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Scooped by
Charles Tiayon
November 4, 2011 1:59 PM
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Un poema de desafiante homoerotismo e inconveniencias sociales, y el trabajo de diversos traductores.
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
For many young readers feeling distant from their native cultures, Indian translations offer a way back home.
"‘Bimaar Yaad’ from Gulzar’s Raat Pashmine Ki (2002)
On the cusp of my twenties, when my inner monologue started dictating itself in English, I knew something had gone wrong. Not because English wasn’t mine to wield, but because it felt like a betrayal of my mother tongue, Hindi.
“Gunahon Ka Devta by Dharamvir Bharati is a brilliant start for Hindi literature. You can always fall back on its English translation Chander & Sudha,” Saheli Chatterjee placatingly says when I confess to my disloyalty. A marketing strategist from West Bengal, Chatterjee is a polyglot, gliding effortlessly between Hindi, Bengali and English, often revisiting the same book in more than one language. This cross-lingual experience, she says, offers unexpected insights. “Sometimes, I notice how certain words or feelings get lost, or even gained, in translation. It makes me appreciate both versions differently, but it mostly makes me realise how exquisitely Indian languages capture emotions.”
Post-independence, English dominated India’s literary imagination as the country tried to shake off its colonial hangover. The tide heightened with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which bagged the Booker Prize in 1981 and catapulted Indian English writing onto the global stage. Authors followed suit, Indian English-language books flooded bookstores and regional literature was relegated to the back shelves. Even as the Desivad (nativism) movement of the ’80s heralded a return to indigenous voices, English remained the language of prestige. The international conquest of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things only cemented its status. In 2007, The Guardian cheekily referred to English as “an auntie if not a mother tongue” of India. For a long time, reading outside of English simply wasn’t cool.
But in recent years, the spotlight seems to be swinging back home. Young Indians are now embracing native and translated literature, not only out of literary curiosity but also as a means of reconnecting with their cultural roots. The 2022 International Booker win for Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) marked a watershed moment as the first Indian language novel to win the prize, changing the perception of translations almost overnight. Suddenly, books written in Indian languages weren’t seen as niche or secondary; they were celebrated as essential voices in global literature. Publishers took note. Penguin Random House India even launched its new imprint ‘Penguin Swadesh’, aimed at publishing books in Indian languages in 2023.
Where translators’ names once rarely appeared on book covers due to apprehensions of readership drop, today translations are not only celebrated but widely acknowledged as a form of cultural discovery. According to Deepa Bhasthi, the translator of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, which won the 2025 International Booker prize, “It’s a good time to be reading literature from our backyards.” In her post-win interview with the Booker Prizes, she spoke about how “so many people below 35 have pretty much lived their entire lives online, which makes it easier for them to be open to literature from different languages and cultures.”
For many young readers feeling distant from their native cultures, translated books offer a way back home. “The idea that people can access the cultures of their origin through a literary or cinematic lens is becoming more powerful,” says J. Devika, translator between English and Malayalam.
Unlike millennials, who equated English with upward mobility, Gen Z has a strong sense of ‘India pride.’ For them, reading a Malayalam classic or Bengali feminist fiction in English isn’t a niche hobby that earns them bragging rights. It’s the longing to know the mouthfeel of languages alien to them; languages that their grandparents perhaps spoke their entire lives. “For many of us who studied in English-medium institutions, English feels just as close as our native language. So reading the same book in both versions—first in English, then in the original—can help readers ease into the mother tongue, especially when they’re not entirely fluent, which is unfortunately not rare,” explains Bhasthi.
Closer to home, the boom in regional literature festivals has created thriving spaces for young Indians to discover and celebrate native-language storytelling. Conceived in 2022, Kerala’s Wayanad Literature Festival positions itself as India’s first rural literary celebration. The latest edition of Meghalaya’s Shillong Literary Festival aimed to highlight regional languages, particularly Khasi and Garo, which are still seeking constitutional recognition. In March 2025, Vidhan Soundha, the legislative chambers of Karnataka, opened its doors to the public for its first-ever book fair and cultural festival focused on Kannada books, which attracted over 150,000 readers.
“Reading in Tamil reminds me of the way people speak in my hometown and even small details like how families interact and festivals are celebrated,” says Saranya Dhandapani, a techie from Bangalore, highlighting the emotional proximity she feels towards Chennai when reading Tamil books. Chatterjee observes how, although the language to describe them may be different, the experiences regional authors write about are often universal. “An English translation of a book by Perumal Murugan, who originally writes in Tamil, depicts a mother-in-law upset over the bride’s spending, which is something we see in Bengal too.”
Are Indian translations always faithful to the original? “I noticed that the long, immersive monologues in original Punjabi books are broken into shorter, fragmented phrases in the English translation,” says Noida-based engineer Ekambir Singh, reflecting on Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar in Punjabi and its English translation by Khushwant Singh. Chatterjee had similar takeaways when she read Manav Kaul’s Tumhare Baare Mein, followed by its English version, A Bird on My Windowsill by Nandini Kumar Nickerson, where “a section that appears as flowing prose in Hindi was reimagined as free verse poetry in English to retain its lyrical intensity.” Devika posits, “Translation is the translator’s reading. It’s not a mechanical transfer of meaning but an original act of creation.” She recalls translating The Sthory of Two Wimmin Named Kalyani and Dakshayani by R. Rajasree, where she recreated the distinct Malayalam colloquialisms of north and south Kerala, which function almost like characters. “Some readers found this irritating, but the dialects were central to the novel’s tension and its vision of social justice.”
Although Indian translations are enjoying their much-deserved moment in the sun, it’s crucial not to glamourise them to the point of othering them. In her translator’s note for Heart Lamp, Bhasthi explains her choice to forgo italics for transliterated Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words: italicising only exoticises them, marking them as alien. It’s the same reason you won’t find any footnotes either. Instead, Bhasthi leaves us with a question: “People often ask what gets lost in translation—but I’d rather ask: what gets found?”
Also read:
Indian fiction isn’t flying off bookshelves like it should. It’s time we asked why
Bookshelf wealth is all well and good, but are you checking on your bookshelf’s health?
When languages in India disappear, they take more than words with them"
SUVRAT ARORA
26 July 2025
https://www.vogue.in/content/indian-translations-most-loyal-readers-gen-z
#metaglossia_mundus
"The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) advises applicants with upcoming field office appointments that they are responsible for providing their own interpreters if translation services are needed. If an interpreter cannot be secured in time, USCIS recommends contacting them to reschedule the appointment.
USCIS stated, “If you have an upcoming appointment at a USCIS field office and require interpretation services, you must provide your own interpreter. If you cannot find an interpreter in time for your appointment, you must contact USCIS to reschedule.”
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However, attorney Keshab Seadie has cautioned applicants about bringing interpreters to USCIS appointments or interviews. Seadie notes that for employment-based green card applications or other applications requiring English proficiency, bringing a Nepali interpreter could potentially lead to rejection of the application.
In contrast, Seadie confirmed that for family-based green card applications and other application types, applicants may bring their own interpreters. He emphasized that interpreters must be fluent in both English and the applicant’s language and must meet established standards.
According to USCIS, interpreters must be fluent in English and the applicant’s language. They are expected to translate everything the applicant says during the interview honestly, accurately, and completely.
Interpreters are not permitted to answer on behalf of the applicant; their role is solely to facilitate communication between the officer and the applicant. Additionally, interpreters must agree to maintain the confidentiality of the applicant’s information.
Interpreters must be at least 18 years old and cannot serve as a witness in the applicant’s case. Attorneys or accredited representatives are not allowed to act as both a representative and an interpreter simultaneously, per USCIS guidelines.
USCIS officers will evaluate whether an interpreter meets the required qualifications. If an officer determines that the interpreter is not qualified, they may disallow the translation.
If an interpreter is used, both the applicant and the interpreter must sign and submit Form G-1256. This form cannot be signed before the interview and must be signed in the presence of the interviewing officer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, USCIS provided interpreters for Nepali asylum interviews. However, this policy changed on September 13, 2023, requiring asylum applicants to bring their own Nepali interpreters if needed.
The provision of interpreters by USCIS was implemented in September 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. USCIS ended this practice after the federal declaration of a public health emergency related to COVID-19 expired in May 2023.
USCIS previously warned that if an applicant’s English proficiency is poor and an interpreter is needed but not provided, or if the interpreter is not fluent in both English and the applicant’s language, the agency might consider the applicant as having failed to appear for the interview. This could result in the cancellation of the asylum interview and referral of the asylum application to an immigration judge.
However, if an applicant provides a valid reason for being unable to bring an interpreter, USCIS may grant another interview date. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis."
https://nepyork.com/2025/07/23/uscis-reminds-applicants-to-bring-their-own-interpreters-lawyer-warns-of-risks/
#metaglossia_mundus
" ABSTRACT: People hold different beliefs about the nature of emotions: some view emotions as valuable and controllable, while others see them as harmful and unchangeable. Evidence suggests that these emotion beliefs are associated with mental health symptoms via their influence on emotion regulation. To explore these beliefs, it is essential to employ valid and reliable measures. This systematic review provides a comprehensive overview of existing measures of emotion beliefs and an evaluation of their quality (validity, reliability). A search of seven online databases yielded a total of 5276 citations (after duplicate removal), of which 69 met inclusion criteria and were assessed using the Quality Assessment with Diverse Studies (QuADS) and modified criteria outlined by Halle and Darling-Churchill. The findings of this review serve as a resource for researchers and clinicians seeking emotion belief measures. However, it also identified several areas for advancement in the field, including a need to develop more consistent theoretical frameworks, measures using alternative assessment approaches beyond self-report questionnaires (e.g., vignettes), and measures specifically designed for children and adolescents. There is also an opportunity for more qualitative studies to explore emotion beliefs."
Measuring emotion beliefs: a systematic review
Susanne Peter, Bonamy R. Oliver, Harriet R. Kabo, Anna V. Raynaud, Marthe Wiggers &Matthew P. Somerville
Received 21 Feb 2025, Accepted 20 Jun 2025, Published online: 11 Jul 2025
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2025.2526676#abstract
#metaglossia_mundus
"I hadn’t given the matter much thought until today, but I notice that most of my last several columns have been about works in translation. World literature is at its peak now; yet, I’m constantly aware how many languages fail to attract the attention of enterprising translators. But, with Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq — two authors who work in Indian languages — having been awarded the prestigious Booker International Prize, this trend might be shifting.
Translators are given their due along with authors, encouraging the latter to choose novels and stories that may otherwise be confined to monolingual readers. I’m delighted to learn that Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Khadija Mastur’s classic Urdu novel, Aangan, will be released as a Penguin Classic, introducing this fine Pakistani writer to foreign readers well over half a century after the novel’s first publication. I hope that Rockwell’s translation of Zameen — my favourite among Mastur’s fictions — follows suit.
Urdu and Hindi have, arguably, a larger group of translators than Kannada, the language in which Mushtaq writes. Other South Asian languages are generally bypassed by publishers. This year, I heard that Mehdi Khawaja’s translation of To Each His Own Hell, a 1975 novel by the pioneer of Kashmiri fiction writer Akhtar Mohiuddin (1928-2001), had won a prize; but rumour has it that we will have to wait a year or two to see it in print.
I’ve always been interested in translations from languages that are considered ‘minor’ in the publishing world, regardless of the numbers that speak them. I’ve read stories by Mohiuddin over the years in literary journals and am aware that, at some point, a collection of his stories was published in English. But the one novel of his I was able to find was, to my judgement, so poorly rendered and full of typographical errors as to make it unreadable. Then, there’s the case of the very popular Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam, who was well served by the Urdu and Hindi translations in which I read her. Though her poetry has been passably well served in English, her fiction is only adequately represented by Khushwant Singh’s version of Pinjar [The Skeleton] and a handful of her short stories. Other works are all but unreadable.
In Sindhi, Jamal Abro (1924-2004) has been better served in Pirani, a series of stories translated by various hands. Often, however, when judging works translated from a language I can’t read, I wonder whether the selection of some of these stories is based on a sociopolitical rather than an aesthetic criterion, as is the case with many South Asian fictions, including Mohiuddin’s.
I’ve always been interested in translations from languages that are considered ‘minor’ in the publishing world, regardless of the numbers that speak them.
Among other Asian languages, Japanese, Chinese and, increasingly, Korean are adequately represented in English translation, unlike, for example, Indonesian or Thai. The very enterprising Lontar Modern Library of Indonesia has published a number of renowned and lesser-known fictions in translation, but these are impossible to find in British bookshops. In most cases, I have had to make do with Kindle versions. Recently, I waited a year for Amazon to make available a novel of historical and feminist significance, Against the Grain by Suwarsih Djojopuspito.
The story of the novel and its author was told to me by my friend Toeti Heraty (1933-2021), the eminent Indonesian poet and philosopher, in her Jakarta library in 1992. Suwarsih (1912-1977) originally wrote this autobiographically tinged novel in her native Sundanese but, because of its nationalist, anti-colonial content, she failed to find a publisher and, on a friend’s advice, rewrote the novel in Dutch in the early 1940s and published it in Holland.
After Indonesia’s independence, Suwarsih moved to a third language, Bahasa Indonesia, the language that Toeti, a feminist of the next generation, also chose above Dutch — in which she had been educated — or Javanese — her native tongue. It was this interface of languages, along with her pioneering pursuit of lost women writers, that led Toeti to Suwarsih’s work. She may have encouraged the older writer to reclaim her radical novel from obscurity by rewriting it in Indonesian for a generation unacquainted with Dutch and with the history of their nationalist predecessors. “I did not know that what I wrote at that time would be valuable and would attract attention today,” she said about her decision to translate herself.
The Indonesian version, Manusia Bebas [Free Main/Free People], was published in 1975, with an introduction by Toeti. I have the copy Toeti gave me of the Indonesian edition here beside me today.
Somehow, it gives me pleasure to know that the English rendition I have read is of the Indonesian and not the Dutch version, perhaps because I feel that Suwarsih would have had the hindsight to see her own Dutch words in a different perspective, and that the novel is as much a product of her mature years as it is a reflection of her youth. I can’t judge as the Dutch text is unavailable to me. This juxtaposition of retrospection, testimony and linguistic overlay gives the novel its impact; as a bilingual, I cannot believe that the act of translating ourselves can be devoid of mindfulness. (I’m reminded of Qurratulain Hyder’s and Abdullah Hussein’s similar forays into English.) What did Suwarsih delete, or add?
What we know is that the text we have before us is Suwarsih’s final and definitive word of memory and invention. How well her English translator has served her I cannot say. But today’s reader can benefit from both the immediacy of direct recall, the distance of considered recollection and reflect on the double vision every act of translation, by self or other, imposes.
The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist
COLUMN: THE IMPORTANCE OF TRANSLATION
AAMER HUSSEIN
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, 27 Jul, 2025 08:19am
https://www.dawn.com/news/amp/1926884
#metaglossia_mundus
"COPENHAGEN: Three in four people who use AI are turning to the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot to get advice and recommendations on shopping and travel instead of using the previous online method of search engines like Google, new research shows.
AI-supported online shopping is done at least occasionally by 76% of AI users, with 17% doing so most or even all of the time, according to a study conducted by the market research institute Norstat on behalf of Verdane, a leading European investment company.
The changes in consumer search behaviour pose a major challenge not only for search engine providers like Google but also for manufacturers and retailers, who must adapt to maintain their visibility in the AI-driven world.
AI chatbots have emerged as powerful tools for tracking down specific products, often providing helpful advice in response to complex and specific queries.
Of the survey respondents, 3% are dedicated AI enthusiasts who always use AI tools instead of search engines when shopping online, while 14% said they mostly use AI and 35% do so occasionally.
A total of 7,282 people from the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland aged between 18 and 60 participated in the survey in June.
The highest proportion of AI use is in online travel research, at 33%. This is followed by consumer electronics (22%), DIY and hobby supplies (20%), and software or digital subscriptions (19%). However, AI usage is still relatively low in fashion and clothing (13%), cosmetics (12%), and real estate (7%).
STARPICKS
Kidney alert! From warning signs to winning strategies
Among AI tools, ChatGPT is far ahead of its competitors and 86% of AI users regularly use OpenAI's chatbot. This is followed at a considerable distance by Google's Gemini (26% regular users) and Microsoft's Copilot (20%).
The Chinese AI bot DeepSeek, which has been the subject of heated debate among AI experts and data protection advocates, appears to have no significant role among consumers in Europe. – dpa"
AI is replacing search engines as a shopping guide, research suggests
Sunday, 27 Jul 202512:00 PM MYT
https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2025/07/27/ai-is-replacing-search-engines-as-a-shopping-guide-research-suggests
#metaglossia_mundus
A highly original book from the author of Goblinhood explores the art and work of translating fiction
"Fair by Jen Calleja review – on the magic of translation
A highly original book from the author of Goblinhood explores the art and work of translating fiction
Alex Clark
Fri 25 Jul 2025 07.00 BST
Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is vital to all her endeavours: her work as a literary translator, rendering German prose and poetry into English; her life as a publisher, and co-founder with her friend Kat Storace of Praspar Press, which aims to bring Maltese literature to a wider audience; her own writing, which includes the novel Vehicle and the essay collection Goblinhood; and her other incarnation, as a member of the post-punk band Sauna Youth.
All of this takes a significant amount of energy and determination, but one of Fair’s central contentions is that it is all made far harder than it ought to be by, in effect, the covert acceptance of inequality and exclusion in the arts and literature. She recalls, for example, finally feeling that she has made it as a translator when she is invited to speak at the London Book Fair; years later, she returns to tell the audience that she has plenty of work, but only £30 in her bank account because so many of the organisations in the room are behind on paying her. “Out of the frying pan of grifting,” as she acidly notes, “into the fire of contempt”.
But it is not simply a question of spiralling workload, dwindling rates of pay, insecure employment or even the spectre of AI. Translators are additionally required to go along with their own erasure: to sign up to the idea that invisibility is hard-wired into their value, and that a truly great translation is the one that the reader fails to notice. Maintaining this fiction might take obvious forms – neglecting to give a translator their rightful billing on the text itself – or it might be subtle and insidious, as in the insistence that translators suppress their regional identity by rendering everything in homogeneous southern English. Departing from such strictures has not hindered translators such as the inestimable Deborah Smith, who introduced Yorkshire dialect into her versions of the novels of Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang.
In fact, as Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress, shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic. Her relationship with the manuscripts on her desk, for example, is informed by her life-changing encounter with Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader), a novel that she selected at random in a Munich bookshop when she was a teenager, over time allowing the chasms in her understanding and appreciation of the prose to slowly fill in and resolve. “Looking at this first page now, it feels so strange to know how I would translate it, how only I would translate it,” she writes. “Even stranger to think that now I pick up novels in German, open them, read them, and know how to translate them into books you buy in shops. That people trust me to do this.”
Fair is so titled in part to reflect its qualities as a manifesto – not only an improvement in pay and working conditions, but a demand that literary translation as a practice and profession should be a viable aspiration for a far greater number and type of people. It also describes the book’s puckish structure, in which we wander the stands, stalls and hallways of a notional trade fair, and where the illusion of cosy intimacy and friendliness – the decorated cubicles for meetings, the drinks receptions, the musical performances – are at odds with the corporate reality of such gatherings, which are essentially transactional rather than poetic. It can be a somewhat distracting and disorientating mechanism, which is perhaps the point. Stripping away the industrial structures of creating art is far easier said than done, but as she repeatedly tells us, you have to start somewhere.
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja is published by Prototype (£12.99)."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/25/fair-by-jen-calleja-review-on-the-magic-of-translation
#metaglossia_mundus
"Abstract: This study investigates the motivations of Emirati creative writers to choose the global language, English, rather than the UAE’s official language, Arabic, for their literary texts. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the role of English in the Gulf region, but hardly any of this research focusses on the arts. Drawing upon studies of anglophone literature from other countries where English is not an official language, content analysis, and a case study, this article identifies the reach for international audiences as the main motivation, followed by personal language command. Literary influence and genre selection are minor reasons causing Emirati writers to published in English. Situating the small but steadily growing translingual, or exophonic Emirati canon within the short local literary history as well as within a global anglophone context, the article also demonstrates that innovative uses of language may occur. Regional efforts to promote local authors along with changing publishing conditions will likely lead to an expansion of the studied canon in the near future."
Relevance
Literary Translingualism in the United Arab Emirates: Anglophone Emirati prose and poetry
Doris Hambuch, Moza Al Tenaijy, Aisha Khamis Aldarmaki & Ali Nawab Alblooshi
Cogent Arts & Humanities, Volume 12, 2025 - Issue 1
Article |Published Online: 24 Jul 2025
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2025.2534252?src=#abstract
#metaglossia_mundus
Nevada Supreme Court has an all out call for court interpreters to help those involved in court proceedings who are not proficient in English.
"RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - Often viewers are taken into a court room to watch the proceedings. It could be a preliminary hearing, it could be an arraignment. Or it could be a full-on court case.
The words used can be confusing, not to mention the protocol, and the proceedings aren’t commonplace for someone who’s never been in a courtroom.
Imagine then, what it’s like if you don’t know the language.
“There’s always a need for court interpreters yes,” says Regina Flores, Nevada Supreme Court Web Archtitect.
And that need is not going away here in Nevada.
Twice a year Nevada’s Supreme Court puts a call out to bilingual residents who have an interest in becoming court interpreters.
Tests are given twice a year. Both oral and written. It’s estimated there’s a 30% pass rate.
The difficulty may lie in that interpretation must be consecutive and simultaneous.
Applicants must also participate in 40-hours of courtroom observation.
“So, they will get certified and then whenever a court requires an interpreter from a specific language background they will then, they will have a sort of roster of court interpreters,” says Flores. “They will seek out whoever is available.”
That hearing could be virtual or in-person.
Flores says the job can become a career for some interpreters depending upon how often they work.
And they won’t be lacking in requests for their services.
“It is so important,” says Flores. “You are helping people whose lives may be at stake. So, you are not only making a career out of it. You are making a huge impact on the justice system.”
Those bilingual in Spanish are most in demand. But those who speak both English and Tagalog, Cantonese, and Vietnamese are also encouraged to apply.
For more information go to the following website:
https://nvcourts.gov/aoc/programs_and_services/court_interpreter/become_a_court_interpreter
Copyright 2025 KOLO."
https://www.kolotv.com/2025/07/26/court-interpreters-needed-throughout-nevada/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Alphabétisation dans nos langues nationales : Désormais un impératif
Le taux d'alphabétisation dans nos langues est globalement évalué à 30%. Ce qui atteste des efforts à accomplir davantage surtout que 13 d'entre elles sont devenues des langues officielles
L'Essor 25 Juillet 2025 - 09:00
Celui qui espère sur des statistiques impressionnantes en termes de taux d’alphabétisation de nos compatriotes dans les langues nationales risque d’être un peu déçu par les chiffres. Il ressort des données de la Direction nationale de l’éducation non formelle et des langues nationales (DNENFLN) que ce taux est estimé à environ 30%. Aujourd’hui, avec l’évolution des choses, l’alphabétisation est en train de devenir une exigence surtout que 13 de nos langues nationales sont devenues des langues officielles.
Un constat s’impose. Il est courant de voir nos compatriotes écrire nos langues, notamment le bamanankan avec l’alphabet français ou l’alphabet phonétique international. Les diphtongues du bamanankan «u» et «ɛ» sont remplacées respectivement par les voyelles «u» et «è». La diphtongue du bamanankan «ɛn» par in. Il existe plusieurs exemples de ce type sur les réseaux sociaux, les affiches publiques, mais aussi sur les véhicules de transport en commun, entre autres. Cette situation préoccupe les défenseurs de nos patrimoines linguistiques.
Chaka Keïta est journaliste et auteur d’un recueil de poèmes et d’un autre de contes en bamanankan intitulés respectivement «Jaahe» qui signifie l’étonnement et «Musokɛlɛ», prosaïquement l’accouchement. Il explique que pour le moment, il n’y a aucun décret qui oblige l’adoption intégrale d’un système d’écriture de nos langues. Ce qui fait que les gens écrivent la même chose de plusieurs manières, déplore-t-il. Et de dire qu’il est temps que les autorités compétentes décident de normaliser ces écritures.
L’auteur de «Jaahe» révèle aussi qu’il ne faut pas que nos langues se limitent au stade littéraire. C’est-à-dire des romans, de la poésie et du conte. Il estime simplement qu’il faut les utiliser aussi dans le domaine de la recherche scientifique afin qu’elles enregistrent des avancées significatives’ y compris dans les activités socioprofessionnelles.
Chaka Keïta avoue que des efforts sont en train d'être accomplis pour alphabétiser au niveau du primaire, secondaire voire universitaire. Selon le journaliste-écrivain, après l’alphabétisation, il faut que l’apprentissage de nos langues aboutisse à des opportunités diverses. Pour lui, le système d'alphabétisation instauré depuis longtemps est une manière faite à la base pour que le français soit bien maîtrisé dans nos pays.
Et de rappeler que les projets d'alphabétisation au Mali ont toujours été financés et le premier objectif n'a jamais été de mieux comprendre nos langues. Il propose de mettre en œuvre une autre politique qui permettra de mieux connaître nos langues, cultures et aspirations pour les années à venir. Cela pour le développement de nos sociétés. «Tant que cela n'est pas fait, on tournera en rond et la finalité sera toujours la langue française», prévient Chaka Keïta.
OUTIL DE DÉVELOPPEMENT- Quant à Salif Sora, membre de l’Association «Mali faso kanw layiriwalitɔn (Mafala)», il souligne que les membres de son association œuvrent pour le développement des langues nationales à travers la sensibilisation, la formation et la traduction. Il martèle que l’implication de la population dans la promotion des langues maternelles relève de la volonté de l’État.
Si les autorités compétentes décident aujourd’hui que tous les services écrivent dans les langues nationales, déclare-t-il, les gens s’y conformeront rapidement après quelques mois de formation. Cet interlocuteur pense que le système éducatif devrait mettre à la disposition des enfants des syllabaires pour leur faciliter la maitrise de nos langues depuis le primaire. Ce qui, selon lui, permettra aux apprenants d’accéder aux connaissances sans grande difficulté. Il persiste et signe que nos langues sont des outils efficaces de communication et d’information. Ce qui peut permettre d’aplanir souvent les interprétations dans lesquelles, on est souvent trahi.
À en croire les responsables de la Direction nationale de l’éducation non formelle et des langues nationales (DNENFLN), le taux d’alphabétisation dans nos langues est estimé à environ 30%. Une statistique loin d’être satisfaisante. Outre, l’Académie malienne des langues (Amalan) est une structure de recherche créée par l’État dans le but de préserver les langues maternelles. Elle couvre les treize unités linguistiques du Mali à savoir le Bamanankan, le Bomu, le Bozo, le Dɔgɔsɔ, le Fulfulde, le Mamara, le Xaasongaxanŋo (Khassonké), le Sɔngoy, le Soninke, le Syɛnara, le Maninkakan, le Tamasheq, le Hasanya (Maure).
Le chef d’unité Bamanankan, Yacouba Sanogo est attaché de recherche à l’Amalan. Il explique que son établissement procède à la description scientifique et systématique des langues nationales attestées dans les différentes aires sociolinguistiques du pays en vue de leur instrumentation. Il explique que l’instrumentation consiste à offrir à chaque langue, un alphabet des règles de transcription et des documents de référence linguistique. Dans le même sens, poursuit le chercheur, l’Amalan s’active à créer un environnement lettré au niveau de chaque communauté linguistique.
En tant que structure technique, elle initie les textes législatifs et réglementaires en vue d’offrir un statut aux langues nationales, fait savoir l’agent de l’Amalan. Selon lui, on doit faire en sorte que les langues nationales deviennent des outils de développement socio-économique du Mali. Elles sont les véhicules de la culture et du développement endogène durable.
Pour éviter de voir les orthographes erronées sur les véhicules, les plaques publicitaires, le chef d’unité bamanankan préconise une forte campagne de sensibilisation dont l’objectif sera d’orienter les usagers vers l’Amalan en vue de la traduction des textes à mettre sur ces panneaux ou les véhicules.
Au-delà des efforts qui sont en train d’être faits par cette académie, il y a quelques contraintes. Yacouba Sanogo évoque l’insuffisance de ressources financières et de moyens logistiques pour mener à bien ses missions de terrain. Il entrevoit un peu d’espoir avec les initiatives et les actions de valorisation de ces langues.
Les autorités de la Transition ont entrepris un vaste chantier visant à refonder notre système éducatif. Les États généraux de l’éducation (EGE), tenus en janvier 2024, et la décision de déclarer 13 de nos langues nationales comme des langues officielles sont des actions fortes s’inscrivant dans cette dynamique. Parmi les recommandations des EGE, la valorisation des langues nationales occupe une place importante. Il ne reste plus qu’à espérer que cette volonté de valoriser nos langues aboutisse à un véritable essor.
****
Langues nationales : Atouts de développement
Réunis, le jeudi 24 avril, pour la première séance plénière de la session ordinaire d’avril 2025, les membres du Conseil national de Transition (CNT) ont examiné cinq textes dont le projet portant de loi organique déterminant les conditions et les modalités d’emploi des langues officielles du Mali. Après avoir été défendue par le ministre de l’Éducation nationale, Amadou Sy Savané devant les conseillers, le CNT a adopté la loi organique déterminant les conditions et les modalités d’emploi des langues officielles de notre pays. Aussi, les membres du Conseil ont adopté un amendement supprimant un texte de l’article 31 de la Constitution du 22 juillet 2023 qui limitait les langues nationales officielles du Mali à 13 langues. Ils ont adopté un texte qui laisse la porte ouverte à d’autres langues pouvant instrumenter et augmenter les langues offucielles. En quoi l’augmentation des 13 langues pourrait contribuer au développement envisagé par le peuple ? Y a t-il d’obstacle à la valorisation de nos langues ?
De l’avis du président de «Mali fasokanw layiriwalitɔn (Ma.fa.la)», de Salif Sora, ce n’est pas une bonne idée d’augmenter encore les 13 langues nationales déclarées officielles. Il estime que ce nombre est largement suffisant. «Même s’ils peuvent officialiser encore plus, ils doivent quand même reconnaître une seule comme principale et langue de travail. Mais à cette allure, toutes les langues ne peuvent pas être mises au même pied, sinon cela serait encore un recul pour nous, parce qu’on ne peut pas communiquer dans toutes les langues», explique ce militant de la promotion des langues nationales.
Et d’estimer que tous les pays développés choisissent une langue parmi tant d’autres comme celle de travail et de communication. Selon lui, il faut se débarrasser de la mentalité selon laquelle, le choix d’une langue parmi les autres comme officielle et de travail offusquera les autres communautés. C’est une appréhension injustifiée.
Dr Mahamadou Konta a occupé plusieurs postes à l’Académie malienne des langues (Amalan). Il fut chef de l’unité Bamanankan, celui de section outils de références linguistiques et chef de département programmes d’études et de recherche linguistiques appliquées. Fort de ce vécu, il ne voit pas d’obstacle à la promotion de nos langues. Selon lui, aucune voix ne s’est levée pour protester contre quoique ce soit depuis leur officialisation.
Le chercheur déclare que les textes sont clairs de 1960 à nos jours pour valoriser les langues nationales. «D’abord l’esprit de la première Constitution dit que : dès que les conditions sont réunies et que les langues sont prêtes, il faut travailler avec elles officiellement. Depuis ce jour, nous sommes dans cet esprit qui a évolué jusqu’à leur officialisation aujourd’hui», rappelle-t-il. Et de dire que l’amendement qui a été adopté par le CNT, supprimant le texte qui limite à13 langues, n’abroge point la loi organique déterminant les conditions et les modalités d’emploi des langues officielles.
SOCLE- Dr Mahamadou Konta dira que de l’indépendance à aujourd’hui, des efforts ont été consentis pour valoriser nos langues, surtout en matière d’éducation. Il s’est avéré dans les années 1960 que pour alphabétiser le maximum d’adultes dans un temps record, il fallait faire recours aux langues maternelles. Le slogan de l’époque était «apprendre à lire et à écrire». À partir de 1968, le Centre national d’alphabétisation fonctionnelle (CNAF) a été portée sur les fonts baptismaux. Pendant cette période, en plus des adultes ruraux, l’alphabétisation fonctionnelle s’étendait aux ouvriers de certaines unités industrielles.
Tous ces efforts ont été déployés pour bâtir le socle d’un développement fort. «Peut-on nous reprocher de baisser les bras face à l'ignorance et le sous-développement ? Non. Il y a eu sûrement des insuffisances, des erreurs voire des fautes graves. Mais depuis les premières années de l’accession à la souveraineté nationale, le Mali s’inscrit dans l'amélioration des activités productives et la formation citoyenne par l'alphabétisation», a expliqué cet interlocuteur. L'introduction des langues nationales devrait nous amener à être surs de nous-mêmes et enclins à prendre des initiatives pour s'émanciper. Selon le chercheur, il n'y a pas d'autres alternatives que de réussir absolument cette mission. Et de confier que le succès de la Compagnie malienne pour le développement du textile (CMDT) est dû en grande partie à la réussite des campagnes d'alphabétisation dans les zones cotonnières au Mali.
N'Famoro KEITA"
https://www.maliweb.net/societe/alphabetisation-dans-nos-langues-nationales-desormais-un-imperatif-3107638.html
#metaglossia_mundus
"Intelligence artificielle : Google change d’échelle en Afrique
Google investit 37 millions de dollars dans l’intelligence artificielle africaine avec l’ouverture d’un centre au Ghana. L’entreprise cible la sécurité alimentaire, les langues africaines et la formation technologique sur le continent.
Par Jeune Afrique avec AFP
Publié le 24 juillet 2025
Google a dévoilé le 24 juillet un programme de 37 millions de dollars destiné à accélérer le développement de l’intelligence artificielle (IA) sur le continent africain, avec des investissements allant de la recherche locale à des projets portant sur la surveillance des cultures agricoles ou l’adaptation des technologies aux langues africaines.
« L’Afrique abrite aujourd’hui certains des travaux les plus importants et les plus inspirants dans le domaine de l’IA », a déclaré James Manyika, vice-président de Google, lors du lancement d’un « centre communautaire dédié à l’IA » à Accra, la capitale du Ghana.
Un nouveau centre communautaire dédié à l’IA au Ghana
Ce centre servira de plaque tournante pour la formation, la collaboration et l’expérimentation. Parmi les initiatives phares dévoilées figure l’AI Collaborative for Food Security, un réseau réunissant chercheurs et organisations à but non lucratif pour concevoir des outils capables d’améliorer la détection précoce de la famine, la résilience des cultures et la prise de décision pour les petits exploitants agricoles.
Objectif : aider les systèmes alimentaires africains à mieux résister aux chocs climatiques et économiques. L’entreprise s’apprête également à lancer une plateforme de financement pour soutenir les start-up axées sur l’IA dans les secteurs de l’agriculture, de la santé et de l’éducation.
Financement ciblé pour les start-up et l’éducation
Par le biais de sa branche philanthropique, le groupe promet 7 millions de dollars pour élargir les initiatives d’éducation à l’IA au Nigeria, au Kenya, en Afrique du Sud et au Ghana.
En parallèle, Google a annoncé un financement de 3 millions de dollars au collectif Masakhane, qui développe des outils d’IA pour plus de 40 langues africaines.
Deux subventions de recherche d’un million de dollars chacune seront attribuées à l’African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence et au Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, tous deux basés en Afrique du Sud.
Google avait déjà mené des initiatives sur le continent notamment dans les technologies pour la santé maternelle au Ghana et au Nigeria, les alertes aux incendies de forêt en Afrique de l’Est ou encore le développement de modèles linguistiques à Accra et Nairobi."
https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1709203/economie-entreprises/intelligence-artificielle-google-change-dechelle-en-afrique/
#metaglossia_mundus
Pourquoi parle-t-on d'Afrique francophone, anglophone ou lusophone?
Publié le : 25/07/2025 - 07:00
"Avec plus de 2 000 langues parlées, 39 familles linguistiques, sur le continent, pourquoi se réfère-t-on sans cesse aux langues occidentales ? Et puis pourquoi parle-t-on de Kylian Mbappé comme d'un Franco-Camerounais, mais jamais, ou très rarement, de Nicolas Sarkozy comme d'un Franco-Hongrois ? Ces questions sémantiques, c'est un auditeur qui nous les pose. Pour lui répondre, nous sommes en compagnie d'Elgas et de l'universitaire Maboula Soumahoro, spécialiste des études africaines-américaines et de la diaspora noire africaine. (Rediffusion)"
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/pourquoi-rfi-dit-%C3%A7a/20250725-pourquoi-parle-t-on-d-afrique-francophone-anglophone-ou-lusophone
#metaglossia_mundus
"The only American Sign Language interpreting program at a public university in Indiana will be cut as a result of a new policy in the state budget. Advocates warn Indiana already has a shortage of interpreters and this will reduce access for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
The new state budget requires Indiana’s public universities and colleges to eliminate or consolidate degree programs with low enrollment or completion rates. Indiana University Indianapolis will eliminate its American Sign Language-English interpreting degree after current students graduate.
Geoffrey Bignell, Indiana Association of the Deaf advocacy director, said through an interpreter this cut will limit Indiana’s training capacity and lead to fewer interpreters in the state. Bignell said that will mean more issues accessing health care, education and employment for deaf individuals.
“It's more of the basically daily life that will significantly be impacted,” Bignell said.
Bignell said the accessibility of interpreters already has a big effect on how people in the Deaf community access services.
For example, research from the National Institutes of Health shows deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are more likely to seek medical care through an emergency room than a doctor's office.
“Doctors typically do not provide sign language interpreters, but ERs will,” Bignell said. “Individuals typically go there, but the funding cost for the ER itself has, of course, gone up. However, the deaf individuals typically end up having medical assistance needs that use taxpayer money, and so the state will end up paying that as well for individuals going to the ER.”
Bignell said interpreters are also critical in educational environments. Having less capacity to train interpreters in Indiana could affect the options for where a parent is able to send their child.
“If they're looking to put their child in a mainstream setting, however, there is not an interpreter available, they will potentially put them into the Deaf school,” Bignell said.
But funding for the Indiana School for the Deaf was also slashed in the state budget. Bignell said the school was forced to cut educational services and staff. And he said student safety has been “diminished.”
“We're very restricted,” Bignell said. “For many parents with deaf children, just in that one specific school regard, it is not equal access with other parents within the state. Any individual who may have a hearing child [has the ability] to give them the best educational choices. Deaf individuals are suffering on that front.”
Bignell said an estimated 60 percent of interpreters working in Indiana are nearing retirement age, meaning Indiana will likely have to bring more interpreters in from out-of-state.
“We have to cover the expenses of the interpreters’ travel, and it ends up costing more to the state,” Bignell said. “We need to make sure that we're able to provide interpreters within the state, so that those funds would be less impacted by the out-of-state interpreters.”
Bignell said lawmakers and the governor aren’t considering the long-term effects of what they eliminated in the state budget.
“They need to consider that, rather than just going ahead and cutting things that they believe are not needed,” Bignell said. “The consequences of this is excluding individuals from what the state is looking to provide.”"
https://www.wbaa.org/local-news/2025-07-23/indiana-cuts-only-public-university-asl-interpretation-program-deaf-advocate-warns-loss-of-access
#metaglossia_mundus
"Today, Artisight launched Voice-Activated Interpreters on the company's leading Smart Hospital Platform so clinicians can seamlessly communicate with patients in hundreds of languages. Within seconds, the technology enables around-the-clock access to thousands of medical interpreters in more than 240 languages, including American Sign Language. Compatible with any translation service used by hospitals, the advancement launched in collaboration with LanguageLine Solutions, a leading provider of on-demand language access.
Clinicians can now instantly access interpreters during a patient encounter with a verbal cue. For example, providers say "OK Artisight – Spanish Interpreter," and an interpreter appears on the Artisight-connected TV.
The need for on-demand medical interpretation is enormous—one in five residents in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home. Studies show that Limited English Proficiency (LEP) patients are 25% less likely to receive preventive care services and 50% more likely to experience adverse health outcomes than English-speaking patients.
On-demand interpretation bridges language and cultural barriers, allowing for improved diagnoses, treatment-plan adherence, and medical outcomes. Language access has also been shown to dramatically increase staff efficiency.
"For the first time, clinicians can bring an interpreter in the room with a voice command," said Dr. Andrew Gostine, chief executive officer and co-founder of Artisight. "This is another example of how we're building the infrastructure to bring advanced technology into hospitals, eliminating friction for clinicians and patients at the bedside."
The Voice-Activated Interpreter is now available at hundreds of hospitals already using the company's Smart Hospital Platform. Remote Artisight caregivers can access LanguageLine audio and video interpretation on demand, as well. This gives healthcare providers the ability to seamlessly access language support regardless of their physical location.
"Reliable on-demand interpreting services are essential for delivering high-quality care. We've seen the need grow exponentially, to the extent that we managed over 85 million interactions last year," LanguageLine President and CEO Simon Yoxon-Grant said. "Artisight's voice-activated ability to immediately access a qualified interpreter further dissolves language barriers and will save caregivers a significant amount of time and frustration. Every second counts when you are dealing with people's health and wellbeing."
Artisight already reduces the time nurses spend on administrative tasks by more than 30 minutes per shift. By making on-demand interpreters available in every patient room, clinicians can spend less time on repetitive tasks. This enhancement builds upon the company's mission to create the hospital of the future using advanced AI, powered by NVIDIA Technologies like TensortRT, Triton and Jetson NX GPUs, to drive meaningful improvements across the entire healthcare ecosystem.
About Artisight
Artisight redefines the possibilities of healthcare through its Smart Hospital Platform and solutions for virtual care, quality improvement, and care coordination. Anchored in deep clinical knowledge and industry-defining artificial intelligence, Artisight's state-of-the-art computer vision and robust multi-sensor network adapts in real-time to specific environments and workflows, unlocking previously inaccessible data and ensuring seamless integration into your healthcare ecosystem. For more information, visit https://artisight.com/
Media Contact
Andrea Heuer
917-914-5563
andrea@12080group.com
SOURCE Artisight"
Jul 24, 2025, 07:30 ET
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/artisight-brings-voice-activated-interpreters-to-smart-hospital-platform-302512481.html
#metaglossia_mundus
"OTTAWA — Professional interpreters are warning that the federal government's plans to cut its procurement costs could compromise the public's access to parliamentary, Supreme Court and other official proceedings in both official languages.
Jeremy Link, a spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada, said the department recently began a process to replace the federal government's existing freelance interpretation contracts.
As part of that process, the government is seeking to make several major changes to the procurement of services for Parliament and other institutions like the Supreme Court.
The Canadian branch of the International Association of Conference Interpreters, AIIC-Canada, said those changes include eliminating measures to protect interpreters’ hearing and adopting a "lowest bid" approach to replace the "best fit" model that considers applicants' credentials and experience.
"This change would almost certainly have the effect of pushing the most experienced freelancers off an already short-handed team," the organization said in a news release. It said that adopting a lowest-bid approach is "just about the money."
In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month, AIIC-Canada president Alionka Skup said the proposed new rules would lower the quality of interpretation services and undermine public access to government proceedings in Canada’s two official languages.
Skup said the changes also ignore the current "severe shortage" of accredited and qualified suppliers of interpretation services. She said about 100 accredited and qualified freelancers now shoulder about 60 per cent of all parliamentary assignments.
Nicole Gagnon, a spokesperson for AIIC-Canada and a career freelance interpreter, said the shortage started before the pandemic but got worse as Parliament went virtual and interpreters like herself sustained injuries.
Several Parliament Hill interpreters have experienced hearing damage due to poor sound quality and feedback, and the federal government was forced to adjust the setup in the House of Commons and committee rooms last year.
"With this new standing offer, odds are they'll decide to just hang up their headsets because it's not worth their trouble," Gagnon said.
Gagnon said the government is also planning to start paying interpreters by the hour rather than by the day.
"That's a fundamental change that is totally unacceptable to us," she said. "This standing offer goes against our standards of practice. We work by the day, we do not work by the hour. We're not gig workers."
Gagnon said she and other interpreters oppose the lowest-bid model because it doesn't take credentials and experience into account.
"Quite a few of us have more years' experience than others, have other degrees, be it in engineering or law or administration, and so these are additional credentials that should be taken into account when assigning interpreters," she said. "You would want to assign an interpreter to the Supreme Court if they have done studies in law or if that's their field of expertise, rather than send someone who has not."
Gagnon said she worries about how MPs who rely on translation services will be affected by a possible decline in quality, noting that most of the interpreters' work is translating English into French.
Link said Public Services and Procurement Canada issued a call for feedback from suppliers and industry on the new procurement approach in June. He said the input gathered will play a "key role" in shaping and refining the procurement strategy going forward.
Gagnon said that when it met with suppliers last week, the government made it clear that it likely wouldn't reconsider adopting the lowest-bid approach.
The department is extending current contracts with freelance interpreters until the end of the year as it works to update the procurement process. Once the new process is in place, interpreters will have to decide whether to submit bids to keep working on Parliament Hill.
Gagnon said that the hourly pay and lowest-bid proposals are "non-starters" for her and that if they're introduced, she won't be offering her services again.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2025.
Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press"
https://www.coastreporter.net/the-mix/parliamentary-interpreters-sound-alarm-over-coming-changes-to-procurement-rules-10984630
#metaglossia_mundus
"From “yeet” to “social distancing,” new words and phrases constantly emerge and evolve in American English. But how do these neologisms—newly coined terms—gain acceptance and become part of mainstream dialect?
We interviewed Christopher Green, associate professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, to better understand the fascinating process behind language evolution.
The Birth of New Words
Christopher Green
Most neologisms aren’t totally new creations, according to Green. “It is fairly rare for entirely new terms to emerge,” he says. Instead, most new words contain repurposed pieces of existing terms or represent nuanced changes where existing meanings expand or contract.
However, completely new terms do occasionally surface. Take “yeet,” most commonly meaning to throw something away. This recent addition to American slang emerged among younger social media users and spread rapidly through digital platforms, illustrating how modern technology accelerates language evolution.
“A term must have a community of use whereby some string of sounds and an associated meaning come to be accepted and used by that community and eventually more broadly,” Green says. “Social media and global news cycles now help spread new terms far more quickly than in times past.”
The Question of ‘Official’ Recognition
When does a word “officially” become part of the language? Green suggests this concept is more fluid than many realize. While some track when dictionaries add new words to their collections, and the American Dialect Society holds yearly meetings where linguists vote on a “word (or phrase) of the year,” these represent informal recognition rather than official status.
Patterns of Acceptance and Rejection
Many neologisms follow cyclical patterns, appearing, disappearing and sometimes reemerging based on changing circumstances. “Who knew what ‘social distancing’ was before 2020?” Green asks. The term rapidly gained widespread use during the pandemic, then largely fell out of everyday conversation—though it remains in our collective memory, ready to resurface if needed.
Generational language patterns also repeat over time. “Every generation has its term to express their liking of something,” Green says, citing examples like “rad, cool, fly, hip, neato, fire, lit and savage.” These terms often function as markers of in-group versus out-group identity, with people borrowing language from specific communities to signal desired membership.
Cultural Drivers of Language Change
Cultural shifts significantly influence neologism creation, though Green emphasizes that the process depends heavily on community adoption. He points to terms popularized in LGBTQ ballroom culture during the 1980s that have survived and expanded in use, often without users realizing their origins. Terms like “work,” “yes queen,” “serve” and “slay” exemplify how marginalized communities often drive mainstream language innovation.
Green says it can be humorous to observe contemporary reactions to Gen Alpha terminology. Adults sometimes express bewilderment at terms like “cap, sus, rizz, bet, ate, cheugy and low-key,” often forgetting their own generational slang. “Some adults of my generation and above act like we didn’t have our own terms that our parents and grandparents didn’t understand,” he says, recalling 1990s expressions like “booyah, jiggy and as if!”
The key difference today is the speed and scale of dissemination. While past generations relied on music and television to spread new language, social media now enables instant global communication, dramatically accelerating how neologisms travel through speech communities.
The Future of Language Evolution
As American English continues to evolve, understanding neologism patterns helps us appreciate language as a living, breathing entity shaped by community use, cultural identity and technological advancement. Whether a new word survives depends ultimately on whether communities find it useful enough to adopt and maintain over time—a process as unpredictable as human creativity itself.
Green is available for media interviews on this topic. Reporters may contact Keith Kobland, associate director of media relations, at kkobland@syr.edu to request an interview or further information."
Friday, July 25, 2025, By Jen Plummer
https://news.syr.edu/blog/2025/07/25/how-new-words-enter-our-language-a-linguistics-expert-explains/
#metaglossia_mundus
Microsoft has released GitHub Spark – a new tool in Microsoft Copilot that enables users to turn ideas into fully functional applications using just natural language. With Spark, developers can describe an idea and generate a complete front-end and back-end app, all built and deployed automatically using Claude Sonnet 4. For those who prefer a hands-on approach, Spark also supports traditional development through visual editing tools and GitHub Copilot-powered code suggestions.
"Microsoft debuts GitHub Spark to enable natural language app development
GitHub Spark develops the coding needed to launch a fully working app from natural language requests from the user
New tool within Microsoft Copilot allows users to create full-stack applications by describing their ideas in natural language, with no set-up required
BY ALICE CHAMBERS | 24 JULY 2025
Microsoft has released GitHub Spark – a new tool in Microsoft Copilot that enables users to turn ideas into fully functional applications using just natural language.
With Spark, developers can describe an idea and generate a complete front-end and back-end app, all built and deployed automatically using Claude Sonnet 4. For those who prefer a hands-on approach, Spark also supports traditional development through visual editing tools and GitHub Copilot-powered code suggestions.
No set-up is required – Spark includes everything out of the box, from data handling and large language model (LLM) inference to hosting, deployment and GitHub integration.
Users can further enhance their applications with intelligent features powered by LLMs from OpenAI, Mea, DeepSeek, xAI and others.
Spark is available in public preview for Copilot Pro+ users with rollout to additional customers coming soon."
https://www.technologyrecord.com/article/microsoft-debuts-github-spark-to-enable-natural-language-app-development
#metaglossia_mundus
"Google Invests $37 Million to Boost AI in Africa, Focuses on Food, Education, and Local Languages
...
The funding will support food security, digital education, AI tools in local languages, startup growth, and research infrastructure.
A large share of the money, $25 million, will go to a new AI Collaborative for Food Security, aimed at helping smallholder farmers better predict hunger risks, respond to climate change, and improve crop production. The programme brings together researchers and nonprofit groups to build AI tools that work for Africa’s farming systems.
To make digital tools more inclusive, Google is committing $3 million to the Masakhane Research Foundation, a pan-African collective working on AI tools in more than 40 African languages.
The goal is to help more people use the internet and digital services in their native languages by building voice tools, translation systems, and high-quality data.
Startups are also in focus, as Google is launching a funding programme that will support over 100 early-stage African startups using AI to solve real-life problems in agriculture, healthcare, and education. These startups will get funding, mentorship, and access to technical tools to help them grow responsibly.
As part of its infrastructure plan, Google is opening the first AI Community Centre in Africa, located in Accra, Ghana. The centre will offer free training, workshops, and community projects focused on AI literacy, culture, and social impact. It’s designed as an open space for students, developers, and creatives.
Google will also offer 100,000 scholarships in Ghana through its Career Certificate programme, with training in AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and IT support. An additional $7 million is being invested to support AI education in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana, funding schools, nonprofits, and digital safety projects.
Two African universities will receive $1 million each to support AI research and train MSc and PhD students. One grant goes to the African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AfriDSAI) at the University of Pretoria, and the other to the Wits MIND Institute in South Africa.
Google’s Senior Vice President, James Manyika, said, “Africa is home to some of the most important and inspiring work in AI today. We are committed to supporting the next wave of innovation through long-term investment, local partnerships, and platforms that help researchers and entrepreneurs build solutions that matter.”
Yossi Matias, Google’s vice president of Engineering and Research, added, “This new wave of support reflects our belief in the talent, creativity, and ingenuity across the continent. By building with local communities and institutions, we’re supporting solutions that are rooted in Africa’s realities and built for global impact.”
This latest investment expands on the previous efforts of Google in Africa, including AI tools for maternal health in Nigeria and Ghana, wildfire alerts in East Africa, and local language model development in Nairobi and Accra.
Africa is fast emerging as a centre for AI growth, with over 2,400 AI-focused startups and more than 20 national AI strategies either launched or in development."
https://techeconomy.ng/google-invests-millions-to-boost-ai-in-africa/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Spectrum launches ASL interpreting service in NYC, including Staten Island
Spectrum recently announced the launch of a virtual American Sign Language interpreting service at 20 stores in the New York City area, including one Staten Island location.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Spectrum recently announced the launch of a virtual American Sign Language interpreting service at 20 stores across the New York City area, including one Staten Island location.
The service, which is accessible through a QR code in the store, offers customers who are Deaf or part of the hard-of-hearing community an interpreter who will facilitate conversations between them and a store specialist in real time through a personal device. Spectrum first launched the virtual interpreting service at four stores in Rochester, New York, last year.
ECB Pauses After Series Of Cuts, Opting For A 'Wait And See' ApproachECB Pauses After Series Of Cuts, Opting For A 'Wait And See' Approach
The initiative was brought forward through a partnership with Sorenson Communications, a global language service provider that promotes accessibility tools such as call captioning, video remote sign language interpreting and post-production language services.
“As a leader in providing accessible products and services for customers with disabilities, the virtual ASL interpreting service offers Deaf customers a more efficient and smoother interaction with our store specialists,” said Steven Raymond, vice president of accessibility for Spectrum. “With a large Deaf population in New York City, and sign language among the many languages used here, it was a natural next step to expand the service here, ensuring our customers have access for a seamless Spectrum experience.”"
Nicolette Cavallaro | ncavallaro@siadvance.com
Jul. 23, 2025, 7:30 a.m.
https://www.silive.com/news/2025/07/spectrum-launches-asl-interpreting-service-in-nyc-including-staten-island.html
#metaglossia_mundus
Name of post : Junior Hindi Translator
Footwear Design & Development Institute (FDDI) is inviting applications from eligible candidates for recruitment to the posts or career of Junior Hindi Translator in 2025.
Name of post : Junior Hindi Translator
Assam Career : IIT Guwahati Recruitment 2025Assam Career : College of Veterinary Science Recruitment 2025Assam Career : Numaligarh Refinery Recruitment 2025TCIL Recruitment 2025 : Apply for Manager jobsAssam Career : NIT Silchar Recruitment 2025
No. of posts : 4
Essential Qualification :
Bachelor's Degree with Hindi as a compulsory subject with minimum 55% marks from a recognized University/ InstituteDesirable Qualification : Master's Degree in Hindi with minimum 55% marks from a recognized University / InstituteAlso Read : 10 intriguing shayaris and quotes of Sara Ali Khan
Essential Work Experience :
Diploma or Certificate course of in translation from Hindi to English & vice versa from a recognized University / Institute.OrAtleast 02 years experience of translation work from Hindi to English and vice versaDesirable Work Experience : Typing in Hindi and English
How to apply :
Candidates must submit online applications at https://www.fddiindia.com/career.phpOnline applications will close at
https://m.nenow.in/article/assam-career/fddi-recruitment-2025-apply-for-junior-hindi-translator-job/445694
#metaglossia_mundus
"L'Association canadienne de l'industrie de la langue (anciennement l'AILIA) est l'association professionnelle canadienne à but non lucratif des entreprises offrant des services linguistiques. Elle a pour mission de faire la promotion de l'industrie canadienne de la langue et d’en accroître la compétitivité tant sur le marché national que sur les marchés étrangers en jouant activement son rôle de porte-parole, en assurant le partage d’information et en soutenant le développement de mécanismes d’accréditation.
La gouvernance est assurée par un conseil d'administration bénévole actif.
Promouvoir les intérêts des membres de l’industrie de la langue
Constituer une plate-forme d'action commune à toutes les composantes de l'industrie
Devenir un carrefour d'échange
Accroître la notoriété des entreprises et du secteur
Trouver des solutions pour faire face aux défis de l'industrie
Promouvoir l'innovation ainsi que la recherche-développement
Assurer le réseautage entre les entreprises de l'industrie et d’autres partenaires des secteurs public et privé
Devenir un interlocuteur incontournable des pouvoirs publics
Stimuler les efforts des intervenants de l'industrie à l'échelle nationale et internationale
Encourager la mise en place d'alliances et de projets propres à faire progresser le secteur"
https://www.ailia.ca/fr
#metaglossia_mundus
"OCDE will host its ninth annual Interpreters and Translators Conference Oct. 3-4 at Vanguard University. Keynote speaker Ewandro Magalhães, a TEDx presenter and former U.N. chief interpreter, will headline the event.
International TEDx speaker and former chief interpreter in the United Nations system Ewandro Magalhães will headline the 2025 Interpreters and Translators Conference hosted by the Orange County Department of Education this fall.
Now in its ninth year, the annual event is organized by OCDE’s Educational Services division and will take place Oct. 3-4 at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa. This year’s theme, “Empowering Communities Through Language Access: Innovation & Impact for Language Professionals,” emphasizes the critical role interpreters and translators play in helping schools connect with families and support student learning through effective communication.
Magalhães, a veteran conference interpreter and author, will deliver both the opening and closing keynotes.
“Each year, our conference is more than a professional gathering — it’s a celebration of purpose,” said Natalia Abarca, OCDE’s Language Services coordinator. “We’re spotlighting the innovation and impact that interpreters and translators bring to the frontlines of equity. This work is important, and together, we’re not just bridging languages — we’re building trust and providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”
In 2024, OCDE’s Language Services unit was honored with a prestigious Golden Bell Award from the California School Boards Association. The recognition highlighted the department’s efforts to enhance interpreting and translation practices, support bilingual staff, and offer high-quality training programs, including the annual conference, that promote language access across educational communities.
Friday’s program will also include the presentation of the Award of Distinction to two outstanding bilingual professionals working in Orange County schools. In addition, one administrator will be recognized with the Language Access Administrator Award of Distinction.
Throughout the two-day event, participants will have the opportunity to attend 25 sessions across several topics, including skills development for interpreters and translators, note taking, family engagement, and the integration of artificial intelligence in the language access field.
The cost to attend is $250, which includes complimentary parking as well as breakfast and lunch on both days.
For more information or to register, visit the conference webpage. Questions about the conference: Language_Services@ocde.us. Registration inquiries:
Angela Del Rosario at ADelRosario@ocde.us."
Language access professionals to gather for 2025 Interpreters and Translators Conference
Vicky Nguyen July 23, 2025
https://newsroom.ocde.us/language-access-professionals-to-gather-for-2025-interpreters-and-translators-conference/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Ghost Cities is about a young Chinese-Australian man who is fired from his translator job at the Chinese consulate after it is discovered he cannot speak Mandarin.
First time author Siang Lu won the prestigious $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award for his novel, Ghost Cities, described as “a genuine landmark in Australian literature”.
Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora,” the judges said.
“Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.”
Ghost Cities was unpublished for 10 years after 200 rejections.
“Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new.
On winning the award, Lu, 39, said he was “honoured beyond belief, and beyond words”.“I didn’t dare dream of this. It didn’t seem possible.”
Lu, who is of Chinese-Malaysian descent, moved with his family moved from Malaysia to Brisbane in the 1990s when he was four.
The 2025 judging panel comprised Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Prof Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, and author, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo.
The Miles Franklin literary award was established in the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin, for the “advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature”."
Joanne Williamson
July 24, 2025 - 6:47PM
Understanding China through art in Australia
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/books-magazines/books/brisbane-author-siang-lu-wins-2025-miles-franklin-literary-award/news-story/e2dc7d28557f126293358c7f6bfd8a46
#metaglossia_mundus
Imayam discusses translation, character-driven writing, and the importance of language evolution in storytelling with Justice Sridevan.
"A writer creates a work, but a translator breathes new life into it, says writer Imayam
Mr. Imayam was in conversation with Justice (retired) Prabha Sridevan, former judge of the Madras High Court, who has translated three of his books into English, at The Hindu office in Chennai.
Updated - July 25, 2025 01:52 pm IST - CHENNAI
THE HINDU BUREAU
Tamil writer Imayam in conversation with Justice (Retired) Prabha Sridevan at The Hindu office in Chennai on Thursday, July 24, 2025.
The task of a writer is to create, while the translator, in turn, breathes new life into it through another language, said Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Imayam on Thursday (July 24, 2025).
Mr. Imayam was in conversation with Justice (retired) Prabha Sridevan, former judge of the Madras High Court, who has translated three of his books into English, at The Hindu office in Chennai. Sharing her experience of working with Mr. Imayam, Justice Sridevan said, “Translating vattara vazhakku (regional dialect) into English is difficult. But Mr. Imayam does not use vattara vazhakku in his writing. His language is unique.”
While talking about translating Mr. Imayam’s Ippodhu Uyirodirukkiren into the English edition (I’m alive... for now), Justice Sridevan said, “The story is narrated by a 15-year-old boy. I cannot use words like ‘dichotomy’ or ‘parameters’ while translating his voice. I have to be conscious of the kind of words he would have used if he had known English. I cannot use polysyllabic words. The language has to be simple and true to his age and background.”
Responding to a question from Justice Sridevan, who asked whether the humour in his otherwise dark and serious stories comes naturally or is consciously added, Mr. Imayam said he does not sit and decide what to include or leave out. “It is the character that decides, not me. I don’t interfere. I simply write what they speak. Once I finish writing, the character leaves me, and I also leave them,” he said.
“Love is the foundation of all my stories,” Mr. Imayam said, while talking about where he draws inspiration for his stories. As society continues to change, it is the duty of a writer to document that transformation. The foremost responsibility of a writer is to keep renewing and reshaping the language through creative evolution, to ensure that the language remains alive and relevant, he said.
“To me, storytelling comes second. Reviving and refreshing the language comes first. That is my identity. In the past two thousand years, many kings and wealthy people have come and gone. Only Tholkappiyar, Thiruvalluvar, and Kambar still live on through their writings,” he added.
(This conversation was held as part of The Hindu’s Out of Print series with writers)"
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/a-writer-creates-a-work-but-a-translator-breathes-new-life-into-it-says-writer-imayam/article69851642.ece
#metaglossia_mundus
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