 Your new post is loading...
|
Scooped by
Charles Tiayon
July 6, 2012 8:43 PM
|
This week, physicists revealed to the world that they’ve all but confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, called the “God Particle” in layman’s terms. The discovery is said to answer the riddle of how subatomic particles were formed, and what gives them their mass. As an interpreter and translator who’s dabbled in more than one specialty within the scope of being a linguist, and in the shadow of such an exciting moment for mankind, I started exploring what makes us tick, a “Linguist Particle,” if you will. This week, physicists revealed to the world that they’ve all but confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, called the “God Particle” in layman’s terms. The discovery is said to answer the riddle of how subatomic particles were formed, and what gives them their mass. As an interpreter and translator who’s dabbled in more than one specialty within the scope of being a linguist, and in the shadow of such an exciting moment for mankind, I started exploring what makes us tick, a “Linguist Particle,” if you will.
Researchers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East are building their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence
"In a high-stakes artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, an equally transformative movement is taking shape elsewhere. From Cape Town to Bangalore, from Cairo to Riyadh, researchers, engineers and public institutions are building homegrown AI systems, models that speak not just in local languages, but with regional insight and cultural depth.
The dominant narrative in AI, particularly since the early 2020s, has focused on a handful of US-based companies like OpenAI with GPT, Google with Gemini, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude. They vie to build ever larger and more capable models. Earlier in 2025, China’s DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, added a new twist by releasing large language models (LLMs) that rival their American counterparts, with a smaller computational demand. But increasingly, researchers across the Global South are challenging the notion that technological leadership in AI is the exclusive domain of these two superpowers.
Instead, scientists and institutions in countries like India, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rethinking the very premise of generative AI. Their focus is not on scaling up, but on scaling right, building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities.
“How do we make sure that the entire planet benefits from AI?” asks Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a lead developer of InkubaLM, a generative model trained on five African languages. “I want more and more voices to be in the conversation”.
Beyond English, beyond Silicon Valley
Large language models work by training on massive troves of online text. While the latest versions of GPT, Gemini or LLaMa boast multilingual capabilities, the overwhelming presence of English-language material and Western cultural contexts in these datasets skews their outputs. For speakers of Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages, that means AI systems may not only stumble over grammar and syntax, they can also miss the point entirely.
“In Indian languages, large models trained on English data just don’t perform well,” says Janki Nawale, a linguist at AI4Bharat, a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “There are cultural nuances, dialectal variations, and even non-standard scripts that make translation and understanding difficult.” Nawale’s team builds supervised datasets and evaluation benchmarks for what specialists call “low resource” languages, those that lack robust digital corpora for machine learning.
It’s not just a question of grammar or vocabulary. “The meaning often lies in the implication,” says Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. “In isiXhosa, the words are one thing but what’s being implied is what really matters.” Marivate co-leads Masakhane NLP, a pan-African collective of AI researchers that recently developed AFROBENCH, a rigorous benchmark for evaluating how well large language models perform on 64 African languages across 15 tasks. The results, published in a preprint in March, revealed major gaps in performance between English and nearly all African languages, especially with open-source models.
Similar concerns arise in the Arabic-speaking world. “If English dominates the training process, the answers will be filtered through a Western lens rather than an Arab one,” says Mekki Habib, a robotics professor at the American University in Cairo. A 2024 preprint from the Tunisian AI firm Clusterlab finds that many multilingual models fail to capture Arabic’s syntactic complexity or cultural frames of reference, particularly in dialect-rich contexts.
Governments step in
For many countries in the Global South, the stakes are geopolitical as well as linguistic. Dependence on Western or Chinese AI infrastructure could mean diminished sovereignty over information, technology, and even national narratives. In response, governments are pouring resources into creating their own models.
Saudi Arabia’s national AI authority, SDAIA, has built ‘ALLaM,’ an Arabic-first model based on Meta’s LLaMa-2, enriched with more than 540 billion Arabic tokens. The United Arab Emirates has backed several initiatives, including ‘Jais,’ an open-source Arabic-English model built by MBZUAI in collaboration with US chipmaker Cerebras Systems and the Abu Dhabi firm Inception. Another UAE-backed project, Noor, focuses on educational and Islamic applications.
In Qatar, researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, have developed the Fanar platform and its LLMs Fanar Star and Fanar Prime. Trained on a trillion tokens of Arabic, English, and code, Fanar’s tokenization approach is specifically engineered to reflect Arabic’s rich morphology and syntax.
India has emerged as a major hub for AI localization. In 2024, the government launched BharatGen, a public-private initiative funded with 235 crore (€26 million) initiative aimed at building foundation models attuned to India’s vast linguistic and cultural diversity. The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and also involves its sister organizations in Hyderabad, Mandi, Kanpur, Indore, and Madras. The programme’s first product, e-vikrAI, can generate product descriptions and pricing suggestions from images in various Indic languages. Startups like Ola-backed Krutrim and CoRover’s BharatGPT have jumped in, while Google’s Indian lab unveiled MuRIL, a language model trained exclusively on Indian languages. The Indian governments’ AI Mission has received more than180 proposals from local researchers and startups to build national-scale AI infrastructure and large language models, and the Bengaluru-based company, AI Sarvam, has been selected to build India’s first ‘sovereign’ LLM, expected to be fluent in various Indian languages.
In Africa, much of the energy comes from the ground up. Masakhane NLP and Deep Learning Indaba, a pan-African academic movement, have created a decentralized research culture across the continent. One notable offshoot, Johannesburg-based Lelapa AI, launched InkubaLM in September 2024. It’s a ‘small language model’ (SLM) focused on five African languages with broad reach: Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa.
“With only 0.4 billion parameters, it performs comparably to much larger models,” says Rosman. The model’s compact size and efficiency are designed to meet Africa’s infrastructure constraints while serving real-world applications. Another African model is UlizaLlama, a 7-billion parameter model developed by the Kenyan foundation Jacaranda Health, to support new and expectant mothers with AI-driven support in Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.
India’s research scene is similarly vibrant. The AI4Bharat laboratory at IIT Madras has just released IndicTrans2, that supports translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam AI, another startup, released its first LLM last year to support 10 major Indian languages. And KissanAI, co-founded by Pratik Desai, develops generative AI tools to deliver agricultural advice to farmers in their native languages.
The data dilemma
Yet building LLMs for underrepresented languages poses enormous challenges. Chief among them is data scarcity. “Even Hindi datasets are tiny compared to English,” says Tapas Kumar Mishra, a professor at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in eastern India. “So, training models from scratch is unlikely to match English-based models in performance.”
Rosman agrees. “The big-data paradigm doesn’t work for African languages. We simply don’t have the volume.” His team is pioneering alternative approaches like the Esethu Framework, a protocol for ethically collecting speech datasets from native speakers and redistributing revenue back to further development of AI tools for under-resourced languages. The project’s pilot used read speech from isiXhosa speakers, complete with metadata, to build voice-based applications.
In Arab nations, similar work is underway. Clusterlab’s 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset is the largest of its kind, meticulously extracted and cleaned from the web to support Arabic-first model training.
The cost of staying local
But for all the innovation, practical obstacles remain. “The return on investment is low,” says KissanAI’s Desai. “The market for regional language models is big, but those with purchasing power still work in English.” And while Western tech companies attract the best minds globally, including many Indian and African scientists, researchers at home often face limited funding, patchy computing infrastructure, and unclear legal frameworks around data and privacy.
“There’s still a lack of sustainable funding, a shortage of specialists, and insufficient integration with educational or public systems,” warns Habib, the Cairo-based professor. “All of this has to change.”
A different vision for AI
Despite the hurdles, what’s emerging is a distinct vision for AI in the Global South – one that favours practical impact over prestige, and community ownership over corporate secrecy.
“There’s more emphasis here on solving real problems for real people,” says Nawale of AI4Bharat. Rather than chasing benchmark scores, researchers are aiming for relevance: tools for farmers, students, and small business owners.
And openness matters. “Some companies claim to be open-source, but they only release the model weights, not the data,” Marivate says. “With InkubaLM, we release both. We want others to build on what we’ve done, to do it better.”
In a global contest often measured in teraflops and tokens, these efforts may seem modest. But for the billions who speak the world’s less-resourced languages, they represent a future in which AI doesn’t just speak to them, but with them."
Sibusiso Biyela, Amr Rageh and Shakoor Rather
20 May 2025
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2025.65
#metaglossia_mundus
«Éclaircie» élu meilleur livre étranger 2024 par de nombreux journaux sera traduit en huit langues
"Littérature sans frontières
Carys Davies, lauréate du Prix du meilleur livre étranger 2025
Publié le : 19/12/2025
Carys Davies a grandi au Pays de Galles avant de partir aux États-Unis. Elle est l’auteure de trois romans dont le premier, «West» (Seuil, 2021), a obtenu le Prix du livre de l’année au Pays de Galles. Son deuxième roman, «Le Voyage de Hilary Byrd» (Seuil, 2022), a été élu roman de l’année 2020 par le Sunday Times. «Éclaircie» a, quant à lui, été élu meilleur livre 2024 par de nombreux journaux, il sera traduit en huit langues. Carys Davies vit aujourd’hui à Édimbourg."
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/litt%C3%A9rature-sans-fronti%C3%A8res/20251219-carys-davies-laur%C3%A9ate-du-prix-du-meilleur-livre-%C3%A9tranger-2025
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Human language inspired AI – and now we can use that AI to learn about language
PhD candidate Yuchen Lian (LIACS) wants to understand why human languages look the way they do – and find inspiration to improve AI along the way. She defended her thesis on 12 December.
‘Languages change all the time. Think about ancient Chinese and modern Mandarin. There is a huge difference between them,’ Lian starts talking about her research enthusiastically. ‘And even more so between different languages.’
At the same time, there are universal characteristics, the PhD candidate explains. ‘Linguists want to understand which features are common and why they appear. With the increase in computational power of the last years, we can now learn about language evolution through computer models in increasingly realistic settings.’
‘I believe it's crucial to combine computer science and linguistics to reach a full understanding of language evolution.’
Artificial miniature languages
Lian completed her PhD under the supervision of Tessa Verhoef and Arianna Bisazza, and with support from the China Scholarship Council. As part of the programme, she spent three years at Leiden University before returning to China to continue her doctoral work. ‘I missed Leiden quite a lot, the atmosphere here is really good. I’m happy to return for my PhD defence.’
In her research, the PhD candidate is inspired by miniature languages used in linguistics experiments with people. Participants are given three words: a subject, object and verb. For example, cat, mouse, and chasing. In various assignments, researchers monitor how they use these words. In English, for example, the word order is fixed, explains Lian. “The cat chases the mouse” is the only correct sentence. But in Japanese, there are markers after a word to indicate its function. The order of words is therefore more flexible.
A conversation between AI agents
Lian models two or more AI agents that can communicate with each other. These agents are first trained on a pre-defined artificial language, like the experiments with human participants. ‘We basically give them a vocabulary at the start,’ says Lian. ‘Then we let the agents interact in pairs or even groups through interactive language games. When they accomplish a task successfully, all agents get a reward. That's how they learn.’
The different agents can have the same vocabulary, but different grammar rules to analyse various scenarios. The results show that these agents can replicate the trade-off between word order flexibility and the use of markers. ‘So we know the model works. Moreover, it allows us to extend the results with humans to a larger scale. This complements experiments with humans nicely.’
Human language inspires AI chatbots
Lian opened a new avenue to learn about language evolution. At the same time, her work has the potential to improve AI. ‘We can take inspiration from human language and use that to improve the outcomes of an AI chatbot, for example. Currently, they are trained predominantly through passive exposure to enormous amounts of data. But humans clearly acquire language in a much more interactive way. My simulations demonstrate that repeated communication can result in more efficient interactions and spontaneous emergence of human-like patterns.’
A computer scientist in the field of linguistics
‘My topic extends over the borders of computer science,’ reflects Lian on her PhD. ‘It's quite a challenge to get into this interdisciplinary field. We speak different languages and have different standards in publishing, for example. It was sometimes hard for me that language evolution has no ground truths, propositions cannot be proved in a mathematical sense.’
At the same time, she also found the combination to be fulfilling. ‘Luckily, my promotors had expertise in both fields. I believe it's crucial to combine computer science and linguistics to reach a full understanding of language evolution.’
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/12/human-language-inspired-ai---and-now-we-can-use-that-ai-to-learn-about-language
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"When filing evidence with a court, certified human translations still control.
Welcome to the new multilingual reality of global disputes. International lawsuits no longer involve just multiple jurisdictions; they involve multiple languages, multiple versions of the same document, and multiple interpretations of key communications. As companies expand supply chains, outsource operations, and sell globally, courts are confronting a surge in multilingual evidence:
cross-border emails
bilingual contracts
multilingual warning labels
international HR and compliance records
foreign-language consumer complaints
multilingual product manuals
In complex cases, what a party understood, and in which language, can swing liability dramatically. This has transformed multilingual evidence from a niche issue into a core driver of modern litigation outcomes. Legal authorities such as Crowell & Moring’s Cross-Border Litigation Guide has noted that multilingual evidence is increasingly decisive in global disputes.
Because case timelines move faster than translated documents can be certified, legal teams increasingly rely on MachineTranslation.com, a high-accuracy and free AI translation tool that supports over a million users, processes billions of translated words, and provides legal-friendly features needed to manage multilingual evidence without compromising defensibility.
1. How Courts Evaluate Multilingual Evidence Today
1.1. Courts Now Scrutinize “What Was Understood When”
Judges focus on whether a party reasonably understood:
the contractual obligation
the warning label
the risk disclosure
the regulatory requirement
The question is no longer “What does this document say?”
It is now:
“In which language did the parties act, rely, or misinterpret the meaning?”
Liability frequently shifts when:
language versions conflict
translations were inaccurate
one party spoke both languages and leveraged ambiguity
a party failed to verify a machine translation before acting on it
1.2. Machine Translations Are Admissible — With Limits
Most jurisdictions allow machine-translated documents for:
discovery
early case assessment
privilege review
internal investigations
multilingual e-discovery sorting
red-flag identification
But when filing evidence with a court, certified human translations still control. Courts also caution parties that reliance on faulty MT can increase liability. This proves a statement in a blog on Legal Translation, it will still need to be reviewed, shared, and adopted across jurisdictions. That means translating large volumes of legal text into dozens of languages quickly, but without compromising quality
2. The Five Litigation Areas Where Multilingual Evidence Changes Outcomes
2.1 Contract Disputes
Bilingual contracts often include a “controlling language clause.”
If the versions diverge, courts evaluate:
reliance during negotiation
whether mistranslation created unfairness
whether ambiguity was exploited
2.2 Product Liability
Manufacturers face heightened exposure when:
safety instructions differ across languages
manuals contradict one another
incorrect translations mislead installers
Regulators increasingly consider mistranslation a failure to warn.
2.3 Employment & Workplace Claims
Inconsistent multilingual HR documents impact:
consent
discipline
worker safety
termination fairness
Courts ask whether employees were given clear, equivalent information.
2.4 Data Privacy & Regulated Industries
Incorrectly translated privacy policies can lead to:
GDPR penalties
consumer lawsuits
cross-border compliance failures
Even minor shifts like “may collect” → “will collect” can trigger exposure.
2.5 Cross-Border Fraud & Misrepresentation
Mistranslations can reveal:
deceptive intent
knowledge of falsity
reckless reliance on automated tools
This area is expanding rapidly.
3. How MachineTranslation.com Supports Defensible Litigation Workflows
Legal teams trust MachineTranslation.com because it provides:
accuracy
auditability
speed
scale
3.1 Immediate Translation of Massive Document Sets
MachineTranslation.com processes large collections of:
multilingual emails
attachments
WhatsApp messages
supplier communication
This enables lawyers to quickly identify:
custodians
privilege
key documents
risk factors
3.2 Side-by-Side Translation View
Attorneys can simultaneously see:
source text
MT output
glossary-applied terminology
3.3 Built-In Quality Signals
MachineTranslation.com allows exporting:
confidence scores
revision logs
translation memory matches
audit trails
These features strengthen defensibility when challenged.
3.4 Multilingual Version Comparison
The platform identifies:
mismatched clauses
altered definitions
missing obligations
ambiguous language
across versions.
3.5 Enterprise Integrations
MachineTranslation.com is used by:
compliance organizations
global HR teams
in-house counsel
external law firms
investigations teams
Because it’s secure and designed for legal workflows.
4. Example: How a Simple Mistranslation Alters Liability
Original German Clause
“Der Lieferant muss sicherstellen, dass alle Teile frei von Materialfehlern sind.”
Correct Translation
“The supplier must ensure that all parts are free from material defects.”
Strict obligation → full liability.
Faulty Translation
“The supplier should try to make sure that all parts are free of defects.”
Best-effort → reduced responsibility.
Impact on Liability
Impact on liability between accurate translations and faulty translations. Table by author.
Such shifts can significantly alter:
breach analysis
indemnification triggers
warranty enforcement
damages calculations
settlement leverage
5. Where MachineTranslation.com Prevents These Errors
5.1 Higher Accuracy Engines
The platform blends multiple AI models + legal-domain training.
5.2 Glossaries for Legal Terms
You can lock crucial definitions such as:
indemnify
strict liability
must ensure
5.3 Alignment Tools
Side-by-side comparison reveals discrepancies immediately.
5.4 Exportable Audit Trails
MachineTranslation.com provides:
timestamps
glossaries used
translation history
6. Best Practices for Attorneys Handling Multilingual Evidence
Identify original source language
Use MachineTranslation.com for early triage
Escalate key passages to certified translators
Compare MT, human, and original versions
Preserve every language version
Document all translation steps"
https://www.legalreader.com/how-multilingual-evidence-is-reshaping-liability-in-cross-border-litigation/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Questel Seamlessly Integrates AI-Assisted Patent Translation with Equinox IP Management Software
Translators are Increasingly Leveraging Innovative AI Tools to Improve Speed and Quality of IP Document Translations
Questel, a world leader in intellectual property including AI-assisted patent translation and filing, announced that it has created multiple Connectors to integrate its patent translation services with its Equinox IP Management Software and other third-party IP systems. The Connectors allow Patent professionals to initiate new cases and communicate with patent translation professionals about case progress. Also, Questel is expanding its application of AI solutions to raise global patent translation to new levels of quality and consistency, while responsibly upholding obligations for confidentiality and security.
IP Translation Services Connected to Equinox
Questel’s substantial patent and IP translation services have now been integrated into Questel’s Equinox IP management software (and third-party platforms via API) via seamless Connectors, thereby expanding the end-to-end IP ecosystem. Due to this integration, IP professionals will experience unmatched ease of use, efficiency, and security throughout their patent translation project. Clients can obtain estimates and instruct translators in seconds using the Questel Services Portal, and can also download case instructions and upload deliverables.
AI-Driven Innovations in Patent Translation
Always a pioneer in applying AI technology to improve translation outcomes, Questel has sharpened its focus on equipping its skilled translators with state-of-the-art AI tools to produce unparalleled quality. While the expertise of human translators is still at the heart of Questel’s patent translation resources, AI innovations allow their multilingual, highly educated professionals to be effective, accurate and confidential. Questel is one of few language service providers (LSP) using AI to check and fix machine translations successfully, and to safely automate specific segments of translation work while maintaining human quality.
Highlights of AI-enabled Translation by Questel’s IP and Patent Translation Services:
Machine Translation Quality Evaluation (MTQE)
Translating IP and patent-related documentation ranges from being incredibly complex or rather straightforward. MTQE tools quickly identify potential problems or complexities to flag them for greater scrutiny from human translators. Effectively, MTQE AI focuses human translators’ efforts where their nuanced expertise and judgement are most needed.
Hallucination Detection
AI has become infamous for generating hallucinations, so Questel uses specialized AI to examine what the large language model or neural tool is producing to detect obvious hallucinations. In some cases, the hallucination can be fixed, while in other cases, the translation may need to be completely redone.
Compliance Checking
Compliance with government regulations and patent filing agents’ requirements is essential to success for any patent translation project. Questel strategically uses patent-specific AI to enhance efficiency and ensure data security compliance. This includes safeguarding consistency of terms used throughout the document and adherence to the filing agent’s unique preferences and formatting requirements.
Scoring and Metrics
The MQM (Multidimensional Quality Metric) is a benchmark Questel employs so that revisers can internally score translators and gauge their performance. MQM measures in an automated way to see what translators delivered and how well the AI assisted them.
Risk Adjusted Service Levels
IP professionals clearly want choice when it comes to service levels in patent translation. Not all clients require a premium level for every translation need. Some patents are worth larger monetary investments, whereas others can be achieved more economically. More routine documents, such as prior art and office actions, may not need high-touch human translation so AI’s role can be more substantial for those. Questel offers a wide range of service levels to meet clients’ requirements and budgetary allowances. These range from Premium-Filing Ready to AI Auto Translations with many gradations in between.
“Questel’s Translation Services are known for superior human expertise, ease of use, quality and speed,” remarked Jeremy Coombs, Vice President of Translation & Filing Services at Questel. “Our new Connector-driven integration between our Patent Translation Services and Equinox adds tremendous convenience and visibility to the translation process. Also, our translators are leveraging AI in innovative ways to augment their work, leading to more expedient and comprehensive results for our clients.”
Click here for more information about Questel’s IP Translation Services and more."
https://www.morningstar.com/news/business-wire/20251217721972/questel-seamlessly-integrates-ai-assisted-patent-translation-with-equinox-ip-management-software
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
«Sous-titrer ne suffit pas» : le doublage dopé à l’IA, nouvelle arme des influenceurs pour percer à l’international
DÉCRYPTAGE - Pour fidéliser les créateurs de contenu, YouTube annonce améliorer le doublage automatisé de leurs vidéos et intégrer la synchronisation labiale. Un moyen de se distinguer de ses rivaux TikTok et Instagram.
Charles Sterlings a confié récemment à ses fans ses astuces pour acheter des billets d’avion à prix doux. La vidéo de ce créateur de contenu français, spécialisé en économie, a fait 3 millions de vues sur Instagram. Mais une fois doublée en italien, elle a été visionnée par 5 millions de personnes supplémentaires. La version en espagnol a, elle, intéressé 2 millions d’internautes en plus. Chaque semaine, ce créateur, qui compte 2,7 millions d’abonnés sur ses différents réseaux sociaux, consacre environ dix heures à ses traductions et montages.
Contrairement à Charles Sterlings, la plupart des créateurs de contenu n’ont pas franchi le pas du doublage de leurs vidéos, coûteux et chronophage. Alors, pour leur permettre d’élargir leur audience, YouTube a dévoilé ce mardi de nouvelles fonctionnalités dopées à l’intelligence artificielle. En plus du doublage automatisé, déjà disponible depuis deux ans, la plateforme ajoute la synchronisation labiale..."
Par Keren Lentschner
https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/sous-titrer-ne-suffit-pas-le-doublage-dope-a-l-ia-nouvelle-arme-des-influenceurs-pour-percer-a-l-international-20250916
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Cette étude se penche sur les enjeux et les défis traductologiques liés à la traduction littéraire, en particulier dans le cas des nouvelles de Faribâ Vafi, l’une des figures de la littérature iranienne contemporaine. L’objectif principal est d’élaborer une stratégie traductive capable de préserver à la fois la structure narrative, les spécificités stylistiques et les éléments culturels propres à l’univers de l’auteure, tout en produisant un texte fluide, lisible et culturellement accessible en langue cible.
Notre corpus est constitué de quatre nouvelles issues du recueil Pas de vent, pas de rame que nous avons traduites en français. Ces textes, empreints d’un réalisme subtil et d’une écriture intimiste, posent des défis particuliers sur les plans lexical, syntaxique et culturel. Afin d’aborder ces problématiques, notre analyse s’appuie sur l’approche comparative de Vinay et Darbelnet, qui permet de mettre en lumière les procédés de transposition, d’équivalence ou encore d’emprunt mobilisés dans le passage du persan au français. Cette approche sera également enrichie par des apports théoriques issus de travaux récents sur la traduction des culturèmes et des spécificités littéraires dans les textes contemporains."
https://journals.atu.ac.ir/article_20020.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Tokyo bookstore where translated Korean literature sparks ‘conversation across borders’
Since 2015, publisher Kim Seung-bok has used her shop Chekccori to connect Japanese readers with top Korean authors ‘in the right way’
On a quiet street in Jimbocho, a Tokyo neighbourhood known for its second-hand bookshops and publishing houses, one shop stands out: Chekccori. The store’s shelves are lined with Korean literature translated into Japanese, as well as works in the original language. It has become a gathering place for readers eager to cross cultural borders one page at a time. The name Chekccori means “a celebration after finishing a book” in Korean. The store was founded in 2015 by Tokyo-based South Korean publisher Kim Seung-bok. In recent years, it has seen a surge in young women drawn by their love of K-pop, as well as middle-aged men who have discovered the charm of Korean novels after Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
Ayano Tachibana visited the shop in late August to find books for her coming trip to Seoul. She said she first encountered Korean literature through friends who loved K-pop and later studied Korean at university. “I loved The White Book by Han Kang,” 23-year-old Tachibana said, referring to the author’s poetic exploration of grief and fragility through reflections on white objects such as ice and paper.
“Reading it with classmates, guided by a professor who was a fan, made me realise literature could be a conversation across borders.”
Chekccori stocks around 4,000 books, including titles from Kim’s own publishing company. Kim founded Cuon in 2007 to bring more Korean literature to Japanese readers, at a time when few bookstores stocked such works. Cuon’s first release was Han’s The Vegetarian, a novel that won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, bringing her international acclaim. The novel, which tells the story of a woman whose decision to stop eating meat provokes a violent backlash from her ignorant husband and authoritarian father, has been acclaimed for its haunting portrayal of repression, desire and the struggle for autonomy.
Kim said that while not an easy read, it is the kind of work that serious readers will recognise as extraordinary. “I wanted to establish a reputation for publishing works of real literary achievement,” said Kim, who has been in Japan since the early 1990s, when she came to study literary criticism after learning creative writing at a university in Seoul. Originally from South Jeolla province on the southern tip of South Korea, Kim witnessed how Japanese culture flowed into the country in the 1980s through magazines such as Non-no and novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.
“So I thought, literature could also flow the other way,” she said. After working in advertising, Kim launched Cuon in Tokyo but struggled to promote Korean titles because most bookstores had no dedicated section for them. “The category of ‘Korean Literature’ did not exist, making it hard to find shelf space. Rather than feeling disappointed, I instead decided to create that space myself,” she said.
That led to Kim opening Chekccori in 2015.
Over the past decade, the number of Korean books translated into Japanese has increased dramatically. Kim estimates that 300 to 400 South Korean titles are now published annually in Japan, compared to only about 20 per year around 2010. The trend was fuelled in part by the success of Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which sold 290,000 copies in Japan after its 2018 release by publisher Chikuma Shobo. The novel, about a woman facing systemic misogyny in a patriarchal society, resonated deeply with readers.
Kim credits this popularity to the rise of social media, which has allowed ideas and movements – including feminism – to spread rapidly across borders. The feminist movement in South Korea gained momentum after a 2016 murder case in Seoul, followed by the global #MeToo movement in 2017. Kim’s publisher has released many feminist-themed books, including a collection of essays titled “#Living as a woman who speaks up” by author and lawyer Jeong So-yeon. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Chekccori has set a new goal to introduce more Korean poetry, a genre still relatively under-represented in translation. The bookstore held events for Korean poet Shin Mina, who was in Tokyo for two months earlier this year under a writer-in-residence programme.
Interest in Korean poetry is growing. Yukinori Ebihara visited Chekccori for the first time after hearing Mariko Saito, translator of Han’s novels and many other works, read Korean poems on the radio. “Even without understanding the words, the sound was beautiful. It made me want to hear more, to feel that resonance,” the 74-year-old said. Today, Kim’s focus has shifted from growth to sustainability. After recovering from cancer a few years ago, she hopes to ensure that Chekccori continues connecting readers and writers for years to come.
“What I’d like to do is to return to the basics – the craft of choosing excellent books, creating them with care, and placing them in the hands of readers in the right way,” she said."
Kyodo
Published: 5:15pm, 4 Nov 2025
https://amp.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/3331461/tokyo-bookstore-where-translated-korean-literature-sparks-conversation-across-borders
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Jobs in higher education.
"Sign Language Interpreter II, Office for Disability Equity
University of Montana
Missoula, MT
Type: Full-Time
Salary: $35 per hour
Posted: 1 day ago
Application Due: 12/22/2025
Category: Disability and Accessibility Services; +1
Sign Language Interpreter II, Office for Disability Equity
Salary: $35.00 Hourly
Location: Missoula Mountain Campus
Job Type: Hourly Staff Full-time
Job Number: 202400475
Sector:
Department: UM VP Student Success & Campus Life
Closing Date: 12/22/2025 11:59 PM Mountain
FLSA: Non-Exempt
Bargaining Unit:
Description
The Office for Disability Equity invites applications for a Sign Language Interpreter II to provide sign language interpreting services to students, faculty, staff and visitors of UM.
Examples of Duties and Responsibilities
Voice-to-sign and sign-to-voice interpretation of all courses, lectures, tutor sessions, labs, meetings, special events and community outreach.
Follow current trends in American Sign Language.
Adapt interpreting methods when necessary.
Engage in professional development.
Support the University's inclusive prosperity mission.
Other duties as assigned.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in ASL-English Interpreting or relevant field. An equivalent combination of education and experience, including a 4.0+ EIPA score may be considered.
Fluency in ASL & English.
RID or BEI certification.
Demonstrated ability to apply and analyze the RID Code of Professional Conduct.
Demonstrated knowledge of and skill in American Sign Language, voice-to-sign, and sign-to-voice interpretation.
...
Preferred Qualifications
Five-years' experience working in a post-secondary and/or community settings.
Completion of an interpreter training program; preference given to Bachelor's degree in ASL-English interpretation or related field.
Adherence to follow the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct.
Preference given to candidates with RID certification and/or BEI certification and/or EIPA score 4.0 or higher.
Additional Information
Position Number: 100070
Compensation Title: Sign Language Interpreter II
Bargaining Unit: FOCUS-MFPE
Work Schedule: Full-time, 1.0 FTE (40 Hours a week), Monday through Friday 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, 12 months/year
Probationary Period: Six (6) months minimum
Benefits Include: Insurance package, mandatory retirement plan, partial tuition waiver, and wellness program.
https://www.higheredjobs.com/admin/details.cfm?JobCode=179321983
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"MELBOURNE – On December 4 thousands of unionised healthcare workers from across Victoria, Australia banded together in a landmark protest for better pay – the first of its kind in 25 years.
Four Greek interpreters from The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne stood out as key participants, striking for improved wages and manageable workloads. Among them, long-time union member and Greek interpreter, Soula (Anastasia) Tousimis, who stressed the importance of the union and increased remuneration for interpreters.
“The union looks after our interests as interpreters … they recognize us … we feel protected,” Tousimis said. “A lot of people still don’t even know that we exist in the hospital system. We are highly qualified professionals who have been neglected for too long and deserve better.”
As a symbol of their loyalty to the Health Workers Union (HWU) and their profession in healthcare, the Greek interpreters walked off the job and onto the streets with the echoes of “union power” chants behind them.
HWU Lead Organiser Jake McGuinness welcomed all HWU members at 10 AM in front of the Victorian Trades Hall Council in Melbourne, where the t-shirt-printed capitalised message “have a heart for healthcare workers, stand together, win together” accompanied police escorts.
Persistent in pink, and in powerful demonstration with their main banner, Tousimis and her colleagues marched in solidarity with the crowd toward Melbourne’s iconic Parliament House.
“We’ve had enough and can’t wait any longer, we have to do something about it now”, she said.
Fellow Greek interpreters Komninos and Maria added that the protest is timely as the Victorian economy is still recovering from the losses of COVID-19 lockdowns.
“Cost of living is higher and wages are stuck …they (the Victorian government) haven’t accounted for that,” shared Komninos.
Maria urged that despite “high inflation” and working on salaries “lower than before COVID,” the “power of the people” is what can make all the difference. I have always believed in the power of the people. When people come together, it is always a success.”
According to the HWU website, the strike is in response to the Victorian Government’s recent 3% pay rise offer for healthcare workers, in comparison to a 7.1% increase for nurses, and 8.25% for paramedics.
Soula Tousimis and her daughter Christine Filippidis ahead of the protest. Photo: Christine Filippidis
Health Workers Union bans
In a video from the HWU Victoria Facebook page, McGuinness can be seen calling on the Victorian government to take action, stating that bans, including “a closure of one in four hospital beds”, “a pause on all category 2 and 3 elective surgeries,” and “a ban on cleaning non-clinical areas of the hospital” will be put in place if healthcare workers’ demands aren’t met.
“If the government continues to refuse to treat these workers with respect and offer them a liveable pay deal, then in January (2026) we will be forced to escalate these bans”, he said.
For now, Soula and her fellow Greek interpreters remain committed to providing a duty of care to their patients at The Alfred, yet maintain that their voices also be heard in their fight for fairness.
“We won’t ever give up” Soula said. “This is who we are, and we will keep pushing for better … for what’s fair for all interpreters and healthcare workers.”
To find out more about the rolling bans and how you can support interpreters and other healthcare workers visit the HWU website."
https://www.thenationalherald.com/greek-interpreters-take-center-stage-at-historic-union-strike-in-australia/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Oversight panel mulls probing interpreters helping non-citizens get Maine driving permits
The Government Oversight Committee had originally been asked to investigate whether two noncitizen drivers involved in pedestrian fatalities had improperly obtained driving credentials. Now the panel wants more information about interpreters who help noncitizens complete their written exams...
The Maine Legislature's Government Oversight Committee is weighing a probe into how interpreters help non-citizens obtain their driver's licenses. Some lawmakers are calling for an investigation after two people were recently killed in separate incidents in Lewiston and New Gloucester.
According to the Secretary of State's office, both of the fatalities involved drivers who were legally present in the U.S. when their license or drivers permit was issued. One of the drivers had his license for more than six years at the time of the crash and the other had his permit for about a week.
While a pair of Republican lawmakers had originally questioned whether the drivers had improperly obtained driving credentials, officials from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles provided the committee a timeline showing both were legally present, verified with the federal verification system and met the federal and state requirements.
Both drivers had temporary legal status. Neither Maine nor federal REAL ID laws require noncitizens to have permanent legal status to obtain driving credentials.
Nevertheless, Wednesday's oversight hearing drew additional questions and allegations that interpreters are helping non-English speaking applicants pass their written exams. Interpreters are allowed to assist non-English speaking applicants during their driving exams, but some lawmakers said whistleblowers at the BMV were prepared to testify under oath that they had witnessed cheating during written exams.
Several Democrats on the committee worried the potential inquiry is influenced by politically-inflamed suspicions about non-white immigrants, but others said the oversight panel should make sure there's no cheating and accountability for interpreters.
The committee requested more information from the BMV and is expected to revisit the matter at a later meeting.
Community support has always powered public media, and the power to keep this vital public service going rests with you. Join us with ongoing support as an Evergreen Friend and be part of the community that ensures Maine Public remains strong."
Maine Public | By Steve Mistler
Published December 17, 2025 at 6:21 PM EST
https://www.mainepublic.org/maine/2025-12-17/oversight-panel-mulls-probing-interpreters-helping-noncitizens-get-maine-driving-permits
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers developed an AI expressive architecture called PaTH Attention, increasing the capabilities of large language models that can perform better state tracking and sequential reasoning over long text.
"Most languages use word position and sentence structure to extract meaning. For example, “The cat sat on the box,” is not the same as “The box was on the cat.” Over a long text, like a financial document or a novel, the syntax of these words likely evolves.
Similarly, a person might be tracking variables in a piece of code or following instructions that have conditional actions. These are examples of state changes and sequential reasoning that we expect state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems to excel at; however, the existing, cutting-edge attention mechanism within transformers — the primarily architecture used in large language models (LLMs) for determining the importance of words — has theoretical and empirical limitations when it comes to such capabilities.
An attention mechanism allows an LLM to look back at earlier parts of a query or document and, based on its training, determine which details and words matter most; however, this mechanism alone does not understand word order. It “sees” all of the input words, a.k.a. tokens, at the same time and handles them in the order that they’re presented, so researchers have developed techniques to encode position information. This is key for domains that are highly structured, like language. But the predominant position-encoding method, called rotary position encoding (RoPE), only takes into account the relative distance between tokens in a sequence and is independent of the input data. This means that, for example, words that are four positions apart, like “cat” and “box” in the example above, will all receive the same fixed mathematical rotation specific to that relative distance.
Now research led by MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has produced an encoding technique known as “PaTH Attention” that makes positional information adaptive and context-aware rather than static, as with RoPE.
“Transformers enable accurate and scalable modeling of many domains, but they have these limitations vis-a-vis state tracking, a class of phenomena that is thought to underlie important capabilities that we want in our AI systems. So, the important question is: How can we maintain the scalability and efficiency of transformers, while enabling state tracking?” says the paper’s senior author Yoon Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
A new paper on this work was presented earlier this month at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Kim’s co-authors include lead author Songlin Yang, an EECS graduate student and former MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Summer Program intern; Kaiyue Wen of Stanford University; Liliang Ren of Microsoft; and Yikang Shen, Shawn Tan, Mayank Mishra, and Rameswar Panda of IBM Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
Path to understanding
Instead of assigning every word a fixed rotation based on relative distance between tokens, as RoPE does, PaTH Attention is flexible, treating the in-between words as a path made up of small, data-dependent transformations. Each transformation, based on a mathematical operation called a Householder reflection, acts like a tiny mirror that adjusts depending on the content of each token it passes. Each step in a sequence can influence how the model interprets information later on. The cumulative effect lets the system model how the meaning changes along the path between words, not just how far apart they are. This approach allows transformers to keep track of how entities and relationships change over time, giving it a sense of “positional memory.” Think of this as walking a path while experiencing your environment and how it affects you. Further, the team also developed a hardware-efficient algorithm to more efficiently compute attention scores between every pair of tokens so that the cumulative mathematical transformation from PaTH Attention is compressed and broken down into smaller computations so that it’s compatible with fast processing on GPUs.
The MIT-IBM researchers then explored PaTH Attention’s performance on synthetic and real-world tasks, including reasoning, long-context benchmarks, and full LLM training to see whether it improved a model’s ability to track information over time. The team tested its ability to follow the most recent “write” command despite many distracting steps and multi-step recall tests, tasks that are difficult for standard positional encoding methods like RoPE. The researchers also trained mid-size LLMs and compared them against other methods. PaTH Attention improved perplexity and outcompeted other methods on reasoning benchmarks it wasn’t trained on. They also evaluated retrieval, reasoning, and stability with inputs of tens of thousands of tokens. PaTH Attention consistently proved capable of content-awareness.
“We found that both on diagnostic tasks that are designed to test the limitations of transformers and on real-world language modeling tasks, our new approach was able to outperform existing attention mechanisms, while maintaining their efficiency,” says Kim. Further, “I’d be excited to see whether these types of data-dependent position encodings, like PATH, improve the performance of transformers on structured domains like biology, in [analyzing] proteins or DNA.”
Thinking bigger and more efficiently
The researchers then investigated how the PaTH Attention mechanism would perform if it more similarly mimicked human cognition, where we ignore old or less-relevant information when making decisions. To do this, they combined PaTH Attention with another position encoding scheme known as the Forgetting Transformer (FoX), which allows models to selectively “forget.” The resulting PaTH-FoX system adds a way to down-weight information in a data-dependent way, achieving strong results across reasoning, long-context understanding, and language modeling benchmarks. In this way, PaTH Attention extends the expressive power of transformer architectures.
Kim says research like this is part of a broader effort to develop the “next big thing” in AI. He explains that a major driver of both the deep learning and generative AI revolutions has been the creation of “general-purpose building blocks that can be applied to wide domains,” such as “convolution layers, RNN [recurrent neural network] layers,” and, most recently, transformers. Looking ahead, Kim notes that considerations like accuracy, expressivity, flexibility, and hardware scalability have been and will be essential. As he puts it, “the core enterprise of modern architecture research is trying to come up with these new primitives that maintain or improve the expressivity, while also being scalable.”
This work was supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the AI2050 program at Schmidt Sciences."
https://news.mit.edu/2025/new-way-to-increase-large-mlanguage-model-capabilities-1217
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Arabic is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages with at least 400 million speakers, including 200 million native speakers and 200 million to 250 million non-native speakers.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) serves as the formal language for government, legal matters and education, and it is widely used in international and religious contexts. Additionally, more than 25 dialects are spoken primarily across the Middle East and North Africa.
Every year on December 18, the United Nations commemorates World Arabic Language Day, celebrating Arabic as “the pillar of the cultural diversity of humanity”. The date was chosen to mark the day in 1973 on which the UN General Assembly adopted Arabic as one of its six official languages.
In the following visual explainer, Al Jazeera lists some of the most common words in today’s English language that originated from Arabic or passed through Arabic before reaching English.
How Arabic words entered other languages
As the most spoken of the Semitic languages, a group of languages that originated across Southwest Asia and Africa, Arabic has influenced societies and other languages for centuries.
Linguists say the presence of Arabic words in other languages reflects long histories of contact through trade, scholarship and cultural exchange.
English, Spanish, French, Turkish and many other languages across the globe have borrowed hundreds to thousands of words from Arabic that are used in everyday language.
Muntasir Al Hamad, a linguist and professor of Arabic at Qatar University, says this type of borrowing is a “natural phenomenon” and languages have borrowed from one another for centuries.
“Arabic is no different in that sense. This is reflected in vocabulary, science, technology and civilisation,” he tells Al Jazeera.
An alphabet with many forms
Arabic uses an alphabet of 28 letters and is written from right to left. The script is cursive, and its letters change shape depending on their position in a word. Short vowels are typically omitted in everyday writing.
These features, together with Arabic’s extensive vocabulary, have contributed to the perception that the language is difficult for non-native speakers to learn.
However, Al Hamad says this perception is far from accurate for many people.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about Arabic is that it is among the most difficult languages in the world,” he said. “In reality, it is simply a language with systems that differ from English or from many European languages.”
He added that while the Arabic script may appear unfamiliar to some learners, it is “quite familiar” to speakers of other languages, such as Urdu and Farsi. Speakers of those languages, Al Hamad says, often find Arabic easier to read while Turkish speakers may find its vocabulary easier to memorise due to the thousands of Arabic words Turkish has absorbed.
From A for algebra to T for tariffs
One of the biggest contributions the Arabic language has made to the world is in the fields of mathematics and science.
Over time, some of these words entered other languages in shortened or adapted forms, becoming so familiar that their origins are often forgotten.
One example is algebra, a cornerstone of mathematics. The term comes from the Arabic word al-jabr, meaning “restoration” or “reunion”. It originally appeared in the title of a ninth-century work on solving equations by the Baghdad-based Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, after whom the word “algorithm” is derived.
Other Arabic words underwent more dramatic transformations. Carat, the unit used to measure the weight of gemstones, traces its roots to the Arabic word qirat.
According to Al Hamad, these changes reveal how English and other languages adapt unfamiliar sounds. “Because English has relatively few words beginning with Q,” he explains, “Arabic words such as qirat were reshaped using more familiar sounds like C, G or K, producing forms such as carat.”
The same process can be seen in everyday vocabulary beyond science and mathematics. The word giraffe, for instance, comes from the Arabic zarafa, and went through a similar transformation as English and other European languages reshaped the original sounds to fit their own phonetic patterns, much as they did with words beginning with the Arabic letter Q.
On the other hand, words such as tariff, which is derived from the Arabic word ta’rif, meaning “to notify” or “to announce”, entered English through contact with other languages involved in trade.
Al Hamad says these words “most likely entered the English language via Romance languages” although not necessarily in the forms we recognise today. He adds that they also passed through Turkish, which “borrowed heavily from Arabic” and influenced the medieval world through trade and warfare. Later, during the British colonial era, English both borrowed from and contributed words directly to Arabic.
According to Al Hamad, these changes reveal how English and other languages adapt unfamiliar sounds. “Because English has relatively few words beginning with Q,” he explains, “Arabic words such as qirat were reshaped using more familiar sounds like C, G or K, producing forms such as carat.”
The same process can be seen in everyday vocabulary beyond science and mathematics. The word giraffe, for instance, comes from the Arabic zarafa, and went through a similar transformation as English and other European languages reshaped the original sounds to fit their own phonetic patterns, much as they did with words beginning with the Arabic letter Q.
On the other hand, words such as tariff, which is derived from the Arabic word ta’rif, meaning “to notify” or “to announce”, entered English through contact with other languages involved in trade.
Al Hamad says these words “most likely entered the English language via Romance languages” although not necessarily in the forms we recognise today. He adds that they also passed through Turkish, which “borrowed heavily from Arabic” and influenced the medieval world through trade and warfare. Later, during the British colonial era, English both borrowed from and contributed words directly to Arabic..."
By Alma Milisic and Mohammed Haddad
18 Dec 2025
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/18/from-a-for-algebra-to-t-for-tariffs-arabic-words-used-in-english-speech
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"PEN International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee
17 Dec
Written By PEN International
“At a time when so many voices risk being silenced, our Committee works to ensure that every language has the space to thrive. Protecting linguistic rights is not only about preserving heritage — it is about safeguarding dignity, diversity, and the freedom to imagine in one’s own words.” Urtzi Urrutikoetxea, Chair of PEN International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee
In a world where thousands of languages are at risk, defending linguistic rights has never been more urgent. PEN International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee (TLCR) stands at the centre of one of the most important struggles of our time: ensuring that all languages — and the people who speak, write, and dream in them — can flourish.
The Committee’s mission is rooted in the belief that translation is more than a literary act; it is an act of solidarity. When a language is marginalised, its stories and people risk disappearing. Translation offers a bridge, carrying those voices into new spaces, widening their reach.
A history of championing translation
Although the TLCR was officially created in 1978 during PEN International 43rd Congress in Stockholm, its commitment to translation began much earlier. As far back as 1928, PEN collaborated with the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, a League of Nations body, to promote translations across borders. PEN Centres identified works deserving translation, which the Institute then shared with publishers worldwide. A Geneva meeting in July 1928, attended by figures such as John Galsworthy and Salvador de Madariaga, formally approved the arrangement.
The creation of the TLCR
By 1978, this vision had grown into a formal structure dedicated to translation. That year, under the global presidency of Mario Vargas Llosa, Swedish PEN used the Stockholm Congress to draw attention to the essential role of translators. Per Wästberg, then president of Swedish PEN, put together a coalition of PEN Centres to broaden access to world literature. Originally known as the Programme and Translation Committee, its first aim was simple yet radical: to champion translation from all literary traditions, especially those with little international presence. The Committee supported anthologies bringing lesser-translated voices into dialogue — for example collaborations between Portuguese and Catalan poets or Macedonian and French poets.
From “small” to “minoritised” languages
One of the Committee’s key contributions has been to challenge the idea of “small languages” and advancing the concept of “minoritised languages” — languages marginalised by political, economic, and cultural forces. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, under the leadership of Portuguese poet Ana Hatherly, the Committee sharpened its focus on cultural rights. With strong support from several PEN Centres, it affirmed that translation cannot be separated from defending linguistic communities. This led to the Committee’s current name: the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee.
The World Conference on Linguistic Rights
This mission culminated in 1996, when 61 NGOs, 41 PEN Centres, and 40 experts gathered in Barcelona for the World Conference on Linguistic Rights. Organised by the Committee in partnership with the International Escarré Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations and with UNESCO’s support, the event aimed to create a global framework to protect linguistic rights.
Over three days, experts, activists, and writers drafted the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (UDLR). Its scientific council, chaired by linguist Isidor Marí, warned that up to 80% of the world’s languages could disappear within the twenty-first century. The Declaration set out principles for linguistic justice and cultural coexistence and was formally approved at the University of Barcelona, with delegates from every continent signing it. UNESCO received the document a month later.
Building on the UDLR
Fifteen years later, the Girona Manifesto (2011) and the Quebec Declaration on Literary Translation and Translators (2015) continued to advance linguistic and translation rights. The Committee has also held meetings outside Europe, including Johannesburg (2016), Bengaluru (2017), and San Cristóbal de las Casas (2019), where the first Indigenous PEN Centre joined the PEN family (PEN Chiapas Pluricultural). The COVID-19 pandemic inspired the launch of the Video-Poem Marathon in Indigenous and Minoritised languages, further supporting their visibility. Since then, more Indigenous writers and their languages are represented, and the anthology Lenguas Vivas, featuring 26 authors in Indigenous languages of Latin America, has become a milestone in PEN International’s history.
A legacy that matters
From its earliest years, the TLCR has defended linguistic diversity, promoted translation, and upheld the rights of communities whose languages are endangered or overlooked. At a time when globalisation threatens to flatten cultures, the Committee reminds us that every language carries its own worldview and that every worldview is essential to humanity."
https://www.pen-international.org/news/pen-international-translation-and-linguistic-rights-committee
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Workshop 'Meet the Expert - Methodological Issues in Translation Studies Theses'
For whom: Employees, Students
When: 21-01-2026 from 10:00 to 12:00
Where: Campus Mercator, room BK.03, Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45, 9000 Ghent
Language: English
Organizer: Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Contact: piet.vanpoucke@ugent.be
The workshop is intended as a brainstorming session for discussing the presentation of methodological issues in Translation Studies Theses.
Each participant prepares a short abstract (up to 500 words) in English on their chosen topic. In the workshop, there will first be a short introduction to / survey of different types of methods’ sections in PhD dissertations in Translation Studies. Operationalisation is one of the key concepts here.
The theses discussed are all online, and a list of them will be provided, in case any of the participants are interested in having a look beforehand. After this survey, doctoral candidates will be discussing their methods and optimal ways of structuring the methods section, in smaller groups. Ideas, challenges and questions will be noted down and presented to the whole group afterwards.
Everyone has a chance to participate in the discussion, and the workshop organiser will comment on the groups’ suggestions as well as individual abstracts submitted earlier."
https://www.ugent.be/en/agenda/translation-studies
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Led by a unique team of adjunct professionals, the program offers American Sign Language courses taught by qualified instructors who are native signers, along with interpreting classes led by nationally certified interpreters, preparing students for real-world careers. The prospective interpreter gets the best of both worlds.
Through its Interpreter Training Program, Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City is working to meet that critical need: preparing qualified interpreters to serve communities statewide.
Jimmy Mitchell, department head of OSU-OKC’s Interpreter Training Program, said the program is focused on equipping students with the skills and ethics necessary to succeed in the workforce.
“We are very serious about developing qualified and skilled interpreters in every possible way that we can to make sure that they are ready for the workforce,” Mitchell said through an interpreter.
The program offers American Sign Language courses taught by qualified instructors, as well as interpreting classes led by nationally certified interpreters. Adjunct faculty bring real-world experience to the classroom, teaching both technical skills and professional ethics. Students also gain hands-on experience through internships and community projects coordinated by Mitchell.
Mitchell’s own path to interpreter education began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he frequently interpreted at emergency press conferences for Gov. Kevin Stitt. That experience sparked a deeper interest in the interpreting community.
Previously a vocational rehabilitation counselor, Mitchell had seen and experienced firsthand the challenges clients faced when interpreters were under qualified.
“I knew that we had interpreting problems in the state of Oklahoma,” he said. “After COVID, I realized teaching was more of my calling.”
Mitchell later taught at OSU-Stillwater before joining OSU-OKC as department head three years ago. Since then, he has worked to expand the program’s reach and strengthen its ties to the community.
“I send interns out to the community to work, in order to gain valuable real time experience you can't get in a classroom setting.” he said. “Whatever they need, if we need an intern for observation or hands up, then I coordinate all of that.”
Looking ahead, Mitchell envisions developing microcredentials in specialized areas such as medical, educational and legal interpreting. He also hopes to establish a bachelor’s degree program at OSU-OKC, similar to the one offered at OSU-Stillwater, to give local students more opportunities to advance their education. “I would love to set up a program here for the local students who want to have a bachelor’s degree in interpreting, while being as flexible as possible for students who work while attending school or for those with family obligations” he said.
Partnerships with community organizations and workforce initiatives are also part of his vision for growth.
“More partnerships with the community and different organizations and the workforce would help develop the program more,” Mitchell said."
https://news.okstate.edu/articles/osu-okc/2025/osu-okc-interpreter-training-program-builds-pathways-for-skilled-professionals.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Inside the World of a Sign Language Interpreter
Sign language interpreters are often unseen, yet they play a critical role in bridging communication between the deaf and hearing worlds. Bill Pugin, a veteran ASL interpreter of more than 50 years and author of the new book Fly on the Wall, shares how his deaf sister inspired his career and offers fascinating stories from decades of interpreting—especially in the entertainment industry. From working with Paul McCartney, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, and Natalie Portman to performing high-pressure live, on-stage interpreting, Pugin explains why interpreting is about conveying meaning, not word-for-word translation. His book is available now, with a local book signing set for January 14 in Palm Springs.
By: Thalia Hayden
December 16, 2025
https://www.nbcpalmsprings.com/2025/12/16/inside-the-world-of-a-sign-language-interpreter
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"We offer
The post of a Translator / Interpreter (Local Agent Group I) in the Head of Delegation Section. The team consists of 14 people and there are occasional atypical working hours.
Under this post, the recruited person will be attributed functions depending on the needs of the Delegation, and on the changes of these needs. The successful candidate will serve under the supervision and responsibility of the Ambassador, and will provide support, expertise and assistance performing tasks related to interpretation, protocol, coordination of European Union institutions VIP visits with the Ukrainian MFA and other governmental entities, and communications with Ukrainian authorities..
Following main tasks and duties are currently required:
To liaise with the Ukrainian authorities and different headquarters in Brussels (EEAS, Commission, Council).
To coordinate the protocol and the logistic of VIP visits organised by HQ: drafting of programmes, writing NVs, coordinating and communicating with the UA and EU security personnel, facilitating border crossing, communication with public, regional and local authorities, arrival/departure coordination, booking of the VIP Lounge, arranging permits for the EU security personnel, assistance with the accommodation, transportation arrangement, communication with the Ukrainian railways to arrange carriages/compartments, coordination of the motorcade, ordering of food and flowers/gifts, etc.
To translate from English into Ukrainian and from Ukrainian into English.
To interpret for the Ambassador and other Delegation officials in meetings and accompanying her/him on missions when necessary.
To coordinate the logistic of major events organised by the Delegation.
To provide occasional drafting and organisational assistance for the Ambassador such as drafting notes for high-level meetings and missions.
To fulfil other tasks as designated by the Ambassador.
The Employment Contract will be signed for 10 years. The base salary will depend on relevant and verified employment experience. There is a competitive benefits package, subject to certain conditions, including personal leave days and public holidays, health insurances and a retirement savings plan.
The expected start date will be March 2026.
Minimum requirements / eligibility criteria (necessary for the application to be considered)
University degree required minimum BA level, preferably in translation, linguistic, philology or a related field;
At least 3 years of professional experience in a related field after obtaining the minimum required diploma;
Ukrainian: C 2 level (spoken and written);
English: C 2 level (spoken and written);
Knowledge of IT tools: MS Office;
Right to residence and work in Ukraine;
Medical fitness to carry out the tasks assigned.
Assets / selection criteria (basis for awarding points to select the best applicant)
Master in political science, international relations, journalism, communications or other related field.
Previous experience in protocol and liaising with a variety of actors as diplomatic corps, government, officials, national authorities, and a demonstrated ability to foster good relationships with them.
Previous experience with an international organisation would be an advantage
Personal skills
Communication skills
Excellent drafting skills in English and Ukrainian
Capacity to communicate clearly and concisely
Good negotiation skills
Interpersonal skills
Ability to listen and understand, to consult and to share information
Ability to work in a team in a multi-cultural environment
Positive and proactive attitude
Intellectual skills
Ability to prioritise
Strong analytical skills
Sense of initiative as regards the day-to-day work
Management skills
Excellent organisational skills
Ability to meet deadlines
PERSONAL QUALITIES
High degree of responsibility and discretion
Commitment to assure quality, speed and accuracy in performing technical and procedural duties
Ability to work under pressure and flexibility to respond quickly to new demands
Strong sense of confidentiality and diplomacy
Proven problem-solving abilities
How to apply
Please submit in English your application, consisting of a cover letter, Europass format CV https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/ and a declaration on honour regarding the work rights and medical fitness (no template, free format) via the Email: eeasjobs-101@eeas.europa.eu (Reference: Translator / Interpreter job) no later than 15/01/2026. Only complete applications received on time via eeasjobs-101@eeas.europa.eu will be considered.
The successful candidate will be subject to a medical check.
The process
After the deadline for applications, the eligible applications will be admitted to the Selection by the Committee set up for this purpose.
Depending on the number of applications received, successive phases of Selection may include shortlisting of candidates based assessment of the information provided in the cover letter, CV; practical testing and interviews.
Only candidates admitted to each successive selection phase will be contacted individually. The Delegation will use the same means of publication as for this job advertisement to inform the remaining candidates once the recruitment procedure has been completed and that a candidate has (or has not) been recruited.
The Delegation will not supply additional information or discuss the selection procedure. During the selection process, please do not contact the members of the Selection Committee, but address your questions and comments to eeasjobs-101@eeas.europa.eu
EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES:
The European Union is committed to an equal opportunities policy for all its employees and applicants for employment. As an employer, the EU is committed to promoting gender equality and to preventing discrimination on any grounds. It actively welcomes applications from all qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds and from the broadest possible geographical basis amongst the EU Member States. We aim at a service which is truly representative of society, where each staff member feels respected, is able to give their best and can develop their full potential."
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ukraine/european-union-delegation-ukraine-looking-translator-interpreter-head-delegation-section_en
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Les traducteurs dénoncent
Les éditions Harlequin testent la traduction avec l'IA
Les éditions Harlequin, célèbres pour leurs romans sentimentaux, ont mis fin ces dernières semaines à leur collaboration en France avec des traducteurs. Elle souhaite les remplacer par une agence utilisant l'intelligence artificielle, dénonce une association de traducteurs. L'éditeur assure qu'il s'agit de «tests» à ce stade.
Les éditions Harlequin, célèbres pour leurs romans sentimentaux, ont mis fin ces dernières semaines à leur collaboration en France avec des traducteurs.
Les éditions Harlequin appartiennent au groupe américain HarperCollins.
Dans un communiqué publié lundi, l'association des traducteurs littéraires de France et le collectif «En chair et en os» expliquent que, «depuis quelques semaines», des traducteurs travaillant régulièrement avec les éditions Harlequin «reçoivent les uns après les autres un appel téléphonique leur annonçant la fin de leur collaboration avec la maison d'édition».
Selon les auteurs du communiqué, «Harlequin abandonne la traduction: un prestataire externe, l'agence de communication Fluent Planet se chargera de passer les textes dans un logiciel de 'traduction automatique' et de recruter directement en freelance des relecteurs et relectrices chargés de post-éditer la sortie machine en français».
Les traducteurs contactés ne se sont vu offrir «comme compensation que la possibilité (sans aucune garantie, d'ailleurs) de travailler au rabais pour un prestataire externe au lieu de traduire pour une maison d'édition», déplorent-t-il, dénonçant un «plan social invisible» pour des traducteurs collaborant parfois depuis de longues années avec Harlequin.
Une première à grande échelle
«C'est à notre connaissance la première fois en France qu'une maison d'édition passe à grande échelle à la 'traduction automatique' et à la post-édition, de surcroît en externalisant cette activité», s'indignent-ils.
«AUCUNE collection Harlequin n'a été traduite uniquement par traduction automatique générée par intelligence artificielle», a réagi HarperCollins dans une déclaration écrite transmise à l'AFP.
«Les ventes de nos collections Harlequin déclinent sur le marché français depuis ces dernières années. Nous souhaitons continuer à proposer au lectorat autant de publications possibles au prix public actuel qui est très bas, 4,99 euros par exemple pour (la collection) Azur», explique l'éditeur.
Fluent Planet se présente comme l'agence de communication «la plus en pointe sur les techniques humaines et numériques de traduction écrite». «L'intelligence artificielle est utilisée comme outil d'assistance, jamais comme substitut au travail du traducteur, qui conserve toujours le dernier mot», a assuré à l'AFP son directeur général, Thierry Tavakelian..."
17.12.2025
https://www.bluewin.ch/fr/infos/faits-divers/les-ditions-harlequin-testent-la-traduction-avec-l-ia-3014313.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Cette rencontre propose de découvrir la première traduction française de El Amigo Melquíades o por la boca muere el pez de Carlos Arniches, dont la première eut lieu au théâtre Apolo de Madrid le 14 mai 1914 et fut publiée la même année par l’éditeur R. Velasco. Pour la première fois, ce texte devient accessible au public francophone sous le titre L’ami Melquiadès ou l’âne qui brait jamais ne se tait, grâce au travail collectif de l’Atelier de traduction théâtrale du Centre de Recherche sur l’Espagne Contemporaine (CREC).
Cette présentation sera l’occasion de mettre en lumière une pratique de traduction originale, à savoir la traduction théâtrale collective, tout en faisant résonner la voix de Carlos Arniches, maître de la verve populaire madrilène et figure que Federico García Lorca considérait comme dotée d’une véritable poétique.
La rencontre sera animée par Marie Salgues et Évelyne Ricci, enseignantes-chercheuses en études hispaniques à la Sorbonne Nouvelle et Serge Salaün professeur émérite et fondateur du CREC.
Lecture en français et en espagnol par Inès Bartholmé, Zaineb Hassiri, Natalia Rojas García, étudiantes en Master à l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Dans le cadre des Nuits de la lecture 2026 et du cycle À voix haute : littérature et traduction, nous vous invitons à découvrir « L’ami Melquíades ou l’âne qui brait jamais ne se tait », une pièce emblématique de Carlos Arniches, l’un des plus grands dramaturges espagnols du XXe siècle.
Le vendredi 23 janvier 2026
de 18h00 à 19h30
gratuit Public jeunes et adultes.
Horaire : année-mois-jour-heure
début : 2026-01-23T19:00:00+01:00
fin : 2026-01-23T20:30:00+01:00
Date(s) : 2026-01-23T18:00:00+02:00_2026-01-23T19:30:00+02:00
Bibliothèque Sorbonne Nouvelle 8 avenue Saint Mandé 75012 Paris
https://www.dbu.univ-paris3.fr/accueil-dbu bibliotheque@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr"
https://unidivers.fr/event/lecture-bilingue-du-dramaturge-espagnol-carlos-arniches-bibliotheque-sorbonne-nouvelle-paris-paris-2026-01-23t1900000100/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Lecture bilingue du dramaturge espagnol Carlos Arniches Bibliothèque Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris Dans le cadre des Nuits de la lecture 2026 et du cycle À voix haute : littérature et traduction, nous vous invitons à découvrir "L'ami Melquíades ou l’âne qui brait jamais ne se tait", une pièce emblématique de Carlos Arniches, l'un des plus grands dramaturges espagnols du XXe siècle.
The Cervantes Institute in Shanghai will present next week the third edition of the Catalogue of Spanish Literature translated into Chinese.
"The Cervantes Institute in Shanghai will present next week the third edition of the ‘Catalog of Spanish Literature Translated into Chinese’, a publication that compiles nearly two thousand titles by authors from Spain and Latin America published in China up to August 2025.
The event, which will take place on December 18, will include the director of the Shanghai center, Inma González Puy; the author of the publication, Lucila Carzoglio; the translator Hou Jian; and the editor Peng Lun.
With nearly 250 pages, this publication explores those titles by Spanish-language authors that have found a place in the Chinese publishing world. For example, it shows that the most translated and cited writer is the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, whose fortieth death anniversary is next year and whose works are being republished in the Asian country.
Following closely behind is the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. Both authors influenced not only the publishing world but also Chinese literature, as the impact of the Latin American Boom was “decisive” in China during the 1980s. Another prominent author in this catalog is the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, whose entire body of work has been translated.
Furthermore, between 2020 and August 2025, approximately 350 titles were published for the first time. Andrés Barba, Sara Mesa, Juan Tallón, Benjamín Labatut, Alia Trabucco Zerán, Javier Cercas, María Gainza, Agustina Bazterrica, Cristina Rivera Garza, Fernanda Melchor, Claudia Ulloa Donoso, and Pilar Quintana are some of the authors.
In this case, literature written by women is “setting trends,” with names such as Irene Vallejo, Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Cristina Rivera Garza, Fernanda Melchor, Sara Mesa, and Guadalupe Nettel, among others.
The document also reflects that in the 1950s and 60s, Spanish and Latin American authors whose work resonated with the political context in China, such as Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Mariano Azuela, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Miguel Ángel Asturias, began to circulate in local versions. In the early 1980s, a Spanish classic like “El Cantar de mío Cid” was translated, and “El lazarillo de Tormes” was republished.
However, it was the Latin American Boom that truly broke down literary barriers. Between 1979 and 1999, researcher Lou Yu mentions ten editions and three translations of García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”; six editions and three translations of Neruda’s “Confieso que he vivido”; and three editions of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “La casa verde” and “La tía Julia y el escribidor,” among others. Many of these editions had print runs exceeding fifty thousand and even reaching one hundred thousand copies.
The catalogue is being published to coincide with the 110th anniversary of the first recorded translation from Spanish to Chinese. According to researcher Hou Jian, the first translation of a literary work from Spanish was in 1915 with a book whose author was not identified, but which was titled ‘Anecdotes of the Spanish Court’. Separately, the first Chinese version of Don Quixote appeared in 1922, adapted by Lin Shu from an indirect translation from English, and it was a bestseller.
Although print runs are currently smaller than in the 1980s, current translations reach China almost simultaneously with the rest of the world, with print runs typically ranging from 5,000 to 8,000 copies.
“I can’t think of a more solid bridge than translating the literature of a people, a continent, a community of more than 600 million speakers, whose works and reference authors will be known and understood in China, thanks to the talent and effort of the translators who, in an act of pure creation, seek the right and precise word to exchange sensibilities between geographically distant countries, but increasingly united,” declared Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, in his prologue."
https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2025/12/16/cervantes-institute-compiles-nearly-2000-spanish-literary-works-translated-into-chinese/?amp=1
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is seeking a number of English to French translators for temporary positions in the lead up to, and during, the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Ensuring a successful EU Presidency in 2026 is essential for Ireland’s position, influence and reputation in the EU and for advancing the Union’s agenda against a complex geopolitical background. Ireland will assume the rotating six-month presidency on 01 July 2026.
The Irish Presidency website and social media channels will serve as the main public sources of information and news about all matters relating to Ireland’s Presidency and will be available in Irish, English and French. For many users abroad, the Irish Presidency website or social media channels will be the only contact point with Ireland’s Presidency and it is therefore essential that the online presence operates to the highest professional standards.
Successful candidates will have an exciting opportunity to be involved in the communications aspects of the work of the Department directly related to the Presidency by providing English to French translations for the Irish Presidency online content and other translation requirements as required.
For further information, (including details on how to apply) please see the attached Information Booklet.
Closing Date
The closing date for completed applications is 12 noon on Thursday 8th January 2026. Late applications cannot be accepted.
NOTE: Entry requirements/qualifications/eligibility may not be verified by the Department until the final stage of the process. Therefore, those candidates who do not possess the entry/eligibility requirements, and proceed with their application, are putting themselves to unnecessary effort/expense and will not be offered a position from this campaign. Candidates must satisfy the eligibility criteria, including the educational requirement, at the time the offer of temporary employment is made."
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-foreign-affairs/news/french-translator-temporary/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Hannah Kauders on bypassing conventions to capture the spirit of Fátima Vélez’s “Galápagos"
"Fátima Vélez’s Galápagos is a plague novel unlike any other. Lorenzo’s body is disintegrating, his nails are falling off one by one. He takes this as an opportunity for one final journey, charting a course for the Galápagos Islands. His friends and lovers join him on the voyage, drinking wine and eating manchego cheese aboard the Bumfuck as their bodies decompose. Yet their creativity persists even as death presses in, and they swap stories on deck that challenge each others’ sense of love, loyalty, and mortality. In Vélez’s hands, illness is not just an affliction of the body but a force that reshapes language, desire, and art itself.
Hannah Kauders’s English translation captures the strangeness and poetry of Vélez’s prose, which bends syntax and genre, and blurs the line between the grotesque and the sublime. Translating Galápagos required both precision and irreverence: willingness to break linguistic rules, as Vélez does, and dedication to honor the unique style of the original rather than smooth it away.
I spoke with Kauders about how she navigated the book’s queered language, the grotesque humor in her translation, and the story’s haunting themes of art making, contagion, and survival.
Shoshana Akabas: How did you first encounter this book, and what made you want to translate it?
Hannah Kauders: I first found Galápagos through the book’s agent. I was having a coffee with Maria, and she asked me what kind of book I would be interested in translating, which is not a question that anyone had ever asked me before!
I told her I really wanted a project that would be creatively challenging. At that moment in my life, I was longing for something really absorbing to translate, something that would push me to my limits. And I was also interested in working on a book that had queer narratives, or engaged with queered language. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that book actually existed. And in fact, it did!
Galápagos is very interested in the inequity that’s built into the fabric of language.
SA: You mention queered language, which I know can be a translation challenge. How did you navigate translating a gendered language like Spanish to a non-gendered language like English?
HK: What’s really helpful about the book is how interested its narrative is in the subversion of that genderedness in language. For example, Paz María, the best friend of the narrator, has boy-girl twins, and she’s very averse to labeling them in the gendered “hijos” [children] (which is gendered male in Spanish), because she has one boy and one girl. She says it’s unfair. And Lorenzo responds, “language is unfair.”
Galápagos is very interested in the inequity that’s built into the fabric of language and how language creates limits in what can be expressed. And so, thankfully, because Fátima is interested in that subversion, I felt license to break the rules in the same way she did.
But because we have more gender-neutral language in English when it comes to words like “children,” it created a new challenge, which was to use the gender-neutral language while drawing attention to the fact that the language was gendered in the original Spanish.
SA: I noticed you left “hijos” untranslated. How did you decide to do that?
HK: Oftentimes when a word gets left in the original language, it’s because, either consciously or not, there’s some desire on the part of a translator (or even an editor) to inject moments of local flair into a text. And I don’t always think that’s a responsible choice. But because Fátima was problematizing the language, I felt like I had permission to keep it that way.
00:00
00:50
SA: What were some of the other challenges that you encountered in translating this book?
Take a break from the news
We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.
Enter your email
Submit
HK: The elements that made this book so exciting were precisely what made it difficult to translate.
SA: You said you wanted a challenge!
HK: I got what I wanted, and it was more difficult than I ever expected. This is a book that defies traditional elements of narrative at every level—at a level of plot, narrative arc, but also at the sentence level. Fátima is a poet, and it’s so clear reading her work that she has a passion for the line. For me, one of the big challenges is that Spanish is so much more syntactically flexible than English. And Fátima took every opportunity to do the kind of gymnastics that Spanish allows for—and that English absolutely does not allow for, because of our subject-verb-object structure. That structure is really hard to play with in English while also keeping things relatively intelligible.
Register was also a challenge, because the work really plays with this tension between literary and colloquial language. And as “fluent” as a translator is, sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint just how colloquial something is. I found myself having to ask a lot of questions, both of the author, but also my friend—just constantly bombarding him with questions: Is this something you read in a book? Is this something that you would hear aloud? If so, who would say this, and in what context? Just to get a sense of how colloquial, then, my translation needed to be.
I realized pretty quickly that I had to just jettison all hope that I would be able to replicate the order of things, but then I realized that it was a book that doesn’t seem particularly interested in the order of things.
SA: You mentioned asking the author questions. Some translators remain totally separate from the author or aren’t able to ask questions because the author is no longer alive. How did you decide when to consult the author? What was that relationship like?
As long as desire exists, a person will be vulnerable to contagion.
HK: I involved Fátima at the beginning when I was trying to get a vision of the book. I asked her a lot of questions about what inspired her to write it, who her references were from a literary perspective that inspired this style, but I did not ask her specific questions about my translation. I worried that I would lose my nerve if I asked her too many questions, so I saved all of my questions for the bitter end. Then I sent her a copy of the manuscript, and she went through this thing meticulously.
SA: Did you receive pushback on anything?
HK: There were some moments where my own need to try to make things seem logical was exposed. It was humbling. She had hundreds and hundreds of comments. We spent hours on Zoom, just going over every single thing. It was a team effort at the end.
EL: It’s a remarkable translation, and I found the sort of grotesque descriptions of physical deterioration quite striking. Can you talk about what role those passages play?
HK: What’s so beautiful about what Fátima does is that she replicates the feeling of being disfigured on the level of language. And at the same time, Lorenzo as a character has to contend with the fragility of his own body that is disintegrating.
This is part of the book’s claim: that art making is an embodied practice. It’s hard to make art if your body is in pain or ailing or uncomfortable. Lorenzo is fighting against his own embodiedness, and he has this inability to reckon with what’s actually happening to his body.
SA: Let’s talk about what’s actually happening to his body. AIDS is never explicitly mentioned, but there’s so much about illness in this book.
HK: Yeah, it’s definitely a plague novel. Fátima’s playing with this motif of storytelling in the time of plague, and she’s drawing that from a lot of things like The Decameron. She is very interested in what it means to tell stories in a time of plague or illness. So in some ways, it fits perfectly into what we might expect from a pandemic novel. What’s so interesting, though, is the way that desire is portrayed in relation to contagion. As long as desire exists, a person will be vulnerable to contagion.
SA: On the theme of storytelling and illness, I was really curious about the Galapagos as the backdrop. What sort of symbolic role does that play as the voyage destination in a book about storytelling and survival?
HK: The Galapagos is a landscape that is desolate if we look at it from the perspective of human habitation, but when we look at it from the perspective of a natural world that is so rich, as an environment, it puts these characters in their place and makes them feel their vulnerability. I can imagine it also felt rich to Fátima as the Galapagos has come to stand for extinction, the fragility of our ecosystem, and the fragility of human life.
SA: Aside from the setting, what else about this book feels specific to the South American landscape in which it was written?
HK: Right now in Latin America—Colombia has been my focus for the last few years—there’s been a rich wave of writers who are interested in how deeply the health of humanity and the health of the environment are intertwined. I think that this book in some ways exists in that tradition.
And I have to say, one thing I’ve noticed about the contemporary writers I’ve been reading—especially from Colombia—is a kind of openness to defying boundaries when it comes to genre, which I don’t think I’ve seen as much in contemporary literature in the US. It’s not because of a dearth of people writing that sort of work, but because of how risky it can feel to publish, and how difficult it might feel to market. So, I’m really excited that a book like this had an opportunity to find an audience in the US. Because frankly, I don’t think a lot of books like this in the US, written by writers in English, are finding a home.
SA: Situated in the tradition of the plague novel, what was it like to translate this novel during the COVID pandemic?
HK: It’s precisely in the darkest times that we long to engage with weighty subjects in a way that feels irreverent. That irreverence was especially welcome to me. My father had just died when I translated this book. Approaching this as someone who had just lost a parent during the pandemic, not to COVID but to cancer, I came to the book in great need of that irreverence, because death was looming over my whole existence.
People who haven’t experienced that loss don’t really understand just how absurd everything feels when you’re grieving, how the texture of life itself feels like it’s been totally destabilized. So this book was a really welcome opportunity to just exist in that space of absurdity where I already found myself at that moment in time. So, in some ways, the timing made it especially difficult because of the subject matter, but the tone and Fátima’s approach stylistically to writing about death and dying felt very fresh and very free.
Frankly, I don’t think a lot of books like this in the US, written by writers in English, are finding a home.
SA: What is something about the translation process, either for this book, or in general, that might surprise people?
7 Genre-Smashing Horror Novels in Translation
Zachary C. Solomon recommends literature that defies easy categorization and pushes against the parameters of form
Apr 19 – Zachary C. Solomon
Reading Lists
HK: People think of art-making as something that we do in the mind. Translating this book was disconcerting a lot of the time because of the way that I would feel its effect in my body—and not just from hours slumped over with a red pen, but also because I had to be in this kind of consciousness where there is so much detail about how the body is breaking down, often portrayed in very unapologetic language that could not be less interested in propriety, that really embraces the scatological and grotesque. So, I felt my own embodiment all the time when I was translating. On the first page, Lorenzo gets a hangnail, and I swear to you I got a hangnail after, and I was like, “Oh my god, my body is unraveling, my skin is falling off, my body is breaking down.” And I think that’s actually what trained me to understand where Fátima’s interest lies in this book, which is precisely in the idea of contagion. I felt it in my body as a translator of the work. And more clearly than ever, I understood how fundamentally physical the activity of a book passing through the translator can be.
About the Author
Shoshana Akabas is a New York based writer, teacher, and translator. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA from Columbia, where she has taught writing. She is also the founder and executive director of New Neighbors Partnership, a refugee-serving nonprofit in NYC."
Dec 16, 2025
Shoshana Akabas
https://electricliterature.com/the-book-that-infected-its-translators-body/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The latest wave of updates to the “General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” includes an adjustment to a portion about editions and translations of the Holy Bible.
The handbook notes that “generally, members should use a preferred or Church-published edition of the Bible in Church classes and meetings.” In English, that is the King James Version.
The adjusted handbook section also points to examples of English Bible translations that members can consider as they seek to better understand the teachings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament...
“We can confidently gain insights from multiple translations [of the Bible], in part because ‘we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.’ Latter-day scripture, including the teachings of living prophets, is a good standard for evaluating any doctrinal discrepancies that might come up in different Bible translations.” —Elder Renlund
“The Lord said that He speaks to men and women ‘after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding’ (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24),” the Apostle says. “Clearly, God’s children are more inclined to accept and follow His teachings when they can understand them.”
This is why the Church has shared examples of translations that achieve both readability and doctrinal clarity. The list comprises (but is not limited to) the following translations:
Ages 14 and Above
English Standard Version (ESV)
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Ages 11–13
New International Version (NIV)
New Living Translation (NLT)
New King James Version (NKJV)
Ages 8 and Above
New International Reader’s Version (NIrV)
Using multiple translations of the Bible is not new for the Church. The handbook explains that the Church “identifies editions of the Bible that align well with the Lord’s doctrine in the Book of Mormon and modern revelation (see Articles of Faith 1:8). A preferred edition of the Bible is then chosen for many languages spoken by Church members.”
The Church publishes its own edition of the Bible in some languages. For example, in addition to the KJV in English, the faith publishes the Reina-Valera 2009 in Spanish and the Almeida 2015 in Portuguese.
“There’s a misconception that modern translations of the Bible are less than faithful to the ancient sources — that in modernizing the language, translators have compromised or dumbed down the doctrine,” says Elder Jörg Klebingat of the Seventy, a member of the Scriptures Committee. “In many cases, that simply isn’t true. Modern translators often have access to manuscripts that were not available to early translators. And most modern translations were produced by faithful scholars and linguists who are utterly convinced that the Bible is the word of God. The simplified language they use supports — rather than compromises — understanding of the doctrine of Jesus Christ.”
The handbook encourages Church members to “use a preferred or Church-published edition of the Bible in Church classes and meetings. This helps maintain clarity in discussions and consistent understanding of doctrine. Other Bible translations may also be used.”
“We can all benefit from translations made by our Christian brothers and sisters to enhance our study and faith as disciples of Christ,” says Sister Tamara W. Runia. “Our hope is that everyone will feel welcome and respected, no matter the translation they connect with and choose to use. What matters most is how the scriptures speak to our spirits and draw us closer to God as we read every day.”
Many Latter-day Saints have already found power in this practice. Alysia Burdge of Washington state has ADHD, which makes reading comprehension — especially of the Bible — difficult for her.
During high school, her grandmother gifted her a Bible in a modern translation that was easier to understand. That simple offering transformed her ability to grasp the meaning of the sacred text.
“Now I feel like I can really understand the word of God,” Alysia says, “and it helps me feel the Spirit more deeply. Sometimes I compare different Bible translations. It helps me notice deeper meanings and strengthen my testimony because I understand what the verses are saying.”
Marc De La Peña Barredo, an institute teacher in the Philippines, says he has found similar usefulness in exploring different Bible translations. Including them in his study has boosted his confidence as a teacher.
“Comparing Bible translations has significantly enriched the way I prepare and deliver my lessons,” he says. “It has empowered me to teach with greater clarity and purpose, helping my students draw closer to the Savior through the scriptures.”
Seth Stewart,* a parent of three neurodivergent children in Utah, says reading a more accessible Bible translation has transformed their family’s scripture study.
“For individuals with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or other learning differences,” he says, “simpler translations can make the difference between feeling shut out of God’s word and truly connecting with it.”
For those worried about using a new Bible translation, Elder Renlund says to rely on the robust resource that is modern revelation.
“As Latter-day Saints,” the Apostle teaches, “we can confidently gain insights from multiple translations, in part because ‘we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God’ (Articles of Faith 1:8). Latter-day scripture, including the teachings of living prophets, is a good standard for evaluating any doctrinal discrepancies that might come up in different Bible translations.”
*Name changed to protect privacy"
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/holy-bible-translations-editions-church-of-jesus-christ
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in the Translation Industry: Past Insights, Current Trends, and Future Prospects
In an era where communication knows no borders, the translation industry stands at the intersection of technology and human understanding. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into this sector has transformed the way we communicate across languages, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of translators. The work of researchers like M.Q. Shormani and Y.A. Al-Sohbani sheds light on this evolution, examining the contributions of AI to the translation industry and projecting its future trajectory. Their insights remind us how far we’ve come and point towards an exciting horizon in language processing.
Historically, translation relied heavily on human expertise, with professional translators painstakingly working through texts, ensuring not just accuracy but also cultural nuance. As global interactions increased, the demand for quicker, reliable translations surged. Enter AI—a game changer that bridged the gap between demand and supply. With the advent of neural networks in the 2010s, AI began to deliver translations that, while not perfect, offered a remarkable improvement over traditional machine translation systems. This has laid the groundwork for a future where AI enhances human translation rather than replaces it.
The rise of AI in translation has primarily been propelled by advancements in natural language processing (NLP). These technologies harness vast datasets, including multilingual corpuses, allowing machines to learn language patterns, idioms, and contextual meanings. For instance, Google Translate, which initially relied on statistical methods, has transitioned to neural machine translation (NMT). This approach considers entire sentences, enabling AI to capture the flow and context of text, resulting in more coherent translations. Such improvements highlight AI’s crucial role in enhancing the quality of translations across various languages.
However, the transition to AI-driven translation tools has not been seamless. While machines excel in efficiency and can process language at an unprecedented scale, they still grapple with the subtleties that only human translators navigate adeptly. For example, humor, idiomatic expressions, and regional dialects often pose challenges to AI systems, which can struggle to deliver accurate representations of tone and context. Researchers continue to explore ways to blend human intuition with AI’s speed, aiming to create systems that augment human capabilities rather than undermine them.
Another aspect to consider is the ethical implications of AI in translation. As these technologies become more prevalent, concerns about bias in translation algorithms arise. Since AI learns from existing texts, any prejudices present in the source material can be amplified in translation outputs. This issue underscores the importance of diversifying datasets used to train AI models, ensuring that translations reflect a range of perspectives and do not perpetuate stereotypes or inaccuracies. Awareness of these ethical dimensions is crucial as we navigate the potential pitfalls of technology in the translation arena.
The pandemic accelerated the demand for digital solutions, prompting many businesses to adopt AI-based translation tools to maintain communication despite physical barriers. The translation industry witnessed a surge in the use of AI-powered platforms that enable real-time translations—particularly useful in international business negotiations, global customer service, and online content dissemination. These tools empower organizations to connect with diverse markets more effectively, reducing turnaround times and enhancing customer experiences.
Despite the benefits, there is apprehension among professional translators regarding the increasing reliance on AI technology. Many fear that widespread adoption could undermine their livelihood, leading to a diminished appreciation for the art of translation. However, Shormani and Al-Sohbani emphasize that rather than diminishing the role of human translators, AI could lead to the emergence of new opportunities. Translators may shift their focus towards specialist areas, such as localization, transcreation, or culturally nuanced texts that require a human touch.
In the educational sphere, the integration of AI tools into translation curricula can equip future translators with the skills necessary to leverage these technologies. Training programs that emphasize both linguistic proficiency and technological fluency will be essential in preparing the next generation of translators. By working alongside AI tools, students can learn to maximize productivity while maintaining the critical thinking and cultural sensitivity required for high-quality translations.
Looking forward, the landscape of translation will undoubtedly be reshaped by ongoing advancements in AI. Continuous research will drive innovation, leading to more sophisticated algorithms capable of understanding and producing translations that are contextually aware and culturally relevant. As machine learning models become increasingly adept at managing diverse languages and dialects, we can expect a future where language barriers are significantly diminished, fostering greater interpersonal and international collaboration.
The future of the translation industry will likely see the emergence of hybrid models where human translators work in synergy with AI tools. This dynamic environment will usher in a new paradigm, characterized by collaborative workflows that pair human creativity with machine efficiency. Such frameworks could lead to unprecedented levels of accuracy and relevance, affirming the value of human insight while harnessing the power of technology.
In conclusion, the research conducted by Shormani and Al-Sohbani offers a comprehensive overview of the contributions of AI to the translation field. As we reflect on how far we have come, it’s essential to remain mindful of the challenges that lie ahead. The balance between leveraging technology and preserving the human element in translation will be integral to the industry’s evolution. As we navigate this unfolding narrative, the hope is to foster an environment where both AI innovations and human expertise elevate the standards of translation across the globe. Indeed, the future of translation holds endless possibilities, transforming not just language but human connections worldwide.
Subject of Research: The contributions of artificial intelligence to the translation industry.
Article Title: Artificial intelligence contribution to translation industry: looking back and forward.
Article References:
Shormani, M.Q., Al-Sohbani, Y.A. Artificial intelligence contribution to translation industry: looking back and forward.
Discov Artif Intell (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-025-00487-3";
Bioengineer December 15, 2025
https://bioengineer.org/ais-impact-on-translation-past-and-future-insights/
"Doctranslate.io is an AI-powered translation platform designed to handle multiple content formats, including text, documents, images, audio, and video. The platform focuses on preserving the original formatting and structural integrity of the source material, which can be critical for professional and enterprise use.
By supporting a wide range of languages and file types, Doctranslate.io aims to facilitate multilingual communication, content localization, and global collaboration. Its applications include translating corporate reports, marketing materials, multimedia content, and technical documents, allowing organizations to maintain consistency across markets. The software is intended for businesses, professionals, and enterprises that require accurate, context-aware translation without compromising layout or readability. Doctranslate.io emphasizes automation, efficiency, and scalability for multilingual workflows in diverse business environments.
Trend Themes
1. AI-powered Multimodal Translation - AI-driven platforms capable of handling text, audio, video, and document translations are revolutionizing how businesses manage multilingual communication.
2. Context-aware Localization Tools - New tools that understand context and maintain format integrity are enhancing accuracy in translating diverse content across languages.
3. Scalable Multilingual Workflows - The development of scalable multilingual solutions is facilitating seamless global collaboration, boosting efficiency in diverse business landscapes.
Industry Implications
1. Translation Services - The translation industry is transforming with AI innovations that improve the speed and accuracy of content localization across multiple formats.
2. Content Management Systems - Content management technologies are evolving to integrate AI-powered translation tools, enhancing their ability to support diverse, multilingual content formats.
3. Global Marketing Solutions - Global marketing industries can harness advanced translation software to maintain brand consistency and communicate effectively in various cultural contexts."
Ellen Smith
December 16, 2025 — Tech
Multimodal Translation Tools
https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/doctranslateio1
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
|
