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Charles Tiayon
July 4, 2:35 PM
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Oxford Languages are working to make our language data available as widely as possible to support under-resourced languages and global varieties of English. "If you have a smartphone or use some of the biggest search engines, then you have Oxford Languages’ dictionaries at your fingertips. While the Oxford English Dictionary is our flagship title, we don’t just hold English language data. In support of our mission at OUP—to advance the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide—we work with cutting-edge technology providers to make Oxford Languages’ data available as widely as possible. One of our aims is to digitize under-resourced languages to support localization. We service over 60 languages, and in 2024/25, we launched 10 new language datasets, ranging from Indonesian, to Sanskrit, to Assamese. For such languages, we might develop the content with out partners, or we may acquire and develop it by working with native linguists, local agencies, authors, institutes, foundations, and our in-house development teams. Under-resourced languages
Sometimes our customers will request a new language dataset for their digital products, but we also look for gaps in the market. In high demand and under-resourced, in 2024, we successfully added the leading Indonesian Monolingual Dictionary to our language portfolio. Sourcing, developing and investing in under-resourced languages helps to widen access to these languages, while also digitally preserving culture and history. Alexandra Feeley
Director of Business and Market Development
“In countries where English is commonly spoken but not the main language, you are forced to use English for technology because the features don’t tend to support native speakers. When I open my phone or my email nowadays, I expect predictive text, to fill in the blanks, to spell check. But when you look at Indian languages or African languages for example, there isn’t that same level of native digitalization. “This is why we have created resources to allow technologists to develop the tools for those under-resourced languages. If you can experience something in your native language, it becomes an extension of you and it’s then a lot easier to relate to products and to expand your usage of things.” Some of the under-resourced languages we’re working on include Hebrew and Catalan. When we work on such projects, our teams make sure we’re best representing the language and how it is spoken by reviewing corpora, including inflection coverage and having complete and short definitions. World Englishes
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. However, English is not the same language that it was when the First Edition was published in 1928. Danica Salazar
OED World English Editor “Since then, it has become a truly global language, spoken by billions of people of immensely varied origins and backgrounds—and as these people continue to contribute to the richness and diversity of the English lexicon, so will the OED continue to adapt its policies and practices in order to ensure that these contributions are represented in the dictionary.” Collectively, we refer to global varieties of English as ‘World Englishes’, supporting our goal in the lead up to the centenary of the OED’s First Edition in 2028 in widening the geographical coverage of the dictionary. Our World English programme recognizes that English is a world language, and so British English is no longer regarded as the dominant form of English but just one of many varieties. Each quarterly update of the OED now includes examples from different World Englishes. You can find out more in the March 2025 update, which features ‘untranslatable’ words. As language continues to evolve, we regularly update our datasets to make sure our customers’ dictionary displays, games, mobile applications, and other solutions stay current with modern English. You can find out more about this here. Another ongoing project is the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), which will apply the depth and rigour of the OED’s historical methodology specifically to the study of African American English. A diverse team of lexicographers and researchers are creating a dictionary that will illuminate the history, meaning, and significance of this body of language. More than 1,350 meanings for 1,100 words are now in draft with 300 words finalized. John McCullough, Lexicographer at the ODAAE, said: “What is really important about the ODAAE is our opportunity to represent speakers of African American English in a way that is both accurate and respectful to the enduring legacy of the language, and provide high-quality research evidence that highlights its importance to the cultural and linguistic landscape of English throughout history. “This is a language variety that has thrived in its expression of Black identity, often despite and in spite of historical marginalization and stigmatization. We are proud of the work we have done to include a wide range of entries that reflect the ways in which AAE is a distinct yet inextricable foundation of American English and continues to linguistically innovate and spearhead cultural change.” Anansa Benbow, also an ODAAE Lexicographer, said: “African American English has undeniably influenced global English. I am proud to help document its lexicon through my work on the ODAAE, a project that is about amplifying voices, histories, and identities, as well as honouring and preserving the richness of African American English. It is a project that speaks to the heart of our mission at OUP.”
New technologies help our data go further
The OED Labs initiative is helping the shape the future of the Oxford English Dictionary research experience through new technologies. We have been piloting an AI search assistant on OED.com for users to search across the dictionary’s content quickly, without needing to understand the many different filters that are available. We are also exploring how we support our lexicographers to use AI to research, revise, and publish OED entries more quickly, as well as developing prototypes to investigate how OED data can further empower research. Elinor Hawkes, Senior Product Manager, notes: “The OED has a long history of embracing new technologies and we’re excited to see what the future holds. Our dictionary data not only includes contemporary and historical definitions, but also data how, when, where, and by whom words were used. By coupling this rich dataset with emerging technologies, we are able to support new avenues of research better than ever before.”
3 July 2025
You can find out more about Oxford Languages 👇🏿
https://corp.oup.com/spotlights/making-language-data-available-and-representative-worldwide/
#metaglossia_mundus
Researchers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East are building their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence
"In a high-stakes artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, an equally transformative movement is taking shape elsewhere. From Cape Town to Bangalore, from Cairo to Riyadh, researchers, engineers and public institutions are building homegrown AI systems, models that speak not just in local languages, but with regional insight and cultural depth.
The dominant narrative in AI, particularly since the early 2020s, has focused on a handful of US-based companies like OpenAI with GPT, Google with Gemini, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude. They vie to build ever larger and more capable models. Earlier in 2025, China’s DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, added a new twist by releasing large language models (LLMs) that rival their American counterparts, with a smaller computational demand. But increasingly, researchers across the Global South are challenging the notion that technological leadership in AI is the exclusive domain of these two superpowers.
Instead, scientists and institutions in countries like India, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rethinking the very premise of generative AI. Their focus is not on scaling up, but on scaling right, building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities.
“How do we make sure that the entire planet benefits from AI?” asks Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a lead developer of InkubaLM, a generative model trained on five African languages. “I want more and more voices to be in the conversation”.
Beyond English, beyond Silicon Valley
Large language models work by training on massive troves of online text. While the latest versions of GPT, Gemini or LLaMa boast multilingual capabilities, the overwhelming presence of English-language material and Western cultural contexts in these datasets skews their outputs. For speakers of Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages, that means AI systems may not only stumble over grammar and syntax, they can also miss the point entirely.
“In Indian languages, large models trained on English data just don’t perform well,” says Janki Nawale, a linguist at AI4Bharat, a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “There are cultural nuances, dialectal variations, and even non-standard scripts that make translation and understanding difficult.” Nawale’s team builds supervised datasets and evaluation benchmarks for what specialists call “low resource” languages, those that lack robust digital corpora for machine learning.
It’s not just a question of grammar or vocabulary. “The meaning often lies in the implication,” says Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. “In isiXhosa, the words are one thing but what’s being implied is what really matters.” Marivate co-leads Masakhane NLP, a pan-African collective of AI researchers that recently developed AFROBENCH, a rigorous benchmark for evaluating how well large language models perform on 64 African languages across 15 tasks. The results, published in a preprint in March, revealed major gaps in performance between English and nearly all African languages, especially with open-source models.
Similar concerns arise in the Arabic-speaking world. “If English dominates the training process, the answers will be filtered through a Western lens rather than an Arab one,” says Mekki Habib, a robotics professor at the American University in Cairo. A 2024 preprint from the Tunisian AI firm Clusterlab finds that many multilingual models fail to capture Arabic’s syntactic complexity or cultural frames of reference, particularly in dialect-rich contexts.
Governments step in
For many countries in the Global South, the stakes are geopolitical as well as linguistic. Dependence on Western or Chinese AI infrastructure could mean diminished sovereignty over information, technology, and even national narratives. In response, governments are pouring resources into creating their own models.
Saudi Arabia’s national AI authority, SDAIA, has built ‘ALLaM,’ an Arabic-first model based on Meta’s LLaMa-2, enriched with more than 540 billion Arabic tokens. The United Arab Emirates has backed several initiatives, including ‘Jais,’ an open-source Arabic-English model built by MBZUAI in collaboration with US chipmaker Cerebras Systems and the Abu Dhabi firm Inception. Another UAE-backed project, Noor, focuses on educational and Islamic applications.
In Qatar, researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, have developed the Fanar platform and its LLMs Fanar Star and Fanar Prime. Trained on a trillion tokens of Arabic, English, and code, Fanar’s tokenization approach is specifically engineered to reflect Arabic’s rich morphology and syntax.
India has emerged as a major hub for AI localization. In 2024, the government launched BharatGen, a public-private initiative funded with 235 crore (€26 million) initiative aimed at building foundation models attuned to India’s vast linguistic and cultural diversity. The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and also involves its sister organizations in Hyderabad, Mandi, Kanpur, Indore, and Madras. The programme’s first product, e-vikrAI, can generate product descriptions and pricing suggestions from images in various Indic languages. Startups like Ola-backed Krutrim and CoRover’s BharatGPT have jumped in, while Google’s Indian lab unveiled MuRIL, a language model trained exclusively on Indian languages. The Indian governments’ AI Mission has received more than180 proposals from local researchers and startups to build national-scale AI infrastructure and large language models, and the Bengaluru-based company, AI Sarvam, has been selected to build India’s first ‘sovereign’ LLM, expected to be fluent in various Indian languages.
In Africa, much of the energy comes from the ground up. Masakhane NLP and Deep Learning Indaba, a pan-African academic movement, have created a decentralized research culture across the continent. One notable offshoot, Johannesburg-based Lelapa AI, launched InkubaLM in September 2024. It’s a ‘small language model’ (SLM) focused on five African languages with broad reach: Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa.
“With only 0.4 billion parameters, it performs comparably to much larger models,” says Rosman. The model’s compact size and efficiency are designed to meet Africa’s infrastructure constraints while serving real-world applications. Another African model is UlizaLlama, a 7-billion parameter model developed by the Kenyan foundation Jacaranda Health, to support new and expectant mothers with AI-driven support in Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.
India’s research scene is similarly vibrant. The AI4Bharat laboratory at IIT Madras has just released IndicTrans2, that supports translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam AI, another startup, released its first LLM last year to support 10 major Indian languages. And KissanAI, co-founded by Pratik Desai, develops generative AI tools to deliver agricultural advice to farmers in their native languages.
The data dilemma
Yet building LLMs for underrepresented languages poses enormous challenges. Chief among them is data scarcity. “Even Hindi datasets are tiny compared to English,” says Tapas Kumar Mishra, a professor at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in eastern India. “So, training models from scratch is unlikely to match English-based models in performance.”
Rosman agrees. “The big-data paradigm doesn’t work for African languages. We simply don’t have the volume.” His team is pioneering alternative approaches like the Esethu Framework, a protocol for ethically collecting speech datasets from native speakers and redistributing revenue back to further development of AI tools for under-resourced languages. The project’s pilot used read speech from isiXhosa speakers, complete with metadata, to build voice-based applications.
In Arab nations, similar work is underway. Clusterlab’s 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset is the largest of its kind, meticulously extracted and cleaned from the web to support Arabic-first model training.
The cost of staying local
But for all the innovation, practical obstacles remain. “The return on investment is low,” says KissanAI’s Desai. “The market for regional language models is big, but those with purchasing power still work in English.” And while Western tech companies attract the best minds globally, including many Indian and African scientists, researchers at home often face limited funding, patchy computing infrastructure, and unclear legal frameworks around data and privacy.
“There’s still a lack of sustainable funding, a shortage of specialists, and insufficient integration with educational or public systems,” warns Habib, the Cairo-based professor. “All of this has to change.”
A different vision for AI
Despite the hurdles, what’s emerging is a distinct vision for AI in the Global South – one that favours practical impact over prestige, and community ownership over corporate secrecy.
“There’s more emphasis here on solving real problems for real people,” says Nawale of AI4Bharat. Rather than chasing benchmark scores, researchers are aiming for relevance: tools for farmers, students, and small business owners.
And openness matters. “Some companies claim to be open-source, but they only release the model weights, not the data,” Marivate says. “With InkubaLM, we release both. We want others to build on what we’ve done, to do it better.”
In a global contest often measured in teraflops and tokens, these efforts may seem modest. But for the billions who speak the world’s less-resourced languages, they represent a future in which AI doesn’t just speak to them, but with them."
Sibusiso Biyela, Amr Rageh and Shakoor Rather
20 May 2025
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2025.65
#metaglossia_mundus
"Michal Kosinski’s recent study on theory of mind (ToM) tasks given to different large language models (LLMs) (1) is fascinating and offers many insights into the continued evolution and development of LLMs.
When testing ToM in animals, much ethological research has focused on differentiating “genuine” ToM from other cognitive functions. Morgan’s Canon recommends using “lower” rather than “higher” psychological faculties to explain animal behavior where possible (2). While this “canon” may lack justification, “association-blindness” is also problematic (3).
Researchers working in developmental psychology and animal behavior have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to rule out alternative explanations (4), gradually building cumulative cases based on converging evidence (5). We suggest that the same should be done with LLMs. Kosinski considered some alternative explanations and included control trials to exclude simple heuristics (1). We suggest that this should be expanded by examining other alternatives like associative learning, which can be achieved through simple electronic circuits (6) and can be explicitly trained.
Given the sudden jump in performance in newer models, it is likely that LLMs have either been explicitly trained or engineered to solve ToM tasks, which could explain some observed differences from humans (7). Explicit training would likely result in overinferring false beliefs when a similar pattern exists. For example, stating that the container is transparent [inspired by the “goggles experiment” in ethology (8)] should not result in false beliefs while retaining a similar structure to ToM tasks. We suggest that wrongly inferring a false belief in such a scenario would be indicative of explicit training.
LLMs use mathematical representations of word vectors in a multidimensional space that include word associations and positions. Each vector is interpreted through surrounding vectors to give a broader context. Such structured composition can mimic the logic of its training data, given that logical relationships often result in specific vector patterns. LLMs are trained on texts created by humans as well as using reinforcement learning from human feedback (9). Both the training data and the feedback come from humans who possess a ToM, making it at least possible for LLMs to pass ToM tasks simply through pattern recognition.
Testing this would require ToM tasks with radically different patterns (not just novel particulars) from the ones found in the existing literature included in the training data. Alternatively, a significant improvement in ToM task performance in older models through training without model tuning (10) would indicate that patterns in the training data rather than in the model can account for task performance.
None of this implies that LLMs cannot have a genuine ToM. However, we propose that successfully solving isolated ToM tasks is insufficient evidence to indicate the presence of ToM (5). While the studies conducted by Kosinski (1) and others (7) are important and relevant, we suggest that attributing ToM to LLMs may be premature until simpler explanations can be ruled out and a cumulative case based on converging evidence can be made.
Acknowledgments
Author contributionsD.K.F.P. convened discussion group; S.K.Y.P., M.D.B., and A.H. participated in discussion group; and D.K.F.P., S.K.Y.P., M.D.B., and A.H. wrote the paper."
Competing interestsThe authors d
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2507080122
#metaglossia_mundus
According to psychologists like Steven Pinker, music is a peripheral part of our humanity. If music vanished overnight, Pinker argues, "the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." For Nietzsche, this is a radical mistake.
"Pinker vs Nietzsche: Is music the basis of language?
Language is born out of music
4th July 2025
Kathleen Higgins | Kathleen Higgins is a professor of philosophy at Austin, Texas University. Her work focuses on continental philosophy, philosophy of the emotions, and aesthetics.
According to psychologists like Steven Pinker, music is a peripheral part of our humanity. If music vanished overnight, Pinker argues, "the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." For Nietzsche, this is a radical mistake. In this article, Kathleen Higgins presents Nietzsche's argument for music being the foundation of language, without which our lives would not be recognizably human at all. Far from being peripheral, music is essential to our humanity. As Nietzsche wrote late in life: "Without music, life would be a mistake."
Music is a pervasive presence, not only marking special occasions like birthdays and weddings, but also serving as background for daily activities like driving, exercising, or watching a show. So prevalent is music in our ordinary routines that it is hard to imagine what our lives would be like without it.
But cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker considers music more or less dispensable. “Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how,” he remarks, “music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” He contends that music is a “spandrel,” in the terminology of biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a by-product of the way we have evolved, but without evolutionary value itself. Pinker calls music “auditory cheesecake.” It “tickles” a number of our mental faculties, but is no more essential to human life than cheesecake is to our diet. In this respect, music is unlike language, which is an important evolutionary adaptation that aids in our survival.
___
Our ability to communicate meanings linguistically presupposes our musicality.
___
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that Pinker has it all wrong, particularly in his comparison of music and language. Nietzsche rejects the idea that language is more fundamental than music to the life of our species. According to him, our ability to communicate meanings linguistically presupposes our musicality. Without music, he argues, we would not have language as we know it.
The idea that music is a precondition of language may sound far-fetched, but debates about whether music or language is more fundamental have been longstanding in Western thought. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle examined the connection between music and language when they considered poetry set to music. They argued that in such settings, musical rhythms and melodies should support the texts that they accompanied. This view led late Renaissance opera composers to develop the recitative, which involved setting texts so that the music mimicked the rhythms and contours of speech. The recitative was so musically constrained that composers interspersed recitatives with arias, providing opportunities for singers to show off their virtuosity.
SUGGESTED VIEWING
Dostoevsky vs Nietzsche
With Niki Seth-Smith, Janne Teller, Oliver Ready, Kathleen Higgins
Early Christian thinkers debated whether God had endowed human beings with music as part of their nature or whether music was a later human invention. Modern thinkers disagreed on the origin of music and language and whether one preceded the other. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that language and music emerged from a common expressive mode—a view that in broad terms continues to have some currency. Herbert Spencer maintained that language came first, with music developing as a way of heightening emotion in speech. Charles Darwin, by contrast, contended that the melodic and rhythmic features of nonhuman animal vocalizations developed as means for attracting members of the opposite sex, suggesting that music (in some sense of the term) was prior to language."
https://iai.tv/articles/pinker-vs-nietzsche-is-music-the-basis-of-language-auid-3247
#metaglossia_mundus
"Russian companies are hiring Korean-language translators and cultural experts as thousands of North Korean laborers pour into Russia to fill construction and infrastructure jobs, the Daily Storm news outlet reported.
North Korea has emerged as one of Russia’s key allies since the invasion of Ukraine, sending thousands of troops and workers to Russia. This influx has created a demand for translators to manage the thousands of North Koreans now working in the country.
Job postings for Korean interpreters — some offering salaries as high as $4,000 per month — have appeared on major Russian job sites and niche Telegram channels in recent weeks, the Daily Storm reported.
One recent listing from Strana Development, a construction firm based in Moscow, sought an interpreter fluent in Korean with knowledge of North Korean culture and etiquette to work on a construction site in the capital.
Similar vacancies have appeared on Telegram channels for translators.
A reporter from the Daily Storm called the phone number on a post seeking a Korean language specialist for work with construction teams in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.
The reporter was told that the position was intended for North Korean citizens, adding that “groups of 30 to 35 people will be arriving every seven to 10 days and will be assigned to various construction sites.”
“The main tasks are to help the workers adapt to their job sites, organize daily routines, provide safety briefings and define the scope and methods of work,” the employer added.
NEWS
North Korea Targets Russian Tourists with New Beach Resort
READ MORE
The influx of workers has prompted academic and military institutions to step in. The Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), Russia’s top diplomatic training university, recently advertised a position for a Korean military translation instructor.
Applicants are required to have military experience or an advanced academic degree, with salaries ranging from 100,000 to 120,000 rubles per month ($1,000 to $1,300).
Translation services are also being sought for more formal business engagements.
The outsourcing company Excelsior recently posted an opening for an interpreter to accompany a delegation of North Korean businessmen, with duties including providing live interpretation at meetings and events.
Pavel Belenets, a representative of the Primorsky-based development firm Eskadra, said in late June that more than 150,000 North Koreans have submitted job applications to work in Russia.
He estimated that around 15,000 are currently employed, mostly in construction and restoration projects, a figure that could potentially reach 50,000 by the end of the year.
NEWS
North Korea Will Send Thousands of Military Personnel to Help Rebuild Kursk Region, Shoigu Says
READ MORE
Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said last month that some 6,000 North Korean “specialists” would be deployed to the Kursk border region to help with reconstruction following Ukraine's cross-border incursion.
Similar arrangements have been discussed for war-torn areas of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces, including the Donbas region.
United Nations sanctions prohibit member states from hiring North Korean workers abroad due to fears that their wages are funneled directly to the regime in Pyongyang.
Human rights groups have long documented harsh conditions for North Koreans working overseas, citing cases of surveillance, forced labor and the confiscation of salaries by the state."
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/07/04/russian-firms-seek-north-korean-translators-to-support-influx-of-workers-a89683
#metaglossia_mundus
"Newswire / July 3, 2025 / Propio, a leading innovator in interpreting, translation, and localization solutions, is proud to announce its acquisition of CyraCom International Inc., one of the world's largest remote interpretation providers that specializes in healthcare. This historic transaction brings together two of the largest U.S.-based Language Service Providers (LSPs), creating an unparalleled partnership capable of delivering expanded solutions, deeper expertise, and even greater resources to clients across healthcare, government, insurance, education and enterprise sectors.
"This is a transformative moment in our industry and Propio is taking the lead in it," said Marco Assis, CEO of Propio. "We are combining two trusted leaders with decades of remote-interpretation excellence. Together, we'll set an even greater standard for access, speed, and quality in language solutions."
Clients of both organizations will benefit from a seamless transition, continued support from their dedicated teams, and immediate access to enhanced technology and service options. The combined entity will allow for Propio's AI-powered automation and workflows, technology solutions, and compliance infrastructure, to drive even better outcomes for the new clients and the communities they serve.
"Language access is something both organizations are very passionate about and, together, we will be able to more effectively help our clients remove barriers to communication and care," added Assis.
The integration process is already underway, with both leadership teams working closely to ensure a smooth and transparent experience for all clients.
About Propio Language Services
Propio is an industry-leading language solutions partner that combines high-quality human expertise with advanced technology to support interpretation, translation, and localization needs across healthcare, education, legal, financial, and other industries.
To support its clients, Propio offers secure, easy-to-use tools like the Propio ONE app for interpretation, Propio Workforce OS® for resource service coordination in healthcare, and AI translation solutions to increase speed and efficiency. Powered by a network of over 20,000 linguists covering 300+ languages, Propio now works with more than 12,000 client partners worldwide.
Propio's vision is simple: to make communication easier through the use of advanced technology.
About CyraCom
CyraCom has been a leader in language services for over 30 years, specializing in over-the-phone and video interpretation. Known for its rigorous interpreter training and U.S.-based operations, CyraCom has supported clients across healthcare, legal, and public service industries.
Media Contact:
Sarah Haner, Marketing Director
communications@propio.com
SOURCE: Propio Language Services"
https://www.morningstar.com/news/accesswire/1045129msn/propio-language-services-acquires-cyracom-combining-two-of-the-worlds-largest-healthcare-interpretation-providers
#metaglossia_mundus
"Quelles initiatives pour préserver les langues en danger ?
Publié le : 03/07/2025 - 17:30
Environ 7 000 langues sont parlées dans le monde, mais celui-ci est dominé par une vingtaine de langues ! Qu'en est-il des autres ? En cette décennie des langues autochtones décidée par l'UNESCO, RFI a consacré un grand dossier aux langues en danger, conçu par Baptiste Condominas.
Combien de langues disparaissent chaque année ? Difficile à quantifier, car il est parfois impossible de savoir à quel moment le dernier locuteur d'une langue meurt.
Depuis quelques années, les chercheurs s'y intéressent, parce que lorsqu'une langue disparaît, c'est toute une culture qui disparait avec.
L'Unesco juge que si rien n'est fait, la moitié des langues pourrait disparaitre au cours de ce siècle. L'Asie-Pacifique est la première aire géographique concernée avec notamment les langues indonésiennes, ou encore les langues aborigènes en Australie. Certains pays d'Afrique comme le Cameroun, le Nigeria, l'Éthiopie ou le Soudan sont concernés.
Pourquoi chaque année, certaines langues disparaissent ? Comment protéger des langues en danger ? En quoi le changement climatique peut-il favoriser la disparition de certaines langues ? Quelles sont les conséquences de la disparition de langues chaque année ? Y a-t-il des mouvements de revendications pour la sauvegarde de ces langues ?
Certaines langues disparaissent, car certains groupes sont obligés d'abandonner leur langue ancestrale au profit d'une langue dominante. Il y a trois contextes : la colonisation européenne qui a entraîné la mort de millions d'autochtones, la formation des États-nations avec une éducation monolingue dans une langue unique et les périodes de crises comme les guerres, les épidémies. Les langues ne meurent pas, elles sont tuées.
Evangelia Adamou
Exemples avec :
Le live : une langue finno-ougrienne complexe, à déclinaisons, encore parlée en Lettonie par une vingtaine de personnes, dans un pays de 1,8 million d’habitants. Parlée autrefois par les communautés lives sur les terres de Courlande et au nord de Riga, les locuteurs sont aujourd’hui dispersés et se mobilisent pour que cette langue ne disparaisse pas. Depuis 1999, cette langue a le statut de langue indigène. Une vraie langue survivante !
Avec notre correspondante en Lettonie, Marielle Vitureau.
Le taa : une langue d'Afrique australe, parlée par environ quatre mille locuteurs au Botswana et en Namibie. Une langue «qui a le système sonore le plus complexe du monde» avec plus d'une centaine de sons qui a fasciné Ian Brennan, compositeur et producteur récompensé aux Grammy Awards en 2011 pour le meilleur album de musique du monde !
Avec notre correspondant régional, Valentin Hugues.
Le sapara : une langue indigène de l'Équateur. L'une des dernières locutrices, Mukusawa Santi Ashanga, est décédée en mars dernier à Quito. Les Saparas étaient un peuple indigène assez nombreux au XVIIè siècle puis les maladies (fièvre jaune, fièvre du caoutchouc) ont décimé une partie de la population qui est passée de 100.000 à 20.000 personnes au début du XXè siècle. Il resterait aujourd'hui quelques centaines de personnes, mais qui ne parleraient pas ou peu la langue.
Avec notre correspondant en Équateur, Eric Samson..."
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/de-vive-s-voix/20250703-quelles-initiatives-pour-pr%C3%A9server-les-langues-en-danger
#metaglossia_mundus
"L’Académie française décerne le Grand Prix Hervé-Deluen à Souleymane Bachir Diagne
VENDREDI 4 JUILLET 2025 À 22H51
Dakar, 4 juil (APS) – L’Académie française a décerné le Grand Prix Hervé-Deluen 2025 à Souleymane Bachir Diagne, en reconnaissance de ‘’sa contribution remarquable à l’éclat de la langue et de la pensée françaises’’, ont annoncé, vendredi, les Éditions Albin Michel, éditeur du philosophe sénégalais.
‘’Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer que quatre auteurs publiés chez Albin Michel sont nommés aux prix de l’Académie française’’, a écrit la maison d’édition sur sa page Facebook.
Elle précise ensuite que Souleymane Bachir Diagne est lauréat du Grand Prix Hervé-Deluen, qui récompense ‘’toute personne ou toute institution qui contribue efficacement à la défense et à la promotion du français comme langue internationale’’.
Décernée chaque année par la fondation Hervé-Deluen depuis 2007, cette distinction est devenue le Grand Prix Hervé-Deluen en 2015.
Le lauréat reçoit une récompense de 25 000 euros, soit 16,3 millions de francs CFA.
M. Diagne, âgé de 69 ans, éminent spécialiste de l’histoire des sciences et de la philosophie islamique, a enseigné pendant plusieurs années à l’université Cheikh-Anta-Diop de Dakar (Sénégal), avant d’intégrer l’université Columbia (États-Unis d’Amérique).
Il est auteur de nombreux livres, dont un essai consacré à la traduction, ‘’De langue à langue : l’hospitalité de la traduction’’ (2022), publié chez Albin Michel.
Le poète François Cassingena-Trévedy, le scénariste et réalisateur Thierry Thomas, et l’écrivain Ruben Barrouk, tous de nationalité française, sont les autres auteurs publiés par Albin Michel et nommés aux prix de l’Académie française 2025.
M. Cassingena-Trévedy est lauréat du Grand Prix Moron. Il a été récompensé pour ‘’Paysan de Dieu’’ (2024).
Thierry Thomas est lauréat du prix Roland-de-Jouvenel, qui lui a été décerné pour le roman ‘’Feydeau s’en va’’ (2024).
Ruben Barrouk, qui est d’origine marocaine, est lauréat du prix Mottant. Il a été récompensé pour le roman ‘’Tout le bruit du Guéliz’’ (2024).
FKS/ESF "
https://aps.sn/lacademie-francaise-decerne-le-grand-prix-herve-deluen-a-souleymane-bachir-diagne/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Internet haut débit : Starlink lance ses services au Tchad avec une offre illimitée à 32 000 FCFA/mois
Le Tchad devient le 24ᵉ pays africain à accueillir Starlink, avec des forfaits inédits et compétitifs pour combler le déficit de connectivité, notamment en zone rurale.
Un kit starlink au Tchad
Le fournisseur d'accès à internet par satellite Starlink, filiale de SpaceX d'Elon Musk, a annoncé ce jeudi 3 juillet le lancement officiel de ses services au Tchad. « L'Internet haut débit de Starlink est désormais disponible au Tchad, marquant le 24 e pays, territoire ou marché en Afrique où Starlink est disponible ! », a précisé un communiqué de l’entreprise.
D’après les informations sur le site de Starlink, les utilisateurs tchadiens pourront bénéficier d'un internet haut débit avec deux offres tarifaires compétitives : un forfait de 18 000 Fcfa pour 250 Go et une offre illimitée à 32 000 Fcfa par mois.
Une stratégie de couverture et des partenariats locaux
Le déploiement de Starlink au Tchad s'inscrit dans une stratégie visant à combler le déficit de connectivité internet, particulièrement dans les zones reculées du pays. Le 13 mars 2025, le Tchad avait signé une convention de partenariat avec Starlink pour bénéficier de cette connexion à haut débit, avec l'objectif d'améliorer l'accès des citoyens à l'information publique et aux services administratifs en ligne. Ce lancement est également le fruit d'un accord stratégique signé le 5 mai 2025 entre Airtel Africa et SpaceX pour commercialiser les services Starlink sur le continent. De son côté, Moov Africa (Maroc Telecom), déjà présent via sa filiale tchadienne, l’un des leadeurs du secteur, devrait être le principal concurrent de Starlink sur ce marché.
L'arrivée officielle de Starlink promet de transformer l'accès à internet au Tchad, où la connectivité était jusqu'ici limitée dans de nombreuses zones. Le ministre tchadien des Télécommunications, Michel Boukar, avait déjà annoncé en mars dernier l'autorisation de Starlink, insistant sur l'objectif d'une meilleure couverture du territoire. Cette initiative place le Tchad comme le premier pays de la CEMAC à bénéficier officiellement des services Starlink, alors que des négociations sont toujours en cours au Cameroun, première économie de la zone. Les offres tarifaires tchadiennes sont par ailleurs plus abordables que celles pratiquées en République Démocratique du Congo (RDC), où un forfait résidentiel illimité ou de 50 Go coûte environ 144 000 FC (environ 51,4 USD)"
Internet haut débit : Starlink lance ses services au Tchad avec une offre illimitée à 32 000 FCFA/mois"
Publiée jeudi 3 juillet 2025 à 17:50:26
Modifiée jeudi 3 juillet 2025 à 17:50:41
Par
Albert AMOUGOU https://share.google/RdaXUtWl5im4tXwXQ
#metaglossia_mundus
"Local languages are becoming an important tool of identity and cultural assertion due to their superior literary expressions.
As India takes confident strides, it is shedding the mantle of English language supremacy. Indian writers want the world to engage in conversations with them - in their native languages. Local languages are becoming an important tool of identity and cultural assertion due to their superior literary expressions. This shift in perspective has not come under a government scheme. Publishing industry is witnessing a churning.Indian spices
Though, Indian bibliophiles have enjoyed a globalised world view. Russian, French, German, Latin American or Japanese - the best literature of these languages has been made available in English and Hindi translations for decades.
But this has been a one-way traffic. While Indians were reading world literature; the language-literature of India was not made available to the global audience. Thereby limiting the reach of writers writing in 24 Indian languages.
While Indian writers, writing in English — Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie et. al. became global celebrities; this was not so for other Indian languages. Few writers in Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese etc. produced world-class literature yet their reach remained limited to the region.
Indian spices
Not only great works of literature written in regional languages of India were not getting translated into foreign languages; almost no translation activity was taking place among the 24 literary languages recognised by Sahitya Akademi of India. This made the writers feel isolated. Even when they did get translated, the translations remained obscure, locked in some government library. Readers could not access them.
Changing the script
This scenario is changing. When Penguin India, the largest English publishing house in India, publishes an English international award-winning book; it simultaneously gets it published in Hindi translation. Almost all popular authors of English want their books to be available in Hindi. Hindi readership is, by some rough estimates, five to ten times greater than English.
"Japanese yakuza novel wins UK award for crime fiction in translation
A novel depicting yakuza gangster life by a Japanese author has won a prestigious British award for crime fiction.
The Crime Writers' Association awarded its 2025 Dagger prize for crime fiction in translation to Otani Akira's "The Night of Baba Yaga" in London on Thursday. The novel was translated by Sam Bett.
Created in 1955, the Daggers are considered one of the world's most prestigious awards for crime and thriller writing along with the Edgar Awards of the United States.
The story is about the bond between a woman known for her fighting prowess and the only daughter of the head of a Japanese yakuza group. The woman is forced to become the daughter's bodyguard.
It depicts how the two women come to trust each other against the backdrop of the criminal underworld.
The fast-paced novel makes use of graphically violent scenes and language to depict the two women in pursuit of their hopes for their lives.
The book was first published in Japan in 2020. Translated versions later hit the British, US, and South Korean markets. Some reviews described the novel as one that empowers women in a sophisticated way.
Otani, 44, is from Tokyo and was originally a scenario writer for video games. She has written novels and essays on a variety of themes, including love and families.
The Daggers' translated novel category was created in 2006. Japanese author Yuzuki Asako's Butter was also shortlisted for this year's prize.
Otani is the first Japanese Dagger winner and the second Asian, following South Korean writer Yun Ko-eun who won in 2021."
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20250704_05/
#metaglossia_mundus "Japanese yakuza novel wins UK award for crime fiction in translation
A novel depicting yakuza gangster life by a Japanese author has won a prestigious British award for crime fiction.
The Crime Writers' Association awarded its 2025 Dagger prize for crime fiction in translation to Otani Akira's "The Night of Baba Yaga" in London on Thursday. The novel was translated by Sam Bett.
Created in 1955, the Daggers are considered one of the world's most prestigious awards for crime and thriller writing along with the Edgar Awards of the United States.
The story is about the bond between a woman known for her fighting prowess and the only daughter of the head of a Japanese yakuza group. The woman is forced to become the daughter's bodyguard.
It depicts how the two women come to trust each other against the backdrop of the criminal underworld.
The fast-paced novel makes use of graphically violent scenes and language to depict the two women in pursuit of their hopes for their lives.
The book was first published in Japan in 2020. Translated versions later hit the British, US, and South Korean markets. Some reviews described the novel as one that empowers women in a sophisticated way.
Otani, 44, is from Tokyo and was originally a scenario writer for video games. She has written novels and essays on a variety of themes, including love and families.
The Daggers' translated novel category was created in 2006. Japanese author Yuzuki Asako's Butter was also shortlisted for this year's prize.
Otani is the first Japanese Dagger winner and the second Asian, following South Korean writer Yun Ko-eun who won in 2021."
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20250704_05/
#metaglossia_mundus
Incomes and literacy rates are growing nationwide; contributing to publishing in local languages with a rigour not known before. An estimate puts roughly 19,000 active publishers in India, mostly in Hindi and other regional languages like, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, which have had a long tradition of libraries and reading clubs. The corporate publishing houses are tapping these small publishers to capitalise on their writing traditions.
International Booker and translation
Recognition to the quotidian; the voices emanating from narrow, smaller spaces has come, by the fillip given to translation as a literary activity. The Booker International Prize 2022, received by Hindi novelist Geetanjali Shree for Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell and for 2024 by Banu Mushtaq’s, Heart Lamp translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has put the status of translator at par with the author. The Booker Prize money of 50,000 pounds is divided equally between the author and the translator to acknowledge the significant contribution of translators in bringing literary works to a wider audience.
“The coming decade of world literature belongs to translators. They are getting money and recognition at par with the authors. Most literary awards are going to be based on translations which used to be a missionary work; in India translators’ names did not appear on the cover page. This is changing—the translator shares the same space as the author. The world is going to be unified by translators; they have more power now,” comments Madhav Kaushik, President, Sahitya Kala Akademi.
Indian spices
Almost all major universities are teaching comparative literature and translation, which is no more limited to the linguistics department; where the linguists debated over the nomenclature—to call it trans-literation or trans- creation. Foreign embassies are engaging translators to introduce their literature to India and vice versa.
Translation has arrived as a well-paid, well-recognised creative art.
Self- translation
While the name and money of the Booker Prize is shared with the translator, India’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, preferred to translate his own poems from original Bengali into English. His collection of poetry Geetanjali, for which he was granted the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, Tagore did not want to rely on others’ interpretations of his poems. He was not always satisfied with the translations done by others —as he wanted to ensure his voice and finer nuances were preserved in the English version. Though, several English writers pointed at the flaws in his translations for their Indianness—Tagore stuck to his conviction—to his uniqueness. Indian spices
Tagore was not alone. Many great authors and poets translated their own works. Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, known for his complex and intricate characters, translated his own works from Russian into English. So did Samuel Beckett, a French Nobel Laureate, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and others. Despite the best efforts of the translator, at times the author feels, no one else can get the soul of his/her writing. Especially in the case of poetry.
In the market-driven economy of demand and supply, nuances are replaced by speed. Now, readers demand instant translations of popular books.
From creativity to AI
Several established authors are engaging in translation to enhance their understanding of creative processes of writing — of translating thoughts and emotions into a language. Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer award-winning author says, translation has transformed the way she writes; in her book Translating Myself and Others. Deepa Bhasthi, translator of Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada short story collection Heart Lamp, says, “I was very deliberate in my choice to not use italics for the Kannada, Urdu or Arabic words that remain untranslated in English.” This is reflective of a new kind of confidence in the local culture and its expressions, while engaging with a global audience.
Writers no longer want to wait for the long process of translation that takes years and, at times, decades to see the light of other languages. Vikram Sampath, a well-known published author of several research-based books in English, says he had to wait for his books to be translated into Kannada, his mother tongue, for almost 15 years. His well-researched book; Splendours of Royal Mysore, meant for Kannada readers; his two-volume authentic biography of Veer Savarkar; Tipu Sultan; The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum etc. are still not available in Kannada or Marathi languages.
Not giving up, he has started a start-up NAAV AI, that aims to get writings translated into Indian languages “to infuse frenetic speed, functionality and efficiency into the publishing industry through AI-generated translations.”
The future of the publishing world belongs to good translators — with or without AI.
By Vandana Shukla
July 3, 2025, 12:00 PM -
https://newsarenaindia.com/undefined/translation-gateway-to-global-cultural-understanding/49198
#metaglossia_mundus
"Opera browser update adds built-in translation, custom cursors, and multitasking tools
By Wayne Williams
Norwegian browser company Opera has launched a major update for its desktop browsers Opera One and Opera GX, adding a privacy-focused translation feature, improved multitasking tools, and a new level of personalization for GX users.
The update rolls out as Opera continues to try to compete with bigger players like Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox by leaning into user-driven customization and features.
SEE ALSO: How safe are your browser extensions? New free database helps you find out
Opera Translate is the highlight of the new release. Built directly into Opera One and Opera GX, the tool detects when a webpage is in a different language and instantly offers to translate it, with options for one-time or always-on translation for specific languages.
Unlike most browser translation tools, Opera Translate keeps all translation processing in-house, running through servers based in Europe and avoiding third-party data sharing. This privacy angle is a central part of Opera’s pitch, especially at a time when data handling practices are increasingly under public scrutiny.
The translation feature uses AI-enhanced technology from Lingvanex and supports over 40 languages. According to Opera, this was one of the most requested additions by its global user base. For users browsing news sites in foreign languages, shopping internationally, or researching across different regions, the feature removes a recurring problem while maintaining control over personal data.
In Opera One, the update enhances Split Screen functionality. Now integrated with Tab Islands, the browser allows users to open side-by-side views within grouped tabs, giving them more flexibility when comparing content or managing multitasking workflows. Opera also enabled toolbar access within each tab in Split Screen mode. That means tools like Bookmarks, Downloads, and the Snapshot tool remain accessible without exiting the current view. The Music Player, often used by Opera One’s productivity-focused users, also stays visible throughout Split Screen browsing.
Talking about the new feature, Tomasz Stawarz, Director of Product at Opera, said:
"The internet connects the world, but language can still be a barrier to exploring its full potential. With the introduction of Opera Translate, we're giving our users access to content and ideas from across the globe without compromising their privacy."
Opera GX Browser
Opera GX, the gaming-focused variant of the browser, is pushing even further into personalization with a new feature that lets users fully customize their mouse cursor across the browser interface.
Opera says it is the first browser to offer this level of cursor control, thanks to a collaboration with Sweezy Cursors. More than 30 cursor packs, including animated and static versions, are now available directly through the GX Store. Users don’t need to modify system settings or install extensions to apply these custom designs.
Opera says security was a key concern with this feature as many cursor customization tools from third-party extensions can introduce risks by accessing page content.
Opera GX avoids this by executing all cursor rendering locally within the browser engine, ensuring privacy and performance. The cursor customizations also extend across the entire interface, offering a consistent and immersive browsing experience. Opera says it plans to roll out branded cursor packs based on popular game IPs in the future.
The update also brings Opera GX's Tab Islands feature out of early access and into the stable release. Tab Islands are designed to make managing browser tabs easier by letting users group tabs by purpose and assign colors and names to those groups. This is especially useful for gamers who might want to separate game guides from Discord or YouTube. Whole Tab Islands can now be saved as single Speed Dials on the browser’s homepage, letting users relaunch entire research or gaming setups instantly.
Opera’s focus on built-in tools and user customization is a deliberate strategy to differentiate itself from its larger rivals. While Chrome and Edge dominate market share, Opera has found a niche with users who want a browser that feels personal and doesn’t rely heavily on third-party add-ons. It’s also targeting users who value European data privacy standards, something that becomes a clearer competitive angle with features like in-house translation.
Compared to Firefox, which is also user-focused but more barebones out of the box, Opera continues to add quality-of-life updates with a tighter integration between features. And while Chrome remains the go-to browser for the vast majority of web users, it typically lags in native customization without the use of extensions.
Users can get all of these new features by updating to the latest version of Opera One or Opera GX manually or waiting for the automatic update to arrive. Opera GX is available on both Windows and macOS, and all features, including the animated cursors and Tab Island upgrades, are live now."
https://betanews.com/2025/07/03/opera-browser-built-in-translation/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Japanese yakuza novel wins UK award for crime fiction in translation
A novel depicting yakuza gangster life by a Japanese author has won a prestigious British award for crime fiction.
The Crime Writers' Association awarded its 2025 Dagger prize for crime fiction in translation to Otani Akira's "The Night of Baba Yaga" in London on Thursday. The novel was translated by Sam Bett.
Created in 1955, the Daggers are considered one of the world's most prestigious awards for crime and thriller writing along with the Edgar Awards of the United States.
The story is about the bond between a woman known for her fighting prowess and the only daughter of the head of a Japanese yakuza group. The woman is forced to become the daughter's bodyguard.
It depicts how the two women come to trust each other against the backdrop of the criminal underworld.
The fast-paced novel makes use of graphically violent scenes and language to depict the two women in pursuit of their hopes for their lives.
The book was first published in Japan in 2020. Translated versions later hit the British, US, and South Korean markets. Some reviews described the novel as one that empowers women in a sophisticated way.
Otani, 44, is from Tokyo and was originally a scenario writer for video games. She has written novels and essays on a variety of themes, including love and families.
The Daggers' translated novel category was created in 2006. Japanese author Yuzuki Asako's Butter was also shortlisted for this year's prize.
Otani is the first Japanese Dagger winner and the second Asian, following South Korean writer Yun Ko-eun who won in 2021."
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20250704_05/
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Award-winning poet discusses 'What Is Korean Literature to the International Reader?' at the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum
Poet Kim Hye-soon speaks during the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum held at Yonsei University in Seoul on Friday. (LTI Korea)
Translated literature is a gift to the language it arrives in, acclaimed poet Kim Hye-soon said, describing it as the Korean language offering a present — “like tossing a new pebble into the well of another language.”
“I think translating Korean literature isn’t about elevating Korea’s literary status. Rather, it’s about expanding the boundaries of the target language. Translation is a reciprocal relationship, not a one-way transaction,” Kim said.
“We already know how much the boundaries of Korean have broadened through translations of foreign works — how our ways of thinking have deepened and diversified. I believe the same holds true in reverse.”
Kim spoke at the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum during a wide-ranging onstage conversation with Jeffrey Yang, editor-at-large at New Directions, on the topic “What Is Korean Literature to the International Reader?” New Directions has published two of Kim’s recent English collections: “Autobiography of Death” and “Phantom Pain Wings,” both translated by Choi Don Mee.
Poet Kim Hye-soon (left) and Jeffrey Yang, editor-at-large at New Directions Publishing, attend the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum held at Yonsei University in Seoul on Friday. (LTI Korea)
Fresh from a monthlong European book tour through Germany, Austria and the UK, Kim said conversations with international audiences had energized her in unexpected ways.
“Through these exchanges, I feel as though we’re expanding the ‘territory of poetry.' Maybe that’s why we call out to poets from afar,” she said.
Kim also reflected on the contrast between how literature is discussed at home and abroad.
“In Korea, I’m often asked about ‘Korean literature’ — where it should be heading, what its defining characteristics are — but honestly, I don’t even know where ‘my own literature’ is headed.”
“Outside the country, however, I’ve always had the impression that people focus more on individual works rather than national categories. I can’t recall being asked a question framed around nationality, and we don’t approach their writers that way either.”
While she’s happy to recommend Korean poets when asked abroad and welcomes growing international interest in Korean literature, Kim noted that she has never thought of herself as writing “Korean literature.”
“I’ve always just seen myself as doing ‘literature,’” she said, adding that she hopes policymakers will move beyond broad national labels and show greater respect for each writer’s individuality.
Poet Kim Hye-soon (center) and Jeffrey Yang (right), editor-at-large at New Directions Publishing, attend the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum held at Yonsei University in Seoul on Friday. (LTI Korea)
‘Translation is creative act’
Kim has been steadily gaining international recognition, winning numerous accolades worldwide. In 2019, she became the first Asian woman to win Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.
More recently, she was named an International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature in England in 2022, elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April, and shortlisted for Germany’s international prize for literature this year.
Despite these honors, Kim remains candid about her uncertainty over why her work resonates with readers abroad.
“That’s the part I really don’t understand. Whether in Korea or elsewhere, I don’t know exactly why I have readers. Some may be drawn to the way the translation offers a familiar way of speaking, while others might be intrigued by its unfamiliarity. I think I fall into the latter group.”
What has moved her most, however, is not the prizes but what happens to her translators.
“The most striking moments for me are when those who translated my poems later debuted as poets themselves. Some began writing poems while translating my work, opened up their own poetic worlds, published collections and went on to win major awards. That has been the most memorable part.”
She cited Choi, her longtime English translator, who often says that translating Kim’s poems sparked her own writing practice.
“Just as I discover my poems in the sound drifting through this world, I think there’s a similar kind of discovery at work in poetry translation. Translation is not just word-by-word interpretation; it is a creative act.”
Kim shared her views on the art of poetry translation itself.
“I believe that translating poetry begins with translating its form and rhythm,” she said. “When translators ask me what I want most from them, I always tell them: ‘Translate the rhythm.’”
She also acknowledged the inevitable challenges and occasional mistranslations in the process.
“Sometimes a homonym might be misunderstood, for example, the word for ‘tribe’ was translated as ‘lack,’ or ‘starting a pilgrimage’ was rendered as ‘ending a pilgrimage,’” she said.
But she emphasized that translation is not about nitpicking such errors.
“I think of translation as translating the house the poet built,” she said. “The mistakes I mention are more like a cup placed slightly askew on a shelf in that house, a small detail, but the house itself remains intact.”
Updated : July 4, 2025 - 18:36:10
July 4, 2025 - 15:12:49
By Hwang Dong-hee
hwangdh@heraldcorp.com
https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10524686
#metaglossia_mundus
"L’éditeur bordelais Monsieur Toussaint Louverture annonce une nouvelle traduction de «Frankenstein»
«Frankenstein» ouvre la nouvelle collection de classiques de l’éditeur Monsieur Toussaint Louverture
Après avoir rencontré un succès fulgurant avec la saga Blackwater, les éditions Monsieur Toussaint Louverture annoncent leur entrée dans la réédition de grands classiques de la littérature. Premier titre au programme: Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, dans sa version de 1831, avec une traduction inédite signée Marie Darrieussecq, à paraître le 12 septembre.
L'éditeur de l'un des succès les plus inattendus de ces dernières années avec la saga Blackwater de Michael McDowell, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, a annoncé vendredi se lancer dans la réédition de classiques de la littérature.
Le premier titre dans cette veine sera Frankenstein de Mary Shelley (dans son édition révisée de 1831), avec une traduction inédite de Marie Darieussecq, à paraître le 12 septembre.
«C'est décidé: nous avions envie de revisiter ces grands textes de la littérature mondiale, pour leur donner tout ce que nous avons à donner», a écrit la maison d'édition sur ses réseaux sociaux, avec une photo de la couverture de ce Frankenstein.
«Le hasard nous a fait croiser le chemin de Marie Darrieussecq et sa ferveur pour Mary Shelley et ses créations. Un court texte lu dans la presse nous a tout de suite donné envie de lui écrire pour la convaincre de se lancer. Et elle a accepté», a-t-elle ajouté.
Monsieur Toussaint Louverture édite essentiellement de la littérature étrangère et a connu de belles réussites dans la découverte ou la redécouverte d'auteurs non traduits en France.
C'est le cas de Blackwater de l'Américain Michael McDowell, une saga fantastique et familiale initialement publiée en 1983 et traduite pour la première fois en français en 2022. Les six tomes ont atteint un total d'un million d'exemplaires en un an et demi et continuent à bien se vendre.
Cette maison d'édition est implantée dans un bourg de la région de Bordeaux, Sadirac.
La Britannique Mary Shelley avait achevé à l'âge de 20 ans Frankenstein ou le Prométhée moderne, publié pour la première fois en 1818 et devenu ensuite l'une des fictions les plus lues et adaptées au monde.
Avec AFP"
https://icibeyrouth.com/articles/1319916/lediteur-bordelais-monsieur-toussaint-louverture-annonce-une-nouvelle-traduction-de-frankenstein
#metaglossia_mundus
Valoriser la créativité des traducteurs, c’est privilégier la diversité culturelle et la beauté des langues contre l’uniformisation numérique des textes, fait valoir Philippe Robinet, le directeur-général des éditions Calmann-Lévy.
"La traduction littéraire fait appel à la sensibilité humaine : défendons-la face à l’IA !
Valoriser la créativité des traducteurs, c’est privilégier la diversité culturelle et la beauté des langues contre l’uniformisation numérique des textes, fait valoir Philippe Robinet, le président–directeur des éditions Calmann-Lévy.
La traduction littéraire ne peut être réduite à un simple transfert de mots d’une langue à une autre. Ici, dans une librairie de Lyon, le 26 janvier 2023. (Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas)
par Philippe Robinet, président-directeur général des éditions Calmann-Lévy
publié aujourd'hui à 15h50
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Pour chaque livre traduit, il y a un travail d’une complexité et d’une richesse importantes. Le traducteur n’est pas un simple passeur de mots, il est un créateur à part entière, un artisan du langage qui façonne la réception d’une œuvre, lui donne une nouvelle voix et une nouvelle vie. Sa voix dans une nouvelle langue. Or, à l’heure où l’intelligence artificielle s’impose dans de nombreux secteurs, la reconnaissance du rôle des traducteurs dans le monde de l’édition devient un enjeu fondamental.
Les étudiants en traduction, premières victimes de l’ère ChatGPT
La traduction littéraire est une activité profondément humaine, où la sensibilité, l’intuition, la culture, et la connaissance intime des langues et des contextes jouent un rôle essentiel. Chaque choix du traducteur − un mot, une tournure, un rythme − peut transformer le texte d’origine et influer sur la manière dont le lecteur percevra l’œuvre. C’est un acte de création qui mêle fidélité au texte source et adaptation à la langue cible, dans le but de préserver autant que possible l’esprit, le ton et la puissance évocatrice de l’original.
Cependant, cette fonction est encore trop sous-estimée et le traducteur reste parfois un «invisible» de l’édition. Cette invisibilité est paradoxale, d’autant que le traducteur est indispensable à la circulation des idées et des cultures dans un monde globalisé. C’est pourquoi il est urgent de valoriser ces voix qui, dans l’ombre, donnent vie aux œuvres étrangères."
https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/tribunes/la-traduction-litteraire-fait-appel-a-la-sensibilite-humaine-defendons-la-face-a-lia-20250704_L22BSI27FFD4PKSIK3CHEXEHOY/
#metaglossia_mundus
Le PDG de la Commission de la littérature, de l’édition et de la traduction rencontre l’ambassadrice du Royaume de Norvège en Arabie saoudite
Riyad, 04 juillet 2025, SPA -- Le PDG de la Commission de la littérature, de l’édition et de la traduction, Dr Abdullatif Alwasel, a rencontré aujourd’hui l’ambassadrice du Royaume de Norvège en Arabie saoudite, Mme Kjersti Tromsdal.
Au cours de cette rencontre, les deux parties ont discuté des moyens de renforcer les relations culturelles entre les deux pays, et ont passé en revue plusieurs programmes et initiatives mis en œuvre par la Commission pour encourager les échanges culturels et soutenir les écrivains, les traducteurs et les intellectuels.
Ils ont également exploré les possibilités de coopération dans les domaines de la littérature, de l’édition et de la traduction, ainsi que la participation conjointe à des salons culturels afin de renforcer les liens littéraires entre l’Arabie saoudite et la Norvège.
À cette occasion, Dr Alwasel a présenté plusieurs initiatives destinées à promouvoir les échanges de savoirs, notamment la traduction d’ouvrages norvégiens en arabe et de publications saoudiennes en norvégien, dans le but de diffuser la culture saoudienne à l’international et de favoriser le dialogue interculturel. Par ailleurs, il a invité l’ambassadrice à assister aux prochaines manifestations organisées par la Commission, telles que la Foire internationale du livre de Riyad, le Forum de la traduction et la Conférence internationale de philosophie de Riyad.
-- SPA
02:15 Heure locale 23:15 GMT
0007
https://www.spa.gov.sa/fr/N2351832
#metaglossia_mundus
"Une extension Chrome et Firefox désactive le doublage par IA de YouTube
Article de Pierre Dandumont
Depuis quelques mois, YouTube tend à traduire automatiquement les titres des vidéos dans la langue de l'utilisateur, mais aussi de traduire automatiquement le contenu des vidéos, avec dans de nombreux cas de l'audio généré par une intelligence artificielle1. Si ce comportement vous énerve et que vous utilisez Firefox ou Chrome, il existe une extension : YouTube No Translation.
Un exemple de titres de vidéos traduits automatiquement. Image iGeneration.
Elle effectue quatre opérations sur les vidéos. La première est de garder le titre original, sans afficher la traduction automatique. La seconde est d'empêcher la traduction de la description. La troisième va forcer la piste audio originale dans tous les cas, pour éviter que YouTube impose une version doublée ou générée par IA. Enfin, elle désactive les sous-titres générés automatiquement et force le cas échéant les sous-titres dans la langue originale de la vidéo, s'ils existent2.
MrBeast est mis en avant sur le site de l'extension, mais ses vidéos ne sont pas traduites par IA.
L'extension est gratuite mais l'auteur propose aux personnes qui apprécient son travail de l'aider... peut-être pour lui demander de développer une version pour Safari..."
https://www.msn.com/fr-fr/actualite/technologie-et-sciences/une-extension-chrome-et-firefox-d%C3%A9sactive-le-doublage-par-ia-de-youtube/ar-AA1HVfXB
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Le Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction est attribué à Mariano Rolando Andrade et Christophe Manon pour Chansons des mers du Sud, paru chez L'herbe qui tremble.
Créé en 1976, le Prix Mallarmé est l'une des plus anciennes distinctions consacrées à la poésie de langue française. Décerné par l'Académie Mallarmé, composée de vingt-neuf membres sous la présidence de Sylvestre Clancier, le prix récompense un auteur pour un recueil ou l'ensemble de son œuvre.
Outre la reconnaissance littéraire, il s'accompagne d'une dotation financière et d'une résidence poétique d'un mois à Brive. La remise du prix aura lieu le 8 novembre prochain à la Foire du livre de Brive, avec le soutien de la Ville.
Né en 1950, Valeriu Stancu est une figure reconnue des lettres européennes, auteur d’une œuvre dense, traduite dans plus de vingt pays. Écrivain, traducteur et éditeur, il partage sa production entre le roumain et le français. Son parcours littéraire comprend une soixantaine d'ouvrages parmi lesquels Miroirs du sommeil (L’Arbre à paroles, 2010), Ballade de mon ami le bourreau (Éditions Maïa, 2020) et L’insomniaque fusil de Rimbaud (Phi, 2024)...
Le Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction
Créé en 2022, le Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction distingue les traducteurs et traductrices qui contribuent à faire découvrir en français la richesse de la poésie internationale. La cérémonie de remise se tiendra le 18 décembre 2025 à la Maison de la Poésie de Paris.
Le Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction 2025 revient à l'écrivain et journaliste argentin Mariano Rolando Andrade et au poète français Christophe Manon pour la traduction en français du recueil Chansons des mers du Sud, publié chez L'herbe qui tremble.
Né à Buenos Aires en 1973, Mariano Rolando Andrade est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages parmi lesquels Les Voyages de Rimbaud (1996) et Ballades des mers du Nord (2023). Il a notamment reçu le Prix international Juan Rulfo décerné par RFI. La cérémonie est prévue le 18 décembre à la Maison de la Poésie de Paris.
Christophe Manon, poète prolifique, est connu pour son œuvre traversant poésie, roman et traduction. Il a publié récemment Signes des temps (2024), Tout disparaîtra (2024) et Un amour (2025), ainsi qu’une trilogie aux éditions Verdier (Extrêmes et lumineux, Pâture de vent, Porte du Soleil).
L'an dernier, le Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction a été décerné à Marie Vrinat pour sa version française du recueil Là où nous ne sommes pas de Guéorgui Gospodinov, publié aux éditions Les Carnets du Dessert de Lune. Quant au Prix Mallarmé, il a distingué Alain Breton pour son recueil Je ne rendrai pas le feu, paru aux éditions Les Hommes sans Épaules..."
Par Dépêche
04/07/2025
Contact : depeche@actualitte.com
https://actualitte.com/article/124775/prix-litteraires/prix-mallarme-2025-deux-laureats-pour-celebrer-la-poesie-et-la-traduction
#metaglossia_mundus
"AI safety is a theme rapidly gaining traction across the continent and globally. But rather than echoing familiar concerns about rogue algorithms, killer robots, or existential threats to humanity, a webinar held by the EthicsLab on 18 June 2025 sought to ask a more situated question: what does it mean to talk about safety in Africa, and for whom is safety at stake?
Our guest speaker, Dr. Samuel Segun, Senior Researcher at the Global Centre on AI Governance, offered a panoptic and conceptually sharp overview of current risks, regulatory blind spots, and opportunities for African leadership in shaping AI safety. His framing was especially valuable because it resisted attempts to limit safety to a narrow technical question about models misfiring. Instead, it brought into view the social, political, infrastructural, and epistemic conditions that shape how AI is built, used, and governed on the continent.
Framing the issue: AI Safety ≠ AI Ethics?
Segun opened by clarifying that AI safety and AI ethics, though often used interchangeably, are not quite the same. Safety tends to ask whether a system will behave reliably and avoid unintended harms. Ethics, by contrast, probes whether systems and the societies that shape them are structured in ways that are just, inclusive, and normatively defensible.
Yet in practice, the line blurs. In Africa, like elsewhere, the harms are not abstract but lived, including manipulated elections, surveillance of activists, online gender-based violence, and misinformation campaigns that worsen public health crises. These are not merely questions of safety but equally questions of power. They raise questions about what happens when frameworks of “safety” and “risk” assume a universal subject or an abstract “humanity”, and overlook the uneven geographies of exposure, harm, and harm prevention. Specifically, they overlook the possibility that what is safe for some may not be safe for others.
Although Segun drew a distinction between safety and ethics, his broad framing of safety ended up encompassing many classic ethical concerns like justice, labour exploitation, human rights, environmental harm. Jantina De Vries’ intervention pointed to the risks of this move, asking if ethics loses its critical edge when absorbed into safety. We may come to see political problems as technical ones, or assume that preventing harm is the same as enabling justice.
While AI safety tends to focus on preventing harm or managing risk, ethics asks deeper questions about how technology shapes the way we live, who is included or excluded, and what values guide these choices. De Vries sought to direct attention not just to how systems work, but to how people use them, and to the social conditions that make some groups more vulnerable than others.
Three risk zones: Malicious use, malfunction, systemic harm
Segun drew on the three broad categories of risk identified in the International AI Safety Report (2025), which include malicious use, malfunction, and systemic harm. Each is worth unpacking.
Malicious use includes deliberate weaponisation of AI technologies: surveillance tools used to monitor dissent, deepfakes deployed during elections, voice-cloning scams targeting vulnerable users. African cases abound, from Zimbabwe’s use of facial recognition cameras to Uganda’s police profiling of activists to cybercriminals in Ghana impersonating relatives for mobile money scams. In these cases, AI becomes less a tool for liberation and more a tool for control and deception.
Malfunction refers to unintended but no less harmful failures: biased algorithms trained on non-African data, healthcare chatbots that provide dangerous advice, systems that “hallucinate” but are treated as infallible. The data scarcity in African languages and contexts makes such errors more likely, and the consequences more severe, especially when users are structurally positioned to trust or rely on the system.
Systemic risk looks at the bigger picture. What happens when AI accelerates job displacement, undermines already fragile labour markets, or amplifies environmental harm? What futures are being made impossible or foreclosed? As Segun noted, Africa’s developmental trajectories, especially around tech-enabled outsourcing, may be prematurely cut off by automation. And as data centres expand, their energy and water demands threaten communities already grappling with scarcity.
These risks are neither hypothetical nor are they evenly distributed. As I noted in our discussion, a critical question in assessing these AI safety risks is: who bears the brunt of these harms? Whose access to water is diverted to cool a data centre? Whose job disappears in the integration of chatbots in call centres? Who is profiled, monitored, or manipulated, and who is shielded from those effects? AI safety and risk is never just about technical systems; it is always about people, positioned differently in power and precarity.
Regulating in a global ecosystem
One recurring question in the discussion was whether Africa can meaningfully regulate AI in a world where much of the technology is developed elsewhere. Segun argued that AI regulation cannot be siloed from broader data governance. Foundational protections like privacy, data ownership, and consumer rights are often cited as prerequisites for meaningful AI regulation. But perhaps the more urgent question is: who decides what counts as foundational? In African contexts where precarious labour conditions and environmental vulnerability are already widespread, is it clear that privacy should always be the primary or starting concern? Shouldn’t protections for workers, energy security, or environmental commons be just as foundational given the ways AI technologies intersect with these spheres? What’s at stake, in other words, is not only how we regulate, but which harms we centre in our regulatory imagination.
Some participants pointed to the EU’s AI Act as a possible model, but Segun cautioned against transplanting frameworks without adaptation. Legislation without enforcement, he reminded us, can offer the illusion of protection while leaving underlying harms intact. What is needed is not just policy, but capacity to audit, to adapt, and to govern. Encouragingly, there are efforts underway. Several African countries are drafting AI strategies. Kenya, Segun tells us, is part of the international AI Safety Institute Network (though it does not yet have a domestic institute). But continent-wide coordination remains limited and uneven.
Toward African-led responses
Segun proposed five directions for action, each of which invites further engagement:
A human rights-based approach to AI governance grounded in principles like non-discrimination, privacy, and participation.
An African AI Safety Institute as a dedicated space for research, risk mitigation, and knowledge exchange across the continent.
Early detection systems and tools that can flag AI-generated fakes and scaled manipulation, with support for African languages and local contexts.
Public literacy and capacity-building that includes not only technical training, but critical media and civic education.
Enforcement, not just legislation to ensure that policy frameworks are effectively implemented.
Each of these ideas deserves deeper conversation. Who defines what counts as “safe”? How do we build detection systems without reinforcing surveillance logics? Can public literacy campaigns avoid becoming top-down digital paternalism?
Closing thoughts: On safety, ethics, and imagination
It is clear that the term safety does useful work, alerting us to danger and demanding precaution. But it also has limits. It can drift into technocratic neutrality, obscuring the political choices embedded in design and deployment. Choices about what gets built, how and where; whose data is used; and which harms are prioritised are always shaped by competing values and interests. Safety, and its proxy of risk, can also flatten difference, treating harms as universal rather than situated. Is it worth building on and pushing beyond safety, toward something like justice or even care?"
Dr Anye Nyamnjoh
Senior Research Officer, EthicsLab
01 Jul 2025
https://health.uct.ac.za/ethics-lab/articles/2025-07-01-ai-safety-africa-whats-stake-and-who-decides
#metaglossia_mundus
"From healthcare to higher education, and digital inclusion to identity politics, language is emerging as both a barrier and a bridge in shaping access, justice, and transformation.
These themes took centre stage at the 2025 Southern African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society (SALALS) Conference, held from 25 to 27 June at Nelson Mandela University’s Business School.
Professors Quentin Williams and Pamela Maseko, David Blignaut, Head of Department, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics and Prof Lynn Mario de Souza.
Under the theme “Traditions, Transformations and African Thought: Imagining Linguistics in Africa for the 21st Century,” the conference brought together linguists, educators, and language practitioners from across Southern Africa to interrogate how linguistic practices and policies can better reflect African realities and resist colonial legacies.
“This conference invites us to honour traditions while embracing necessary transformation — and to do so through the lens of African intellectual thought,” said the organising committee in the conference foreword.
“We ask: how can we imagine a linguistics in Africa that is rooted in the continent’s own frameworks of knowing and being?”
Hosted by the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, the conference featured keynote addresses from two globally renowned scholars: Professor Lynn Mario de Souza from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and Professor Quentin Williams from the University of the Western Cape.
Challenging epistemic injustice
Professor De Souza introduced the concept of epistemic activism, critiquing the dominance of the Global North in knowledge production and calling for the recognition of Global South epistemologies.
“We cannot normalise the language of the colonisers,” he said. “Instead, we must embrace double consciousness.”
Prof De Souza challenged the tendency to view language as a monolingual, monocultural system – a perspective that, he argued, fails to reflect the complex, plural realities of African societies. “What we see as pluralism is often interpreted by the North as many monolingualisms,” he explained.
Central to his address was a call to resist this imposed linguistic framing and instead cultivate ways of knowing rooted in African pluralism and multilingual lived experience. He concluded with an invitation to embrace serendipity – the idea of accepting uncertainty and the ongoing nature of communication: “The process of communication is never complete. It’s about constant feedback, adjustment, and learning.”
Language, race and “In Difference”
In his keynote, Prof Williams reflected on the emergence of the non-racial tradition in South African sociolinguistics during the 1980s – a response to the weaponisation of language under apartheid.
While acknowledging the strides made since then, he argued that the field has yet to fully reckon with the legacy of apartheid-era linguistics and its ongoing influence on contemporary understandings of race and language.
To advance the field, Williams proposed the concept of “in difference” – a fluid, relational approach to understanding linguistic identity that moves beyond fixed racial or linguistic categories.
He illustrated this with a case study of the local pop group Woman2Woman, whose performance of a Beyoncé cover, blending Kaaps and South African English, sparked debate around linguistic authenticity. Through this example, Williams demonstrated how marginalised speakers use language to negotiate identity and challenge dominant norms.
In closing, he called for a sociolinguistics that embraces the contested, evolving nature of language and difference.
Reimagining humanities
The conference also featured vigorous panel discussions on the need to localise language policies to support meaningful inclusion across social institutions.
It also included a session titled “Promoting African Scholarship to a Global Academic Audience”, which offered insights into academic publishing, particularly for emerging researchers seeking to contribute to scholarly discourse.
In her address, Prof Pamela Maseko, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, noted the wide representation of institutions from South Africa and abroad – emphasising the global relevance of the conversations taking place.
Prof Maseko framed the conference as a critical space for both reflection and reimagination, especially in addressing epistemic injustices that continue to shape academia and society at large.
She spoke to the historical marginalisation of African languages and knowledge systems, posing the crucial question: Whose language and knowledge matters – and is allowed to be heard – in our academic spaces?
Calling for a truly Africa-purposed humanities education, Prof Maseko stressed the need for curricula that reflect the continent’s realities while advancing transformative societal goals.
In conclusion, she reaffirmed the significance of the conference as an extension of the Faculty's mission to build a Humanities curriculum that is Africa-centred, socially conscious, and ethically grounded.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Learning and Teaching, Dr Muki Moeng, noted that Southern African linguistics and applied linguistics are well-positioned to awaken African scholarship, epistemologies, and systems of thought.
Dr Moeng emphasised the importance of generating knowledge systems rooted in the global South. She concluded by highlighting that this conference reinforces the need for African scholarship that embodies African epistemologies, rather than relying solely on Western paradigms."
01/07/2025
https://news.mandela.ac.za/News/Language-as-a-bridge-and-barrier-SALALS-2025-exp
#metaglossia_mundus
La traduction représente un «soft power» essentiel pour façonner un discours sécuritaire global inclusif et promouvoir la compréhension interculturelle.
"La traduction s’est imposée comme un levier incontournable pour le renforcement de la sécurité nationale et internationale, ont affirmé les participants à un colloque international organisé mercredi à Rabat, sur le thème «Traduction et sécurité : le rôle de la traduction dans le renforcement de la sécurité nationale et internationale.»
Organisée par l’Organisation du monde islamique pour l’éducation, les sciences et la culture (Icesco), en collaboration avec l’Université arabe Naif des sciences de sécurité en Arabie saoudite, cette rencontre a permis de mettre en exergue le rôle multidimensionnel de la traduction, notamment en termes de transfert rapide et précis d’informations sensibles, dans le cadre de la lutte contre le terrorisme et la criminalité organisée ou encore en matière de gestion des crises sécuritaires urgentes.
S'exprimant à cette occasion, le directeur général de l’Icesco, Dr Salem ben Mohammed Al-Malik, a souligné que la traduction représente aujourd’hui un «soft power» essentiel pour façonner un discours sécuritaire global inclusif et promouvoir la compréhension interculturelle, mettant l’accent sur la nécessité de créer des espaces culturels sûrs, fondés sur la diversité linguistique et les valeurs d'entente mutuelle.
Dr Al-Malik a également mis en garde contre une dépendance excessive à la traduction automatique, qui, malgré ses avantages technologiques, demeure incapable de saisir la complexité des contextes culturels et sécuritaires. Dans ce sens, il a rappelé la création par l’Icesco d’un centre spécialisé de traduction et d’édition, dédié à la production de traductions fidèles, respectueuses des spécificités culturelles et sécuritaires, et à la valorisation de la culture islamique sur la scène mondiale.
De son côté, le contrôleur général et porte-parole de la Direction générale de la Sûreté nationale (DGSN) et de la Direction générale de la surveillance du Territoire (DGST), Boubker Sabik, a fait observer que la traduction constitue un maillon essentiel de la coopération sécuritaire et judiciaire internationale, notamment en matière d’extradition, de mandats d’arrêt ou d’exécution des commissions rogatoires.
Il a expliqué que la traduction exige une extrême précision et des compétences élevées, en raison de la sensibilité des informations échangées, qui peuvent avoir d’importantes implications juridiques, notant qu'une traduction rigoureuse contribue à neutraliser les menaces sécuritaires et à renforcer la stabilité.
Évoquant l’impact des technologies, M. Sabik a souligné que la sécurité et la traduction ont toutes deux bénéficié des avancées numériques, notamment de l’intelligence artificielle, dans le traitement rapide et massif de données et de textes, relevant que cette technologie ne saurait remplacer la supervision humaine, notamment dans des domaines sensibles comme la sécurité et la justice.
Pour sa part, le secrétaire du conseil supérieur de l’Université arabe Naïf pour les sciences de la sécurité, Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Harfash, a précisé que l’université a lancé «l'initiative de la traduction sécuritaire» dans le cadre de ses stratégies de recherche visant à soutenir les politiques sécuritaires fondées sur les preuves scientifiques.
Cette initiative tient compte de l'insuffisance des références scientifiques disponibles en langue arabe en matière de formation sécuritaire, a fait observer M. Al Harfash, également chargé des relations extérieures à l’université.
Dans ce contexte, l’université veille à traduire d'ouvrages enseignés dans les établissements de formation sécuritaires les plus prestigieux à l’échelle mondiale, dans le cadre de ses efforts soutenus visant l’amélioration des cursus, a-t-il poursuivi.
Au programme de ce colloque figurent plusieurs axes traitant du «Rôle de la traduction face aux questions sécuritaires et le renforcement de la sécurité nationale et internationale», «Le partenariat stratégique entre les institutions sécuritaires, les experts en traduction et les organisations internationales», «Les défis linguistiques et culturels dans la traduction sécuritaire», «La traduction sécuritaire et les défis de l’évolution numérique» ainsi que de «La traduction et la cybersécurité».
À cette occasion, un mémorandum d’entente a été signé entre le centre de traduction et d'édition et l’École supérieure Roi Fahd de traduction, en vue de renforcer la coopération scientifique et la formation mutuelle, et de promouvoir la traduction au niveau régional et international, dans la voie de la promotion de la connaissance et le soutien des compétences dans le domaine de la traduction spécialisée.
LE MATIN | 03 JUILLET 2025 À 16:15
https://lematin.ma/culture/la-traduction-levier-de-la-securite-nationale-et-internationale/289104
#metaglossia_mundus
Créé en 1995, et d'abord connu sous le nom de Prix Amédée Pichot, le Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles distingue chaque année la traduction littéraire d’une œuvre de fiction contemporaine. Il honore à la fois sa qualité et les défis qu’elle a relevés. Le jury, composé de traductrices et traducteurs aux côtés d'écrivaines et écrivains, vient de dévoiler la liste des six finalistes de l’édition 2025.
"Qui remportera le Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles ?
Créé en 1995, et d'abord connu sous le nom de Prix Amédée Pichot, le Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles distingue chaque année la traduction littéraire d’une œuvre de fiction contemporaine. Il honore à la fois sa qualité et les défis qu’elle a relevés. Le jury, composé de traductrices et traducteurs aux côtés d'écrivaines et écrivains, vient de dévoiler la liste des six finalistes de l’édition 2025.
Le 03/07/2025 à 13:02 par Dépêche
Le Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles souffle déjà ses 30 bougies. Cette année, la remise du prix se fera le vendredi 7 novembre 2025 à la Chapelle du Méjan, à Arles, à l’occasion des 42es Assises de la traduction littéraire.
Le jury 2025 du Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles réunit l’écrivaine et traductrice de l’anglais Jakuta Alikavazovic, l’écrivain et traducteur du russe Yves Gauthier, ainsi qu’Isabelle Kalinowski, spécialiste de la traduction de l’allemand. Emmanuelle Péchenart apporte son expertise du chinois, Delphine Valentin celle de l’espagnol, tandis que Dominique Vitalyos navigue entre anglais, malaisien et indonésien. L’écrivaine Nina Yargekov complète ce jury.
Ensemble, ils ont constitué une liste de 6 ouvrages finalistes, concourant au titre de grand lauréat et à sa récompense de 5000 €. Alors, qui succédera à Monique Baccelli et Antonio Werli, lauréats 2024 pour leur traduction de l’italien de Horcynus Orca, de Stefano d’Arrigo (Le Nouvel Attila, 2023) ?
Voici la sélection 2025 :
Bernard Banoun pour sa traduction de l’allemand (Autriche) de Le champ de Josef Winkler (Verdier, 2024)
Laura Brignon pour sa traduction de l’italien de Les Merveilles de Viola Ardone (Albin Michel, 2024)
Sébastien Cagnoli pour sa traduction du finnois de À la recherche du vivant d’Iida Turpeinen (Autrement, 2024)
Stéphanie Dujols pour sa traduction de l’arabe (Palestine) de Je suis ma liberté de Nasser Abu Srour (Gallimard, 2024)
Laure Hinckel pour sa traduction du roumain de Théodoros de Mircea Cărtărescu (éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2024)
Marily Le Nir pour sa traduction du roumain (Moldavie) de Cette corde qui m’attache à la terre de Lorina Bălteanu (éditions des Syrtes, 2024)
Retrouver la liste des prix littéraires français et francophones
Par Dépêche
Contact : depeche@actualitte.com"
https://actualitte.com/article/124756/prix-litteraires/qui-remportera-le-grand-prix-de-traduction-de-la-ville-d-arles
#metaglossia_mundus
"MONTREAL — Quebec’s language watchdog has changed its tune on whether it’s acceptable to use the word “go” to cheer on sports teams.
In a new guideline posted in its online dictionary, the Office québécois de la langue française says that while “allez” is the preferred term, it’s now “partially legitimized” to use the English word to show encouragement.
The flip-flop comes after the office took a hard line with Montreal’s transit agency, pressing it for months in 2024 to scrub the word “go” from the electronic signs on more than 1,000 city buses.
The watchdog confirmed it had changed its position after The Canadian Press obtained a series of emails through access to information legislation, revealing it gave the transit agency a green light to use “go” in June.
The reversal followed a public outcry on the eve of the Montreal Canadiens’ first playoff home game in April, when the Montreal Gazette reported how the transit agency had replaced “Go! Canadiens Go!” with “Allez! Canadiens Allez!” to stay on the watchdog’s good side.
The revelations prompted French-language Minister Jean-François Roberge to intervene, declaring that the expression “Go Habs Go” is part of Quebec culture, and that any future complaints about the slogan would be dismissed.
That statement verged on political interference and placed the watchdog in a difficult position, according to one expert.
“The office had to respond to a political order,” said Benoît Melançon, emeritus professor of French literature at Université de Montréal. “The minister said, ‘You will accept this,’ so the office had to find a way to accept it.”
The transit agency says it hasn’t decided whether it will put the word “go” back on its bus displays. On Wednesday, a spokesperson said the agency is now “beginning its reflection on the subject.”
In an April statement, Dominique Malack, the president of the language office, agreed that the slogan “Go Habs Go” is anchored in Quebec’s history. Still, she went on to say that the word “go” is an anglicism, and that public bodies have an obligation to use “exemplary” French, which includes using only French words in their signage.
Emails released to The Canadian Press show the transit agency asked the watchdog in May, following the uproar, for authorization to start using “go” again. A month later, on June 6, the language office directed transit officials to its new entry for the word “allez” in its online dictionary of terminology, a reference guide for the proper use of French in Quebec.
The page notes how the anglicism “go” has been used in Quebec since at least the 1980s and is “well-established” in common parlance. “It is considered to be partially legitimized,” the entry says.
When asked by The Canadian Press to comment on the newly released email correspondence, the watchdog confirmed it had updated its position.
“The office now considers that a public body can use the interjection go in a context of encouragement … without this compromising the duty of exemplarity incumbent upon it under the Charter of the French Language,” spokesperson Gilles Payer told The Canadian Press in an email.
Payer confirmed the entry was newly published on May 30. “The media coverage of the case concerning the use of the borrowed word ‘go’ in a sports context led the office to officially assess the acceptability” of the word, he said.
Melançon, the French literature professor, said the new rationale – especially the term “partially legitimized” – suggests the office was uneasy with the change.
“This must have given rise to some pretty intense internal debates,” he said. “‘Do we take into account what the minister is telling us or do we not take it into account? If we don’t take it into account, what are the consequences? If we do, how do we justify changing our minds?’”
At least one transit agency official felt dubious about the original complaint, which related to a bus displaying the words “Go! CF Mtl Go!” in support of Montreal’s professional soccer club. She called the issue a “grey zone” in a June 2024 email to colleagues.
“We’ve been using the word ‘go’ for years without a problem,” she wrote. “Are we going to change everything because of one complaint?”
But by later that month, the agency had decided to scrap the word, which involved manually updating the display on each of more than 1,000 buses over a period of months.
The agency has said no further change will be made before the buses undergo regular maintenance in the fall.
The language office has received at least two other complaints about the word “go” in the last five years, according to a response to a separate access-to-information request.
In 2023, someone complained about the slogan “Go Habs Go” appearing on an outdoor billboard. That complaint was dismissed because the expression is a trademark.
A similar complaint in 2021 targeted the hashtag #GoHabsGo that appears in oversized letters outside the Bell Centre in Montreal, the home arena of the Canadiens.
The person who filed the complaint suggested that to comply with Quebec’s language rules, the expression “Allez les Habitants allez” should appear alongside the English slogan, in larger letters. “And yes, I’m serious, if the law applies, then apply it! :)” the person wrote.
According to the language watchdog, that complaint was resolved following an intervention, though it provided no details. A spokesperson for the hockey team declined to comment."
By Canadian Press
Jul 3, 2025 | 2:05 AM
https://larongenow.com/2025/07/03/quebec-language-watchdog-now-says-its-ok-to-use-go-to-support-sports-teams-2/
#metaglossia_mundus
"RWS continues winning streak with four awards in a year for its neural machine translation solution
MAIDENHEAD, England–(BUSINESS WIRE)–RWS, a content solutions company, powered by technology and human expertise, today announced that its Language Weaver solution has been selected as winner of the ‘Machine Translation Solution of the Year’ award in the 8th annual AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough.
The AI Breakthrough Awards shine a spotlight on the boldest innovators and most impactful technologies leading the charge in AI across a comprehensive set of categories, including generative AI, agentic AI, natural language processing and industry-specific AI applications. This year’s program attracted more than 5,000 nominations from over 20 different countries.
“While many competitors offer fragmented capabilities, Language Weaver delivers a uniquely comprehensive translation experience tailored for global enterprises,” said Steve Johansson, Managing Director, AI Breakthrough. “We’re pleased to award RWS with the 2025 award for ‘Machine Translation Solution of the Year!’”
The latest award follows three other recent industry accolades, including two 2025 AI Excellence Awards and an AI Breakthrough Award in 2024.
Language Weaver is an AI-powered translation solution that seamlessly integrates adaptive neural machine translation (NMT), scalable performance, intuitive usability and enterprise-grade security into a single, end-to-end platform. The solution ensures compliance with data protection regulations and offers robust privacy controls as well as flexible deployment options – whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments.
“This award is a true testament to the incredible dedication and innovation of our Language Weaver team,” said Mark Lawyer, President of Regulated Industries & Linguistic AI at RWS. “Their passion, expertise, and relentless pursuit of excellence have positioned Language Weaver as a leader in AI-powered translation – capable of helping clients to handle high volumes of complex, multilingual content.”
The Language Weaver platform processes up to 500,000 words per minute across 150+ languages and its adaptive AI models continuously learn and refine translations. It incorporates industry-specific glossaries, branded terminology, and real-time feedback for enhanced contextual accuracy.
About RWS
RWS is a content solutions company, powered by technology and human expertise. We grow the value of ideas, data and content by making sure organizations are understood. Everywhere.
Our proprietary technology, 45+ AI patents and human experts help organizations bring ideas to market faster, build deeper relationships across borders and cultures, and enter new markets with confidence – growing their business and connecting them to a world of opportunities.
It’s why over 80 of the world’s top 100 brands trust RWS to drive innovation, inform decisions and shape brand experiences.
With 60+ global locations, across five continents, our teams work with businesses across almost all industries. Innovating since 1958, RWS is headquartered in the UK and publicly listed on AIM, the London Stock Exchange regulated market (RWS.L).
For further information, please visit: rws.com.
About AI Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AI Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Artificial Intelligence technologies, services, companies and products. The AI Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of AI companies and products in categories including Generative AI, Machine Learning, AI Platforms, Robotics, Business Intelligence, AI Hardware, Computer Vision and more. For more information visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.
Tech Breakthrough LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our recognition programs, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with award designations. Tech Breakthrough LLC recognition consists of the opinions of the Tech Breakthrough LLC organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Tech Breakthrough LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this recognition program, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Contacts
RWS
Denis Davies
Corporate Communications
ddavies@rws.com
+44 1628 410105
https://siliconcanals.com/language-weaver-takes-grand-prize-for-machine-translation-at-2025-ai-breakthrough-awards/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Can AI Translators Do the Work of Bilingual Staffers?
As demographics change, bilingual public-sector workers can’t always keep up with all the “new” languages spoken by constituents. A Wordly report and client offer an inside view of the changes.
Bilingual staffers shoulder much of the translation burden for local governments, but artificial intelligence is taking on more of that work.
That’s according to a fresh report from Wordly, an AI translation service used by public agencies.
The survey findings from Wordly, combined with experiences from one of its larger clients, paints a useful picture of the state of public-sector translation.
The company found that 66 percent of local governments rely on bilingual staff, while 31 percent use AI tools for translation.
The findings were based on survey responses from 117 local public agencies of various sizes, though almost half of them had populations between 50,000 and 300,000.
San Jose, Calif., is one of the cities that has shifted from in-person interpreters to Wordly’s AI translation tool, a move that, according to the company, has reduced costs and expanded access for people who don’t speak English or don’t speak it well.
The survey also found that local governments tend to improve their translation capabilities mainly to widen access to permitting and other services, to increase civic participation at meetings and other events, and for public safety alerts and communications.
In Washoe County, Nev. — home to Reno — officials use the Wordly AI tech mainly for public meetings, according to Elizabeth Jourdin, an HR manager.
That said, the tool also helps the county onboard new employees who are hard of hearing, train case management professionals who are “monolingual,” provide “language access during marriage ceremonies,” support food safety programs for restaurant owners, and boost customer service at front desk counters in county departments, she told Government Technology via email.
Spanish stands as the county’s primary language need besides English, Jourdin said, though the area’s demographics are changing as the county attracts more people who speak such languages as Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu and others.
The county has even bigger plans when it comes to translation. It's working from what she called a “multi-year language access policy which includes enhancing staff support, testing and training to utilize bilingual skillset.”
One thing learned during the effort is that officials should have a broad view of the challenges that come with different languages and translation.
“One of the greatest lessons we learned is that there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all solution’ for our community, or employees,” she said. “The needs of our employees and community occur on a spectrum, and we need to be prepared to offer multiple solutions.”
Thad Rueter
July 02, 2025
https://www.govtech.com/biz/can-ai-translators-do-the-work-of-bilingual-staffers
#metaglossia_mundus
UCLA professor chooses text that an AI platform almost certainly could not translate.
"Michael Berry’s translations make contemporary Chinese fiction accessible to Americans
Peggy McInerny/UCLA
July 2, 2025
UCLA professor Michael Berry has translated 11 Chinese-language works of fiction, three of which were published in early 2025. Among them is “Dead Souls,” the last book in the “Hospital Trilogy” by one of China's most celebrated science fiction writers, Han Song, and two novels by Chinese novelist Fang Fang: “Soft Burial” and “The Running Flame.”
Berry’s most recent translations build on his extensive body of work — scholarly cultural history, translations of Chinese-language novels and books on (and interviews with) Chinese filmmakers — all of which make contemporary Chinese culture more accessible to American audiences.
A professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, Berry spent five years translating Han’s trilogy, with a Guggenheim Fellowship supporting his work on “Dead Souls,” which was published in January. The two newest Fang Fang translations were published in March, in part supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.
In a recent op-ed on artificial intelligence in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Berry said the three Han novels were one of the more difficult projects he had ever undertaken, in part because he chose material that could not be translated by an AI translation platform.
Read more about Berry’s most recent translations and their contemporary significance on the UCLA International Institute’s website."
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/michael-berry-translations-contemporary-chinese-fiction-accessible-to-americans
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"If you have a smartphone or use some of the biggest search engines, then you have Oxford Languages’ dictionaries at your fingertips.
While the Oxford English Dictionary is our flagship title, we don’t just hold English language data. In support of our mission at OUP—to advance the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide—we work with cutting-edge technology providers to make Oxford Languages’ data available as widely as possible.
One of our aims is to digitize under-resourced languages to support localization. We service over 60 languages, and in 2024/25, we launched 10 new language datasets, ranging from Indonesian, to Sanskrit, to Assamese. For such languages, we might develop the content with out partners, or we may acquire and develop it by working with native linguists, local agencies, authors, institutes, foundations, and our in-house development teams.
Under-resourced languages
Sometimes our customers will request a new language dataset for their digital products, but we also look for gaps in the market. In high demand and under-resourced, in 2024, we successfully added the leading Indonesian Monolingual Dictionary to our language portfolio. Sourcing, developing and investing in under-resourced languages helps to widen access to these languages, while also digitally preserving culture and history.
Alexandra Feeley
Director of Business and Market Development
“In countries where English is commonly spoken but not the main language, you are forced to use English for technology because the features don’t tend to support native speakers. When I open my phone or my email nowadays, I expect predictive text, to fill in the blanks, to spell check. But when you look at Indian languages or African languages for example, there isn’t that same level of native digitalization.
“This is why we have created resources to allow technologists to develop the tools for those under-resourced languages. If you can experience something in your native language, it becomes an extension of you and it’s then a lot easier to relate to products and to expand your usage of things.”
Some of the under-resourced languages we’re working on include Hebrew and Catalan. When we work on such projects, our teams make sure we’re best representing the language and how it is spoken by reviewing corpora, including inflection coverage and having complete and short definitions.
World Englishes
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. However, English is not the same language that it was when the First Edition was published in 1928.
Danica Salazar
OED World English Editor
“Since then, it has become a truly global language, spoken by billions of people of immensely varied origins and backgrounds—and as these people continue to contribute to the richness and diversity of the English lexicon, so will the OED continue to adapt its policies and practices in order to ensure that these contributions are represented in the dictionary.”
Collectively, we refer to global varieties of English as ‘World Englishes’, supporting our goal in the lead up to the centenary of the OED’s First Edition in 2028 in widening the geographical coverage of the dictionary. Our World English programme recognizes that English is a world language, and so British English is no longer regarded as the dominant form of English but just one of many varieties. Each quarterly update of the OED now includes examples from different World Englishes. You can find out more in the March 2025 update, which features ‘untranslatable’ words.
As language continues to evolve, we regularly update our datasets to make sure our customers’ dictionary displays, games, mobile applications, and other solutions stay current with modern English. You can find out more about this here.
Another ongoing project is the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), which will apply the depth and rigour of the OED’s historical methodology specifically to the study of African American English. A diverse team of lexicographers and researchers are creating a dictionary that will illuminate the history, meaning, and significance of this body of language. More than 1,350 meanings for 1,100 words are now in draft with 300 words finalized.
John McCullough, Lexicographer at the ODAAE, said:
“What is really important about the ODAAE is our opportunity to represent speakers of African American English in a way that is both accurate and respectful to the enduring legacy of the language, and provide high-quality research evidence that highlights its importance to the cultural and linguistic landscape of English throughout history.
“This is a language variety that has thrived in its expression of Black identity, often despite and in spite of historical marginalization and stigmatization. We are proud of the work we have done to include a wide range of entries that reflect the ways in which AAE is a distinct yet inextricable foundation of American English and continues to linguistically innovate and spearhead cultural change.”
Anansa Benbow, also an ODAAE Lexicographer, said:
“African American English has undeniably influenced global English. I am proud to help document its lexicon through my work on the ODAAE, a project that is about amplifying voices, histories, and identities, as well as honouring and preserving the richness of African American English. It is a project that speaks to the heart of our mission at OUP.”
New technologies help our data go further
The OED Labs initiative is helping the shape the future of the Oxford English Dictionary research experience through new technologies.
We have been piloting an AI search assistant on OED.com for users to search across the dictionary’s content quickly, without needing to understand the many different filters that are available. We are also exploring how we support our lexicographers to use AI to research, revise, and publish OED entries more quickly, as well as developing prototypes to investigate how OED data can further empower research.
Elinor Hawkes, Senior Product Manager, notes:
“The OED has a long history of embracing new technologies and we’re excited to see what the future holds. Our dictionary data not only includes contemporary and historical definitions, but also data how, when, where, and by whom words were used. By coupling this rich dataset with emerging technologies, we are able to support new avenues of research better than ever before.”
3 July 2025
You can find out more about Oxford Languages 👇🏿
https://corp.oup.com/spotlights/making-language-data-available-and-representative-worldwide/
#metaglossia_mundus