Metaglossia: The Translation World

Acolad Acquisition Expands AI Translation Through Enterprise Relationships

Martin Chen

RWS completed its Acolad acquisition on November 2, 2026, expanding enterprise customer access while retaining specialist human services within its AI strategy. The RWS Acolad acquisition gives the company more relationships through which to sell language technology. It also makes an existing tension more visible: automating content production while preserving the expertise customers need to trust the results.

The transaction covers Acogroup, Acolad’s parent company. RWS says the combination broadens access to its translation and content platforms across Europe and North America. The strategic question is how those platforms fit into established customer operations, especially where specialist review matters as much as translation speed.

DeepL provides a useful competitive reference because it also emphasizes enterprise translation quality, terminology, and human judgment. RWS is pursuing that market through a combination of software and acquired service relationships. The analysis here centers on that approach: using established delivery teams to expand automation without weakening accountability.

What the RWS Acolad acquisition changes
RWS announced the completion in its acquisition completion release after social consultation and regulatory approvals concluded. Acolad brings localization, interpreting, transcription, and data services. Localization means adapting content for a particular language, market, and audience.

RWS says Acolad customers will gain access to Language Weaver Pro, Trados, and its Cultural Intelligence Layer. The last term describes RWS’s approach to combining AI with cultural, linguistic, and specialist expertise. These are company descriptions of the intended offering, rather than independent findings about customer outcomes.

The immediate change is ownership and customer reach; the operating benefits still depend on implementation.

An acquisition can place complementary capabilities within the same organization without immediately combining the systems behind them. Customer contracts, document permissions, terminology resources, and review responsibilities still need coherent treatment. The completion announcement establishes the transaction, but it does not establish that every customer already has a unified workflow.

The original acquisition agreement, announced August 3, described approximately 1,200 Acolad employees across 22 countries. Those figures help explain the commercial rationale. RWS gains an established operating presence through which it can introduce technology alongside existing services.

That presence matters because language work often starts with a business process rather than a software purchase. A customer needs documents delivered, an interpreter available, or content approved for publication. A vendor already responsible for that work has an opportunity to introduce automation within an understood service relationship.

However, an existing relationship does not guarantee acceptance of a new platform. Buyers can value their delivery team while preferring different technology. They can also accept automation for routine material while requiring specialist handling elsewhere. RWS will need to accommodate those distinctions if broader access is to become sustained adoption.

The transaction also broadens the range of work under the combined organization. Written translation, spoken interpreting, and transcription involve different delivery requirements. A common corporate owner does not remove those differences. The strategic benefit depends on coordinating them without treating every content task as interchangeable.

For customers, the practical significance therefore extends beyond the list of available products. The relevant questions concern who handles an assignment, which technology processes it, and who approves the result. Clear answers would make the expanded offering easier to evaluate.

That is why this acquisition deserves attention as an enterprise distribution move. RWS has expanded the relationships surrounding its technology. Whether those relationships support a better service will become clearer through customer migrations, product delivery, and operating disclosures.

Enterprise buyers put human oversight at the center
RWS identifies regulated industries, public institutions, and medical devices among Acolad’s strengths. It presents those capabilities as complementary to its existing life sciences business. These customer categories make the relationship between automation and specialist review particularly relevant.

Consider a hypothetical medical device manufacturer adapting instructions for another market. A fluent translation is useful, but the document also needs consistent terminology and an identifiable approval process. If the source changes, reviewers need to know which translated passages require renewed attention.

This example illustrates the acquisition’s operating challenge without implying a documented customer deployment. The value of AI depends partly on how well it fits the surrounding controls. Faster drafting offers limited help if the organization cannot confidently approve and maintain the resulting documents.

For enterprise buyers, useful automation includes a clear route from generated text to accountable approval.

That requirement puts pressure on procurement teams as well as suppliers. A broader vendor portfolio creates more purchasing options, but it also creates questions about service boundaries. Buyers need to distinguish access to software from responsibility for a finished, approved deliverable.

A specialist reviewer may need the source document, approved vocabulary, and earlier editorial decisions. Without that context, the reviewer has to reconstruct the reasoning behind the text. Automation can then move effort from drafting into investigation, reducing the practical benefit of the initial speed improvement.

The same principle applies to less regulated work. A product team adapting support documentation still needs consistent feature names and current instructions. A sales team translating presentations needs to preserve approved claims. Different consequences call for different review standards, even when the underlying translation technology remains the same.

Knowledge workers therefore have a stake in how the combined organization manages source material. Translation quality depends partly on whether the input is current and complete. Organizations examining that problem can also explore how a searchable knowledge base supports access to technical documentation.

That connection concerns information preparation rather than translation performance. Finding the correct source does not guarantee an accurate translation. It does, however, give reviewers and language specialists a clearer basis for checking the output.

For RWS, retaining specialist judgment creates a commercial balancing act. Human review supports trust, but it also requires time and coordination. The company needs automation to reduce avoidable work while preserving attention where errors carry meaningful consequences.

Buyers should consequently judge the combined offering through complete assignments. A useful evaluation follows a document from intake through translation, review, revision, and release. That reveals whether the expanded service simplifies work or merely adds another technology choice to an already complicated process.

RWS is expanding the delivery network around its AI
The timing of the acquisition connects with RWS’s existing product development. The company introduced Language Weaver Pro on March 25, 2026, in collaboration with Cohere. Its enterprise translation model announcement also described integration across the Trados portfolio.

RWS reported favorable benchmark results against other translation tools. Those results remain company-reported claims, and they do not establish performance across every customer’s documents. Language combinations, subject matter, and evaluation procedures can affect how relevant a benchmark is to a purchasing decision.

The acquisition gives RWS a wider route to market for existing technology; it does not itself demonstrate an improvement in translation quality.

That distinction explains the strategic mechanism. Building a capable model and persuading an enterprise to use it are separate tasks. The latter requires an understanding of the customer’s documents, security expectations, approval requirements, and existing delivery arrangements.

An established service organization can help bridge those tasks. Its teams may already understand where terminology causes problems and which materials require specialist attention. If that knowledge informs deployment, technology adoption can become part of an existing service improvement conversation.

The risk is assuming that account access makes integration straightforward. A familiar supplier still needs to justify changes to the way work gets done. Customers may require evidence that a proposed workflow preserves their controls and avoids unnecessary migration effort.

For developers, the relevant issue goes beyond the quality of an isolated translated passage. An application needs predictable handling of inputs, outputs, exceptions, and revisions. A translation feature becomes harder to maintain when the surrounding process leaves ownership or approval status unclear.

The RWS AI translation strategy therefore depends on more than model selection. It depends on connecting technology with the people and procedures that deliver usable content. That is the strategic opportunity created by combining platforms with an established service network.

There is also an important distinction between selling additional products and improving customer operations. A larger portfolio can increase the number of services available under one contract. The customer benefit depends on whether those services work together in a way that reduces friction.

For example, a hypothetical multinational support operation could use automated translation for initial drafts and specialist review for sensitive updates. The arrangement would need clear rules about which materials follow each route. The model’s output quality would remain important, but so would the accuracy of that routing decision.

Acolad integration will be more convincing if customers can see how these choices work in practice. Broad descriptions of AI adoption leave considerable room for interpretation. Specific explanations of review responsibility, document handling, and exception management would make the strategy easier to assess.

The acquisition consequently strengthens RWS’s commercial position in a particular way. It expands the organization around the technology, including customer access and specialist delivery. The resulting advantage depends on how effectively those elements cooperate after completion.

DeepL shows why specialist expertise is not a unique claim
DeepL’s positioning provides an important check on the idea that combining AI and human judgment creates an exclusive advantage. In an August 2026 discussion of translation quality evaluation, the company emphasized context, terminology, consistency, and expert involvement.

DeepL is a competitor describing its own approach, so its arguments require the same scrutiny as RWS’s claims. Its relevance is strategic: another enterprise translation supplier is making the case that useful quality extends beyond a favorable benchmark score.

RWS will need to distinguish the experience it delivers, because competitors also recognize the importance of context and human review.

This makes a simple contest between automated tools and human services misleading. Vendors can combine both, although their operating models differ. The more useful comparison concerns how each supplier assigns responsibility and helps customers manage a complete content process.

RWS’s acquisition approach adds established service relationships to its technology offering. A software-centered supplier can pursue enterprise needs through product controls and connections with customer teams. Neither approach automatically resolves the practical difficulties of approving multilingual content.

The distinction matters when comparing claims about quality. A model evaluation can provide evidence about a defined set of outputs. It cannot, by itself, establish how reliably a supplier handles document updates, unusual terminology, or disagreements between reviewers.

Independent research offers a reason to examine evaluation methods carefully. A study on human translation evaluation found that professional assessment with document context produced different system rankings from crowd evaluation. The research examined older systems and does not rank today’s competing products.

Its relevance is methodological rather than promotional. The people conducting an evaluation and the context they receive can affect the conclusions. That makes a headline ranking an incomplete basis for choosing a supplier.

For enterprise buyers, this suggests comparing systems on representative work rather than treating vendor benchmarks as universal results. A useful assessment considers the source material, target audience, review requirements, and consequences of an error. Those conditions help determine which quality differences actually matter.

For RWS, acquired expertise could support that evaluation process. Specialists familiar with a customer’s content can help identify meaningful errors and recurring difficulties. The advantage remains conditional on retaining that knowledge and making it usable within the combined organization.

RWS AI translation will therefore compete on several connected dimensions. Output quality matters alongside workflow fit, service continuity, and clear accountability. A strong result in one dimension cannot automatically compensate for weaknesses in another.

The acquisition expands RWS’s resources for addressing those requirements. It also increases the importance of showing how the resources work together. Buyers will need evidence of an effective combined service, rather than an assumption that a broader corporate portfolio produces better outcomes.

Acolad integration meets an uneven business backdrop
RWS completed the transaction while its own language and content business was undergoing change. In its October 27 fiscal trading update, the company reported an uneven performance across operating segments.

RWS said Transform recorded a mid-single-digit revenue decline on an organic, constant-currency basis. That measure aims to show underlying performance without acquisition and exchange-rate effects. The company also described initial Language Weaver Pro revenue during the second half.

The financial backdrop makes it important to separate acquired scale from evidence that existing operations are improving.

A transaction can expand reported business activity because the company owns more operations. That does not necessarily show that existing customers are buying more technology. Readers assessing the strategy need to keep those mechanisms distinct.

The trading statement also discussed changes to the client portfolio, so the Transform decline should not be reduced to a single explanation. It does not establish that AI caused the weakness. Equally, the acquisition’s completion does not establish that the underlying pressure has disappeared.

The appropriate conclusion is narrower. RWS is adding customer reach while continuing its transition toward AI-led technology. Management will need to explain how those developments affect the business without allowing the larger combined footprint to obscure underlying trends.

Operational uncertainty deserves equal attention. The closing announcement does not provide a detailed timetable for every customer migration or product connection. Readers should therefore avoid assuming that corporate completion means technology consolidation has already finished.

There is also a knowledge retention issue. Part of the acquisition’s rationale rests on specialist expertise and established relationships. If delivery changes weaken access to that expertise, the combined organization risks undermining something it sought to acquire.

That is a risk inherent in the strategy, rather than a report that employees or customers are leaving. Publicly verified evidence does not establish such an outcome. The point is that retaining useful expertise should feature in any assessment of integration progress.

A related question concerns the distribution of work. Automation can reduce drafting effort while increasing the need to inspect exceptions or resolve inconsistent terminology. Assessing productivity therefore requires looking at the whole assignment rather than one production step.

Customers may also adopt different parts of the expanded offering at different speeds. Some will prioritize continuity; others will seek automation quickly. Treating those preferences as legitimate requirements would support the company’s stated emphasis on choice and human oversight.

The strongest evidence of successful Acolad integration would connect these issues. It would show stable delivery, useful technology adoption, and a clearer operating model. General statements about broader capabilities would provide less insight into whether the combination is working for customers.

Three signals will show how the combination develops
The next reporting and product milestones offer a practical way to assess the transaction without assuming its outcome. The most useful signals concern integration disclosure, product delivery, and customer adoption. Each addresses a different link between ownership and operating benefit.

The RWS Acolad acquisition should be judged through observable changes in delivery and adoption, with financial reporting providing the wider context.

First, watch RWS’s full-year results on December 15, 2026. The company has identified that date for its next full-year reporting. An informative update would distinguish integration activity from changes in underlying business performance.

Clear reporting would strengthen the case that management can explain how the combination is progressing. Limited detail would leave the strategic argument unresolved. An early update cannot establish every long-term benefit, but it can clarify responsibilities, priorities, and the measures management considers meaningful.

Second, watch the translation management platform RWS said it planned to launch in November. A translation management platform coordinates assignments, resources, and review across a content project. Its significance lies in how it supports the work around translation.

Product availability would be an initial signal, followed by evidence about practical use. Buyers should look for clear explanations of terminology handling, approval stages, and connections with existing processes. Those details would help establish whether the product supports the broader integration strategy.

A release alone would not confirm that acquired customers have adopted it. Conversely, a staged rollout would not automatically indicate failure. The useful distinction is between an explained implementation sequence and an unclear promise of future coordination.

Third, watch for specific accounts of customer adoption. Evidence is stronger when it explains the starting problem, the deployed service, and the resulting change. An account that also describes specialist review would help readers assess the balance between automation and accountability.

Such examples should identify the boundaries of the deployment. Results from routine support material would not establish equivalent performance for medical documentation. Clear limits make a customer example more useful because readers can judge whether it resembles their own work.

These signals also establish what would weaken the acquisition thesis. Unclear integration responsibilities, unexplained product delays, or adoption claims without operating detail would leave the promised benefits difficult to assess. None alone determines the eventual outcome, but each affects confidence in execution.

For now, the verified change is substantial in organizational terms. RWS has acquired Acolad’s parent and expanded the relationships surrounding its AI and language services. The implications for individual customers depend on the arrangements that follow.

If your organization relies on multilingual content, use the RWS Acolad acquisition as a reason to examine the next supplier update closely. Ask which services become available, how existing reviews carry forward, and who owns the final approval. Compare those answers with the needs of your actual documents, including sensitive material and routine updates. Follow the December results for integration detail, then look for customer evidence that explains both the gains and their limits. The most informative question is practical: when technology, specialists, and customer teams work together, does the combined service make approved content easier to deliver and maintain?"
https://www.remio.ai/post/rws-acolad-acquisition-expands-ai-translation-through-enterprise-relationships
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Mogging' is Collins' word of the year... but do you know what it means?

"Mogging is about playfully upstaging someone or something
"Mogging", a word used playfully to mean outshining, outperforming or upstaging someone or something, has been named as word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary.

A fast-growing slang word among members of Generations Z and Alpha - both online and in everyday conversation - mogging went mainstream in 2026 with a 210% increase in its usage.

Collins' managing director Alex Beecroft said its lexicographers look at "how often words are used" and also "analyse patterns of usage" that reveal the latest linguistic trends.

The selection of mogging as word of the year, he said, "shows how each generation leaves its mark on language".

Collins
Mogging the Mona Lisa, whatever next?
He added: "It's a great example of how Gen Z and Gen Alpha have adopted a word and turned it into humorous slang, making the language their own and 'mogging' the rest of us!"

Mogging - not to be confused with mugging or mugging someone off - refers to outshining or dominating someone, most often in looks.

You may even have mogged someone or been mogged yourself over the past 12 months.

The word is often traced back to the acronym AMOG, standing for Alpha Male of the Group, and has been variously associated with bodybuilding forums in the mid-2010s as well as the manosphere and Incels.

But it now has a much more mainstream usage, as a playful put-down or a compliment, depending on the context.

It can be seen and heard in looksmaxxing communities - online groups where people swap advice on how to maximise their physical attractiveness.

Collins - one of the UK's major dictionary publishers - draws from a range of sources, including social media, to reflect how the English language is evolving in the UK each year.

Its word of the year for 2025 was "vibe coding" - the art of making an app or website by describing it to artificial intelligence (AI) rather than by writing programming code manually.

Other definitions that made the dictionary's 10-strong shortlist this year include ghost job, something frustrated jobseekers will be familiar with - when an employer posts a position with no intention of appointing someone.

Another, Hydration break was of course made famous by this year's Fifa Men’s World Cup, while p(doom) is the estimation of probability of an AI-aided collapse of civilisation.

Manchesterism, a term associated with Prime Minister and former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, is about the devolution of power to the regions, combining economic growth with social progress.

Check out the other five words that made the list in the quiz above."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cve8rp085zzjo
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Jamais un ouvrage écrit en langue catalane n'avait été distingué depuis la création du prix, en 1970

"La barcelonaise Eva Baltasar remporte le prix Médicis étranger : une première pour un livre en langue catalane
Par ICI Roussillon • Mardi 3 novembre 2026

Le prix Médicis étranger à été remis ce lundi à l'autrice barcelonaise Eva Baltasar pour son roman "Déclin et fascination". C'est la première fois qu'un livre publié à l'origine en catalan remporte cette distinction.

C'est une première pour la littérature catalane. L'autrice barcelonaise Eva Baltasar a remporté ce lundi le prix Médicis étranger pour son roman Déclin et fascination, publié en France aux éditions Verdier. Jamais un ouvrage écrit en langue catalane n'avait été distingué depuis la création du prix, en 1970.

L'écrivaine barcelonaise de 48 ans a tenu à souligner la portée de cette récompense, après l'annonce du palmarès dans un restaurant du 6e arrondissement de Paris. "Avec ce prix, ce n'est pas un seul livre qui est récompensé mais toute la littérature écrite en catalan. Nous formons une grande constellation d'auteurs, vivants et morts", a-t-elle déclaré aux journalistes de la télévision catalane 3CatOuverture dans un nouvel onglet, venus spécialement pour l'occasion.

Le jury du Médicis a donc choisi de mettre à l'honneur son dernier roman, Ocas i fascinació en version originale. Construit en deux parties, le livre suit d'abord le parcours d'une jeune femme diplômée, contrainte d'enchaîner les petits boulots pour survivre, avant de finir à la rue. Le récit bascule ensuite dans une dimension plus mystique, voire surnaturelle.

Une autrice qui intéresse désormais le cinéma
À travers ce personnage, Eva Baltasar fait notamment écho à la crise du logement qui touche l'Espagne. Pour nourrir son récit, l'autrice a d'ailleurs expliqué avoir travaillé un temps comme femme de ménage afin de mieux appréhender le quotidien de son personnage.

Cette récompense constitue une nouvelle consécration pour Eva Baltasar, déjà très reconnue en Catalogne. L'autrice y a reçu plusieurs prix pour ses recueils de poésie et ses précédents romans, traduits dans une douzaine de langues.

Son œuvre suscite désormais l'intérêt du cinéma. Des producteurs américains se sont notamment intéressés à Permafrost, tandis que des producteurs français travaillent sur une adaptation de Mammouth, paru il y a quatre ans. Le cinéaste espagnol Pedro Almodóvar aurait également manifesté son intérêt pour porter à l'écran Poisson, un autre roman à succès de l'écrivaine."
https://www.radiofrance.fr/ici/podcasts/l-info-du-sud/la-barcelonaise-eva-baltasar-remporte-le-prix-medicis-etranger-une-premiere-pour-un-livre-en-langue-catalane-5624840
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Language as a negotiation tool: Roman Krachko on multilingualism and intercultural communication
written by Sarah Dunsby 2nd Nov 26 1:24 pm

In international business, language proficiency helps professionals understand partners, accommodate their habits, and find a common approach. Roman Krachko is a foreign language instructor and polyglot working with English, Spanish, and Chinese. In this interview, he explains why knowing grammar and vocabulary is insufficient for successful negotiations, how cultural nuances influence business communication, and what role humans will retain in language learning in the AI era.

— Roman, you work extensively with business communication. Why is traditional language learning often insufficient for company executives?

— The problem is that people typically formulate a thought in their native language first, translate it, and only then speak. In negotiations, this approach fails because the conversation moves quickly, leaving no time to translate every phrase. This is why I train clients to use language in specific situations, real-world contexts. While we cover grammar and vocabulary, our primary focus is on how to ask questions, express disagreement, negotiate terms, and respond to unexpected answers. For instance, if a partner proposes unfavourable terms, it is crucial to explain your position and justify your refusal immediately. For an executive, this is far more valuable than striving to speak flawlessly like a native speaker.

— How does your methodology differ from the approach of conventional language schools?

— Take a simple example. In Chinese business culture, a direct refusal can be perceived as overly blunt, especially if it puts a partner in an awkward position. Consequently, disagreement is often expressed indirectly: they might say that the matter requires further discussion or that the proposed terms will be difficult to clear. Without this context, you might mistake a polite response for readiness to close a deal. In our sessions, we analyse these scenarios to understand what lies behind specific phrasing, learn to express disagreement ourselves, and clarify a counterpart’s position without creating unnecessary friction. For a specialist negotiating with foreign partners, this has direct practical value: accurate interpretation dictates how the rest of the conversation shapes up.

— You specifically highlight Chinese and Spanish. Why have these become the main pillars of your work, given that English remains the global business language?

— English is indeed essential in many sectors and serves as a fundamental working tool for most international specialists. That said, Chinese is taking on greater significance due to China’s growing role in the global economy, while Spanish unlocks opportunities across numerous countries in Europe and Latin America. Thus, proficiency in these languages is becoming increasingly vital for entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, Chinese and Spanish represent distinct traditions of business communication. With Chinese partners, it is crucial to understand the weight of hierarchy and corporate etiquette. In a Spanish-speaking environment, much depends on the specific country: communication habits and negotiation styles vary significantly between Spain, Mexico, and Argentina. A translator can help you grasp the literal message, but they won’t automatically explain why a counterpart chose specific words, what meaning they embed within them, or how best to respond. This is precisely what I focus on: helping clients navigate these nuances to understand partners accurately and conduct business conversations with confidence.

— Mandarin Chinese is considered one of the most challenging languages for Westerners. How do you explain the nuances of the Chinese mindset to your clients—CEOs and startup founders—through the lens of language?

— I explain that language reflects a culture’s habitual ways of interacting. For example, in English, we frequently say “I think,” directly stating our position. In Chinese communication, however, much depends on context, the counterpart’s status, and how a thought is framed. It is vital to convey your position while preserving harmony and protecting the other person’s “face”—mianzi—meaning their reputation and dignity. When preparing board members for expansion into the Shanghai market, we examine how the grammar and speech patterns of Putonghua influence how people express opinions and make decisions. For instance, we learn to address partners correctly: in the Chinese business environment, it is common to use a surname alongside a job title or rank. This acknowledges the individual’s status and sets the appropriate tone from the very first meeting. We focus not just on pronunciation and tones, but on how to express respect linguistically—knowing when to speak directly and when to leave room for clarification. In negotiations, such nuances help professionals understand their counterpart accurately and build a dialogue that respects China’s cultural specifics.

— Turning from Asia to Europe and Latin America: Spanish is often perceived as accessible. Where does its true power lie in international business, and how does it help build relationships?

— The power of Spanish lies in its ability to foster trust and establish common ground rapidly. When working with companies from Spain and Latin America, personal relationships carry immense weight: how attentively you listen, how you express disagreement, and whether you can discuss complex issues while maintaining positive rapport.

Linguistic nuances play a key role here. For instance, the subjunctive mood allows you to discuss desires, assumptions, and potential scenarios, softening requests and carefully framing expectations. I teach clients to utilize these structures to convey their position precisely while accounting for their partner’s reaction. When you communicate with a Mexican or Colombian partner in high-quality Spanish, it becomes much easier to move beyond formal conversation, demonstrate respect for their culture, and establish a more trusting contact. In international business, this can become a significant competitive advantage.

— Could you share a case study where your linguistic and cultural preparation altered the course of a major international deal?

— A European tech fund was expanding into Mexico City while simultaneously sourcing components in Shenzhen. The negotiations in Mexico had stalled: the European partners were overly direct, which was perceived as arrogance. I conducted a two-week sprint on the nuances of Latin American business Spanish, focusing on markers of empathy and informal networking. Within a week, the parties reached an agreement.

In parallel, we prepared them for an audit in Shenzhen, where the problem was the exact opposite: the Europeans were trying to push deadlines. I shifted them to business Chinese, teaching them structures that expressed “collective reflection” rather than a “personal demand”. The Chinese partners saw that the Europeans respected their cultural code. In the end, the fund closed both deals and secured exclusive terms because, as the Chinese side put it, “they speak the same language as us, not just in business, but in their heads.”

— In conclusion, how do you see the future of the profession? Will AI replace us, or will empathy and cultural competence become the most valuable skills?

— AI is already excellent at translating words, but it does not always convey intentions and cultural nuances. If AI translates a phrase literally during a corporate merger in Guangzhou but misses a subtle tone of doubt in a partner’s voice, the business could lose millions. The language expert of the future is not a “walking dictionary,” but an analyst of human relations, a strategist, and a psychologist. The more the world becomes digitized, the higher the value placed on human intuition and the ability to feel invisible cultural connections. This is precisely why my profession will endure; instead, consultations in this field will become highly compensated and sought-after.

https://londonlovesbusiness.com/language-as-a-negotiation-tool-roman-krachko-on-multilingualism-and-intercultural-communication/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"La nouvelle traduction de « L’adieu aux armes » permet d’en retrouver toute la force. Écrit à Paris et aux États-Unis, à la fin des années 1920, et publié en 1929, le jour du krach de Wall Street, le troisième roman de l’auteur du « Vieil Homme et la Mer » est un pur classique. On y accompagne la route sinueuse de Frédéric Henry, ambulancier américain blessé et soigné en Italie pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Un héros, faussement détaché et froid face à la réalité qui l’entoure, magnifié par l’économie et la précision d’un Ernest Hemingway remarquablement inspiré dans ses descriptions et ses dialogues.

Ernest Hemingway, « L’adieu aux armes », traduit de l’anglais par Philippe Jaworski, Folio, 480 pages"
https://www.letelegramme.fr/culture-loisirs/livres/a-lire/ladieu-aux-armes-une-nouvelle-traduction-redonne-sa-force-au-classique-dhemingway-7151104.php
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Language support for Siri AI will continue to expand, with availability in Chinese (traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese coming by the end of the year.   
Availability
Apple Intelligence is available with Siri and device language set to Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish or Vietnamese.

"With the 27.2 software updates released, Siri AI — an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational and personal — is expanding to more people around the world, with availability now in the French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish languages.
Siri AI is a completely re-imagined version of Siri that is more personal and powerful, without compromising users’ privacy. Built on Apple Intelligence, it draws on personal context understanding to help users find what they need in the moment across their messages, emails, photos and more. With even more system-wide app actions, Siri AI can help users with tasks such as drafting an email from scratch or editing and sharing a set of photos. With on screen awareness, Siri AI can answer questions or take actions related to the content on a user’s screen. It can also use broad world knowledge to get up-to-date information on virtually any topic.
Language support for Siri AI will continue to expand, with availability in Chinese (traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese coming by the end of the year.   
Availability
Apple Intelligence is available with Siri and device language set to Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish or Vietnamese. Some features may not be available in all regions or languages. Some devices may not be available in all regions.
Siri AI is available in beta in iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, macOS 27.2, watchOS 27.2 and visionOS 27.2 and requires an Apple Intelligence-enabled device set to a supported language. It is available in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Some features may not be available in all regions or languages.
Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.
Siri AI is not available for users under 13.
Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, including but not limited to Siri AI, intelligent photo editing tools, Image Playground and AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts. Daily limits may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies and other factors. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future. Use of these features is subject to the Apple Intelligence terms and conditions. Learn more at support.apple.com/en-au/148587."
27 October 2026
https://www.apple.com/au/newsroom/2026/10/siri-ai-is-available-in-more-languages-starting-today/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

A linguist explains how "thinking is walking" in dozens of everyday English phrases, and the examples are mind-blowing.

Linguist and self-professed “etymology nerd” Adam Aleksic shared a video on TikTok explaining how many common phrases we use for thinking directly reference walking. We often use metaphors in our speech, of course, but there are many that we likely don’t even recognize as metaphors.

Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it

He starts with “by the way,” which literally means being next to the way, or the path we’re supposed to be on. It indicates that we’re taking a mental detour from the path we were supposed to be on to introduce something unrelated. On the other hand, when we’re talking about something that is actually on the path we’re meant to be on, we say, “of course,” which literally means “of the path.”

“We use this metaphor all the time when we say, ‘you’re on track’ or ‘you’re way off,’ literally implying that you’re not where you should be on the ‘path’ of thinking,” Aleksic says, explaining that there’s a greater metaphor at play here that “thinking is walking.”

Once you see some examples, it becomes so clear. Our minds “race” or “wander,” our thoughts “stray,” and we “arrive” at conclusions.

“All this relies on physical motion, even though your mind is stationary,” says Aleksic. “But it’s from that idea (that thoughts can walk) that we can then go ahead and make statements about our own cognition. Like how I just used ‘from,’ originally a preposition for motion, and ‘go ahead’ to indicate continuation. Once you know thoughts can walk, you can ‘follow’ them down ‘a line of thinking’ until you ‘come to’ a resolution.”

Here are a few more you’ll recognize
Even a saying as common as “Way to go!” is a metaphor indicating that you are on the correct path.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s easy to come up with many more examples of how we conceptualize thinking as walking:

“Let’s circle back.”
“Walk me through your thinking.”
“I’m backtracking here.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“No way.”
“Let’s move on.”

Other languages do the same thing
Some commenters shared that their languages use similar metaphors:

“In Norwegian you can say ‘du er helt på bærtur’ when someone is way off, and it means that you are on a berry trip, specifically blueberry trip.”

“In Czech, you say btw as ‘mimochodem’, while mimo means outside and chodem means a step or a walk, so literally meaning by the walk.”

“En passant in french is the same way. It’s like ‘I passed near this thought’ while on my way to another thought.”

True to form, Aleksic even has a video commenting on comments:

There’s something to be said for “thinking is walking” even beyond the metaphorical way we describe our thoughts. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers were also obsessive walkers.

Science backs this up, too
In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford University conducted a foundational series of four experiments involving 176 college students and other adults to see if walking had any effect on different types of thinking. In one test, they had some people walk outside and others walk on a treadmill facing a blank wall to see if the environment made a difference.

On brainstorming tasks, it mostly didn’t. Wherever people walked, they came up with more creative ideas than those who sat or were pushed in a wheelchair, and creative output rose by an average of 60%. Participants consistently did better on tests of divergent thinking, such as thinking of alternate uses for common objects, and walking outside produced the most novel, high-quality analogies. The boost did not extend to convergent thinking, where there is a single right answer.

“Incorporating physical activity into our lives is not only beneficial for our hearts but our brains as well,” Oppezzo said. “This research suggests an easy and productive way to weave it into certain work activities.” Could we perhaps say, “walking is thinking” in addition to “thinking is walking”?

A 2021 study of Japanese young adults found that regular walking was associated with more original responses on alternate uses tests, which measure divergent thinking, though not with convergent thinking."
https://www.upworthy.com/linguist-clearly-explains-thinking-is-walking-ex1/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Tizi Ouzou: Colloque national sur les pratiques et enjeux de la traduction institutionnelle
il y a 42 minutes

La faculté des lettres et de langues de l’université Mouloud Mammeri organise depuis ce lundi et pour 2 jours, un colloque national sur : «Pratiques et enjeux de la traduction institutionnelle dans l’Algérie multilingue».

De nombreux enseignants et chercheurs venus de nombreuses universités du pays (Béjaia, Tébessa, Oran Annaba, Blida et Alger) participent à ce colloque. «La traduction constitue un levier fondamental de communication officielle entre l’État, les institutions et les citoyens, notamment dans les contextes caractérisés par le plurilinguisme et la diversité socioculturelle à I’îmage de I’Algérie», nous dit Lydia Guerchouh, la présidente de ce colloque et doyenne de la faculté organisatrice.

La traduction, un processus complexe
«La traduction est une opération qui relève d’un processus complexe où se croisent enjeux terminologiques, juridiques, idéologiques et identitaires», ajoute Lydia Guerchouh.  C’est pourquoi, pour elle, «ce colloque se veut justement un espace de réflexion sur les fondements théoriques de la traduction institutionnelle et l’examen des pratiques professionnelles et des difficultés rencontrées sur le terrain et ainsi réfléchir aux enjeux terminologiques, juridiques et sociopolitiques dans l’objectif de promouvoir la recherche et la formation dans le domaine de la traduction institutionnelle et favoriser les échanges interdisciplinaires entre linguistique, en traductologie, en droit et en sciences sociales».

«L’autre objectif assigné à ce colloque, poursuit-elle, est celui, également, de mettre en lumière les apports des nouvelles technologies (outils de l’IA, bases terminologiques, traduction automatique institutionnelle) et d’interroger leur impact sur la qualité, l’éthique et l’avenir de la traduction».

La traduction institutionnelle, une place centrale dans la circulation des discours officiels      
Pour Lydia Guerchouh, dans un monde marqué par l’intensification des échanges institutionnels, administratifs et diplomatiques, «la traduction institutionnelle occupe une place centrale dans la circulation des discours officiels et dans la mise en œuvre des politiques publiques». Si bien qu’elle estime que la traduction institutionnelle ne saurait être réduite à une simple opération linguistique. «Elle relève d’un processus complexe où se croisent enjeux terminologiques, juridiques, idéologiques et identitaires. Elle soulève des problématiques fondamentales liées à la fidélité au texte source, à l’équivalence fonctionnelle, à la normalisation terminologique, mais également à la responsabilité du traducteur face aux effets produits par le texte traduit dans l’espace public», précise-t-elle.

Comme elle soutient que «dans les contextes multilingues, la traduction institutionnelle joue un rôle déterminant dans I‘aménagement linguistique et la mise en œuvre des politiques linguistiques». C’est pourquoi pour elle, «ce colloque planchera sur la traduction institutionnelle comme un  ensemble des pratiques traductives portant sur des textes produits par des institutions publiques ou parapubliques : lois, décrets, circulaires, formulaires administratifs, documents officiels, discours politiques, textes réglementaires ou communications gouvernementales».

Double exigence pour le traducteur
«La traduction institutionnelle se caractérise par une forte normativité, une stabilité terminologique et une fonction prescriptive ou informative clairement définie», ajouye Lydia Guerchouh. Et de souligner: «contrairement à d’autres types de traduction spécialisée, la traduction institutionnelle impose au traducteur une double exigence. A sa voir la fidélité au contenu source et I ‘adéquation aux normes discursives, juridiques et culturelles de la langue cible».

Et de rappeler que «le traducteur devient ainsi un médiateur institutionnel, responsable non seulement celle de la transmission du sens, mais aussi de la cohérence et de la légitimité du discours traduit dans l’espace public».

La traduction participe à la consolidation de la cohésion sociale
Lydia Guerchouh soutient aussi que «traduire une langue, c’est aussi lui accorder une visibilité, une légitimité et une fonction dans l’espace public». Dans ce sens, la traduction institutionnelle peut être perçue comme un outil de démocratisation de l’accès à l’information, mais aussi comme un indicateur de reconnaissance symbolique des communautés linguistiques.

Et de conclure: «au-delà de ses aspects techniques, la traduction institutionnelle s’inscrit dans un champ éminemment sociopolitique. Elle reflète les rapports de pouvoir entre les langues, les politiques linguistiques de l’État et les choix idéologiques sous-jacents à la production des discours officiels comme elle participe également à la construction du lien citoyen et à la consolidation de la cohésion sociale».

Rachid Hammoutène"
https://www.horizons.dz/2026/11/tizi-ouzou-colloque-national-sur-les-pratiques-et-enjeux-de-la-traduction-institutionnelle/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Translation as Participation: Rethinking Human Agency in the Platform Era"

"Call for contributions
Special Issue of Babel

"Translation as Participation: Rethinking Human Agency in the Platform Era"
Guest Editor: You Wu, East China Normal University

About the Special Issue

In recent years, the global expansion of digital platforms has profoundly reshaped how translation is produced, circulated and valued. Much public discourse frames this change in terms of automation, suggesting that, with the development of neural machine translation and increasingly AI-assisted workflows, technological advancements are rendering human translators redundant. However, this narrative overlooks the crucial cultural transformation in the new media landscape and misses what is most important about our moment, namely the emergent forms of human agency that arise within digital ecosystems. To approach this transformation, the concept of “convergence culture” provides a critical perspective, as translation increasingly takes place within participatory cultures shaped by fandom, social media, and networked publics (Jenkins 1992, 2006; Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013). Thus, this special issue proposes to reconfigure human agency in translation by conceptualizing translation as participation, perceived as a culturally and affectively invested mode of engagement. The issue aims to initiate discussions concerning how we might understand “translation as participation” in the current environment where human and technological mediation are increasingly interdependent on digital platforms.

In the platform era, human involvement in translation has not vanished; rather, it has been reconfigured by the communicative logics of new media, where translation functions within networks of collaboration, circulation and meaning-making that connect professionals, volunteers, fans and users across linguistic and cultural boundaries. A shift toward human-centered AI and intelligence amplification has thus been proposed, emphasizing enhancement of human cognitive agency rather than its replacement (O’Brien 2024; Jiménez-Crespo 2025a; Jiménez-Crespo 2025b). The technological turn situates translation within networked infrastructures, such as algorithms, platforms and automated workflows, while the participatory turn highlights collaboration, user engagement and affective investment of fandom as constitutive of contemporary practice (Wu 2021). These two dimensions of technology and participation are mutually beneficial and stimulating. The cases such as crowdsourced translation, fan subbing and collaborative localization show that translation has become a shared process of meaning construction (Evans 2020; Desjardins 2020; Jiménez-Crespo 2020). Recent work on post-editing further suggests that translation work remains dynamic and complex under technological mediation, resisting straightforward reduction to speed or efficiency metrics (Rico 2022). Against this complexity, recent scholarship has also turned attention to how quantification and platform metrics shape translators’ working conditions, while relying on their adaptive and relational competence (Moorkens 2024; Fırat et al. 2024).

Nevertheless, as Terranova’s concept of “free labour” (2000) and Fuchs’s Digital Labor (2014) remind us, participation in network culture is simultaneously voluntary and exploitative, pleasurable and productive. Translators, subtitlers and localizers, be they professional or fan, embody this paradox, creating value that circulates across cultural industries while often remaining under-recognized and uncompensated/undercompensated. In this sense, digital participation frequently oscillates between creativity and exploitation, voluntarism and value production (Kücklich 2005; Scholz 2013). Online collaborative translation embodies this tension, as it is driven by passion yet risks being subject to potential exploitation when gamification design blurs the boundary between work and play (Zwischenberger 2024), which also requires ethical reflection and intervention.

Situating itself at the intersection of translation studies, media studies and digital labor research, this issue proposes to rethink “translation as participation”, foregrounding how the human translator’s role is being reconfigured rather than diminished, and how this reconfiguration raises renewed attention to questions of justice, recognition and ethical responsibility. Contributions may draw on a wide range of participatory and platformed contexts, including but not limited to social media, web-based literary platforms, streaming services, gaming and localization environments, fan communities, activist networks and other forms of grassroots cultural mediation. The issue seeks to address the following conceptual and theoretical questions: How does translation operate as a participatory practice in platformed cultural environments, and how are forms of agency in translation reshaped by fandom, affective investment and community norms under such conditions? How do platforms structure, incentivize, gamify and govern participatory translation practices (for instance, through gamified designs such as metrics, rankings, rewards and visibility mechanisms)? How are identities, forms of belonging and mediated publics constituted through participatory translation practices? How are core concepts such as authorship, responsibility and agency rethought under conditions of collective and distributed translation? How does participatory translation intersect with forms of digital labour, playbour and unpaid/underpaid cultural production? How do ethical tensions emerge from participatory translation practices shaped by platform logics?

References :

Desjardins, Renée. 2020.“Online and Digital Contexts.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed., edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 386-390. London: Routledge.
Evans, Jonathan. 2020. “Fan Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed., edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 177-181. London: Routledge.
Fırat, Gökhan, Joanna Gough, and Joss Moorkens. 2024. “Translators in the Platform Economy: A Decent Work Perspective.” Perspectives 32 (3): 422–40. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2024.2323213
Moorkens, Joss. 2024. “‘I Am Not a Number’: On Quantification and Algorithmic Norms in Translation.” Perspectives 32 (3): 477–92. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2023.2278536.
Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
----. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2020. “Crowdsourced Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed., 124-129. Routledge.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2025a. “Human-Centeredness in Translation : Advancing Translation Studies in a Human-Centered AI Era”. INContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.54754/incontext.v5i1.132.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2025b. “Human-Centered AI and the Future of Translation Technologies: What Professionals Think About Control and Autonomy in the AI Era.” Information 2025, 16, 387. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16050387
Kücklich, Julian. 2005. “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry.” Fibreculture Journal 5 (1). https://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry/. Accessed January 10, 2026.
Rico, Celia. 2022. “Mind the Gap: The Nature of Machine Translation Post-Editing.” Babel: Revue Internationale de la Traduction / International Journal of Translation 68 (5): 697–722. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00288.ric
Scholz, Trebor, ed. 2013. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.
O’Brien, Sharon. 2024. “Human-Centered Augmented Translation: Against Antagonistic Dualisms.” Perspectives 32 (3): 391–406. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2023.2247423. Terranova, Tiziana. 2000. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18 (2): 33-58. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-33.
Wu, You. 2021. “Revisiting Translation in the Age of Digital Globalization: The ‘Going Global’ of Chinese Web Fiction through Overseas Volunteer Translation Websites.” Babel :Revue Internationale de la Traduction / International Journal of Translation 67 (6): 819-844. https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00248.wu.
Zwischenberger, Cornelia. 2024. “On Categorising Online Collaborative Translation and the Boundary Work Behind It.” The Translator 30 (1): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2023.2275348.
Comment soumettre des propositions
All full manuscripts will be subject to rigorous double-blind peer review. Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the full manuscript. Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 300 words, together with a short bio-note, to the guest editor at translationasparticipation@gmail.com.

Tentative Timeline

Abstract submission deadline: 31 December 2026

Notification of abstract acceptance: February 28, 2027

Full manuscript submission deadline: November 30, 2027

Peer review and revisions: December 2027–May 2028

Expected publication: Mid to late 2028, subject to the journal’s production schedule

Contact pour plus d informations
translationasparticipation@gmail.com"
https://www.ailc-icla.org/fr/events/translation-as-participation-rethinking-human-agency-in-the-platform-era/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Winners of 57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards

"The Korea Times is pleased to announce the winners of its 57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, one of the longest-running honors dedicated to Korean literary translation.

The Grand Prize in fiction, awarded by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, went to Breanna Hundley of the United States for her translation of novelist Cho Ye-eun’s “How to Get Your Deposit Back.”

The Commendation Award for fiction was given to Jude Vandervort of the U.S. for his translation of Jeong Ji-a’s novel “Bead by Bead.”

Two Commendation Awards in poetry went to Noh Hye-yeon for her translation of poems by Lee Su-myeong, including “To Unfold a Bird,” and to Park Se-yeon for her translation of poems by An Hee-yeon, including “There Was a Fire.”

No Grand Prize was awarded in poetry this year, as the jury found the poetry submissions less strong overall than those in fiction and judged that two commendations would more fairly recognize the promise shown by translators.

The Kevin O’Rourke Prize was awarded to Ku Bon-seung of the U.S. for his translation of Danyao’s “Giraffe Is the Name of the World.” Presented in partnership with the Embassy of Ireland in Korea, the prize honors the legacy of the late Kevin O’Rourke, a distinguished translator of Korean literature.

The Korea Times congratulates this year’s winners and thanks all participants for the care and effort they put into their translations. Through the awards, the newspaper seeks to nurture translators who can bring Korean literature to readers around the world. It welcomes submissions for next year’s competition as international interest in Korean writing continues to grow.

This year’s award ceremony will be held on Nov. 10 at the Korea Press Center in Seoul. The awards are sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and KB Financial Group.

Grand Prize in fiction: Breanna Hundley (Cho Ye-eun’s “How to Get Your Deposit Back”)

Commendation Award in fiction: Jude Vandervort (Jeong Ji-a’s novel “Bead by Bead”)

Commendation Awards in poetry: Noh Hye-yeon (selected poems by Lee Su-myeong) and Park Se-yeon (selected poems by An Hee-yeon)

Kevin O'Rourke Prize: Ku Bon-seung (Danyao’s “Giraffe Is the Name of the World”)

Judges: Sora Kim-Russell (award-winning translator), Krys Lee (associate professor in the Underwood International College at Yonsei University) and Ji-Eun Lee (professor in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Emory University)

Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards
By Lee Hae-rin
Published Nov 1, 2026
Lee Hae-rin
Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social"
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/lifestyle/books/20261101/winners-of-57th-modern-korean-literature-translation-awards

Digital Translation History
Processing historical data with digital humanities methods
Print edition expected November 2026
Editor
Diana Roig-Sanz
ICREA and TRANSIC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Philipp Hofeneder
ACDH (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Hardbound – Forthcoming Preorder
ISBN 9789027237644| EUR 140.00 | USD 182.00

e-Book – Open Access
ISBN 9789027243560

Get fulltext from our e-platform
Download Book PDF
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This book aims at establishing digital translation history as a specific field within the broader discipline of translation studies, and at the intersection of translation history and digital humanities. The book responds to the urgent need to encourage source-based and empirical research that is able to identify, at large scale, translations and translators in the global cultural ecosystem over time, as well as to analyze translated texts with digital methodologies and propose multiple tools and new ways to process and read them. In this respect, the book is structured in four sections with multiple case studies dealing with translation flows, agents of translation, textual analysis of translations, and repositories and infrastructures. The book is also an attempt to theorize and institutionalize what previously has been called “big translation history” (Roig-Sanz and Fólica 2021) and apply digital tools to identify patterns of cultural phenomena or word use, as well as to build networks of relationships and visualize spatial information (Vogeler and Hofeneder 2023).
[Benjamins Translation Library, 172] 2026.  xv, 484 pp.
Publishing status: Printing; Print edition expected November 2026
Published online on 12 October 2026
© John Benjamins"
Digital Translation History: Processing historical data with digital humanities methods | Edited by Diana Roig-Sanz and Philipp Hofeneder https://share.google/qck3z1vIJe8TuowFE
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"N’Ko : la traduction automatique progresse de 20 % en deux ans, une avancée présentée à l’EMNLP 2026 de Budapest

Mediaguinee Nov 2, 2026

La Conférence Mondiale sur les méthodes empiriques en traitement automatique des langues, (EMNLP 2026) , s’est achevée cette semaine à Budapest, en Hongrie. Elle s’est tenue du 24 au 29 octobre 2026 au HUNGEXPO.

L’évaluation de l’évolution des performances du système de traduction du N’ko (Evaluation of N’ko in Translation Systems) a été l’un des moments forts de la conférence.

Pour rappel, la traduction automatique du N’ko avait été lancée en 2024 avec Google Translate avec des performances encore moyennes :
– N’ko → vers autres langues : 60%
– Autres langues → vers N’ko : 40%

En 2026, grâce à Gemini Advanced Capabilities, le modèle d’intelligence artificielle de Google, les progrès sont spectaculaires :
– N’ko → vers autres langues : performance estimée à 80%
– Autres langues → vers N’ko : efficacité remontée à 60%

Soit une progression de 20 points en deux ans, dans les deux sens.

À noter que le système de traduction de Google couvre aujourd’hui 249 langues dans le monde.

NB : Pour les systèmes de traduction, le N’ko est la forme standard et harmonisée de l’orthographe des langues mandingues. Monsieur Djibrila Diané, guinéen et Secrétaire Général de l’Organisation Mondiale pour le Développement de l’alphabet N’ko, a représenté la communauté des experts et utilisateurs du N’ko à la conférence.

Nafadji Sory Condé, Sociolinguiste, spécialiste des langues africaines et des politiques linguistiques et éducatives"
https://mediaguinee.com/2026/11/nko-la-traduction-automatique-progresse-de-20-en-deux-ans-une-avancee-presentee-a-lemnlp-2026-de-budapest/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Tuoi Tre Startup Award 2026 : une plateforme de traduction par IA décroche le premier prix
02/11/2026 12:17
La finale et la cérémonie de remise des prix du concours "Tuoi Tre Startup Award 2026" se sont déroulées dans la soirée du 31 octobre à Hô Chi Minh-Ville, consacrant le projet Doctranslate.io du prestigieux titre d'"Étoile d’or de la startup", doté d'une prime de 100 millions de dôngs.

L'événement était organisé conjointement par le journal en ligne Tuôi Tre (Jeunesse), la Fédération de la jeunesse du Vietnam de Hô Chi Minh-Ville, l’Alliance internationale pour l’innovation InnoEx et plusieurs partenaires du secteur technologique.

Le projet lauréat a développé une solution de traduction en ligne propulsée par l’intelligence artificielle (IA), capable de traiter des traductions contextuelles, de réaliser la traduction, l'enregistrement, la transcription et d'effectuer des synthèses automatiques pour les conférences et événements internationaux. Prenant actuellement en charge 80 langues et cherchant à intégrer des dialectes plus rares, la jeune pousse réalise déjà 80% de son chiffre d’affaires auprès de partenaires étrangers et ambitionne désormais de consolider sa position sur le marché vietnamien.

Le prix d'"Étoile d’argent", assorti d'une récompense de 50 millions de dôngs, a été attribué à l'entreprise BioWraps pour sa recherche sur les matériaux et les emballages biodégradables conçus à partir de peaux de fruits et de résidus agricoles, une démarche qui s'inscrit pleinement dans l'économie circulaire et prépare une expansion industrielle vers le marché japonais. En outre, deux prix d'encouragement de 10 millions de dôngs chacun ont été décernés aux projets étudiants A-EYE FRUIT, spécialisé dans le contrôle de la qualité agricole, et GEOCARBON, axé sur la quantification du carbone forestier par l'IA, les autres finalistes du top 11 recevant chacun 30 millions de dôngs.

Placée sous le thème de "L’innovation pour la ville du futur", cette septième édition du concours "Tuoi Tre Startup Award 2026" a mis l'accent sur les infrastructures, les transports, la logistique et le développement durable, en évaluant les projets selon des critères rigoureux de l'innovation et des solutions technologiques ; de la viabilité économique et de la pertinence urbaine ; du modèle économique ; de la capacité et de l’exécution de l'équipe ; des compétences de présentation et de la capacité de pensée critique.

À travers ses sept éditions, le concours a rassemblé près de 1 200 candidatures et distingué environ 200 initiatives.

Présent lors de la cérémonie, le Professeur Mai Thanh Phong, recteur de l’Université de la technologie rattachée à l’Université nationale de Hô Chi Minh-Ville, a souligné la signification particulière du thème de ce concours dans un contexte où la métropole s'orientait vers de nouveaux modèles de croissance fondés sur les sciences, les technologies et l'innovation.

Selon lui, une cité de demain ne se résume pas à des infrastructures de pointe ou à des équipements modernes, mais se mesure avant tout à son aptitude à résoudre efficacement les problématiques concrètes, de la circulation et la logistique à l’économie numérique, en passant par l’environnement et le bien-être social.

VNA/CVN"
https://lecourrier.vn/tuoi-tre-startup-award-2026-une-plateforme-de-traduction-par-ia-decroche-le-premier-prix/1358595.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Qui était Denise Masson, la traductrice du Coran ?
Surnommée la Dame de Marrakech, Denise Masson, intellectuelle française et catholique engagée, est connue pour sa traduction du Coran. Un parcours étonnant.

« Oubliée par l’histoire de France. » C’est ainsi que Flora Boillot, directrice déléguée de l’Institut français du Maroc, présente Denise Masson (1901-1994). En arrivant à son poste, elle a découvert le destin de cette femme, fervente catholique et islamologue autodidacte, dont la traduction du Coran fait toujours référence.

« Il est vrai qu’habituellement on s’attache assez peu au traducteur, poursuit Flora Boillot, mais en l’occurrence il s’agit de l’un des plus grands textes sacrés. Il est assez étonnant que le nom de Denise Masson soit tombé dans l’oubli. »

Grandir entre Rodin et Poulenc
Celle qui a traversé le XXe siècle est « née à Paris, dans un milieu bourgeois, intellectuel et féru d’art », raconte Kamal Moueddene, responsable de la Maison Denise-Masson. Son père, Maurice, dont elle est restée très proche, est un mécène éclairé qui a constitué une incroyable collection de toiles impressionnistes. « Il connaissait personnellement Auguste Rodin, et Francis Poulenc était un ami de la famille. »

Sa mère, Mélanie Passemard, lui transmet la passion du piano. La famille possède aussi un vignoble près d’Alger, où la petite fille effectue de longs séjours..."
Par Flore Pierson
Publié le 29/10/2026 à 14h00, mis à jour le 29/10/2026 à 14h00 •
https://www.lavie.fr/idees/histoire/qui-etait-denise-masson-la-traductrice-du-coran-105885.php
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

New Journal on Translation Brings a Wide Range of Indian Languages to a New Readership

'Hyphen' is handsomely produced and illustrated, with a design that gives the contents the heft of a literary journal.

Hyphen issue 1. Photo: Author provided.
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What is the role of the humble hyphen? That small punctuation mark punches above its weight by connecting what would otherwise stay apart. It creates meaning from the space in between. This is the animating idea behind Hyphen, (the-hyphen.in) a new quarterly journal of translation founded and published by Vivek Shanbhag and edited by Deepa Ganesh. The name, aptly, is inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s description of himself as the hyphen in “Indian-American.”The journal aims to move between “tongues, places, memories and ways of seeing”, and the first issue is an ambitious introduction to the project. It comprises fiction and non-fiction featuring 17 writers and 11 translators, with work in seven languages. The language in focus for this issue is Marathi.

Books
With Books Held High, College Street Walks in Kolkata
Hyphen is handsomely produced and illustrated, with a design that gives the contents the heft of a literary journal. In this way, it contributes to the necessary project of translation as an intellectual practice in its own right.The fiction in the inaugural issue is almost a who’s who of contemporary writing in Indian languages. These include stories by Benyamin, translated from Malayalam by J. Devika; Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Ganesh; and Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Iswarya V.Advertisement
In his essay on Marathi literature, Rajeev Naik stresses that such writing refuses to stay static. Writers have always experimented with genres, styles and ideas in response to social and cultural circumstances. This is not a simple rejection of tradition. Modern Marathi literature, Naik writes, is entangled in its own history even as it departs from it. The relationship is like a hyphen itself: two things retaining their identities while producing something new in their partnership.The story ‘Indulkar’ by Kiran Gurav in the issue, translated by Shanta Gokhale, can be seen as an example of this. Here, the protagonist moves through the worlds of government employment, home and family, as well as his dreams. The story’s postmodernism draws on a traditional Marathi narrative: it exists in a network of relationships between individual and society, reality and fiction, inherited and new forms.Advertisement
The same point, though in a different context, is made by Adivasi writer Parvati Tirkey, in an interview with Sundar Sarukkai while referring to the oral tradition and writing: “Creativity emerges from the moment, from work, from the surrounding world. No single individual owns the song. The next time someone sings it, the song changes slightly; many people carry it forward together. Literature, in this sense, is created collectively by the community.”This sense of literature as a meeting place also acquires political and social weight in Pradnya Daya Pawar’s ‘A Diamond Is Forever,’ translated by Jerry Pinto. The essay, a tribute to Pawar’s mother Hira Pawar, is a portrait of a Dalit woman whose life was shaped by caste discrimination, poverty, feminism and Ambedkarite ideals. Hira Pawar emerges as rebellious and committed, but not without her own contradictions and imperfections. A woman’s private struggle becomes part of a larger social history.Advertisement
A similar mix of the personal and the political appears in Chandrashekhar Phansalkar’s translations of the Marathi poet Narayan Surve on his centenary. These poems reveal, in Phansalkar’s phrase, “a rare combination of tenderness and political consciousness.”Advertisement
In this way, the pieces in Hyphen resist the impulse to put literature into closed boxes: artistic or political, personal or historical, traditional or experimental.Another revealing exploration of this space can be found in an essay born of a conversation between the poet A. R. Venkatachalapathy and the musician Rithvik Raja. They begin with the question: What does it mean to translate a Tamil poem into English? This expands into something larger. For them, translation is not just carrying meaning across languages; it is an attempt to communicate with another time, standing between worlds separated by more than words.Harish Trivedi’s expansive essay, ‘The Making of Modern Hindi,’ extends the argument from individual works to language itself. The Hindi that is seen as a stable linguistic form, Trivedi writes, is instead a product of historical and political transformations. Much of what we think of as traditional Hindi literature was written in Awadhi and Braj. From the late 19th century onwards, Khadi Boli increasingly became the basis of Standard Hindi, accompanied by efforts to standardise spelling, vocabulary and grammar.Thus, languages, like literary traditions, are made rather than inherited intact. They evolve through contact with power and circumstance. Hyphens again: between old and new forms, between region and centre, between literature and politics.It’s worth pointing out that every piece in Hyphen arrives in English from other languages. As a link language this is understandable, even necessary: it is how a Malayalam writer, a Marathi poet and a Hindi scholar can all be read by a common audience. But the hyphen here joins each language to English more firmly than it joins them to one another.It will be interesting to see whether later issues find ways, perhaps through some form of bilingual presentation or translators’ notes, to widen the circle. That would make Hyphen fully live up to its credo of creating the conditions “for listening across linguistic and cultural boundaries, fostering dialogue, empathy, and a richer understanding of one another”.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.. "
Sanjay Sipahimalani
Oct 27 2026
https://m.thewire.in/culture/a-new-journal-on-translation-brings-a-wide-range-of-indian-languages-to-a-new-readership
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Council fails to pay 200 interpreters for more than three months
insidecroydon

CROYDON IN CRISIS: A ‘collapsed’ payments system has seen the council stiff hundreds of casual workers – highly trained translators and interpreters – for tens of thousands of pounds. And Mayor Perry knew nothing about it.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

Mayor Jason Perry’s omnishambles council could find itself dragged through the small claims court by dozens of angry service providers because a faulty payments system has failed to make payments to around 200 freelance translators and interpreters for three months.

The council’s total debts to the hard-working suppliers is estimated to be tens of thousands of pounds.

It has emerged that Croydon Council’s internal payment system collapsed overnight at the end of July. Three months on, the translators are still waiting for their money and “pulling our hair out over the lack of communication”.

CTIS – the Croydon Translation and Interpretation Service – has ground to a halt, with important meetings with often vulnerable clients having to be cancelled due to non-payment of fees. CTIS personnel have been left out of pocket for amounts from a few hundred to several thousand pounds.

Despite numerous complaints from the translators and various assurances from senior council managers, a payment deadline of this week has come and gone with no money paid by Croydon’s cash-strapped council.

The situation has also highlighted that the council has no system in place to make emergency payments to its casual workers when its computerised payments system breaks down.

And Inside Croydon has established that Jason Perry had no idea whatsoever about the chaotic situation at council headquarters, prompting one Town Hall opposition figure to urge the Tory Mayor to “get a grip”.

This latest shambles of council incompetence follows the discovery that Perry’s council is sitting on £8million of overpaid Council Tax, which it has failed to refund to 30,000 households across the borough.

The 200 members of the CTIS team provide translation services across around 75 languages and dialects, plus British Sign Language and deaf-blind support. Day-to-day demand is heavy across Arabic, Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish and Ukrainian, Urdu, Farsi, Tamil and Pashto.

CTIS mainly covers high-stakes social care, safeguarding and child protection cases. CTIS, which has operated for more than 30 years, also organises languages support for Bromley Council, Wandsworth Schools, and Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust.

Break down: a new payment system at the council HQ broke down in July and has not yet been fixed

In Croydon, its freelancers provide vitally important support to allow the council’s full-time staff to do their jobs, and is especially necessary in a borough where the Home Office has one of its largest immigration control centres in the town centre, at Ruskin Square.

The translators work in face-to-face meetings at Fisher’s Folly and via conference calls and video calls across children’s and adult social care, early help services, schools, mental health assessments and family court hearings.

“The impact on residents who need linguistic support is grim,” according to one regular translator, who asked not to be identified in this report.

“When I had to pull out of bookings recently, vital legal meetings — including pre-proceedings child protection meetings — could simply not go ahead.

“I’m not sure social workers understand why interpreters haven’t been available lately, or whether they just assume people aren’t turning up for their bookings.”

Of the unpaid fees, the translator said, “While a few hundred pounds might sound small to council bosses, it hits self-employed household budgets hard in the current economic climate.”

With the council’s computers malfunctioning since July, the translators asked if emergency hardship payments, in lieu of invoices being settled, were a possibility.

“It’s bewildering that they didn’t set them up immediately.”

The translators appear to have been caught in the cross-fire of a turf war at Fisher’s Folly. In one email, David Wheeler, the council’s business and service compliance operations manager, wrote: “The delay has been caused by central processes that we are currently negotiating with the accounts payable team and governance…

“We do not agree with their position.”

Said the translator: “Hearing that CTIS and central accounts/governance are actively arguing while workers go unpaid is alarming.” Some of the workers have become concerned about whether they will ever get paid and whether the bankrupt borough has run out of money once again.

“Without straight answers from the top, the situation has become ridiculous.”

To make a bad situation worse, in one chain of emails, a senior council official broke all kinds of data protection laws by sending out a mass email – with every address clearly  seen in the cc field.

At the end of September, Simon Robson, Croydon’s director of operations for adult social care, wrote from his office on the second floor of Fisher’s Folly “to apologise unreservedly… for the delay in recent payments to you”.

No idea: cabinet member responsible Yvette Hopley

Robson’s email continued: “As David Wheeler has advised you, we have moved to a new system that supports all things CTIS but unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances the payment processes became delayed – hence the issue that has arisen in the last few weeks.

“We have been working extremely hard with our new provider to ensure that this issue is managed as quickly as possible – please be aware it is not the provider’s fault – so moving forward the payments process will return to the timescales you have been used to over many years.”

Another month later, the problems have still yet to be fixed.

“Since colleagues can no longer afford their bills, many of us have stopped accepting bookings,” the translator told Inside Croydon.

“That means essential meetings are actively being cancelled or postponed, leaving vulnerable non-English speakers stranded without professional support.

“The failure sits squarely with finance and accounts, yet nobody higher up is taking proper ownership.”

And they add: “Communication from the council has been pretty dismal.

“We keep getting fobbed off with vague lines about holding on and how ‘every effort is being made’.”

Several translators say that they have repeatedly been asked to re-invoice for unpaid amounts, and issued with multiple purchase orders for the same booking.

Some are contemplating taking the council to the small claims court, a quick and inexpensive way of appearing before an independent judge, who can order payments to be made, plus costs. It would represent an ignominious new low for the basket-case council.

Alarmed: Cllr Stuart King

Councillor Stuart King, the leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall, has written to Mayor Perry over what he described as “an alarming situation”. According to King, neither the Mayor nor Yvette Hopley, the Sanderstead councillor who serves as cabinet member for health and adult social care, had been made aware of the situation by council bosses.

King wants emergency payments to be made to all affected interpreters, and for outstanding payments to be made within a week.

Mayor Perry has failed to reply to King’s urgent email.

Today, Councillor King told Inside Croydon: “It is shocking that the council has treated its own interpreters in this way.

“More alarming still is that neither Mayor Jason Perry nor his cabinet member was aware of the situation until I brought it to their attention.

“This raises serious questions about how the council is being managed, how information is being communicated to those in charge, and whether basic oversight is being exercised.

“It is further evidence of the serious organisational problems within Croydon Council and raises fundamental questions about the Mayor’s grip on the organisation he is responsible for leading.”

Jason Perry is paid £86,000 per year as Mayor of Croydon."
https://insidecroydon.com/2026/10/30/council-fails-to-pay-200-interpreters-for-more-than-three-months/amp/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Finding online information in your own language is an empowering experience, but a language must be consistent to maximize its effectiveness. Without uniform spelling rules and established grammar, meanings vary too much to be useful

"Haitian Creole in the digital age

How digital advancements are transforming the accessibility and usage of Haitian Creole.

Editor’s note: In recognition of International Creole Day, observed annually on Oct. 28, The Haitian Times is republishing this story, originally published on May 29, 2024, exploring the place of Haitian Creole in the digital age. As technology continues to shape how we communicate, the preservation and accessibility of Haitian Creole remain important conversations. We revisit this piece as part of our ongoing coverage of the language’s cultural significance, evolution and future.

As Haiti confronts ongoing crises, Haitian Heritage Month emerges as a powerful reminder of the enduring elements of our culture that we continue to celebrate. Among these, Haitian Creole stands as a beacon of resilience and cultural identity. This month offers a unique opportunity to honor and promote our heritage, particularly through the advancement of our language. As we explore the digital advancements that have transformed the accessibility and usage of Haitian Creole, we see how technology not only preserves but also amplifies our cultural expression on a global scale.

The digital realm has become a key frontier in this cultural promotion. If it seems that you have recently encountered more well-crafted, grammatically correct Haitian Creole in online platforms, you are not mistaken. Although Haitian Creole was declared as one of the two official languages of Haiti in 1987, standard French is still prevalent in formal discourse in Haiti, especially in financial and legal proceedings. All of this is changing with the advancement of digital media. With its inclusion in the language menu of Google Translate and a fully localized interface in Facebook, Haitian Creole has made significant strides in the digital realm over the past years. Amidst rising globalization and worldwide migration streams, access to languages of limited diffusion, i.e. those outside of the traditional set of frequently encountered languages, has become ever more important. Haitian Creole is spoken by 12 million people worldwide and is the third most common language in Florida. Even so, the recent linguistic advances didn’t just happen on their own.

The traditional stereotype of a translator as a bookish person working with a paper dictionary no longer holds true. Modern translators make use of advanced, interconnected software to conduct their research online. Entire teams of trained linguists – based in the U.S. and Haiti – collaborate to prepare and edit translations from English into Haitian Creole. Although news reports about the breakthroughs of AI appear to suggest otherwise, machines alone are not capable of producing fully accurate translations. While major languages such as those spoken at the UN have extensive corpora based on dictionaries and centuries of published materials, Haitian Creole, which has been a predominantly spoken language in the past, cannot rely on comparable resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) engines must be fed relevant information before they can begin the work of learning from it, and in the case of our language, they can only draw on limited data. Before an online tool such as Google Translate can produce basic phrases in Creole, translators must therefore pour over long vocabulary lists to confirm equivalencies. As you will surely have noticed, such tools struggle to translate complex texts that include special professional terms or slang.

The expansion of Haitian Creole in the digital age results from the confluence of multiple historical, legal, and economic factors. The devastating earthquake of 2010 in Haiti led to a spike in demand for language services, as international aid organizations scrambled to provide local assistance in Haiti and realized that materials offered exclusively in French did not always meet the needs of the local population. At the same time, the growing number of new immigrants to the United States who speak a primary language other than English has compelled government agencies at all levels to offer professionally translated versions of civic content. For example, the State of New York approved a sweeping language access law in 2022 that mandates translating the content of state publications into 12 different languages spoken in the state, as determined by census data. One of these languages is Haitian Creole. Haitians who settle in the U.S. are also a powerful economic force – as students, employees, and consumers. Consequently, businesses have shown an increasing interest in producing content such as employee manuals, lease agreements, or vocational instructions in Haitian Creole. This boom in demand for language services in turn has created new job opportunities for educated bilingual speakers who can help cross the linguistic divide as translators (who write texts) or interpreters (who offer spoken services, for example in courts or hospitals).

Finding online information in your own language is an empowering experience, but a language must be consistent to maximize its effectiveness. Without uniform spelling rules and established grammar, meanings vary too much to be useful. There have been extensive efforts to standardize the usage rules for Haitian Creole, led by the Haitian Creole Academy and other language advocates. The booming demand for translated content has not only driven this harmonization further but has also helped define new Haitian Creole words for modern concepts, for example the names of the omnipresent emojis in social media. In the course of this process, Haitian Creole has attained a different level of significance. While educated speakers tended to emphasize their knowledge of French in formal encounters in the past, modern Haitians perceive Haitian Creole as a powerful means to unite their community and to celebrate their culture. Although the translation industry helps to elevate and preserve our rich linguistic heritage, it is up to individual Haitians to contribute to this trend."
by Marleen Julien
Oct. 28, 2026
https://haitiantimes.com/2026/10/28/haitian-creole-digital-age/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Artificial intelligence is changing translation education, not only because it can translate texts, but also because it is changing the way students learn, instructors assess their work and universities understand academic honesty. With tools such as ChatGPT becoming increasingly capable of producing fluent translations, an important question comes to mind: How can we prepare future translators to use AI effectively without losing the skills, judgment and responsibility that make them professionals?

Not every student has the same access to AI
Another important issue discussed in the chapter is digital inequality. It is easy to assume that all students have equal opportunities to use modern technology, but this is not always the case.

Some students can afford paid subscriptions to advanced AI and translation tools, while others depend on free versions with fewer features. Some have reliable internet connections and suitable computers, while others face financial or technical difficulties. Access may also be affected by geographical restrictions and local regulations.

These differences can influence academic performance. If an assignment allows students to use advanced AI tools, those who have access to better technology may enjoy an advantage over classmates who cannot afford it. The result may be an assessment that measures not only translation competence, but also a student’s financial resources and technological opportunities.

This raises a question of fairness. How can a university compare the performance of students who have worked with different levels of technological support?

One possible response is to ensure that students have equal access to the tools required for a particular assignment. Another is to design assessment tasks that make the student’s own knowledge and decision-making visible, rather than allowing the quality of the final text to depend mainly on the technology available.

Fairness in the AI era does not mean giving every student exactly the same tool in every situation. It means making sure that differences in access do not unfairly determine educational results.

Can instructors know whether a student used AI?
Transparency is another major challenge. Universities may require students to disclose whether they have used AI, but such rules are not always easy to enforce. Some students may be reluctant to admit using these tools, even when their use is permitted under certain conditions.

Instructors may turn to AI-detection software in an attempt to identify machine-generated work. However, the chapter discusses the limitations of relying on detection and the risk that decisions may be influenced by suspicion rather than reliable evidence. A student’s writing may be wrongly questioned, while the use of AI in another assignment may go unnoticed.

This creates a difficult situation for both students and instructors. If the institution depends too heavily on detection, assessment can become a contest in which students try to conceal their use of AI and instructors try to discover it. Such an approach does little to encourage honest learning.

A more constructive solution is to make the translation process part of the assessment. Students can be asked to explain the difficulties they encountered, identify the changes they made to an AI-generated draft and justify their translation choices. They may also be required to provide the prompts they used, the machine’s initial output and a record of their revisions.

These measures would help instructors understand not only what the student submitted, but also how the final translation was produced. They would encourage students to take responsibility for their decisions and make their own contribution clearer.

The purpose should not be to catch students out. It should be to create an educational environment in which honest use of technology is possible and the student’s real learning can be assessed.

When AI reproduces human bias
The ethical questions about AI are not only about academic honesty. They are also about the language, values and ideas that AI systems may repeat in their translations.

AI systems learn from large amounts of existing texts and other data. If these materials contain stereotypes or unfair views, AI may repeat them in its translations. This can affect how people, cultures, men and women, and different social groups are presented in another language.

For example, a translation may use words that support a stereotype or present a certain group in an unfair way. This problem may not be easy to notice, especially when the translation is grammatically correct and sounds natural.

This is especially important when translating sensitive texts about identity, politics, culture or social relations. A translator must not only check whether the words are correct, but also whether the translation gives the meaning of the original without adding unfair or harmful ideas.

The problem becomes more difficult when we cannot clearly understand how an AI system reaches its results. If an AI translation contains biased or discriminatory language, who is responsible? Is it the developers who designed the system, the institution that uses it or the translator who accepts its output?

More than one party may be involved, but this does not remove the translator’s responsibility to check the final text. The chapter, therefore, stresses the importance of teaching students how to recognise bias, question the ideas behind AI-generated language and understand the possible results of their translation choices.

Teaching students to think, not just use technology
One important idea in the chapter is that translation education should not only teach students which tools to use and how to use them. Students also need to understand when a tool is suitable, when its results should be questioned and what may happen if they accept its suggestions without checking them.

This requires what the authors call digital reflexivity. In simple words, it means thinking carefully about how we use technology and examining our own decisions when working with it.

A student should not accept an AI translation simply because it sounds good. The student should compare it with the original text, check important information and terminology, and consider whether the machine has understood the context correctly. Students should also know that AI can give answers that sound convincing but may be wrong or have no clear support.

Instructors can develop these skills through practical classroom activities. They can ask students to compare different AI translations, find possible bias, identify mistakes and explain why they accepted or rejected certain suggestions. Students can also write short comments explaining their choices and the reasons behind them.

These activities would make ethics a practical part of translation training instead of a subject discussed only in theory. They would also help students understand that professional translation is not only about producing a fluent text. It also requires good judgment, an understanding of the reader and responsibility for the meaning of the message.

The difference between academic and professional ethics
The chapter also discusses the relationship between ethical behaviour at university and ethical behaviour in professional translation. The two are closely connected, but they are not always the same.

At university, students may be asked to explain when and how they use AI so that instructors can assess their work fairly. In professional translation, however, the rules for using translation technology may depend on the agreement with the client, the type of work and the need to protect confidential information.

A professional translator may use a dictionary or a translation tool without mentioning every resource used. But AI can raise additional questions, especially when the work contains confidential documents or sensitive information. The translator must consider whether the tool is suitable and whether sending information to an external system could put the client’s data at risk.

Students, therefore, need to understand the difference between using AI as a learning tool and using it to provide a professional service. They should also learn how to explain their decisions when questions arise about the quality, accuracy or ethical side of their work.

This is an important responsibility for universities. They should prepare students not only to pass their examinations, but also to deal with the real ethical problems they may face after graduation.

Rethinking the way translation is assessed
Perhaps the most important point in the chapter is that universities need to reconsider how they assess translation skills in the age of AI.

If instructors look only at the final translation, it may become more difficult to know what a student can really do. A well-written text does not always mean that the student understands the original, can identify mistakes or knows how to make the right translation decisions.

The authors suggest giving more attention to the process of translation, not only to the final result. Instead of asking for a completed translation alone, instructors can ask students to record the steps they followed, explain how they used AI and give reasons for their changes. Short learning journals, translation comments and self-assessment activities can help instructors understand how students reached their final results.

Universities can also combine assignments that allow the use of AI with classroom exercises or examinations where students must show their skills without it. In this way, instructors can assess both traditional translation skills and the ability to use modern technology critically.

These changes would make assessment closer to the needs of professional translation. In the translation industry, knowing how to use AI is becoming more useful, but knowing how to check its results is still essential.

The aim is not to return to a world without technology. It is to make sure that technology helps students learn instead of doing the learning for them.

A more responsible future for translation education
The discussion by Bo Li and Yuan Liu reminds us that AI is developing faster than many educational policies and ethical rules. Universities, instructors and students are still learning how to deal with tools that can perform tasks once seen mainly as human language skills.

There is no single rule that can solve every problem. A rule suitable for a simple classroom exercise may not be suitable for a final-year research project. In the same way, the rules for using AI in a translation examination may be different from those for professional work for a client.

What is needed is a clear framework that explains how AI can be used, protects academic honesty, deals with differences in access to technology and encourages students to think carefully about the tools they use. Ethical questions should be discussed openly, and students should have opportunities to practise making responsible decisions before they start their professional careers.

Translation education must also recognize that technology does not remove the need for human responsibility. In fact, as AI becomes better at producing translations that sound convincing, critical thinking becomes even more important. Students need to learn not only how to get an answer from a machine, but also how to decide whether that answer can be trusted.

The responsibility remains human
Chapter 10 presents an important view of the future of translation education. The main question is not simply whether AI should be allowed in the classroom, but how universities can prepare students to use it honestly, fairly and responsibly.

AI can support translation practice, help students consider different ways of translating and provide useful help during learning. However, it can also create problems related to academic honesty, unequal access, hidden bias and questions about who is responsible for the final text.

The answer is neither to accept every new technology without thinking nor to reject it because of fear. The better way is to develop clear rules, effective teaching methods and a stronger sense of professional responsibility.

For translation instructors, this means helping students become more than good users of AI. They should become critical thinkers who understand the limits of technology, can explain their decisions and take responsibility for their work.

Future translators will need technological knowledge, language skills and cultural awareness. But these qualities will not be enough without ethical judgment.

AI may change the way a translation is produced. It should not change our understanding of honesty, fairness and responsibility. These principles must remain at the heart of translation education, even as the tools continue to develop.

Dr Mahmoud Kamel
Professor at the Academy of Arts

https://egyptian-gazette.com/op-ed/when-ai-enters-the-translation-classroom-the-ethical-questions-we-cannot-ignore-2-2/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Mining parallel sentences from archival grammars and dictionaries is a very different route to low-resource MT than paraphrasing a question into dozens of rewrites, and that contrast matters here. One paper builds a pipeline for bitext extraction from documentation materials so languages with almost no web presence can still contribute training data; the other studies uncertainty quantification in question answering, using quality-diversity search to generate controlled input perturbations and measure how unstable a model’s answer becomes.

Mobilizing the Archive: Bitext Extraction at Scale from Archival Documents for Extremely Low-resource Languages
Mine archival grammars and dictionaries for bitext, because an OCR-plus-VLM pipeline extracts usable parallel data for 20 languages and gives low-resource MT up to +15.78 chrF2++ in-context.

While mining parallel sentences from web pages has proven effective for low-resource machine translation, the majority of the world's languages have little to no web presence. What they do have, though, are resources that are the result of centuries of efforts by linguists, such as grammars, dictionaries, and other documentation materials. We propose extracting translation examples from such linguistic resources, which offer parallel data for languages under-represented online and could potentially scale to thousands more languages. We develop a pipeline to achieve this, leveraging an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model as well as a vision language model (VLM), to ensure identified content to be aligned with visual layout information. We demonstrate the utility of the extracted bitexts for bootstrapping translation systems across 20 languages, both by training machine translation models and by applying in-context learning for large language models. For in-context learning, we observe improvements of +15.78 and +6.94 chrF2++ over zero-shot translation for into low- and high-resource languages, respectively.

Neighborhood Elites: Quality-Diversity Search for Uncertainty Quantification in Question Answering
Neighborhood-elites uncertainty sampling is a QA method, but its controlled rewrite space matters for MT evaluation because it separates answer-preserving perturbations by edit type and support explicitness.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable, yet they produce wrong answers indistinguishable from correct ones. In question answering (QA), such an error propagates unnoticed into downstream tasks. Perturbation-based uncertainty quantification (UQ) addresses this by probing a model over a set of input rewrites and reading uncertainty from how much its predictions vary. Yet this set is usually built generically, by free paraphrasing, token-level perturbation, or adversarial search. Such rewrites leave two things uncontrolled that matter in QA: what kind of change is made to the context, and how explicitly the context supports the answer. When neither is controlled, the composition of the set is determined by the generator rather than by design, and the estimate inherits whatever that generator happens to produce. Quality-diversity (QD) search is built to cover a predefined exploration space, so we recast input perturbation as a QD problem and propose neighborhood elites (NE), a neighborhood constructor that spreads answer-preserving rewrites across two axes, the kind of edit and the explicitness of support. We compare NE against three other neighborhood constructors, holding the editor, QA model, uncertainty measure and search objective fixed, and against three scores read from the original context. Across five extractive-QA datasets and five instruction-tuned LLMs, NE improves failure detection against every other constructor in at least 24 of the 25 dataset-model pairs, reaching 0.726 AUROC and 0.211 AUPRC lift over the base rate. Additionally, NE detects failure better than semantic entropy computed over decoder samples, by 0.074 AUROC and 0.062 AUPRC lift, and this advantage widens as the neighborhood grows.

Papers announced by arXiv on Thursday, 29 October 2026, covering submissions from 28 October to 29 October 2026"
October 30, 2026
Machine Translation Digest for Oct 29 2026
https://buttondown.com/daily-mt-picks/archive/machine-translation-digest-for-oct-29-2026/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

A translator must first understand the poet’s intellectual and emotional world and fully absorb the thoughts expressed in the original text

"Understanding author’s thoughts, emotions crucial in translation, says former Chief Justice
Taking part in the book release of Telugu translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, N.V. Ramana says the hallmark of a good translator is the ability to present great literature in simple and accessible language without losing its literary essence

The Hindu Bureau
Former Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana emphasised that understanding the original author’s thoughts, emotions and deeper meaning is essential when translating literary works from one language into another.

He observed that translation was not merely about replacing words with their equivalents in another language, but about conveying the poet’s heart, ideas and experiences to readers. According to him, the hallmark of a good translator is the ability to present great literature in simple and accessible language without losing its literary essence.

He was speaking after unveiling the Telugu translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s internationally-acclaimed literary masterpiece Gitanjali by P. Krishnaiah, Chairman of the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board and former IAS officer. The book was released at a programme organised by Emesco Publishers in Vijayawada on Saturday evening.

Describing Gitanjali as a distinguished work in world literature, Justice Ramana said bringing such a literary masterpiece into another language was no ordinary task. He pointed out that every word in poetry carries a distinct meaning and deeper emotional significance, and translations that fail to capture these nuances cannot do justice to the original work. “A translator must first understand the poet’s intellectual and emotional world and fully absorb the thoughts expressed in the original text,” he said, and appreciated Mr. Krishnaiah for successfully undertaking the responsibility.

He also highlighted the importance of literary and cultural programmes, stating that such initiatives and publications would contribute significantly to the development and promotion of the Telugu language.

Mr. Krishnaiah, through his Telugu translation of Gitanjali, has sought to bring Tagore’s rich literary and philosophical expressions closer to Telugu readers. Particular attention has been given to using simple language while preserving the poetic beauty and literary values of the original work.

Former Andhra Pradesh Minister and former MLA Mandali Buddhaprasad said translations played a vital role in preserving and promoting Telugu language and literature. He appreciated efforts to make internationally-acclaimed literary works accessible to readers in their mother tongue.

Former Minister Dokka Manikya Varaprasad observed that literature was a powerful medium for imparting knowledge and encouraging critical thinking in society. He said such publications helped introduce future generations to the richness of literary heritage.

Emesco Publishers chairman Vijay Kumar said the organisation was committed to making quality literary works accessible to readers and would continue its efforts to introduce world-renowned literature to Telugu audiences.

Literary enthusiasts, educationists and several prominent personalities attended the programme.

Published - October 31, 2026 10:23 pm IST - VIJAYAWADA"
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/understanding-authors-thoughts-emotions-crucial-in-translation-says-former-chief-justice/article71650286.ece
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"How about if everybody spoke English and then we could hire more doctors and fewer translators in our country?”

"JD Vance labeled 'breathtakingly unlikable' for complaining about translators working in the ER
The Vice President made some controversial comments about hospitals employing too many translators, and said that everyone should just be able to speak English

US Vice President JD Vance made the comments during a town hall event for Fox News
Vice President J.D. Vance has been called “disingenuous” for complaining about too many translators in the emergency room during his visit to the hospital with his son.

Speaking at a town hall event broadcast by Fox News, Vance said he visited the emergency room for one of his children recently, adding that it was “all totally fine” and just “young parents being panicky”.

“And I’m sitting in the emergency room, and there are like nine different translators for nine different languages while I’m worried about a medical problem that my son has, and I’m just thinking to myself — how about if everybody spoke English and then we could hire more doctors and fewer translators in our country,” Vance said, to a reaction of cheers from the studio audience...

Bulwark journalist Tim Miller also chimed in, adding, “In this story JD shares that he panicked & took his kid to the emergency room when he was totally fine. Instead of being relieved by that good news, he got upset that there are translators in the hospital helping the sick. This must’ve been before he was Catholic.”

Vance, whose parents-in-law are Indian-born, has faced stark criticism for his comments regarding other cultures recently. The Vice President was also branded a "pathetic embarrassment of a son-in-law" following remarks at a Montana rally earlier in October, where he claimed he "couldn't even pronounce" names and countries in the Middle East and Asia.

Vance was unhappy with the number of translators in the emergency room
"I remember driving to a local gas station to wait hours in line for gasoline that was now, of course, more expensive because of a region of the world made up of countries and names that I cannot even pronounce," he told the hushed venue.

Responding to Vance’s words, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote on X, "JD Vance's in-laws' names are Radhakrishna Chilukuri and Lakshmi Chilukuri. I wonder if he tells them this stuff, too. To their faces. Or does he just save it for white MAGA rallies? Truly a racist, pathetic embarrassment of a son-in-law to his brown Indian immigrant in-laws.”

Immigration has remained a central pillar of the Trump administration, with deportations and detentions climbing sharply over the past year since he came back into power in 2025."
Hannah Broughton
10:16 ET, 30 Oct 2026
https://www.irishstar.com/news/politics/jd-vance-labeled-breathtakingly-unlikable-37827356
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

As part of our Phoenix Poets series, we have the privilege of publishing amazing works of translated poetry. This season, we have a new bilingual Romanian and English edition of Radu Vancu’s The Rope in Bloom, translated by Paula and Cyrus Console-Șoican. This edition of Vancu’s celebrated and devastating 2012 collection marks the full-length English translation of his work. To get to know the collection and the process behind it, bringing it into English, we spoke with Paula and Cyrus Console-Șoican, and here they share about getting to know the world of Radu Vancu, about poetry and translation in the age of AI, and about the regional linguistic quirks they encountered along the way.

Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.

We met in a shared office in the English Department (Kansas University) in 2008; Cyrus, guessing correctly that Paula spoke French, pretended to be having trouble with some lines of Astruc’s “Olympia, la fille des îles.”

What made you excited to work with translating this poet’s work?

The excellence of his book—although there are other reasons for excitement about Vancu. He is a central figure in the poetry community of Romania and beyond: public intellectual, editor of leading Romanian critical journal Transilvania, translator of Pound and Whitman, former president of PEN Romania, organizer of one of the country’s best poetry festivals (Poets In Transylvania, which each year brings writers from all over the world to Sibiu for several days of readings and colloquy). Vancu is a poet for whom poetry means integration into a whole sphere of life—social, political, familial—so that to come to know his work is also to feel you’ve entered the community of people and ideas on which the production of a vital national poetry depends.

Above all, though, we were excited about The Rope In Bloom. It’s an amazing book—the kind of poem that enlarges your model of the human condition even as it reaffirms your solidarity with it. Its themes are among those that exert almost universal fascination: suicide, love, addiction, life after death. The Rope In Bloom tells the story of one generation of a family torn apart by loss, even as the next generation of that family comes into joyous being; the poem’s first person is father to the young family, bereaved to the old. This story spoke intimately to us, who had our own fairly young children with us when we first read Vancu’s poem. We were susceptible to the complex emotion it unforgettably portrays: the crushing love and tenderness (and speechless gratitude) of the young parent, a feeling backed darkly by dread & terror of what might now be taken away.

To us, this mingling of hope with desperation felt timeless but also historically specific. We had both lived through periods of national exuberance—the Romania of the ‘89 revolution; the US of the later 90s when its middle class felt prosperous and destined for a limitless future. We translated the poem during what felt like a generational upheaval of this order. In 1997, the year Vancu discovered his father hanging in the family home, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out the vision of a “benign” global American domination stretching indefinitely into the future; by the time our translation went to press, criminal wars had broken out, escalated, and metastasized from the key “geopolitical pivots” Ukraine and Iran on which Brzezinski’s formula was to depend. Europe was burning. Global surface temperature had blown irrecoverably past the 1.5º limit set by the Paris Agreement, which now seemed like the final exhalation of that optimistic former life.

Translating Rope In Bloom together, often with the children in the next room, gave us the feeling of being brought not only into the ambit of Vancu’s own family or familial personae, but also into a larger collective of Romanian poets and intellectuals working together in service of the true statement—this was a source of excitement and, in the deepest sense, recreation to us.

How would you describe the significance or role of literary translation today?

Maybe the only thing we can say is that literary translation’s significance is suffering profound, rapid change. Large language models produce excellent, sometimes stunningly creative literary translations without apparent time or effort. (We note here, without sanctimony, our commitment to translating without AI assistance. Given the trend toward compulsory AI—the fact that already you can’t look up the meaning of a word or phrase, let alone write an email or text to someone, without receiving suggestions from a machine intelligence—this may require restricting our reference process to dictionaries and other books.)

Why shouldn’t we use AI to translate? We expect it to upend (among many other systems) the entire literary value system. In the world to come it’s conceivable that “handmade” poetry might take on new relevance and cultural weight, but not as an absolute benchmark of literary excellence (we might look to AI for that, just as those interested in absolute excellence in chess look to Stockfish or TCEC—totally legitimate and exciting interests, Cyrus says). Instead, handmade poetry might gain value as a document and register of specific, individual human voices and subjectivities. It’s possible that literary translation will enjoy a similar promotion in status. The practice will remain extremely interesting as a document of one human mind encountering another; people like us will be committed to it because it advances our own literary intelligence and literary relationships. Our own priorities as writers and translators seem to be migrating toward exploration/development/expression of this register, and toward correspondence with a small number of other reader/writers—maybe above all between ourselves.

Tell us a little about your process for translating poetry—are there aspects of the original rhythm or voice you focus on preserving, is there a particular routine or practice you work with, or are there any rules you set for yourself?

Paula writes a detailed literal gloss or trot, which Cyrus then versifies (in the sense of establishing the line as a unit of measure—not in the sense of applying a fixed meter, not for this poem anyway).

Both steps cause infinite problems; the third and longest stage of our process demands lengthy, face-to-face argument of as many potential solutions as one or the other can propose. These discussions most often take place at a table in a cafe. Much of The Rope in Bloom was hammered out at Tucano (Piața Unirii), Harmony (Blvd. Copou), Crows (51st St), and Front Range (Gregory Blvd).

We don’t take avoidable liberties with the denotative content of the original, but decisions about how to put things must serve the goal of producing a poem in English. We want to find the most precise transformation of a Romanian poem into an English one.

What’s something surprising you learned about a language during the translation process?

It’s not surprising for a language to exhibit regional variation around plant and animal names, but it shocked us all the same to hear Vancu use mămăruță instead of buburuză to refer to a ladybird beetle.

Do you see your work in a conversation with a community/communities of other translators or poets?

There are a number of Romanian–English translators we’d like to think of ourselves as working among—Sean Cotter (his version of our other favorite volume of Vancu, Kaddish, now out from Zephyr Press); Monica Cure (Dan Sociu’s Deep Fakes forthcoming from World Poetry); Mihaela Moscaliuc (translator of Carmelia Leonte and Liliana Ursu). Vancu himself is a translator of note.

David Larsen’s Names of the Lion and Mark Alexander’s A Little Book of Du Fu (particularly his use of glosses) expanded our sense of what literary translation can do. Stanley Lombardo is a mentor and inspiration to both of us.

Anything else you’d like us to know?

There are even some who, instead of buburuză, say Boul-lui-Dumnezeu, “God’s Ox.”

Photo credit: Donnelly College
Paula Console-Șoican is a lecturer at the University of Kansas and translator, with Cyrus Console-Soican, of Mircea Ionescu-Quintus’s The Devil’s Grinder: Poems of Hope and Despair from the Forced Labor Camps of Post-WWII.

Photo by Ashley Story
Cyrus Console-Șoican teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is the author of the poetry collections Brief Under Water, The Odicy, and The Wayfarer. He is translator, with Paula Console-Șoican, of Mircea Ionescu-Quintus’s The Devil’s Grinder: Poems of Hope and Despair from the Forced Labor Camps of Post-WWII.

Radu Vancu is university professor of arts and letters at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry and numerous books of prose. He has also contributed important translations into Romanian, including volumes by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and John Berryman. Vancu is editor of Poesis International and Transilvania, founder and organizer of the annual international poetry festival “Poets in Transylvania,” and former president of PEN Romania.

The Rope in Bloom is available on our website. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order directly from us."

https://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2026/10/30/translating-grief-paula-and-cyrus-console-soican-on-radu-vancus-the-rope-in-bloom.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

A clear goal but no single correct answer: translation

Leslie Roberts on Translation, Gamelan, and 1980s New York
By Leslie Roberts
October 30, 2026 11:21 am

Roberts’s solo exhibition at Iowa Projects, is up through November 8.

READ: Kate Briggs's This Little Art, (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2017).
I would love to be a translator if I knew another language well enough. Failing that, I feel lucky to be able to read translator Kate Briggs on that puzzling process, which has a clear goal but no single correct answer. In this engagingly digressive book, she sometimes lets translation become paradigmatic for creative processes in literature and art—all of which, she notes, are mediated by inherent constraints and parameters. As an artist who makes rule-based paintings, this makes perfect sense to me..."

https://www.artforum.com/lists/leslie-roberts-on-translation-gamelan-and-80s-new-york/listen-the-heavenly-orchestra-of-bali-gamelan-semar-pegulingan-saih-pitu-1991/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"‘A privilege, a responsibility and a curse’: The art of literary translation

André Chumko
October 30, 2026

Professor Marco Sonzogni, from Victoria University of Wellington’s school of languages and cultures, co-translated the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson's 2000 book Men in the Off Hours into Italian. Carson was this year awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Post caught up with Sonzogni about the translation process...

Hey Marco! So first things first, how did you connect with Anne?

While I have devoted years to immersing myself in Anne Carson’s literary world, my point of contact with her was her agent via my publisher. My connection is rooted in a deep, scholarly engagement with her writing. The more I read her work, the more I felt the pull to translate it into Italian - even more because Carson is a literary translator herself. That shared vocation created a powerful intellectual bond, even without a direct physical meeting.

How would you describe Men in the Off Hours to someone who’s never read it before?

Layered, complex and extraordinarily beautiful. Even though it was published a quarter of a century ago, it feels as if it were written specifically for our contemporary moment. It represents literary language at its finest, demonstrating everything that literature is capable of when used to express deep feelings, voice radical ideas, and claim new cultural spaces. Anne Carson is one of those writers who extend the possibilities of language.

And how do you actually translate a book, given no two languages are exactly the same?

Translation is an act and a leap of faith. Or, as I like to tell my students, the fattest lie you can tell - that the target text is equivalent to the source text. If it is a lie, and it is, we must tell it in the most convincing way. So, we must acquire and keep honing a cross-cultural mindset and a multilingual skillset.

Literary translation is one of the most challenging but also most rewarding experiences one can have, both as an ordinary or specialised reader. Not only do you get to read literature; you also get to re-write it. A privilege, a responsibility and a curse all at once! So, yes, getting someone else - especially a trusted fellow translator or a trusted reader - to share the love and check your work is the smartest and safest move any translator can make.

What are the most challenging aspects of being a translator?

The most difficult moments occur when linguistic, cultural and literary differences push you into a corner you feel you’re never going to come out of - and if by luck or skill you managed to, it would be to meet many a finger pointed at you by one person or another and for one reason or another. This feeling never leaves you, really, no matter how experienced or seasoned you are, or think you are. Every new translation makes you understand the process more deeply and more holistically - and, one hopes, it also makes you a better translator along the way. Remaining intellectually and emotionally in one piece when faced with the most challenging literary passages in verse or prose is both gruelling and gratifying. Translating a book like Men in the Off Hours was like being on a relentless rollercoaster.

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Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson pictured in 2024.
Photo: Jay Dixit / WikiPortraits
What are the most rewarding parts?

There is a profound joy in seeing an author you have translated receive recognition. What matters is that you’ve contributed to gifting the author and their book new readers, new interpretations, new emotions - an afterlife, as Walter Benjamin would argue. This is the human chain of translation - which can be, perhaps must be, the closest of close-readings and at the same time the most distant of distant (re)writings.

The translator is poised between these two poles, trying to balance objectivity and subjectivity across languages, cultures, traditions, values and audiences. This tension requires that the translator be ready to go the very limit of their intellectual and emotional capabilities.

How is AI affecting the world of translation?

I am an obstinate optimist, and that includes AI. I reject the idea that it will render translators obsolete. Instead, I advocate for human-centred AI. Digital fluency is rapidly becoming the contemporary driver’s licence - a prerequisite for professional life all over the world. AI is a tool, not a substitute for critical thinking. And while AI can provide speed and open new possibilities in the workflow, it must be tempered by the accuracy of human judgment. My current work in AI is guided by human rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We must ensure technology respects cultural specificity and the rigour of human thought.

Finally, what’s something not many people know about you?

To wind down and relax, I love watching videos of trains from all over the world."
https://www.thepost.co.nz/culture/361106110/privilege-responsibility-and-curse-art-literary-translation
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"How a Brock researcher is rethinking translation in the AI era
Friday, October 30, 2026 | by Gillian Min

Associate Professor of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures Nicholas Hauck is researching experimental forms of translation and writing in the age of generative artificial intelligence. During a recent conference at Brock University, Hauck gathered international experts in the field including Michael Cronin, Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin.
Nicholas Hauck is sparking dialogue around experimental forms of translation and writing in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

The Associate Professor of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures’ (MLLC) explores translation as more than a method of transferring meaning from one language to another. For him, the process about exploring new ways to communicate ideas and understanding cross-cultural contexts.

Hauck, who specializes in French, focuses his research focuses on translation as an interconnected creative practice between text, body, mind and the environment.

“With the advancement of technology and AI, it is more important than ever to consider the ways in which the task of language translation can, or can’t, be done by a computer,” he says.

While AI might be successful at translating instructions for everyday activities, Hauck says it falls short when it comes to translating nuances and meaning found in creative texts such as poetry, one of his research interests.

Hauck says that gap also applies to conversational contexts and the subtleties of local dialects, colloquialisms and expressions that don’t translate easily.

“Translation does not always have to produce an exact equivalent. It can involve emotions, sounds or movement. Translation can also be multimodal and what AI cannot yet do is engage in the playfulness and experimental nature of the practice,” he says.

A poem might be best translated through movement, dance or another visual medium, Hauck says, using creative practices to enrichen the experience of understanding the language.

To move beyond conventional notions of translation, it’s essential to understand how the process has evolved over time, says Dante Ognibene, who works alongside Hauck as a research assistant.

“Considering the premise of writing and translation is intriguing, especially when thinking beyond traditional definitions of both practices. Our research explores how meanings are translated through multimodal ways, including in the media, for example,” says the fifth-year Concurrent Teacher Education and French Studies student.

Motivated to add more perspectives to the conversation, Hauck and Ognibene recently gathered scholars, writers and translation experts from across Canada as well as the United Kingdom and United States at Brock to further explore the practice of experimental translation.

Presented by MLLC, the New (and Old) Experiments in Translation (and Writing) Conference took place at Brock’s main campus and the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts from Oct. 22 to 24.

Themes explored included non-conventional forms of writing and translation, multimodal methods of translation, eco-translation and non-human writing.

A key theme discussed was transcreation, a portmanteau of “translation” and “creation” that refers to the process of reimagining texts in different languages and cultures instead of translating word for word and focusing solely on meaning.

“Our goal is to foster dialogue that shifts away from the framework of translation as a transactional model between languages towards recognizing and attempting to account for the multidimensional, multimodal negotiations that occur in and through translation,” Hauck says.

It’s clear, Hauck notes, that the conversation surrounding translation and AI is here to stay — but translation encompasses so much more.

“Translation is really about care and hospitality for others, for our environment and for all the living worlds we cohabitate. If we want to keep living in and with these worlds respectfully, ethically, then we’re going to need translation to develop relationships.”"
https://brocku.ca/brock-news/2026/10/how-a-brock-researcher-is-rethinking-translation-in-the-ai-era/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus