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Charles Tiayon
August 12, 2012 6:05 AM
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Starting soon if your site is hit by numerous DMCA takedown notices it may affect your listing in google search. Google stated in their post
“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our ranking: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.” There are some problems with this new policy. First Google determines what is a valid DMCA takedown. A valid takedown simply means that there was a complaint against the site, the correct paperwork was filled out and there was no counter-claim filed. It doesn’t mean the takedown has gone through any legal process and has been found valid by a court of law. Critics complain that if someone has a beef against a site they could use this to issue false claims to punish the site.
As stated by the EFF “Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of copyright infringement. No court or other umpire confirms that the accusations are valid (although copyright owners can be liable for bad-faith accusations). Demoting search results – effectively telling the searcher that these are not the websites you’re looking for – based on accusations alone gives copyright owners one more bit of control over what we see, hear, and read.” Google has stated that sites may appeal if they believe they have been falsely accused. However it is not clear what number would be considered numerous and if the sites themselves will be notified of the reason they are being demoted in search.
Sites are still listed under Google Search, but most likely will not show up on the first page of search, which means people who are search ninjas, will have no trouble finding these sites, however most normal people searches stop at the first page. Which means for all practical purposes the punish sites will not exist for most people. This will clearly hurt BitTorrent sites who are used to share both legitimate files, but also pirated media and games
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
"Quand la langue française envahit l’espagnol
On pointe volontiers du doigt les anglicismes. Mais des termes français s’introduisent aussi depuis des siècles dans la langue espagnole. Si certains de ces gallicismes sont assimilés, donnant naissance à de nouveaux mots, d’autres sont importés tels quels. De quoi susciter parfois la perplexité de l’hispanophone et mettre à rude épreuve sa volonté d’inclusion, écrit ce quotidien madrilène.
Traduit de l’espagnol
Publié le 19 janvier 2026 à 05h00
Il suffit de jeter un coup d’œil à une carte pour saisir toute l’importance de la relation qui unit depuis des siècles l’Espagne et son voisin du nord, par la force des choses. La France est un passage obligé ; sans elle, point de communication ou de lien avec le reste de l’Europe. Il y a certes les Pyrénées – on a largement ironisé sur leur présence et leur rôle. La voie maritime permet aussi, bien sûr, d’atteindre d’autres terres.
Pourtant, quoi qu’on en pense, la France coiffe l’Espagne. Nous l’aurons crainte, aimée, haïe ; nous aurons tour à tour cultivé la gallophilie et la gallophobie. Nous donnons des surnoms péjoratifs à ses habitants, par exemple gabacho [de l’occitan gavach, “qui parle mal”] ou encore franchute [qui peut être traduit par “franchouillard”]. Nous qualifions d’afrancesados [“francisés”] les Espagnols qui ont collaboré avec Bonaparte… Mais le fait est qu’ils sont là, la France et les Français. Et, dans l’ensemble, nous leur devons beaucoup, et même énormément.
Notre langue doit beaucoup à la leur. Du Moyen Âge à nos jours, le français a enrichi l’espagnol de nombreux mots, parfois évidents (jardín, parterre, bulevar, coqueta) et parfois moins (le mot ideología a des racines gréco-latines, mais il n’existerait pas sans son modèle français, “idéologie”)..."
https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/vu-d-espagne-quand-la-langue-francaise-envahit-l-espagnol_238889
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Plafonnement du CPF : pourquoi un amendement vise à exclure les formations linguistiques
Arnaud
il y a 3 jours
Alors que le débat sur le plafonnement du Compte Personnel de Formation entre dans sa phase décisive, un amendement déposé à l’Assemblée nationale attire particulièrement l’attention des acteurs de la formation. Il propose d’exclure explicitement les formations menant à une certification linguistique du mécanisme de plafonnement introduit par le Sénat dans le cadre du projet de loi de finances pour 2026.
Derrière cette formulation technique se cache un enjeu de fond, à la fois social, économique et stratégique pour la politique de formation professionnelle.
Ce que prévoit exactement l’amendement
Sur le plan juridique, l’amendement est simple dans sa rédaction mais structurant dans ses effets. Il vise à compléter un alinéa du texte budgétaire afin d’exclure du plafonnement :
les formations menant à une certification visant l’atteinte ou l’amélioration d’un niveau de connaissance d’une langue.
Autrement dit, si cet amendement était adopté, les formations linguistiques certifiantes inscrites au Répertoire spécifique ne seraient pas soumises au plafond de droits CPF mobilisables, contrairement à d’autres certifications relevant du même répertoire.
Il s’agit bien d’une exclusion ciblée, et non d’une remise en cause générale du principe de plafonnement.
Le contexte : un plafonnement voté par le Sénat
Pour comprendre la portée de cet amendement, il faut revenir sur le texte adopté par le Sénat.
Dans le cadre du projet de loi de finances pour 2026, les sénateurs ont voté un dispositif visant à plafonner les droits mobilisables sur le CPF pour les actions de formation sanctionnées par des certifications du Répertoire spécifique. L’objectif affiché est double :
responsabiliser davantage les usages du CPF,
maîtriser la dépense publique dans un contexte budgétaire contraint.
Ce principe de plafonnement s’appliquerait de manière indifférenciée à toutes les certifications concernées, sans distinction de nature ou de finalité.
C’est précisément cette approche uniforme que l’amendement de l’Assemblée nationale vient questionner.
Pourquoi les formations linguistiques posent un cas particulier
L’exposé sommaire de l’amendement développe plusieurs arguments structurants, qui méritent d’être explicités.
Un levier clé pour les publics éloignés de l’emploi
Les formations linguistiques jouent un rôle central dans les parcours d’insertion et de réinsertion professionnelle. Elles concernent directement :
les demandeurs d’emploi de longue durée,
les personnes peu ou pas qualifiées,
les salariés en situation de précarité,
les publics issus de parcours migratoires,
ou encore les personnes exerçant dans des territoires où la maîtrise des langues conditionne l’accès à l’emploi.
Dans ces situations, la compétence linguistique n’est pas un simple “plus”. Elle constitue souvent un pré-requis d’employabilité, voire un facteur déterminant de sécurisation des parcours.
Plafonner strictement l’accès à ces formations reviendrait, selon les auteurs de l’amendement, à affaiblir un levier majeur de réduction des inégalités d’accès à l’emploi.
Une logique de progression sur le temps long
Autre point central de l’argumentaire : la nature même des compétences linguistiques.
Contrairement à certaines certifications du Répertoire spécifique qui correspondent à une habilitation ponctuelle ou à une compétence immédiatement acquise, la langue s’inscrit dans une dynamique de progression continue.
Maintenir, consolider ou améliorer un niveau linguistique suppose souvent des formations successives, étalées dans le temps.
Appliquer un plafonnement uniforme risquerait donc de freiner cette progression naturelle et d’entrer en contradiction avec l’objectif fondamental du CPF, qui est la montée en compétences tout au long de la vie.
Des compétences transversales, pas uniquement liées au poste
L’amendement insiste également sur un point juridique et économique important.
Les formations linguistiques ne peuvent être assimilées à de simples formations d’adaptation immédiate au poste de travail, qui relèveraient exclusivement de la responsabilité de l’employeur. Elles développent des compétences transversales, transférables d’un emploi à un autre, d’un secteur à un autre, voire d’un pays à un autre.
À ce titre, elles s’inscrivent pleinement dans la vocation du CPF comme outil d’autonomie professionnelle des actifs, et non comme simple instrument de formation interne à l’entreprise.
Une cohérence avec les textes récents sur le CPF
L’amendement souligne enfin que cette exclusion s’inscrirait dans la continuité de choix déjà opérés par le législateur, notamment lors des textes récents consacrés à la lutte contre la fraude au CPF.
Dans ces réformes, la spécificité des certifications linguistiques a déjà été reconnue, précisément pour permettre leur mobilisation répétée dans une logique de progression et non d’usage unique.
L’exclusion du plafonnement serait donc cohérente avec cette reconnaissance antérieure, sans remettre en cause l’équilibre général du dispositif.
Un amendement ciblé, sans remise en cause globale
Il est important de le souligner : cet amendement ne conteste ni le principe du plafonnement, ni l’objectif de maîtrise de la dépense publique. Il propose un ajustement ciblé, fondé sur la nature spécifique des formations linguistiques et sur leur impact social et économique.
Le texte prévoit d’ailleurs explicitement un mécanisme de compensation financière pour l’État, via la création d’une taxe additionnelle, afin de préserver l’équilibre budgétaire global.
Une issue encore incertaine
À ce stade, cet amendement n’a pas été adopté. Il est en attente dans le cadre des discussions parlementaires à l’Assemblée nationale. Son sort dépendra directement :
du calendrier des débats,
des arbitrages politiques de la semaine en cours,
et, le cas échéant, du recours ou non à l’article 49.3 sur le budget.
En cas de passage en force, il est possible que cet amendement ne soit jamais examiné ni voté.
Ce qu’il faut retenir
Cet amendement constitue une prise de position claire sur la place des formations linguistiques dans l’écosystème du CPF. Il met en lumière une tension structurante entre deux objectifs légitimes : la maîtrise des dépenses publiques et la préservation d’un accès effectif à des compétences clés pour l’emploi.
Quelle que soit son issue, il illustre un point essentiel : la réforme du CPF ne se résume pas à un plafonnement budgétaire. Elle pose des questions de fond sur la nature des compétences que la collectivité choisit de soutenir prioritairement.
Les prochains jours permettront de savoir si cette spécificité linguistique sera reconnue dans le texte final, ou si elle devra s’adapter au nouveau cadre commun qui se dessine pour l’ensemble des formations certifiantes.
Texte intégral de l’amendement relatif à l’exclusion des formations linguistiques du plafonnement du CPF
À l’alinéa 5, après le mot :
« professionnelles »,
insérer les mots :
« , ainsi que de celles menant à une certification visant l’atteinte ou l’amélioration d’un niveau de connaissance d’une langue ».
Exposé sommaire
Le présent amendement vise à exclure explicitement les formations aux langues du champ du plafonnement instauré par l’amendement adopté par le Sénat à l’article 81 du projet de loi de finances pour 2026, en raison de la durée longue de ces formations et de leur rôle déterminant en matière d’employabilité des personnes éloignées de l’emploi.
L’amendement adopté par le Sénat prévoit un mécanisme de plafonnement des droits mobilisables sur le compte personnel de formation (CPF) pour les actions de formation sanctionnées par des certifications enregistrées au répertoire spécifique (RS). Si l’objectif de responsabilisation des acteurs et de maîtrise de la dépense publique est partagé, l’application indifférenciée de ce plafonnement aux formations linguistiques apparaît inadaptée et contre-productive au regard des finalités mêmes du CPF.
Les formations en langues constituent en effet un levier essentiel d’accès ou de retour à l’emploi pour les publics les plus fragiles : demandeurs d’emploi de longue durée, personnes peu qualifiées, salariés occupant des emplois précaires ou exposés aux mutations économiques, mais également personnes issues de parcours migratoires ou résidant dans des territoires où les opportunités professionnelles exigent une maîtrise accrue des langues. À ce titre, elles contribuent directement à la réduction des inégalités d’accès à l’emploi et à la sécurisation des parcours professionnels.
Par nature, les compétences linguistiques s’inscrivent dans une logique de progression continue, sur le temps long. Contrairement à d’autres certifications du répertoire spécifique, elles ne correspondent pas à une habilitation ponctuelle ou définitivement acquise, mais à un apprentissage évolutif nécessitant des formations successives pour consolider, maintenir ou améliorer un niveau de maîtrise. Leur plafonnement risquerait de freiner cette progression et d’entraver l’objectif de montée en compétences poursuivi par le CPF.
En outre, les formations linguistiques ne peuvent être assimilées à des formations strictement liées à l’adaptation immédiate au poste de travail, relevant de la seule responsabilité de l’employeur au titre de l’article L. 6321-1 du code du travail. Elles participent au développement de compétences transversales, transférables d’un emploi à l’autre, et répondent ainsi pleinement à la vocation du CPF comme outil d’autonomie et d’émancipation professionnelle des actifs.
Enfin, l’exclusion des formations en langues du mécanisme de plafonnement s’inscrit dans la continuité des choix opérés par le législateur dans d’autres textes récents, notamment en matière de lutte contre les fraudes au CPF, où la spécificité des certifications linguistiques a été reconnue afin de permettre leur mobilisation répétée dans une logique de progression des compétences.
Le présent amendement vise donc à préserver l’accès effectif aux formations linguistiques financées par le CPF, compétence indispensable à l’insertion professionnelle et à l’adaptation des actifs aux évolutions du marché du travail, tout en maintenant l’équilibre général du dispositif de plafonnement pour les autres certifications du répertoire spécifique.
La perte de recettes pour l’État est compensée à due concurrence par la création d’une taxe additionnelle aux droits mentionnés aux articles 575 et 575 A du code général des impôts.
Source : https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/2247/AN/2483";
https://cpformation.com/plafonnement-du-cpf-pourquoi-un-amendement-vise-a-exclure-les-formations-linguistiques/amp/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"For African enterprises navigating global business, the question has shifted from whether to use AI translation to which system to trust when accuracy affects contracts, compliance, and customer relationships.
The global AI translation market is expanding from $1.20 billion in 2024 to $4.50 billion by 2033 at 16.5% CAGR. Despite 70% of global businesses integrating AI translation by 2025, a trust gap persists: advanced AI tools achieve only 60-85% accuracy versus professional human translation’s 95%+ accuracy.
How Do You Trust AI Translation When You Don’t Speak the Target Language?
For African enterprises expanding across the continent’s 54 countries and 2,000+ languages, or engaging with international partners, this challenge is particularly acute. Decision-makers regularly need to approve critical translations, contracts, compliance documents, and product specifications in languages they don’t understand. The traditional approach has been frustratingly inefficient: copy text into Google Translate, then DeepL, then maybe ChatGPT, manually comparing outputs and hoping for the best.
“The biggest issue isn’t that AI makes mistakes, it’s that you can’t easily tell when it’s wrong unless you speak the target language,” noted a user in the r/LanguageTechnology Reddit community, where translation professionals frequently discuss the challenges of trusting single AI engines. This sentiment echoes across enterprise technology discussions throughout 2024 and 2025, as businesses grapple with the practical reality of deploying AI translation at scale.
MachineTranslation.com’s newly launched SMART (consensus translation) feature offers a fundamentally different approach: instead of asking which single AI engine is best, it answers which translation multiple independent engines agree is correct. SMART provides the most trusted translation by comparing the outputs of 22 AI models. It automatically selects the version that the majority of AIs agree on for each sentence. This drastically reduces risk and cuts AI translation errors by 90%. This verification-first methodology represents what industry experts are calling the most significant advancement in machine translation reliability since neural networks became mainstream.
What Is AI Translation Hallucination and Why Does It Matter?
AI hallucinations in translation occur when systems generate fluent, grammatically correct content containing factual inaccuracies or fabricated information.
A 2025 Scientific Reports study analyzing 3 million mobile app reviews found 1.75% of user complaints were about hallucination-like errors. In enterprise deployments, 47% of AI users in 2024 made at least one major decision based on hallucinated content, while 39% of AI-powered customer service bots were reworked due to hallucination errors.
For translation, hallucinations manifest as dropped words, fabricated facts, and terminology drift—especially in low-resource African languages. MIT’s analysis shows hallucinations are particularly prevalent when translating out of English. OpenAI’s latest models demonstrate hallucination rates of 33-79% depending on complexity.
How Does SMART’s 22-Model Consensus Actually Work?
SMART transforms the translation workflow by querying multiple independent AI engines, including Google, DeepL, Claude, Microsoft, and others from its platform of over 22 AI models, and automatically selecting the sentence-level translation that the majority of engines converge on. Crucially, this isn’t about adding a rewriting layer or stylistic polish on top. SMART picks the strongest consensus result without modifying meaning.
“When you see independent AI systems lining up behind the same segments, you get one outcome that’s genuinely dependable,” explained Rachelle Garcia, AI Lead at Tomedes, the company behind MachineTranslation.com. “It turns the old routine of ‘compare every candidate output manually’ into simply ‘scan what actually matters.'”
The consensus model delivers three key advantages that directly address enterprise pain points:
Hallucination Mitigation:
When one engine fabricates details, others typically don’t. SMART follows the majority rather than the outlier, significantly reducing the risk of invented content making it into final deliverables.
Non-Linguist Confidence:
Stakeholders who don’t speak the target language finally see “the translation where most AIs agree,” providing a practical safety net for approval processes.
Review Efficiency:
Editors and reviewers no longer need to scrutinize five separate versions of the same sentence, dramatically accelerating quality assurance workflows.
What Results Has SMART Demonstrated in Real-World Testing?
Internal evaluations on mixed business and legal material revealed that consensus-driven choices reduced visible AI errors and stylistic drift by 18-22% compared to relying on a single engine. The largest gains came from fewer hallucinated facts, tighter terminology consistency, and fewer dropped words, all critical factors for professional content used in contracts, compliance documents, and stakeholder communications.
Even more striking for enterprise decision-makers: in a focused review where professional linguists rated SMART output, 9 out of 10 described it as the safest entry point for stakeholders who don’t speak the target language at all. This directly addresses the fundamental pain point in global business operations, where executives regularly need to approve translations in languages outside their competency.
According to Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes: “MachineTranslation.com is no longer just a scoring and benchmarking layer for AI outputs; it now builds a single, trustworthy translation from those outputs, end to end. We’ve evolved beyond pure comparison into active composition, and SMART surfaces the most robust translation, not merely the highest-ranked candidate.”
These improvements arrive at a critical moment for African enterprises. As AI adoption accelerates across the continent, with industries from finance to healthcare increasingly relying on automated translation for cost efficiency, the need for verifiable accuracy has never been greater.
Where Does Consensus Translation Provide Maximum Value?
SMART offers benefits across all scenarios, but certain use cases show particularly strong ROI:
Contracts and Legal Policies:
Less scrutiny required; reviewers focus on sensitive clauses, trusting consensus for standard language. Legal AI translation achieves 90% compliance with jurisdiction-specific terminology.
Product Pages and UI Content:
Consistent phrasing across SKUs and interfaces enables faster localization. Critical for African e-commerce – 76% of online buyers prefer products with information in their local language.
Compliance and Regulatory Documents:
Fewer wording slips enable enterprises to align terminology once and distribute confidently across jurisdictions.
Technical and Medical Content:
Healthcare AI localization reduced medical translation errors by 35%, but stakes remain high. Consensus provides a “safety net” when multiple engines converge on medical terminology.
The African context makes these improvements timely. Digital transformation initiatives are driving AI adoption, while Africa’s projected AI market growth to $16.5 billion by 2030 signals increasing enterprise investment.
When Should Enterprises Still Use Human Translation?
SMART’s consensus approach significantly improves AI translation reliability, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for human expertise in all scenarios. The platform explicitly acknowledges this through its optional Human Verification feature for mission-critical content.
Industry data suggests a tiered approach delivers optimal results:
High-Stakes Content (legal documents, marketing campaigns, public-facing materials): Requires human expertise and review. Professional translation delivers 95-100% accuracy versus AI’s 70-85%, and the reputational and legal risks of errors justify the investment. Cost: $0.10-$0.25 per word for common language pairs.
Medium-Stakes Content (help articles, internal policies, onboarding materials): Works well with AI translation plus light human review, especially when using consensus approaches like SMART. Hybrid workflows combining AI draft translation with certified linguist review deliver savings of up to 45% compared to pure human translation while maintaining 97% accuracy. Cost: approximately $0.08 per word including post-editing.
Low-Stakes Content (internal communications, routine emails, preliminary drafts): SMART consensus translation without human review provides a reliable, cost-effective baseline. Free to use for basic implementations, with API options for enterprise integration.
For African SMEs with limited resources, this tiered approach offers a practical pathway. As businesses across the continent seek to transform operations with AI, understanding where to allocate human expertise versus AI automation becomes a crucial competitive advantage.
How Does SMART Fit Into Secure Enterprise Workflows?
Enterprise adoption requires robust data governance. MachineTranslation.com addresses this through:
Secure Mode:
SOC 2-compliant AI processing meeting enterprise security standards
Automatic Anonymization:
Sensitive fields anonymized before processing
Temporary Sharing:
Expiring guest links for controlled collaboration
Format Preservation:
Maintains layouts for PDFs, Word docs, and PowerPoints
No Long-Term Storage:
Content isn’t retained, addressing data sovereignty concerns
These features align with African regulatory frameworks including South Africa’s POPIA, Nigeria’s Data Protection Regulation, and the emerging AU Data Protection Framework.
What Does the Reddit Translation Community Say About This Approach?
The value of comparing multiple AI outputs resonates in translation technology discussions. In r/LanguageTechnology communities, users frequently discuss challenges of trusting single AI engines, with consensus emerging that comparing multiple outputs reduces error risk.
Reddit invested substantially in AI translation, expanding to over 35 countries in 2024. According to Slator, Reddit’s translation cost per language was under $1 million in Q3 2024. CEO Steve Huffman called machine translation “one of the best opportunities we’ve ever seen to rapidly grow the content base outside of English.”
How Should African Enterprises Implement Consensus Translation?
For technology leaders considering SMART:
Identify High-Volume Content:
Start with reliable but not mission-critical translations – product descriptions, support docs, routine correspondence.
Measure Baseline Metrics:
Document current error rates and review time before implementation.
Run Parallel Testing:
Process content through both existing workflow and SMART for 2-4 weeks.
Define Review Triggers:
Establish when consensus translations need human verification.
Scale Gradually:
Begin with one department, validate results, then expand.
This measured approach allows African enterprises embracing AI to validate results before full adoption.
What Are the Broader Implications for African Business?
SMART’s consensus approach signals a shift: rather than seeking the “best” single AI system, orchestrate multiple specialized systems and leverage agreement as reliability proxy.
For Africa’s language diversity, consensus-based approaches offer value for:
Intra-African Trade:
Reliable contract and specification translation as AfCFTA drives cross-border commerce
Regulatory Compliance:
Consistent documentation across multiple African jurisdictions
Digital Public Services:
Verifiable accuracy for e-government initiatives in multiple official languages
Healthcare and Education:
Safety mechanisms where translation errors have direct human impact
The translation market’s projected growth to $27.46 billion by 2030 (from $6.93 billion in 2024) at 25.79% annual growth reflects recognition that language barriers represent genuine economic obstacles.
What Comes Next in Translation Verification?
SMART is live on MachineTranslation.com, free for basic use with enterprise API options. The platform supports 270+ languages via web, Android, iOS, and API.
As AI reshapes enterprise operations, consensus approaches suggest a principle: when single AI systems struggle with reliability, orchestrating multiple systems and extracting consensus offers a practical path forward.
For African technology leaders, the question isn’t which AI translator is best – it’s how organizations verify translation accuracy when decisions depend on it. SMART’s 22-model consensus provides one answer, reducing errors by up to 90% and giving non-linguists a practical safety net.
In a continent where linguistic diversity is simultaneously cultural asset and business challenge, tools making multilingual communication trustworthy aren’t just convenient – they’re an infrastructure for economic integration and growth."
https://www.itnewsafrica.com/2026/01/stop-asking-which-ai-translator-is-best-start-asking-how-translation-gets-verified-inside-smarts-22-model-consensus/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"“AI-powered translations for Reels are starting to roll out in more languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada, on Instagram. These new additions build on our existing language support for English, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish.”
The addition of more of the languages spoken in India is significant, because India is now the biggest single market for both Facebook and Instagram usage, beating out the U.S. by a significant margin.
As such, the capacity to translate your Reels into more natural language for this audience could give some creators a big boost in their audience reach.
Meta’s AI Translations use the sound and tone of the creators own voice, in alignment with lip-synching, to create a more authentic representation of the original clip.
And thus far, it’s having an impact. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri says that creators are seeing increased reach due to translated content, with more Reels from around the world now making their way into people’s feeds.
It could be a valuable consideration, and having the capacity to connect in more languages could boost your exposure to millions more Reels viewers.
In order to activate Meta’s AI translations, you’ll need to have a Page, or have professional mode turned on, and have at least 1,000 followers. Meta’s AI translations are available in countries where Meta AI is available..."
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-adds-more-languages-to-ai-translations-for-reels/810019/
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#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Prix de de la traduction ATTF-BNP PARIBAS Association taiwanaise des traducteurs de français
Hsieh Pei-chi remporte le prix de traduction avec La vie secrète d’un cimetière
Hieh Pei-chi remporte le prix de traduction 2025 de l'ATTF-BNP Paribas pour sa traduction de La vie secrète d'un cimetière, de Benoît Gallot (photos ATTF, montage Rti)
L’Association taïwanaise des traducteurs de français (ATTF) a annoncé aujourd’hui que Hsieh Pei-Chi (謝珮琪) est la lauréate du prix de la traduction de 2025 pour l’ouvrage La vie secrète d’un cimetière, de Benoît Gallot.
L’ATTF décerne chaque année un prix à la meilleure traduction pour des œuvres françaises publiées à Taïwan, sponsorisé par BNP-Paribas et alternant les catégories littéraire et sciences humaines et sociales d’un an à l’autre, cette dernière étant la catégorie de 2025.
Suivant la nomination de cinq ouvrages en novembre dernier, le jury final s'est réuni à Taipei le 11 janvier pour délibérer, noter chaque traduction et choisir la lauréate. Hsieh Pei-chi était nominée pour la première fois à ce prix. Selon Caroline Jortay, qui fait partie de jury : « C'est une traduction exceptionnellement fluide que nous livre Hsieh Pei-chi dans sa traduction de La vie secrète d’un cimetière de Benoît Gallot. On y retrouve toute la délicatesse et la musicalité du texte français, tandis que la traductrice guide avec beaucoup d'habileté les lecteurs sinophones vers les recoins méconnus du Père Lachaise. »
Notons que le jury était composé de l’autrice Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka (林蔚昀), la chercheuse du CNRS Coraline Jortay, la chercheuse à l’Institut d’histoire et philologie de l’Academia Sinica Dai Lijuan (戴麗娟), le docteur en philosophie diplômé de l’Université de Louvain Shen Ching-Kai (沈清楷) et le professeur de politique à l’Université Cheng Chi Yeh Hao (葉浩)."
21/01/2026 14:51
Par： La Rédaction
https://www.rti.org.tw/fr/news?uid=3&pid=187576
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Atos et Graia s’unissent pour lever les barrières linguistiques au travail grâce à la traduction vocale en temps réel
Paris, France – 20 janvier 2026 – Atos, un leader mondial de la transformation digitale accélérée par l’IA, annonce aujourd’hui un partenariat stratégique avec Graia, une plateforme d’intelligence artificielle qui redéfinit l’expérience client au travers d’interactions intelligentes et empathiques. Ensemble, les deux entreprises ont pour objectif de révolutionner le support multilingue au sein de l‘écosystème Digital Workplace d’Atos en intégrant à ses centres de services et de support la technologie de traduction vocale bidirectionnelle de pointe de Graia.
Cette initiative positionne Atos à l’avant-garde de l’innovation en matière d’environnement de travail augmenté par l’IA, en permettant une traduction vocale fluide et en temps réel. Les utilisateurs et les agents de support s’expriment naturellement dans leur langue maternelle pendant que le système traduit instantanément. L’IA générative de Graia ne se contente pas de transcrire et traduire en temps réel, elle surveille également les expressions clés, suggère aux agents des formulations adaptées à la culture de leurs interlocuteurs et automatise l’évaluation des appels. Atos bénéficie ainsi d’un contrôle qualité homogène et d’un suivi des performances d’une grande précision.
Atos accompagne aujourd’hui plus de 5 millions d’utilisateurs à travers le monde dans plus de 100 langues. Grâce à la technologie de Graia, Atos comblera les imperfections linguistiques d’utilisateurs non anglophones rencontrant des difficultés à s’exprimer avec précision en anglais. Déployé initialement dans le cadre du support multilingue, le service sera ensuite étendu aux parcours d’intégration et de formation inclusifs disponibles au sein de l’offre Digital Workplace d’Atos.
Ce partenariat marque un tournant pour l’accessibilité au travail. La traduction en temps réel accélérera la résolution des incidents et éliminera les blocages linguistiques, offrant une expérience positive, tant aux utilisateurs qu’aux équipes de support. Les clients bénéficieront de services hyper-localisés, adaptés à leur langue, leur culture et leurs préférences, et intégrés à une offre dont l’efficacité est reconnue par le marché.
L’IA générative de Graia transcrit et traduit les conversations en temps réel tout en surveillant les expressions clés et fournit aux agents des énoncés adaptés aux nuances culturelles. L’évaluation automatisée des appels garantit un contrôle qualité constant et des indicateurs de performance fiables à chaque interaction. Cette intégration renforce le leadership d’Atos dans la création d’environnements de travail digitaux inclusifs et évolutifs.
Mike McGarvey, responsable mondial de la stratégie, Digital Workplace, Atos Group, a déclaré : « En intégrant la technologie de traduction vocale de Graia à notre écosystème Digital Workplace, nous donnons à nos équipes le moyen de dialoguer plus naturellement avec nos clients du monde entier. Il s’agit d’un pas décisif vers des expériences digitales véritablement inclusives, intuitives et localisées. Des clients des secteurs de la finance, des services publics, du commerce de détail ou de la santé ont déjà manifesté un vif intérêt pour ce service et nous ont confié des projets en phase pilote. »
Sahil Rekhi, directeur commercial, Graia, a déclaré : « Atos innove sans cesse afin de proposer des environnements de travail fluides. Nous sommes très fiers d’avoir été choisis pour enrichir les interactions multilingues au sein des opérations de support technique d’Atos. Ensemble, nous démontrons comment l’IA générative et agentique peut accroître la satisfaction et la productivité des clients grâce à un support intelligent et adaptatif. »
Cette initiative s’inscrit dans la stratégie d’Atos de proposer un support informatique proactif, comme en témoigne l’Experience Operations Center (XOC). Ce service d’Atos identifie et résout en temps réel les problèmes liés à l’expérience collaborateur, créant ainsi un environnement de travail numérique plus engageant et valorisant.
***
À propos d’Atos Group
Atos Group est un leader international de la transformation digitale avec près de 67 000 collaborateurs et un chiffre d’affaires annuel de près de 10 milliards d’euros. Présent commercialement dans 61 pays, il exerce ses activités sous deux marques : Atos pour les services et Eviden pour les produits. Numéro un européen de la cybersécurité, du cloud et des supercalculateurs, Atos Group s’engage pour un avenir sécurisé et décarboné. Il propose des solutions sur mesure et intégrées, accélérées par l’IA, pour tous les secteurs d’activité. Atos Group est la marque sous laquelle Atos SE (Societas Europaea) exerce ses activités. Atos SE est cotée sur Euronext Paris.
La raison d’être d’Atos Group est de contribuer à façonner l’espace informationnel. Avec ses compétences et ses services, le Groupe supporte le développement de la connaissance, de l’éducation et de la recherche dans une approche pluriculturelle et contribue au développement de l’excellence scientifique et technologique. Partout dans le monde, le Groupe permet à ses clients et à ses collaborateurs, et plus généralement au plus grand nombre, de vivre, travailler et progresser durablement et en toute confiance dans l’espace informationnel.
Contact presse
Isabelle Grangé | isabelle.grange@atos.net | +33 (0) 6 64 56 74 88"
https://www.24matins.fr/pr/atos-et-graia-sunissent-pour-lever-les-barrieres-linguistiques-au-travail-grace-a-la-traduction-vocale-en-temps-reel
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"At The Hindu Lit for Life 2026, Deepa Bhasthi unpacked the choices, politics and power behind translating Kannada into English.
“There is no such thing as proper English.” That opening remark by writer and translator Ms. Bhasthi anchored one of the sessions at The Hindu Lit for Life 2026 titled ‘Re-imagining Stories’, moderated by writer and translator Nandini Krishnan. The discussion centred on Ms. Bhasthi’s acclaimed translation of Heart Lamp, the International Booker Prize-winning collection of Kannada stories by Banu Mushtaq.
Ms. Bhasthi was unequivocal that her role went far beyond that of a linguistic mediator. In selecting, editing and translating these works, she acted as editor, interpreter and cultural custodian, shaping what global readers now recognise as Ms. Mushtaq’s literary voice in English. “It wasn’t just the labour of translation,” she noted, “but the choices on what to include, what to leave out, that travelled internationally,” Ms. Bhasthi says.
Ms. Bhasthi opened the session by reading out an excerpt from the Kannada version of Heart Lamp. The discussion lingered on her decision to retain culturally specific terms such as ganda, pati, yajamana, and akki roti without any footnotes. Such choices allow the English version of Heart Lamp to carry an accent, a geography and a lived social texture. Translation, for her, is not about erasing difference but about inviting readers to inhabit another linguistic world. “I am more led by the language than the writer. I want the reader to understand as much of Kannada linguistic culture as possible… If someone can learn a new Kannada word, then why not?” Ms. Bhasthi says.
Ms. Bhasthi spoke about resisting the idea of a “neutral” or “global” English, particularly one shaped by colonial or metropolitan standards, which is why “South Indian speech rhythms deliberately find space in the stories,” says Ms. Bhasthi. She also acknowledged moments of negotiation, particularly with Western publishers unfamiliar with Indian languages. The term “nursing home,” she recalled with humour, proved to be one of the rare compromises.
The session also explored how Ms. Bhasthi’s translations across different authors demand different forms of attentiveness. With Heart Lamp, she said, the process required immersion into unfamiliar religious and cultural registers, including Urdu and Arabic influences within Kannada. On being asked about death as an underlying theme across the stories, Ms. Bhasthi spoke about how they are peppered with dark humour rather than being an easy or light read. “I wanted to ensure that all stages of womanhood are touched upon, from a young bride to an old woman. You realise patriarchy and religious fundamentalism affect women of all ages,” Ms. Bhasthi says.
Despite winning one of the world’s most prestigious translation prizes, Ms. Bhasthi noted that translators continue to remain marginal figures. “As long as reviewers keep calling translations ‘seamless’, they erase the labour and thinking behind every line,” she observes.
Ultimately, the session foregrounded Ms. Bhasthi not just as a translator of Heart Lamp, but as a thinker reshaping how Indian literature travels, insisting that readers learn to listen to stories that challenge them linguistically."
https://www.thehindu.com/lit-for-life/re-imagining-stories-when-language-travels-honestly/article70510354.ece
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#métaglossie
"Hugging Face has released FineTranslations, a large-scale multilingual dataset containing more than 1 trillion tokens of parallel text across English and 500+ languages. The dataset was created by translating non-English content from the FineWeb2 corpus into English using Gemma3 27B, with the full data generation pipeline designed to be reproducible and publicly documented.
The dataset is primarily intended to improve machine translation, particularly in the English→X direction, where performance remains weaker for many lower-resource languages. By starting from text originally written in non-English languages and translating it into English, FineTranslations provides large-scale parallel data suitable for fine-tuning existing translation models. Internal evaluations also indicate that the resulting English text performs on a similar level to FineWeb for English-only model training, allowing the data to be reused beyond translation-specific tasks.
Beyond translation, Hugging Face reports that the resulting English corpus retains substantial cultural and contextual information from the source languages. In internal experiments, models trained on the translated English text achieved performance comparable to those trained on the original FineWeb dataset, suggesting that FineTranslations can also serve as a high-quality supplement for English-only model pretraining.
The dataset is sourced from FineWeb2, which aggregates multilingual web content from CommonCrawl snapshots collected between 2013 and 2024. To reduce skew toward highly repetitive or domain-specific material, such as religious texts and Wikipedia pages, only language subsets with a bible_wiki_ratio below 0.5 were included. For each language, up to 50 billion tokens were processed, with quality classifiers from FineWeb2-HQ applied where available, and random sampling used otherwise.
Translation was carried out at scale using the datatrove framework, which enabled robust checkpointing, asynchronous execution, and efficient GPU utilization on the Hugging Face cluster. Documents were split into chunks of up to 512 tokens, with a sliding-window strategy to preserve context across segments. Additional safeguards were introduced to mitigate common large-scale translation issues, including early classification of toxic or spam-like content, strict formatting constraints, and post-processing to ensure consistency of line breaks and structure.
Each dataset entry includes aligned original and translated text chunks, language and script identifiers, token counts, quality and educational scores, and references to the original CommonCrawl source. The dataset can be accessed through the Hugging Face datasets library...
FineTranslations is available now on Hugging Face. The dataset is released under the Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-By) v1.0 license, and its use is subject to CommonCrawl’s terms."
Robert Krzaczyński
Senior Software Engineer
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/huggingface-fine-translations/
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#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
This Collection invites interdisciplinary scholarship that explores translation as a cultural, aesthetic, and political practice across literature, film, and other media.
"Translating across cultures: literature, film and other media
Submission status
Open
Submission deadline
15 October 2026
Translation is a creative, interpretive, and often contested process that shapes how cultures encounter one another. From literary classics to contemporary cinema, from subtitling and dubbing to fan translations and digital adaptations, translation mediates meaning across languages, genres, and media. It raises questions about fidelity and transformation, visibility and invisibility, and the power dynamics embedded in cultural exchange.
This Collection invites interdisciplinary scholarship that explores translation as a cultural, aesthetic, and political practice across literature, film, and other media. We welcome contributions from across the humanities and arts, including linguistics, literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and related fields. — show all
Submit manuscript
Submission guidelines
Manuscript editing services
Editors
Feng Cui, PhD,
Martyn Gray, PhD &
Irene Ranzato, PhD
Collection content How to submit About the Guest Editors Collection policies
Feng Cui is a Senior Lecturer and PhD Supervisor in the Chinese Programme at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also serves as Coordinator of the Minor in Translation program and the Han Suyin Award Fund at NTU. Dr. Cui’s research interests include the history of translation in China, translation theories, 20th-century Chinese literature, and comparative literature. He has authored, co-authored, edited, and translated ten books and published over 50 journal articles and book chapters. He was also Guest Editor of a special issue titled “Transforming Translation Education through Artificial Intelligence” in The Interpreter and Translator Trainer.
Martyn Gray is Assistant Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he teaches a range of theoretical and practical undergraduate and postgraduate modules. His most recent monograph, entitled Making the 'Invisible' Visible? Reviewing Translated Works (Peter Lang, 2024), focusses on how and against which criteria the work of translators is assessed by amateur and professional reviewers.
Irene Ranzato is Associate Professor of English Language, Translation and Linguistics at Rome Sapienza University, Italy, and Honorary Research Associate at UCL, UK. She is a member of the board of the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA) and is part of the committee in charge of revising the national school guidelines, by appointment of the Italian Ministry of Education. Her research lies at the intersection of linguistic, ideological and cultural issues and focuses on the sociolinguistic analysis of film and television dialogue, and on audiovisual translation, which she explores also in connection with adaptation studies and with gender studies."
https://www.nature.com/collections/gibifiddaj/guest-editors
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#métaglossie
Imagine watching Money Heist or Prison Break in your preferred language without waiting for a dubbed version. Or picture being a die-hard K-Drama fan who does not understand Korean but can still follow conversations without constantly reading subtitles. That vision sits at the heart of live translation, a technology increasingly shaping entertainment, education and cross-border communication.
Over the past two decades, translation tools have moved from static text boxes to experiments in real-time audio. While the promise of seamless, human-like translation is not yet fully realised, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are bringing it closer than ever.
Early years: Literal text on screen
When Google Translate launched in 2006, it functioned as a basic text tool. Users typed or pasted content and received instant translations. The results were often literal and awkward, struggling with grammar and nuance, but the service was transformative. For the first time, millions could access free translations across dozens of languages.
Microsoft took an early step towards spoken translation with Skype Translator in 2014. The system enabled near real-time speech translation between limited language pairs, including English and Spanish. Although conversations required pauses and corrections, it demonstrated that translation could move beyond text.
Smartphones expand the use case
The spread of smartphones widened translation's reach. Google introduced voice input, allowing users to speak and see translations appear on screen. Camera translation followed, letting travellers scan signs, menus and documents.
These tools made travel and everyday interactions easier, but real conversations still felt fragmented. Delays, robotic voices and mismatched tone reminded users that translation remained mediated by machines rather than flowing naturally.
Smart speakers and home use
Amazon entered the space in 2020 with Alexa's Live Translation on Echo devices. The feature allowed conversations across several major languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Hindi. It proved useful in bilingual households, though its reliance on Amazon hardware limited broader adoption.
Conversation mode and meetings
Google's Conversation Mode marked another step forward. Two speakers could take turns while the app translated each side. While more practical, users still had to hold their phones and wait for processing, preventing a fully fluid dialogue.
Video-conferencing platforms also began to experiment. Zoom introduced AI-generated live captions and translated captions, and in 2025 said it was testing more advanced real-time translation features for meetings, according to company announcements. These tools primarily targeted corporate users rather than everyday conversations.
Gemini and real-time audio experiments
Recent attention has focused on Google's Gemini AI model. In early 2026, Google demonstrated and began limited testing of an upgraded "Live Translate" experience within Google Translate, according to company briefings. The system aims to deliver near real-time spoken translations through connected audio devices, including headphones, rather than only displaying text on a screen.
Google says the feature is designed to better reflect tone and emphasis than earlier systems, though it remains in beta testing and continues to face challenges around latency, accuracy and emotional nuance. Access is currently limited by region, language pair and device compatibility, and the company has not positioned the technology as flawless or universally available.
Rose Yao, a Google executive involved in product development, said in company materials that users can activate live translation through the Translate app, while Google continues to refine the experience based on feedback.
Competing approaches
Other technology companies are pursuing similar goals through different routes. Meta announced live translation features for its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2024, with wider availability beginning in 2025. The glasses play translated speech through built-in speakers, but require dedicated hardware.
Apple has also expanded translation features across Messages, FaceTime and phone calls since 2025, and later integrated translation support with AirPods. Apple emphasises on-device processing for privacy, but its tools remain closely tied to its own ecosystem.
Microsoft continues to offer translation through Azure Cognitive Services and Teams, focusing on enterprise users, while Amazon maintains translation capabilities through Alexa.
Text translation becomes smarter
Alongside audio, AI has improved written translation. Systems are increasingly able to interpret meaning rather than translating word-for-word. Idioms, slang and local expressions are now more likely to be rendered in context, according to developers from Google, Apple and Microsoft.
This shift reflects a broader move away from mechanical translation towards systems that attempt to model how humans interpret language, though errors and cultural misunderstandings still occur.
Language learning and education
Google is also integrating translation into language learning. New features allow speakers of several languages, including Bengali, Hindi, German and Italian, to practise English, while English speakers can practise selected foreign languages. Feedback tools and progress tracking aim to encourage regular use, placing Google Translate closer to dedicated learning apps.
The bigger picture
From simple text boxes to camera scans, conversation modes and experimental real-time audio, live translation has steadily evolved. What began as a traveller's aid is becoming a broader communication platform, though fully natural, human-level translation remains a work in progress.
With Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Zoom all investing heavily, the competition to make live translation faster, more accurate and more natural is intensifying. Headphone-based translation may represent the next step, but for now, it remains an emerging technology rather than a finished solution.
Mishuk Rahman and Md Jafar Uddin contributed to this report
https://www.tbsnews.net/tech/when-ai-speaks-you-future-live-translation-1338521?amp
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Alexa Translations Deepens Its UAE Presence Through Trusted Legal Partnerships
Selected as One of Three Canadian Companies to Participate in Minister Sidhu's UAE Trade Mission
DUBAI, UAE, Jan. 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexa Translations, a leader in AI-powered language solutions, continues to strengthen its presence in the region through its participation in a formal engagement held as part of Minister Sidhu's GCC trade mission.
As one of only three Canadian companies participating, alongside Novisto and National Bank of Canada, Alexa Translations was recognized for its commitment to delivering trusted legal technology tailored to the needs of Arabic-speaking professionals across the region.
Alexa Translations
During the weeklong visit, Alexa Translations further deepened its collaboration with Al Tamimi & Company, one of the most respected legal firms in the Middle East. This partnership builds on an established relationship and reflects the company's long-term investment in building technology that supports local legal infrastructure and digital transformation initiatives.
"Our presence in the UAE reflects the region's rapid economic growth and its role as a global hub for business and talent," said Gary Kalaci, CEO of Alexa Translations. "As organizations operate across borders, languages, and legal systems, they need language technology built to support that complexity. Alexa Translations helps bridge those language barriers so teams can operate with confidence in high-stakes environments."
Alexa Translations A.I. solution is purpose-built for legal use cases and shaped in collaboration with Arabic-speaking legal practitioners, combining dialect-sensitive processing, culturally attuned workflows, and secure deployment options designed for regional legal environments.
The company's continued growth in the UAE reflects a long-term commitment to supporting cross-border legal collaboration, improving access to legal services through technology, and strengthening Canada–UAE innovation ties.
About Alexa Translations
Alexa Translations provides A.I.-powered translations for the largest and most prestigious legal, financial, and government institutions. Our unique combination of advanced technology and professionally certified translators deliver tailored solutions with unparalleled quality. Thanks to over two decades of award-winning client success, you can rely on us as a true extension of your team.
Media Contact: Mark Vecchiarelli, Vice President, Marketing, Alexa Translations, media@alexatranslations.com"
News provided by
Alexa Translations
Jan 19, 2026, 10:20 ET
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alexa-translations-deepens-its-uae-presence-through-trusted-legal-partnerships-302664547.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
Dans son nouveau roman, désormais traduit en français, l’écrivaine autrichienne met en scène la lutte d’un jeune homme pour quitter le carcan d’une enfance faite de maltraitances.
"...Paru en 2024 sous le titre de Zitronen, désormais traduit en français, L’invention de la douleur vient d’être récompensé du Prix du livre autrichien remis par l’ambassade d’Autriche en France, dont le jury a salué «un roman saisissant qui aborde un sujet très difficile dans l’une des plus belles langues». C’est que, nous explique Valérie Fritsch, autrice née en 1989 à Graz, «la violence m’était tellement étrangère et lointaine que je voulais mieux la comprendre». Elle a fait de nombreuses recherches pour écrire ce roman. «J’ai commencé par lire beaucoup d’ouvrages spécialisés et quand j’ai eu le sentiment d’en savoir assez sur le plan scientifique, je suis allée à la rencontre des gens pour les observer concrètement.»
« Restons-nous prisonniers de l’identité forgée par l’enfance? »
Valerie Fritsch
Dans la deuxième partie du roman, August est adulte, ou du moins tente de vivre une vie d’adulte. Car le jeune homme est «capable de trébucher et de tomber sur un obstacle inexistant, tant il était habitué à en rencontrer depuis sa plus tendre enfance». Comment sortir d’une enfance qui est pourtant encore partout en nous? Comment conjurer cette souffrance, qui reste «inaccessible, enfermée dans une chambre, dans un corps»?
August tombe follement amoureux d’Ava, goûte au miracle d’être aimé et d’aimer sans que cela fasse mal, mais les blessures restent à vif. Le temps n’a rien pansé, il a enfoui, mais cet amour fait tout resurgir. Possessif, August sent Ava se lasser de ses insécurités et s’éloigner de lui, alors il tombe malade. «Sans hésiter, il donn(e) son corps en offrande, se crucifi(e) lui-même dans l’espoir d’obtenir le grand pardon.» La logique connue dans l’enfance se perpétue ainsi dans l’âge adulte, qui n’apparaît que comme une répétition, avec variations, de l’enfance.
Prison de l’identité
«Détermination et autodétermination» s’affrontent dans sa vie, comme dans celle de tout un chacun. C’est ce qui intéresse l’autrice autrichienne: «Le passé et l’enfance forgent notre identité, façonnent notre personnalité. Puis vient ce moment passionnant où l’on devient adulte: restons-nous prisonniers de cette identité? Est-ce qu’elle nous retient? Ou s’en échappe-t-on?»
Yaleo
C’est dans une langue calme, attentive, «précise et condensée», rendue de manière admirable par la traduction de Tatjana Marwinski, que Valerie Fritsch creuse cette question. L’autrice varie sans cesse le plan large, où l’on observe les personnages de loin, et les plans serrés où, l’espace d’un instant, le lecteur est au plus près de leurs sensations et ressentis. C’est ainsi que le roman nous conduit, pas à pas, vers une fin inéluctable, dont le tragique nimbait déjà les premières pages.
Valerie Fritsch, L’invention de la douleur, trad. Tatjana Marwinski, Ed. Plon, 224 pp."
https://www.laliberte.ch/articles/culture/livres/lecrivaine-autrichienne-valerie-fritsch-face-au-tabou-de-la-violence-maternelle-1275839
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Study calls for restoring status of humanities in higher education
"A recent academic study has called for restoring the central role of the humanities within Oman’s higher education system, describing them as a cornerstone for building a balanced, sustainable knowledge-based economy.
The study, authored by Dr. Maryam bint Ali Al-Hanaei, Associate Professor of Intercultural Communication, and Prof. Mohammed bin Ali Al-Balushi, Professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Sultan Qaboos University, was published in the Journal of Arabian Studies under the title “Reimagining the Knowledge Economy: A Critical Call to Recentre the Humanities in Omani Higher Education.”
The researchers argue that prevailing narratives surrounding the knowledge economy often equate progress and innovation solely with scientific and technological advancement, overlooking the vital contribution of the humanities and social sciences in developing critical thinking, reinforcing ethical values, and preserving cultural identity.
The study highlights a disconnect between national strategic frameworks—such as Oman Vision 2040 and the Cultural Strategy 2021–2040, which emphasize identity, culture, and creativity—and the realities of higher education practices that tend to prioritise scientific, technical, and business disciplines.
Through an analysis of faculty distribution and student enrolment patterns both inside and outside Oman, the study finds that while the humanities continue to hold a notable presence—particularly in education, community, and cultural fields—their share is gradually declining compared to engineering and technical disciplines, especially among students studying abroad.
The researchers stress that recentring the humanities is neither a luxury nor a purely cultural endeavour, but a strategic necessity for sustainable development.
They argue that cultivating informed, creative citizens requires ensuring that scientific and technological progress remains aligned with ethical, social, and cultural values. The study calls for education and research policies that foster integration between the humanities and scientific disciplines through interdisciplinary curricula, institutional and research support, and the embedding of humanities-based knowledge within national innovation systems—consistent with Oman’s aspirations for a knowledge society rooted in identity and openness to the world.
According to the study, investment in the humanities equips future generations with both technical competence and ethical and cultural awareness, supporting comprehensive and balanced development in the Sultanate.
Dr. Al-Hanaei said the research forms part of a broader intellectual project launched in 2022 to reassess the position of the humanities and the knowledge-production system within Omani higher education. She explained that the study presents a methodological critique of neoliberal approaches that frame education primarily as an economic tool measured by profitability rather than human or societal value—an approach that marginalises local and humanistic knowledge and creates ethical and epistemological gaps.
She added that academic experience reveals a clear contradiction between the principles of Oman Vision 2040—which stress identity, values, sustainability, and human development—and educational practices that prioritise technical and professional disciplines driven by market logic. This contradiction, she noted, raises fundamental questions about the purpose of education: whether it should merely supply labour-market skills or also nurture critical awareness, cultural belonging, and intellectual responsibility."
https://www.pressreader.com/oman/times-of-oman/20260119/281552297258671
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"African publishers see Sharjah festival as bridge for culture and translation
The event opens doors for cross-border learning, book translations and new partnerships
The Sharjah Festival of African Literature (SFAL 2026) brings writers and publishers closer to the Arab world.
Sharjah: Literary festivals rooted in culture play a key role in sharing knowledge and bringing communities closer, African publishers and booksellers said at the second edition of the Sharjah Festival of African Literature (SFAL 2026).
Participants said the event offers a rare space where African and Arab writers, publishers and readers can meet, exchange ideas and explore translation opportunities that are often missing back home.
Learning across African borders
James Odhiambo, CEO of the Kenya Publishers Association, said the festival has been an eye-opener even for Africans themselves. The association represents 158 publishers across Kenya.
“This festival is a real learning experience, not only for people outside Africa but also for Africans,” he said. “I discovered here that Ethiopian writing styles and stories are very different from those in Swahili literature. We usually don’t meet, but here in Sharjah, we can sit together, talk and learn from one another.”
Also Read:
Africa’s stories take over Sharjah with culture, food and fashion
Odhiambo said he is also looking to translate African works into Arabic through contacts made at the festival. He pointed out that Swahili and Arabic share many words and cultural links, making collaboration a natural step.
Giving African voices a platform
Mkuki Bgoya, Managing Director of Tanzania-based Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, said African literature is often sidelined on the global stage.
“Many African writers end up being published outside the continent,” he said. “This festival brings them closer to Arab publishers and allows for honest conversations around translation rights and storytelling. This is how culture travels — through seeing yourself in others and being seen in return.”
Building links with the UAE
Ditiro Huma, Director of Mosala Masedi Publishers and Booksellers from South Africa, said the festival also helps visitors understand how publishing and education work in the UAE.
“There is strong potential to build long-term partnerships between South Africa and the UAE,” she said. “Very few festivals allow you to hear Ethiopian stories, learn Arabic basics and enjoy African food, all in one place.”"
January 18, 2026
Balaram Menon, Senior Web Editor
https://gulfnews.com/uae/people/african-publishers-see-sharjah-festival-as-bridge-for-culture-and-translation-1.500412047
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"Literary agents and publishers from French, Korean and Spanish languages showed more interest in translating Tamil books at Chennai International Book Fair 2026. From Tirukkural to Bharathiar poems to contemporary short stories, Tamil books are set to be widely translated, while children's books and science books from foreign languages will be translated into Tamil.
Laticia Ibanez, a French literary teacher and translator, said contemporary Tamil literature, including works of Perumal Murugan and Imayam, is getting translated into French. "We collected 15 Tamil poems from Bharathiar to Perundevi and translated them into French. Tamil publishers are also interested in translating award-winning French novels and non-fiction into Tamil," she said.
Vivian Lavin, a literary agent from Chile, is planning to translate children's literature and non-fiction from Spanish into Tamil.
"We have two Nobel prizes in Spanish, including Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American and children's author to win the prize in 1945. We are planning to translate her works with Tamil Nadu Textbooks and Educational Services Corporation," she said. "In Latin American literature, landscape is another protagonist. It is not only the people," she added. She is planning to take Tirukkural to her country with illustrations for children.
"CIBF is the fastest-growing international book fair in Asia, with participation from more than 100 countries. Now, we will focus on converting these agreements into books," said T Sankara Saravanan, coordinator of the rights committee, CIBF. School education secretary B Chandra Mohan, who is chairman of the organising committee, said 1,830 expressions of interest (EoIs) were signed this year. "This includes 1,273 agreements to translate Tamil books into other languages, and 260 to bring other language books into Tamil," he said."
A Ragu Raman / Jan 19, 2026, 01:43 IST
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/french-korean-spanish-publishers-interested-in-translating-tamil-books/articleshow/126658436.cms
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"Appel à communication
Équipe de recherche
PLIDAM
Date limite
Samedi 31 janvier 2026
Type d'évènement
Colloque
PROBLEMATIQUE
Dans de nombreuses régions du monde, les populations sont confrontées à des bouleversements sociaux de grande ampleur pour des raisons multiples. Des conflits voire des guerres engendrent l’exode rural et des migrations qui ont pour conséquence le dépeuplement des régions entières, aussi bien en milieu rural que dans des centres urbains. Ces réalités contribuent à la perturbation et même à la scission de continuums historiques, sociologiques et culturels. Du point de vue des langues, outre la variation dialectale, ces facteurs impliquent leur développement dissocié selon les contextes urbains et ruraux et une perte de connaissance des langues de socialisation première, et ceci dès le plus jeune âge.
La désintégration de structures familiales naguère existantes, l’accès limité aux nouvelles langues et aux nouveaux codes culturels fragilisent l’implication des parents dans l’éducation de leurs enfants.
OBJECTIFS
L’objectif est de comprendre et d’expliquer ces bouleversements et leurs conséquences préjudiciables sur les structures sociales, familiales et culturelles qui affectent en profondeur la vie des populations. La complexité des situations varie, entre autres, en fonction du degré d’éloignement des migrants pluriel partout par rapport à leur milieu d’origine.
Le type de relation que les migrants vont établir avec leur nouveau milieu a des implications sur le devenir des familles, notamment du point de vue culturel, en plusieurs dimensions. D’où les quatre axes de focalisation : (a) transmission de langue d’origine et éducation ; (b) enseignement de la langue du migrant ; (c) perception sociale et statut de la langue du migrant ; (d) et place des multimédia, formes d’expression et de communication.
Axe transmission de langue et éducation : il englobe surtout la pratique éducative au niveau informel, c’est-à-dire par la participation familiale, et au niveau formel, c’est-à-dire le rapport aux politiques linguistiques dans leur rôle de régulateurs institutionnels sur l’enseignement et l’usage des langues ; quels sont les fonctions de la littérature et des différents genres de la littérature orale dans la transmission de la langue ?
Axe enseignement de la langue du migrant : il s’intéresse à l’enseignement dans les deux contextes : quels sont les enseignements dans les régions / les pays d’origine du migrant ; quelles formes d’enseignement peuvent être développées en contexte de migration ?
Axe perception sociale et statut de la langue du migrant : cet axe interroge d’abord la dynamique linguistique dans la vie collective des immigrés, la loyauté par rapport à la langue d’origine. Elle interroge en même temps la gestion réciproque (immigrés et population hôte) des rapports humains et des réajustements sociaux : s’agit-il d’une gestion syncrétique, par exclusion ou alors par hiérarchisation ?
Axe multimédia, formes d’expression et de communication : ce troisième axe met l’accent sur le concept de communication dans un sens large, pouvant se manifester comme un acte verbal ou artistique, public, collectif ou individuel, solennel ou informel, dans les médias ou en sous forme de contes dans les réseaux sociaux, de maximes et de proverbes, entre autres.
Contributions
En inscrivant leur réflexion dans un cadre interdisciplinaire, les intervenants sont invités à positionner leurs contributions dans l’un des axes et par rapport à l’une des pistes suivantes :
description linguistique ou impact des langues de contact au plan de la phonologie, de la morphologie, de la syntaxe ou de la sémantique, entre autres ;
littérature et oralité : discours solennels, narration, récit, contes, proverbes, entre autres ;
aspects sociolinguistiques : contact de langue et de culture, politique linguistique ;
pratiques didactiques et modes de transmission de langue : en famille et en contexte d’enseignement, dans les rites initiatiques, etc. fonctions et usages de la littérature et des différents genres de la littérature orale ;
graphies, alphabets et transcriptions (ajami, caractères latin), problèmes de transcription et de traduction ainsi que des questions éditoriales ;
usage des langues dans les médias sociaux : Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, entre autres, formes et visées illocutoires ;
la langue en contexte de migration ;
la langue dans le milieu artistique et dans les médias publics ;
l’histoire et l’anthropo-sociologie en contexte migratoire ;
Tous les axes peuvent être abordés par rapport à une langue ou dans une perspective transversale.
Date limite : 31 janvier
Dépôt de dossier :
https://drive.inalco.fr/s/NS3ctX57myotmKF
ORGANISATEUR
Abdourahmane Diallo
CONTACT
Voir l'e-mail"
https://www.inalco.fr/recherche/appels-communication/modes-dexpression-et-de-transmission-culturelles-en-contexte
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"The Hindu Lit for Life 2026
Translators discuss the challenges of re-representing authors across languages
In conversation with Mini Krishnan at the session on ‘Translation: The Bridge Over Lives and Landscapes’, Chandan Gowda, Gowri Ramnarayan, and Vanamala Viswanatha say it’s essential to create the ambience and feel of the original text for meaningful translations
Translation is not only a representation of an author in another language, it is also re-presenting the author, with change at the heart of translation, bilingual scholar and translator Vanamala Viswanatha said here at The Hindu Lit for Life 2026, on Saturday (February 17, 2026).
At the session on ‘In Translation: The Bridge Over Lives and Landscapes’, Ms. Viswanatha, along with journalist and author Gowri Ramnarayan, and columnist, Professor and Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Bengaluru’s Vidyashilp University Chandan Gowda discussed various aspects of translations and their challenges in a conversation with Mini Krishnan, Managing Editor, Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation.
Elaborating on her English translation of celebrated Kannada author Kuvempu’s novel Malegalalli Madumagalu, into Bride in the Hills, Ms. Viswanatha said Kuvempu was not just a writer, he was a symbol of Kannada culture and literature, and also an icon of Kannada pride.
Set in 1893, the novel traces the social and spatial history of the Malnad region in Karnataka, advocates values of equality, and presents the novelist’s critique of caste prejudices. The canvas of the novel is not human-centered alone but deeply biocentric, rooted in the landscape of the Western Ghats, making it a compelling read. As part of the translation, Ms. Viswanatha said she drew up a list of characters, their location, and a map of region.
Speaking about his edited anthology, Sangama-Pastorale: The Kannada and English Short Stories of Rajalakshmi N. Rao, Mr. Gowda said the author wrote for only a few years while in her early 20s during the mid-1950s, and then vanished from the literary scene. One of her stories, ‘August 15’, was a surrealistic response to India’s Independence celebrations. A translator must strike a relationship with the voice of the text, Mr. Gowda said.
Highlighting her translation of Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan, Ms. Ramnarayan said that although she had read the book many times, translating it was a learning experience. Author Kalki believed art and culture must foster communal harmony, and embedded ethical convictions in some of his characters, Ms. Ramnarayan said. He used writing as a responsibility to oppose violence and regressive ideas, while promoting liberal and humane values, she said.
The speakers noted that it was essential to create the ambience and feel of the original text for meaningful translations."
January 17, 2026
Lakshmi Immanuel
https://www.thehindu.com
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Justice Prabha Sridevan discusses the emotional intricacies and challenges of translating Imayam's works at The Hindu Lit for Life 2026.
"Translator has to be functionally true to the author, says Justice Prabha Sridevan
January 17, 2026
B. Kolappan
Translating the works of Imayam is an emotional experience and a form of catharsis, said Justice Prabha Sridevan, who has translated four books by the Sahitya Akademi Award–winning writer.
“He asked me whether I would go through the same pain that he had experienced. I said yes,” Ms. Sridevan said in conversation with journalist Kavitha Muralidharan on the Joys and Challenges of Translating Imayam at The Hindu Lit for Life 2026.
She said she had to remain functionally true to the author and ensure that the reader experienced a significant degree of the pain and anguish she herself felt during the process of translation.
When Kavitha Muralidharan asked about the challenges faced by a translator — particularly since the English reader enters the work during the act of translation — Ms. Sridevan said, “I hear the words in Tamil when I read, and I hear them in English when I translate them into English.” She reiterated that she translated the works not as Justice Prabha Sridevan, but as Ms. Prabha Sridevan.
Describing her collaboration with Mr. Imayam during the translation process as a “lovely journey”, she said her chief concern was the possibility of misunderstanding elements related to tradition and custom, which are not easily translated. She pointed out that neither Begetter in English nor Le Père in French could fully capture the meaning of the Tamil word Pethavan (father).
No area of the Constitution should be immune from judicial review, says former CJI D.Y. Chandrachud
She added that Mr. Imayam himself was unhappy with the English title Salt Seller for Uppu Vandikaran, as it suggests a stationary shopkeeper. By contrast, a salt vendor conveys movement — someone who pulls a cart and travels from place to place. “Vendor alone gives mobility to the word Uppu Vandikaran,” she said.
Responding to a question on whether her familiarity with the author and the text made her prone to overlooking details, Ms. Sridevan said she did not read the text as a reader. “I do not overlook even a comma. Every word is an adventure. If I overlook anything, I fail as a translator,” she said.
Ms. Sridevan also clarified that the objective of translation was not to make the work read better. “Something is always lost in translation. It is like carrying water in your hands — however careful you are, some water will spill,” she said.
Kavitha Muralidharan observed that retaining the author’s voice was essential and that the translator could not afford to intrude upon the text.
Ms. Muralidharan opened the session by quoting Mr. Imayam’s social media post: “I understand life as I write, and as I write, life itself becomes writing.”
Mr. Imayam said that words overheard often became the origin for his stories. He recalled how, at a recent funeral, a father’s cry at the graveyard — “How will I go home alone without you? (his son)” — had become an obsession.
He said that once he began writing a story, he lost himself in the process and became the characters he created. “I become the Arokyam of Koverukazhuthaikal. I become Sedal. But once the book goes to print, the story and the characters leave me. Then, like a beggar, I begin searching for new stories,” he said.
His advice to aspiring writers was simple: “Follow writing as though your parents begot you for that purpose.”"
https://www.thehindu.com/lit-for-life/imayam-and-prabha-sridevan-convo-with-kavitha-muralidharan-lfl/article70481852.ece
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"New translations, fresh understanding
Eldon Peterson Jan 17, 2026 0
On Dec. 16, 2025, the newsroom of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement titled “New Guidance on Bible Translations for Latter-day Saints.” It reported that the updated section of the General Handbook provided 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.”
Elder Jörg Klebingat of the Seventy, a member of the Scriptures Committee, said: “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.”
Recognizing this misconception can open the door to greater biblical understanding.
I had witnessed this in the testimony of two men. First, in the 1990s, a man from Tremonton came into our store looking for some camouflage New Testaments to give to scouts in his troop. Because they were only available in the New International Version, he bought those. He later returned, excited to tell me that reading the New Testament in this modern translation enabled him, for the first time, to understand its meaning.
Then, 20 years later, I met another man who had moved here from Florida. As our conversation turned to how he came to faith in Christ, he said it was through listening to the Bible in a modern translation. Although he had grown up reading the King James Version (KJV), it wasn’t until he listened to God’s Word Translation on audiobook that the Bible’s meaning came alive for him. He was glad to find a church in Logan where the translation used was not a barrier.
Elder Klebingat also observed: “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.”
My experience is that the more I have to think about a text’s meaning, the more likely I am to get it wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. There can be inherent problems with translations that oversimplify the text’s meaning. But a modern, faithful, scholarly translation of the biblical text can bring an otherwise perceived archaic text to life. While not all translations are equal, it is important that we not disregard modern translations because of our misconceptions.
When people come into our store to buy a Bible, I tell them my primary goal is to help them find a translation they can easily understand. Everything else is secondary to finding a translation whose meaning is clear to them. Let me offer a simple example from 2 Peter to illustrate. By considering three translations of a single passage, we will see that while they say the same thing, the meaning of some are clearer than others.
First, consider how the King James Version expresses 2 Peter 1:20–21: “knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Next, the English Standard Version (ESV): “knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Finally, the New Living Translation (NLT) reads: “Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.”
All three are translated from Greek and Hebrew, but each uses a different translation methodology and reads differently while conveying the same message. The NLT is the simplest because of its translation method’s goal. Additionally, differences between the KJV and modern translations are partly due to changes in English over the last 400 years. The KJV’s antiquated language and sentence structure can make understanding difficult. I’ve found that many prefer the KJV, not because it is easier to understand, but because it is familiar.
It’s my hope that in 2026 you will discover the Bible anew. I’ve found that following a Bible reading plan in a modern translation will not only give you a fresh understanding of the Bible but also help you apply it. As the Reformers said: “Sola scriptura.”"
https://www.hjnews.com/features/column/new-translations-fresh-understanding/article_382cd8c7-bfec-4202-b19d-688e733c7770.html
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A world where many worlds fit: indigenous knowledges and intercultural creativity
11 Feb 2026, 17:00 – 18:00
Room 826
20 Bedford Way
London
WC1H 0AL
United Kingdom
Join this event to hear Dr Gloriana Rodríguez Álvarez examine how art can serve as a celebratory, emancipatory form of diversity beyond tokenistic approaches.
"Gloriana’s work seeks to foreground voices that have been historically marginalized, by employing Indigenous and critical methodologies as foundational frameworks. By prioritizing these perspectives, she aims to recentre narratives and knowledge systems that have been systematically side-lined. Her presentation expands its theoretical base by incorporating Indigenous, anti-racist and feminist paradigms. Within this framework, digital art is approached as a transgressive medium that transcends the boundaries between formal and informal, physical and virtual spaces, enabling new forms of knowledge-making.
This seminar will examine how art can serve as a celebratory, emancipatory form of diversity beyond tokenistic approaches. It will demonstrate that, rather than repressing or erasing diversity, art can create spaces centred on celebrating it. In this regard, the role of art is twofold: it allows for more diverse expressions of the human experience whilst inspiring us to connect.
This event will be particularly useful to interculturalists, decolonial scholars, applied linguists, creative practitioners and curious minds.
International Centre for Intercultural Studies UCL200 seminar series 2026
This event is part of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies Seminar Series 2026, titled 'Intercultural Creativity: exploring the potential offered by intercultural creativity as praxis'. In this series, we invite a number of leading academics, working across the fields of intercultural communication and creative arts, to share their work."
United Kingdom
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/events/2026/feb/world-where-many-worlds-fit-indigenous-knowledges-and-intercultural-creativity
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"Atelier "Multicultural Babel Tower"
Présentation
Dans le cadre du consortium UNICIA, un second atelier intitulé "Multicultural Babel Tower" est ouvert aux inscriptions.
Cet atelier en ligne vous aidera à améliorer vos compétences en communication dans les différentes langues des établissements partenaires du consortium. Plusieurs sessions sur cette thématique auront lieu tout au long de l'année, chacune animée par un membre de l'université partenaire. L'idée est de découvrir les principes de communication dans différentes langues nationales par le biais de conversations interactives dans la vie courante.
Au cours du prochain atelier, qui aura lieu le mardi 20 janvier 2026 de 13h à 15h, vous approfondirez vos connaissances sur les mécanismes qui sous-tendent l'apprentissage des langues étrangères, afin de comprendre comment votre cerveau assimile une nouvelle langue, la culture du Sénégal et la langue wolof, explorées à travers des sessions animées par des représentants de l'université Gaston Berger (Sénégal), le tout dans une ambiance authentique et vous garantissant des connaissances concrètes.
Conditions de participation
Les participants doivent remplir les conditions suivantes :
Avoir entre 18 et 26 ans
Etre étudiant, étudiante ou en activité professionnelle
Etre domicilié·e en France, en Pologne, en République tchèque, au Sénégal, au Nigéria ou bien en Afrique du Sud.
Je m'inscris à l'atelier du mardi 20 janvier 2026 à 13h
Formulaire à remplir...
Pour plus d'informations sur le consortium UNICIA, n'hésitez pas à contacter l'équipe projets de la Direction des Relations Internationales."
https://www.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/fr/actualites/international/participez-a-l-atelier-multicultural-babel-tower-d-unicia-1.html
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Must-read book: Poetry after Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Jennifer Scappettone - Oct 2025)
"Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. As global migration, aerial bombardment, and the wireless telegraph shrank distances with brute force during the twentieth century, visions of transcultural communication emerged in the hopes of bridging linguistic difference. At the same time, evolving Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger.
Authors who write xenoglossic verse occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil while rendering the reactionary category of the barbarian obsolete. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions. Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship, modeling paths toward alternative republics in which poetry might assume a central agency.
About the Author
Jennifer Scappettone is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43. She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli."
Poetry After Barbarism | Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
List Price: $40.00£35.00
Pub Date: October 2025
ISBN: 9780231212083
408 Pages
Format: Hardcover
List Price: $160.00£134.00
Pub Date: October 2025
ISBN: 9780231559201
408 Pages
Format: E-book
List Price: $39.99£35.00
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Allegedly, some 45% of languages descend from one, ancient ”Proto-Indo-European“ tongue. But why focus on a hypothetical lost language, when we can work instead to hear one another today?
"in Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (explicitly and abundantly antistatist) Jennifer Scappettone engages with national language traditions without reinscribing dominant geopolitics. Instead, the book offers a course toward “alternative republics … in which poetry (and its undervalued kith, translation) might assume a central agency...”
Difference, not an anachronistic Eden of similarity, is the indubitable protagonist of Scappettone’s story. Approaching the poetic traditions and artistic practices of fugitives, waywards, and exiles, from Etel Adnan to LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Scappettone retells not the story of Babel but the story of the Pentecost: wherein Christ’s followers, inspired by the divine spirit—“inspired” in the literal sense of “breathed into”—are suddenly able to speak languages foreign to them.
The Pentecost does not repair Babel but redrafts it, placing an antidote for our separation and noncommunication back in the hands of those who believe and care enough to speak beyond sameness: poets. Guided by the potential of xenoglossy—the spontaneous knowledge of an unlearned language—Scappettone’s book gathers near-magical moments of people producing works intelligible to those othered to them. These achievements, Scappettone notes, are not because of a myth of shared descent, but because of the possibility of their shared occupation of a homeland, enacted not through the state but through experience, performance, and poetics.
Thus, Poetry After Barbarism might be an inaugural bid at a philology without Babel. Scappettone’s book embraces Ahmed’s impossible invitation for language study to not repair through shared heritage or reform through shared futurity, but instead to regenerate legibility, refuse the pure, reembrace the gift of the unknown. Our new guiding myth, I take it, must be the Pentecost. We must live not at the moment of our scattering but at the moment of our spontaneous, and earned, remembrance. Importantly, though, Scappettone makes clear her work is not originary but collectivizing: it brings under a shared light generations of language workers before her...
In this, Scappettone offers the ultimate rejoinder to both Auerbach and Said. To her, it is not enough that our philological home is the earth. In fact, our language—our home—must also be planetary and cosmic, escaping the entrapments that make an internationalized earth just another vestige of the state.
We need not see ourselves as scattered halves looking to be made whole by a return to a unified state. Escaping Babel’s haunt, it’s possible to see—xenoglossically—our bodies, our histories, our languages as complete in themselves. The task remains, then, to extend care, humanity, solidarity, and life, to tongues—and people—outside of the trajectories inscribed by our protos; to raze the language tree that dictates our cultural debt and our naturalized nations; and to reinvest in living with, and living for, difference."
https://www.publicbooks.org/against-babel-or-how-to-talk-to-strangers/
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"The world's first dataset aimed at improving the quality of English-to-Malayalam machine translation—a long-overlooked language spoken by more than 38 million people in India—has been developed by researchers at the University of Surrey.
Malayalam is considered a low-resource language in the world of machine translation, and until now, there has been almost no data available to evaluate the accuracy of machine-translated text from English, limiting progress for communities that rely on digital translation tools.
The Surrey-led research published in ACL Anthology focused on two key areas—Quality Estimation, which predicts how good a translation is without the need for a reference text, and Automatic Post-Editing (APE), which automatically corrects errors.
The team curated 8,000 English-to-Malayalam translation segments across finance, legal and news—domains where accuracy is essential. Each segment was reviewed by professional annotators at TechLiebe, an industry partner, who provided three human quality scores and a corrected "post-edited" version of the machine-translated text.
Dr. Diptesh Kanojia, senior lecturer at the Surrey Institute for People-Centered AI, and project co-lead, said, "Low-resource languages like Malayalam are often left behind simply because we don't have the datasets needed to improve machine translation. Our work provides a strong foundation for both assessing and correcting translations—supporting Malayalam speakers while also opening the door to similar resources for many other underserved languages."
An additional layer of annotation known as "weak error remarks" was also introduced, allowing human annotators to quickly note and describe the types of errors they spotted, such as mistranslations, missing words or added phrases.
Early findings show that when these added notes are combined with large language models, systems can interpret the translation better on where the translation went wrong—a method that is already outperforming current approaches.
Postgraduate researcher and project lead at Surrey, Archchana Sindhujan, who introduced this novel idea, said, "Malayalam is one of India's classical languages, spoken by millions, yet it remains severely under-resourced for reference-free machine translation evaluation. By introducing Weak Error Remarks, we offer a lightweight and interpretable form of human-annotated supervision that captures translation errors beyond scalar scores.
"This added context enables learning signals that help large language models reason more effectively about translation quality, demonstrating how simple, human-centric annotations can significantly strengthen MT evaluation in low-resource settings."
The research team have completed the majority of annotations, with a public release of the dataset planned for April 2026. The methodology could serve as a blueprint for other low-resource languages, including many across India, Africa and Creole-speaking regions, where high-quality translation data is urgently needed."
by University of Surrey
edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-dataset-english-malayalam-machine-critical.html
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"Pedro the Vast, the debut novel from Chilean writer Simón López Trujillo, was translated into English from Spanish by Robin Myers. The novel has been called “mind-blowing” by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and follows a eucalyptus farm worker who survives a deadly fungal outbreak and becomes the focus of scientific obsession and religious fervor, while his abandoned children struggle to interpret his transformation as their separate reckonings collide in an unforgettable, catastrophic end.
In our latest interview series, “Writer/Translator,” we ask a writer and their translator to interview each other about their work. Below, Trujillo and Myer discuss rewriting, intertextuality, and the role of politics in translation.
Robin Myers: I always love hearing about the path from the book a person intends to write and the book they end up writing. What was the novel you imagined writing when you started work on Pedro the Vast, and what surprised you most about what happened along the way?
Simón Lopez Trujillo: In a way, this novel was a major lesson in what to make with the intentions I have when I’m writing a book. I started working on Pedro the Vast in 2018 and the first draft was completed in early 2019, but the main editing process took place between 2020 and 2021. In the meantime, not only the Covid-19 pandemic happened, but also – and more importantly – the social outburst of October 2019 in Chile. That context, marked both by intense violence and police brutality, but also by a new effervescence that opened the possibility of a new social change, pushed me to transform the novel into a sort of “protest novel” (novela de denuncia). During the hiatus between the first and second draft, I did a lot of research on big forest companies in Chile, their dependency on decree-laws and the dispossession of peasant land in the south of Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and social leaders such as Rodrigo Cisterna (a forestry worker killed by the police in 2007, to whom the novel is dedicated). All this research resulted in an extra 100 pages or so, mainly of information that I wanted the reader to have in mind while reading the novel. But when my editor finally had the chance to revise this second draft, she told me: “Look, why don’t we go back to the previous draft?” I immediately said: “What? But this involved so much work and research…” And she replied: “Yes, but you’re losing your tone.” Then, I went back to the original draft and realized that she was right. I had unwittingly given up the very thing that had led me to write the novel in the first place: a strangeness in the language and story fleshed out by voices and characters that I wasn’t in absolute control of, but which I wanted to follow. And it was this curiosity that made the book feel like a novel, and not a mere device for my own personal political intentions or beliefs. This does not mean that I don’t believe in “political literature” or anything like that – of course I do. But I also believe that nowadays, in times of complex political turmoil and an excessive velocity in the circulation of discourse (where authorship seems reduced to a mere authorial image, and literary content to what “content” means in social media), we must be especially aware of what the actual pace of literature is. Because I don’t believe it moves as fast as we think. Reading, writing, and translating literature are still silent, slow, mostly solitary experiences. And maybe that’s why a good book affects us so deeply: because we feel its language is related to our own private experience. Because we can hear it as if it belonged to us, in a way, and we process it at the speed of abstraction. I’m talking about a slow, deep sense of hearing/reading, something akin to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls “the production of presence” –which is precisely what the mere meaning or content of a novel cannot convey. A strange intimacy, more connected to the mystery of human sensibility than to our intelligence, and more proximate to the realm of political imagination than of political discourse.
RM: One of the things I most admire about Pedro the Vast (and one of the parts I most enjoyed wrestling with as a translator) is the wide (wild!) range of voices: human and non-human, first person and third, with all kinds of different registers in the mix. Was there one of these voices that came to you first?
SLT: I think it probably was the voice of Pedro’s sermons. For me, it’s no accident that the novel opens with that voice, that lyrical and mystical tone, italicized precisely because we don’t know (as readers but also me as writer) its true origin. He begins by confessing precisely this confusion: “If that’s what looking is—you know? I don’t know what I saw, but I saw so much.” It was important for me to work with that feeling of having seen something that you then can’t describe, because that is a way of talking about a certain form of reading, one that usually happens when I’m reading poetry. It’s a strange experience of being carried through a field of images and music, where sense is more a movement than an arrival at a specific point of meaning. In a way, all the main voices of this novel (Pedro’s, Patricio’s, Giovanna’s) are marked by this sort of poetic expansion, because my writing was very much inspired by the language of others: Juan Rulfo, scientific papers on fungi and biology, the testimonies of farmers and forest workers persecuted and killed by Pinochet’s dictatorship, Cristina Rivera Garza, Juan Emar, and “two Spinozas”: Baruch Spinoza, the God-intoxicated rationalist philosopher, and Juan de Espinosa Medrano, a Peruvian poet, priest, and preacher. Both lived and worked during the 17th century and in very different ways: Spinoza’s Ethics is written in extremely dry, heavy logical-mathematical language, while Espinosa Medrano’s La novena maravilla is profoundly baroque, brimming with metaphors and symbols. Every fragment of Pedro’s sermons was written by taking fragments of these “Spinozian” texts and rewriting them until that mystical italicized voice appeared. It’s a voice that seems both above and beneath the surface of the text. That, for me, is the fungal function in the novel: a metaphor for intertextuality. Pedro the Vast is profoundly inspired by that concept and, specifically, by that of rewriting (reescritura): the idea of writing through and with the voices of others. This notion was fundamental for me when I was mainly a writer of poetry, and it’s also a feature of the works of some of my favorite poets, who also tend to be translators: for example, Soledad Fariña, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mirta Rosenberg, and Leónidas Lamborghini, who write or wrote with a language profoundly marked by the experience of translation. As if what they saw and felt (and also had to wrestle with) in the fertile darkness of the in-between were a more intense way of approaching the poetic voice than the more traditional notion of the lyrical “I”: some kind of homogenous subjectivity that simply speaks, without worrying about whether what he says is the “right” choice because he (thinks he) is the sole “owner” of its language.
But while I was writing Pedro I was interested in the very opposite: a language whose speaker is not his owner. In fact, I wanted to advance in the direction of a “disappropriated, ownerless writing,” as explored by Rivera Garza in The Restless Dead. This, for me, is the case of Pedro after he gets infected. I truly think that his voice was also very much inspired by my own experience as a translator. Because that’s the thing with translation: you are not the owner, and you have to choose. For each word in the foreign language, there are multiple options in the language you are writing in, and you’re always responsible for making the right choice. Besides, since everybody wants to shoot the messenger, I think the task is to achieve the sense of something final, indisputable where words are free from objection. For me, this is the only way, as a translator, to become invisible, to survive, but also to mimic the most fundamental feature of writing literature: that is, to feel the language, the written word, as a sort of destiny. To enter the text not as a contingent fact but, instead, as the definitive path for what lies beyond the words. And this, for me, is linked to the metaphoric, to language employed as a vessel for seeing more than what one can see. Donald Davidson once wrote that “metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” whose grace lies not in what the metaphor means (which is actually more the task of metonymy), but in what it makes us “see.” In traversing this expanded field of countless associations where things are no longer identical to themselves. I sincerely think that this aspiration intoxicated much of the spirit of the novel: poetic language employed not as mere figurative speech, but as radical world-making. An opening, a bursting out of the experience of the self.
RM: Could you talk a bit about some of the other writers and works (or other artists and works of art) that influenced you in Pedro the Vast?
SLT: For this novel, I was very influenced by the work of Chilean and Latin American writers who explore the rural territory and rural consciousness not with a folk or naturalistic approach, but with some sense of the visionary, the poetic, and even the hallucinatory. In this sense, Juan Emar’s Ten (recently translated into English by Megan McDowell) was a sort of lighthouse. He goes to the rural land, pushes through it, reinvents it, and manages to find, as a result, a new sort of avant-garde language and vision of things. In this same vein, the writings of José María Arguedas, Marta Brunet, Carlos Droguett, and Manuel Rojas were of major importance to me, as well as more contemporary authors such as Samanta Schweblin (Fever Dream), Marina Closs (The Depopulation), and Juan Cárdenas (The Devil of the Provinces). Nevertheless, my main influence was, without a doubt, Juan Rulfo. Personally, the naming of my protagonist as Pedro is a Platonic gesture in his direction: Pedro Páramoconceived as the perfect, pure, and ideal model from which Pedro the Vast sprouts out as a contingent, humble, imperfect copy. Of course, these are two completely different characters, but Rulfo’s sense of space, time, image and language were a sort of distant murmur that enveloped and followed the contours of my own writing.
I also did a lot of research on subjects like fungi, Spinoza, the history of timber companies in Chile, and their relationship with Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here, works like Anna Tsing-Lowenhaupt’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Marilena de Souza Chaui’s La nervadura de lo real: imaginación y razón en Spinoza, Manuel Acuña Asenjo’s La rebelión de los trabajadores forestales,and Thomas Miller Klublock’s La Frontera: Forest and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory were fundamental.
Simón Lopez Trujillo: There’s a beautiful short poem in your book Having that says: “How will I know/ which voice/ was mine?”. It made me wonder: do you think translation has affected, influenced or shaped your own experience as a poet and a writer? Does it have some similarities or points of contact with the experience of living abroad, considering that you have lived in different parts of Latin America?
Robin Myers: Translation has affected me and my writing in more ways than I’m even fully conscious of, I think. I mean, some ways are pretty clear: as I explore other writers’ styles, registers, resources, and approaches, and as I do my best to inhabit them as a translator, I’m constantly reminded of what’s possible – and I feel pushed to explore, in turn, what I might otherwise assume is my “natural” voice. In this sense, translation is also a perennial reminder that every voice is learned: it’s from listening to others (reading others) that we come to speak (and write) however we speak (and write). Every voice can change. I love how your question also probes at what it means to live somewhere else. For me, this living-elsewhere – mostly in Mexico and more recently in Argentina – means an experience of continual, generative discomfort, even and perhaps especially when you start to feel comfortable where you are. To paraphrase my poet-translator friend Adalber Salas Hernández, migration means having one foot in one place and another foot in no place at all. You’re always learning to walk, and you can’t take any ground entirely for granted. There’s both melancholy and wonder in the vertigo of it all. I aspire to this wondrous discomfort, and to this neverending beginner’s-mind, as both a poet and a translator.
Going back to the first part of your question, though, I’ll also say that translation has made me a less anxious writer. I’m far less nervous about not writing than I used to be: about the fallow periods themselves, and about the sense of loneliness that can come from feeling unable to write for a while. Because when you translate, you are writing, but you’re never alone.
SLT: Perhaps this is too simple a question, but when and why did you start translating literature? And did you have or still have any role models, any literary translators that serve as inspirations for your own work?
RM: It’s not too simple a question at all! I started translating in earnest when I moved to Mexico City in 2011. I’d translated a handful of poems before, but it was then and there that I began to translate the work of young writers (mostly poets at first) I met on arrival, poets who became my friends. Beyond any more abstract interest I had in translation, though, these early experiences gave me a new way of being where I was – in a city that beguiled and challenged and stimulated me; in the company of people I admired and came to love. I translated in hopes of being more there, if that makes sense. Gradually, translation evolved into more of a practice, as well as a livelihood: for many years, I translated non-literary texts for income, and I also started translating more literary prose, which is now the bulk of my work. As for role models, there are so many translators I look up to that I couldn’t possibly name them all here! But to mention a few, Sophie Hughes and Katherine Silver have been among my lodestars for many years. More recently, I’ve gotten to know Julia Sanches and Rosalind Harvey, and I revere them both as translators and as organizers for translatorly rights and labor conditions.
SLT: In our complex times, when we’re constantly confronting horrors we thought were a thing of the past, when everything seems beholden to a nonnegotiable urgency, what do you think the political role of translation is or remains?
RM: To answer this question, I’d like to share some words from other translators I admire.
Johannes Göransson: “Translation brings in alternate canons and texts, and in so doing it also opens up alternative models of authorship. Rather than the singular great author, translation foregrounds the collaborative element of writing as well as the cultural issues and contexts at play in both the creation and transmission of the text… A poetry [or literature in general] that is profoundly engaged with foreign poetry is a poetry that is aware that nations are not homogenous, that while the institutions of literature are almost always hierarchical, writing itself is not.”
Jen/Eleana Hofer: “For years I’ve been thinking and writing through ideas around the ways translation can generate empathetic not-understanding as an alternative to simplistic and often essentializing or assimilationist ideas around the way texts in translation can provide a ‘window’ into other cultures… At its most radically politicized, translation can function to interrogate and destabilize our ideas about how language functions to make meaning, and can therefore invite us into an awareness of how our own modes of perception are configured, encouraging us to use the tools language offers — as the daily currency of thought, experience and communication — to reconstruct the very foundations on which our currently distressing world rests.”
Olivia Lott: “The reason I translate is to use my position within the United States and my native tongue subversively, to contribute to the dismantling of the imperialist vision of Latin America and to express my allyship with this struggle.”
Jeremy Tiang: “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?”"
January 13, 2026
by Adam
https://debutiful.net/2026/01/13/writer-translator-simon-lopez-trujillo-and-robin-myer-pedro-the-vast/
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