff Regulations of Officials of the European Union, an open competition (AD 5) for the recruitment of officials to the Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD).

The profile sought is that of intercultural and language professional for the following languages:

1. German                   (12 successful candidates)
2. Croatian                  (12 successful candidates)                       
3. Lithuanian               (12 successful candidates)
4. Hungarian               (12 successful candidates)

• Slovenian                (12 successful candidates)

This competition notice covers those five languages. You may only apply for one of them. You must choose the language when you complete the online application. Once you have validated your electronic application you will no longer be able to alter that choice.

Hosted in partnership with Bristol Translates Summer School and the University of Bristol, the annual competition is aimed at emerging translators looking for their first publishing opportunity. Each year, one language is selected and students from the Summer School with a specialism in that language submit a translation sample.

Piraino is an Arabic translator specialising in legal and literary translation. Her work has been used in court cases in multiple countries, and her translation of a prominent family’s story of resistance and loss in the Assyrian genocide is expected to be published in 2024. 

John Silva was suddenly taken to Hartford Hospital following a brief stroke-like attack last year. He is deaf and has relied on the hospital’s American Sign Language interpreting service for over 40 years. 

John and his wife Kim, who is hard of hearing, expected to have access to in-person interpreters. However, no in-person sign language interpreters were available when they arrived. Medical staff could also not find the video remote interpreting (VRI) system, typically on an iPad or computer.

Kim Silva said the staff eventually located a VRI system, but only had access to it for an hour since other patients also needed it. John Silva was left to wait six hours for an interpreter to arrive. An in-person interpreter eventually arrived to care for another patient but was able to stay with John and Kim for an hour. 

Ultimately, John needed to undergo a series of examinations and scans with lip-read instructions and relied on a speech-to-text transcriber he provided during the discharge process. 

The Silvas, of Hartford, are just one of hundreds of deaf, hard of hearing and deafblind Connecticut residents experiencing issues accessing sign language interpreting services at medical centers across the state, resulting in worsened health outcomes for the community. 

“Something’s wrong with the system,” John Silva signed. 

Whisper is a technology based on artificial intelligence to transcribe audios. It consists of uploading an audio file to your system, which analyzes and transcribes all the words spoken in the audio, making your transcription easier.

Whisper, in its current version, is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, using AI to process audio and convert its content into text. This version was trained with more than one million hours of audio, surpassing the 680,000 hours of its previous version and reducing errors by 10 to 20 percent.

OpenAI recommends it as a more reliable tool for transcriptions. Although it has occasional errors, it is more efficient than most, being fast, effective and free to use.

A film about the life of Jesus made in 1979 has just been translated into its 2,100th language and the group behind the film expects to use artificial intelligence to add an estimated 200 more languages by 2025.

The executive heading up outreach for the film “Jesus” said Monday that AI is being deployed to speed up translations in the same way Bible translators are using the technology to advance their written work.

“The AI applications that we’re looking at when it comes to translation are in step with the Bible translation community organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators and others,” Josh Newell, executive director of the Jesus Film Project, said in an interview. 

FIT invites all #translators, #interpreters and #terminologists to take part in a free webinar which provides tools for emotion and stress management tailored to language professionals. In this webinar, Dr Séverine Hubscher-Davidson will discuss what stress means, what its symptoms are, and how professionals can manage stress and stressful thoughts. She will introduce the concept of emotional competence and explain its significance in work situations. Through guided practical exercises, participants will be able to develop strategies for managing stress and emotions.

The webinar will take place on Zoom on Friday 17 November at 1-3pm CET, and it will be in English. You can register for the webinar here. The deadline for registrations is Tuesday 14 November 2023, 5pm CET.

Theme: New Voices in Children’s Literature in Translation: Culture, Power and Transnational Approaches.

Dates: 22–23 August 2024, Stockholm (Sweden).

Deadline for abstract: 30 November 2023.

This conference is organized by a collaboration between Stockholm University, Uppsala  University (Sweden), Heriot-Watt University (UK) and the Children In Translation Network at the University of Galway (Ireland) to promote the intersection between Children’s Literature and Translation Studies. We understand this intersection as a space that includes the translation of all forms of multimodal fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults or what Borodo (2007) refers to as “Child-centered Translation Studies” in desire to broaden the field of study to different media.

Join thousands of colleagues to explore AI, stay relevant, and thrive in the rapidly-changing world of translation!

November 14-16, 2023

Join 20+ experts and thousands of colleagues to: 

- Understand the risks and opportunities AI poses and its implications for confidentiality, ethics and pricing

- Develop the right skills and mindset to make informed decisions and educate clients about AI in translation

- Learn to leverage artificial intelligence to boost translation quality, productivity and revenue

- Position yourself as a valuable asset in the evolving translation landscape

In a world dominated by data and technology, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become pivotal for businesses. These language models, a remarkable facet of artificial intelligence, are redefining how organizations function, communicate, and deliver value. Business leaders, CEOs, and upper management need to recognize the significant impact of these models on business processes and strategies.

At their core, large language models are a type of artificial intelligence designed to understand and generate human-like text. Built using vast amounts of training data, large language models work because they understand nuances in human language, provide accurate responses, generate content, and can be fine-tuned with specific information. 

Meta AI is happy to introduce SeamlessM4T, a foundational multilingual and multitask model that seamlessly translates and transcribes across speech and text. SeamlessM4T supports:

• Automatic speech recognition for nearly 100 languages
• Speech-to-text translation for nearly 100 input and output languages
• Speech-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 35 (+ English) output languages
• Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages
• Text-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 35 (+ English) output languages

Conference announcement: 

Theme: TREXTUALITY – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Translated and Multilingual Texts

Dates: 7–9 September 2023

Venue: Arcanum, University of Turku

Schematically, translation studies acknowledges that a text can be translated from one language into another but tends to see source and target texts as stable entities, while in textual scholarship, texts are understood to take many forms, but the different textual manifestations are usually studied only within one language.

In recent years, however, we have seen interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond the source text–target text pair in the case of translation studies and cross linguistic borders when it comes to textual scholarship. For example, thematic journal issues have explored multilingualism and translation from the point of view of textual scholarship (Dillen, Macé, and van Hulle eds. 2012), combined genetic criticism with translation (Durand-Bogaert ed. 2014), and laid out the foundations for genetic translation studies (Cordingley and Montini eds. 2015). Translation can also be seen as a means for bringing out different interpretations of a text and as an intertwined part of writing (Reynolds ed. 2019). Similarly, studies on closely related themes, such as multilingual writing, self-translation, collaborative translation, retranslation, indirect translation, pseudotranslation, backtranslation, and adaptation, may equally provide insights into the complex geneses and networks of dependence that lie behind texts that have manifestations in several languages (Gambier 1994; Bistué 2013). Studies on these kinds of themes often draw on archival resources, as archival material can provide information on translating, translations, and translators (Kujamäki 2018; Cordingley and Hersant eds. 2021).

Keynote speakers:
• Guyda Armstrong, University of Manchester: ”Travelling things: materializing translation in premodern objects"
• Outi Paloposki, University of Turku: ”Drafts, letters, letter drafts – adventures in translation archives”
• Dirk Weissmann, University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès: ”Behind the surface of the monolingual text: multilingual writers, textual genetics and the monolingual paradigm”

Registration is open until 16 August.

More info: https://www.finlit.fi/en/research/critical-editions-edith/trextuality-interdisciplinary-approaches-translated-and

Collogue sur la traduction du sacré

Dans ce colloque, il sera question de répondre aux questions suivantes:

Comment penser le sacré dans sa relation à la terre ?
Comment traduire et actualiser sa dimension et celle du religieux ?
De quelle manière les religions et le sacré peuvent-ils favoriser le discernement ?

M. Thione NIANG a donné, le 09 Février 2023, une conférence à Casablanca, marquant le lancement de la solution EdTech « Yoolof », Une plateforme d’apprentissage du Wolof en Live Online Learning.

Contrairement aux solutions de E-learning classiques, Yoolof  wolof.yool.education  est une plateforme de formation innovante offrant un enseignement de qualité, à distance et en temps réel à partir de salles de cours virtuelles, conçues spécialement pour répondre aux problématiques de l’enseignement et des formations à distance. Les instructeurs ont une vue incomparable sur leur public, ce qui leur permet de repérer les participants nécessitant un soutien, et peuvent transmettre leur savoir de manière engageante.