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Charles Tiayon
November 4, 2011 8:33 PM
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Beyond Intuition: A Guide to Writing and Editing Magazine Nonfiction.
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
"L'IA complique-t-elle la tâche des universités ?
Un de mes collègues, professeur de traduction dans une université vietnamienne, a soupiré : « Chaque fois qu'on assigne une tâche aux étudiants, ils se contentent de coller la question dans ChatGPT et de soumettre le résultat. »
La semaine dernière, lors d'une réunion autour d'un café, un de mes collègues, professeur de traduction dans une université vietnamienne, a soupiré : « J'adorais enseigner la traduction. Mais maintenant, à chaque fois qu'on me donne un exercice, les étudiants se contentent de copier-coller la question dans ChatGPT et de soumettre le résultat. Je n'arrive presque plus à leur donner de retour. »
Paradoxe : les connaissances et les compétences ne sont plus rares, pourtant les frais de scolarité augmentent.
Ce phénomène n'est pas propre à l'enseignement de la traduction. Il reflète le malaise croissant qui règne dans le secteur de l'éducation face à la perturbation, par des outils d'IA comme ChatGPT et DeepL, de nombreux modèles de formation, notamment dans les universités, qui existent depuis des décennies.
Pendant des siècles, les universités ont fonctionné selon un principe très simple : le savoir et les compétences étaient rares. Pour acquérir savoir et compétences, les étudiants devaient payer des frais de scolarité, assister aux cours, lire des livres, réaliser des travaux et, finalement, obtenir un diplôme.
Un diplôme constitue à la fois une source de connaissances et une certification de compétences sur le marché du travail.
Mais aujourd'hui, l'IA peut expliquer, synthétiser, traduire et écrire en quelques secondes à un coût quasi nul. Paradoxalement, alors que les connaissances et les compétences ne sont plus rares et deviennent moins chères, les frais de scolarité universitaires augmentent sans cesse.
Le marché du travail réagit plus vite que les universités. Au Royaume-Uni, le nombre d'emplois disponibles pour les jeunes diplômés a chuté d'environ 33 % au cours de l'année écoulée, soit son niveau le plus bas depuis sept ans, principalement en raison de l'automatisation des postes de début de carrière par les entreprises grâce à l'intelligence artificielle. (Niveau d'emploi pour les personnes ayant peu ou pas d'expérience) et réduction des coûts.
Aux États-Unis, plus de 27 États ont supprimé ou réduit les exigences en matière de diplôme universitaire pour un large éventail de postes dans la fonction publique, dans le but d'élargir le vivier de talents et de remédier aux pénuries de main-d'œuvre ainsi qu'à « l'inflation des diplômes » (la tendance à exiger des qualifications scolaires plus élevées pour des emplois qui auparavant ne nécessitaient que des qualifications moindres).
Les entreprises réévaluent la main-d'œuvre à mesure que l'IA remplace de plus en plus les tâches répétitives et liées au codage qui étaient autrefois le domaine des jeunes diplômés.
Au Vietnam, la transformation induite par l'IA est manifeste dans le service client et le marketing, les chatbots et les outils d'IA remplaçant progressivement des rôles fondamentaux.
Alors que de nombreux programmes universitaires enseignent encore des compétences manuelles comme la rédaction de contenu ou la gestion de communautés, les entreprises ont rapidement remplacé les stagiaires et les nouveaux employés par des systèmes d'IA, privilégiant l'embauche de personnes capables d'utiliser l'IA pour améliorer les performances.
Cependant, tous les types de connaissances et de compétences ne se déprécient pas au même rythme. Les domaines qui peuvent être standardisés et rationalisés, tels que le droit, la comptabilité, l'administration, l'ingénierie des opérations et la traduction, sont les plus durement touchés.
J'en ai fait l'expérience directe, tout comme nombre de mes collègues du secteur de la traduction. J'ai perdu beaucoup de clients internationaux qui me confiaient la traduction de contrats et de documents types, car l'IA prend désormais en charge ces tâches plus rapidement et à moindre coût.
Mais j'ai encore d'autres projets, comme la relecture de traductions de Chat GPT, la recherche et l'analyse de groupes de patients pour tester des questionnaires de santé traduits par l'IA, la comparaison des réponses entre les groupes et l'adaptation du langage aux différents contextes culturels.
Ce sont des emplois qui requièrent du jugement, de l'expérience et de l'empathie – des qualités que l'IA, du moins pour l'instant, ne peut pas remplacer.
Un ami architecte a vécu une expérience similaire. Les logiciels et l'IA peuvent certes faciliter la réalisation de plans standard. Mais lorsqu'un projet doit concilier les besoins des personnes, le paysage, la culture, le budget et les contraintes légales, le rôle de l'architecte devient crucial. Aucun algorithme ne peut « comprendre » les individus et le contexte comme un professionnel expérimenté.
L'IA se rapproche de plus en plus de l'humain.
Ces histoires révèlent une tendance de plus en plus nette : l’IA remplace efficacement les tâches répétitives et standardisées ; mais plus elle se rapproche des humains, du contexte, des émotions, de l’éthique et de la responsabilité sociale, plus le rôle des humains devient irremplaçable.
Et c’est là que l’histoire ne tourne plus uniquement autour de la traduction ou de l’architecture, mais aborde directement une institution centrale de la société du savoir : l’université.
Si même l'IA peut obtenir d'excellents résultats à un examen, alors continuer à enseigner et à évaluer de la même manière ne fait que dévaloriser l'université. La valeur des universités aujourd'hui ne réside plus principalement dans la transmission du savoir, mais dans le développement de l'esprit critique, du jugement et des capacités intellectuelles des étudiants.
Cependant, la réalité au Vietnam montre que, même si ce n'est pas le cas pour tous, de nombreux programmes enseignent et évaluent encore de manière traditionnelle : prise de notes, apprentissage par cœur, réalisation de devoirs selon un modèle, tests basés sur des « exemples de réponses ».
Dans le contexte de l'IA, cette méthode pédagogique révèle clairement ses limites. Un rapport de groupe peut être rédigé en une soirée grâce à l'IA ; une présentation peut être créée en quelques minutes ; même les arguments et les preuves peuvent être « préparés pour vous ». Si l'évaluation se limite à la capacité de reproduire un contenu, alors plus les apprenants disposent de technologies, moins ils sont amenés à réfléchir par eux-mêmes.
Bien sûr, il y a aussi eu des évolutions positives. Dans certains programmes avancés, les étudiants doivent analyser les résultats de l'IA, comparer les points de vue, défendre des arguments contre des contre-arguments, travailler sur des projets concrets et assumer la responsabilité de leurs choix.
Ces établissements scolaires font figure de pionniers en intégrant l'IA dans l'enseignement, en organisant des formations pour les enseignants spécialisés et en élaborant des programmes d'études axés sur la maîtrise des outils d'IA. Toutefois, ces approches demeurent dispersées, variant d'un enseignant ou d'un établissement à l'autre, et ne constituent pas encore une orientation systémique cohérente.
La question cruciale n’est pas de savoir si l’IA va « freiner » les universités, mais plutôt : les universités vietnamiennes évoluent-elles suffisamment vite pour passer de l’enseignement des connaissances au développement de la pensée et du caractère humains – l’IA étant un outil puissant pour soutenir les apprenants et les travailleurs ?
Dr. Pham Hoa Hiep
Source : https://tuoitre.vn/ai-co-dang-lam-kho-dai-hoc-20251231112540395.htm";
Báo Tuổi Trẻ
30/01/2026
https://www.vietnam.vn/fr/ai-co-dang-lam-kho-dai-hoc
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Santo Domingo. - Legal translators or court interpreters, Alberto Gómez and Luis Manuel Pérez Guzmán denounced that the Attorney General's Office has established new measures that hinder the dynamism of the processes and the ability to respond in a timely manner to deliver documents to users. In this regard, they call on the Attorney General of the Republic, Yeni Berenice Reynoso, to take action, reiterating that our interest is for this measure to be reversed so that legal translators and court interpreters can provide a quality service to the population. They indicated that the new measures are to present the passport or identity document of the actors or of the people who appear in the documents, which has generated enormous delays.
You can also read: Deligne guarantees fair payment for expropriations after protest in Los Alcarrizos
"This measure is not covered by any law that supports it. The role of the legalizations department of the Attorney General's Office is to certify signatures of both legal translators and notaries; that is what they are authorized to do." "We wanted to raise our voice on behalf of the thousands of users who daily seek these services, as well as on behalf of all legal translators who are being affected by the implementation of this measure, which was abruptly and without prior notice put into effect two weeks ago," said Alberto Gómez, who is the director of Tralega Traducciones Legales. Luis Manuel Pérez Guzmán, director of Dragoman Traducciones reiterated "this measure has caused much uproar and displeasure in the population that requires their legalized documents on time." Alberto Gómez and Luis Manuel Pérez Guzmán, who represent the main legal translation companies in the Dominican Republic, maintain that this joint effort has the mission of helping the population that requires these services for different reasons, for example, legalization of translations of birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, legal documents for studies, among others. “In addition to offering a quality service, in each request, we guide clients to resolve their procedures effectively. We do our work out of vocation, aware that the most gratifying honor a human being can have is to serve at the right time,” pointed out Alberto Gómez and Luis Manuel Pérez Guzmán, who have more than 20 years of professional experience."
Paola Castillo
January 29, 2026
https://deultimominuto.net/en/uncategorized/legal-translators-or-court-interpreters-denounce-absurd-measures-in-the-legalization-of-documents-and-call-on-the-attorney-yeni-berenice-reynoso/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Judiciary clarifies interpreter deployment at Opuwo court
The Office of the Judiciary has clarified how indigenous language interpreters are deployed at courts, following concerns over the availability of Otjiherero and Damara/Nama interpretation services at the Opuwo Magistrate’s Court.
Judiciary spokesperson Vikitoria Hango tells Nampa in a media response that the current structure of the judiciary presents challenges in ensuring that all indigenous languages are represented at every court simultaneously.
She explains that the allocation of interpreters is guided by geographical location and the predominant languages spoken in each region.
“The distribution of interpreters is determined by the geographical location of courts and the dominant language in that area. When specific language interpreters are required, a systematic process is followed to source them in advance,” Hango says.
She adds that the Office of the Judiciary has not identified any backlog of court cases attributable solely to a shortage of interpreters, noting that mechanisms are in place to ensure proceedings remain fair and accessible.
Language access remains a key component of the justice system, particularly in rural areas where multiple indigenous languages are widely spoken.
The Opuwo Magistrate’s Court serves communities across the Kunene region."
By Namibia Press Agency
29 January 2026
https://www.namibian.com.na/judiciary-clarifies-interpreter-deployment-at-opuwo-court/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
This two-volume, 1,600-page dictionary is the result of more than fifty years of collaboration among Native speakers, educators and linguists and contains more than 19,000 entries. The dictionary also includes a grammatical sketch of the language, a pronunciation key and guides to noun forms and verb conjugations. Designed by Michael Alpert, director emeritus of the UMaine Press, this edition of the dictionary features a user-friendly layout of entries with examples of everyday usage for each word.
"The University of Maine Press published the second edition of “Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqey Latuwewakon: Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary” by David A. Francis, Robert M. Leavitt and Margaret Apt.
This two-volume, 1,600-page dictionary is the result of more than fifty years of collaboration among Native speakers, educators and linguists and contains more than 19,000 entries. The dictionary also includes a grammatical sketch of the language, a pronunciation key and guides to noun forms and verb conjugations. Designed by Michael Alpert, director emeritus of the UMaine Press, this edition of the dictionary features a user-friendly layout of entries with examples of everyday usage for each word.
Passamaquoddy and Maliseet communities in eastern and northern Maine will be hosting book launches in the coming weeks, and other events are being planned for the spring at UMaine and its regional campus, the University of Maine at Machias. Goose Lane Editions of New Brunswick is distributing the dictionaries in Canada.
To place orders, contact Betsy Rose, betsy.rose@maine.edu. More UMaine Press publications are available at umaine.edu/umpress/."
https://umaine.edu/news/2026/01/new-edition-of-passamaquoddy-maliseet-dictionary-published-by-umaine-press/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"One out of every two people worldwide speak one or more languages. With over 7,000 languages spoken globally, bilingualism is a skill that will forever be useful.
In the North Penn School District alone, there are around 80 languages spoken among students and families, and this year, the district has decided to award those who can speak multiple languages “proficiently” with the PA Seal of Biliteracy (PASB).
If a student, by the time of high school graduation, is proficient in both English and one or more additional language, they are eligible for the seal. This includes ELs (English Learners) and those who speak another language at home.
“[Through this award, students can receive] credit for being bilingual in their native language. Bengali, Gujarati, or Arabic are commonly spoken languages in our district population [that we don’t offer courses for here at North Penn,” Curriculum Supervisor Rachel Earley said.
The first step in getting the seal is making sure all the prerequisites are met. Students must meet all the requirements needed to graduate high school, as well as prove proficiency in English and their second language. This must be done via grades in English and world language courses, as well as one additional document of proof each. The secondary piece of proof can be attained through various “pathways.”
English proficiency can be proven through a passing score on a state assessment, an AP exam, or a test of equal status, or, alternatively, through a portfolio that “meets the criteria for listening, speaking, reading, and writing at the intermediate or higher English proficiency level,” which will be reviewed and approved by the school’s Seal of Biliteracy committee.
Additional language proficiency can be proven through school transcripts from another country (including Puerto Rico as a territory) proving three or more years of instruction averaging a B or higher, a passing grade on an approved language assessment, or a portfolio that matches the same criteria as above.
To view more details and all criteria necessary for the seal, click here.
In a world where the word “fluency” is used extremely liberally, certification of bilingualism can provide security for those who see it, such as employers and universities.
According to the Pennsylvania State Modern Language Association (PSMLA), this award “provides employers and universities with a method of identifying people who are bilingual, recognizes students with 21st century skills, and encourages the study of other languages and cultures.”
And while this award does look good on job applications, and might even be the last deciding factor over a competing candidate, students can also receive language credits in college depending on the school they are considering.
Those on the aforementioned Seal of Biliteracy committee are set on encouraging applications for the PASB. This being the inaugural year for the award at North Penn, they look forward to seeing many more students receive it in the future."
https://www.knightcrier.org/student-life/2026/01/30/pa-seal-of-biliteracy-recognizes-multilingual-students-at-north-penn/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"A series of events will be held throughout the year to commemorate this historic initiative. The ‘Languages 250 at Trinity (1776-2026)’ programme will showcase the important work of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies and promote the cause of modern language education on the island of Ireland.
The School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies last night kickstarted a year of celebrations to mark 250 years of modern languages in Trinity.
Trinity College Dublin was the first university in these islands to introduce the study of modern continental languages. In 1776 Trinity appointed professors in French, German, Spanish and Italian. They were the first university Chairs in modern languages and, in the case of the Chairs in French and German, the oldest continuous Chairs in these languages in the world.
The establishment was spearheaded by the newly appointed Provost John Hely Hutchinson, motivated by his desire to equip college graduates with language skills for foreign travel and cultural engagement, opening them up to the exciting possibilities of Enlightenment Europe.
Last night’s opening ceremony in Trinity Long Room Hub featured an address by Pat Cox, President, Jean Monnet Foundation and former President of the European Parliament.
Pat Cox is pictured above on left with Provost Dr Linda Doyle and Thomas Byrne, T.D, Minister of State for European Affairs
Pat Cox said: “We are marking one of the world’s and Ireland’s most enduring academic traditions, the institutionalisation of modern language teaching in French, German, Italian and Spanish established through professorships here at Trinity College Dublin 250 years ago.
“Beyond history, the marketplace, career opportunity, and technological aids, fluency in a foreign language builds a self-enriching bridge to new cultures, literature, cinema, networks and friendships, offering a different prism through which to view the world. A shared language confers a sense both of connection and belonging even in the most trying of contexts.”
Provost of Trinity College Dublin Dr Linda Doyle responded:
“Trinity is immensely proud of its 250-year-old tradition in modern language education and remains committed to the promotion of modern languages to create a more open, tolerant, and culturally diverse world.”
Starting in January, a series of events will be held throughout the year to commemorate this historic initiative. The ‘Languages 250 at Trinity (1776-2026)’ programme will showcase the important work of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies and promote the cause of modern language education on the island of Ireland.
Highlights include a conference on ‘Translation in Ireland: Past and Future’ in May and in October a conference on ‘Modern Languages in Irish Life’. Also in October, the Hely-Hutchinson memorial lectures will be delivered by Professor Yves Citton, Université Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis) and author Ulrike Draesner.
Michael Cronin, Chair of French 1776 (above), said:
“The celebrations in 2026 represent a unique opportunity to honour Trinity College’s pioneering role in modern language education, and to build on this legacy to further deepen and strengthen Ireland’s European connections.”
Mary Cosgrove, Professor of German 1776, said:
“The origins of the Chairs of Modern Languages some 250 years ago was a matter not just of institutional, but of national and international significance: their establishment put Trinity, and Ireland, on the map as a pioneer of Modern Languages education at the highest level. In this history, Trinity emerges as a radical, modernising force.
“The advent of the Chairs was furthermore in line with a revolutionary spirit and progressive sensibility as proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776: the Chairs’ emergence indicates the start of a democratising shift, in the university context, from the ancient to the modern, from the study of classical languages to the learning of vernacular and foreign languages.”
Timeline: Chairs of Modern Languages in Trinity:
4 August 1774: Newly appointed Provost John Hely Hutchinson outlines his proposal to the Board of Senior Fellows that ‘it would be highly useful to have Professors of the modern Languages established in the college’
August 1775: R. Antonio Vieyra Transtagano arrives in Trinity to teach Spanish and Italian (Vieyra is the author of a Portuguese-English dictionary and a Portuguese grammar)
September 1775: Anthony D’Esca arrives in Trinity to teach French and German (Voltaire scholar, born in Berlin)
29 October 1776: Letter from King George III confirming appointment of two professors and granting sum of £200 per annum from the royal estates in Ireland to be divided equally between them ‘and to commence from the 29th day of September last.’
15 January 1777: Vieyra and D’Esca granted honorary degrees of LL.D.
26 January 1786: Rev. Frances Bessonnet appointed Professor of French (due to death of D’Esca in January 1785). Lt. Col. James Philip Hamilton appointed Professor of German.
1790-1801: Francis Amyot: Professor of French and German
1802-1841: Charles Willomier – Professor of French and German
1824: Evasio Radice – Professor of Italian and Spanish
1842-1866: Ignatius George Abeltshauser – Professor of French and German
1849: Basilio Angeli – Professor of Italian and Spanish
1866-1907: Albert Maximilian Selss – Professor of German
1862: Augusto Cesare Marani – Professor of Italian and Spanish
1869: Robert Atkinson – Professor of Romance Languages (French, Italian and Spanish combined)
1907: Maurice Alfred Gerothwohl – Professor of Romance Languages
1907: Robert Alan Williams – Professor of German
1909: Thomas B. Rudmose-Brown – Professor of Romance Languages"
Posted on: 30 January 2026
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/top-stories/featured/celebrations-to-mark-250-years-of-modern-languages-at-trinity/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"The path towards a nationwide language resurgence is winding, but schemes like The Queen’s College Translation Exchange (QTE) show the way forward.
School children, primarily in Key Stage 2 and 3, attend sessions run by Oxford undergraduate students who pick the texts. Previously they’ve been tasked with translating graphic novels, poems and comics.
The emphasis lies in the process of creative translation, rather than “functional” translation.
In 2025, 22,000 students aged 11-18 took part in the college’s Anthea Bell Translation Prize and the 2025-2026 competition will run from Monday until 27 March.
Dr Charlotte Ryland, the founding director of The Queen’s College Translation Exchange, said: “We’re trying to present an alternative narrative to the doom and gloom.
“Doing linguistic work in the service of something creative and purposeful, which is what we think is missing from school curriculums.”
The prize has proved extremely popular since it’s 2018 origins and in 2025, QTE were able to add Russian language as their sixth language strand included in the translation prize.
Ryland said: “It’s a Russian language prize rather than Russian literature. So there’s texts from writers who are grew up in and lived in countries before the Soviet Union and that’s a really important part of how it is presented.”
Oxford University Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture Claire Williams added: “Language teaching should be embedded in education, as it used to be.
“The earlier children start learning another language, the more they appreciate the nuances between languages, never mind not having the inhibitions that self-conscious teenagers do.”
In the 2023/24 academic year, less than half (46%) of eligible students in England opted for a language GCSE.
That is compared to 98% of upper secondary students in the EU who study a minimum of one foreign language, according to a recent University of Cambridge study.
QTE also values the languages spoken outside of the school gates, too.
Ryland said: “It’s so important. If we’re going to raise the profile of languages and language learning across the country, we have to start out there with the languages that are in our classrooms rooms, in our homes, and validate those.”
Although the government’s pledge to once again join Erasmus+ in 2027 is a step towards re-building bridges, modern foreign language provision remains in critical condition across the education spectrum in the UK.
A host of universities in the East Midlands are facing modern language course closures.
At the University of Nottingham, all undergraduate modern language degrees will be suspended under the proposed Phase 2 of Future Nottingham, which was announced on 6 November.
They would be the only Russell Group university not to offer modern languages. This unpopular decision comes as a result of the drastic reduction in applicants.
Moreover, the University of Leicester has also proposed closing their languages department and will not accept students from 2026/27 onwards.
Williams said: “I felt shock and disappointment at the short-sightedness of closures and the lack of investment in language-learning.”
Nottingham’s 2023/24 cycle only saw 42 applications to study BA Hons French, in comparison to Oxford University’s 331 applications for the same cycle.
At Oxford University, French still receives the highest number of applicants with 331 in 2024, with Spanish in second, having 226 applicants. However both these numbers have consistently dropped from 2021.
Total 2021 MML applicants (not including joint honours degree with subjects such as English) came to 1,017 in 2021 but fell by 18% by 2024 with 831 applicants, according to Oxford’s own faculty data.
Italian saw the greatest decline with an 84% decrease in applicants from 2021 to 2024.
With such a numerical disparity, the issue of a two-tiered university system manifests as a legitimate concern.
Williams said: “I’m really worried that this might happen, unless we start teaching languages at primary school, or capitalising on the multilingualism of primary schools.”
The QTE has made steps to address this regional disproportionality at secondary school level.
The translation exchange is currently working with six schools in the North West of England to pilot their Think like a Linguist programme.
Students in Blackpool and Rochdale are experiencing the programme that introduces children who live in more monoculture environments to language learning.
Even more worryingly, out of the students who have continued with languages at A-Level and receive university offers, even fewer actually accept to study them at a higher level.
According to the University of Nottingham’s own data, only less than 10% of students holding offers to study Hispanic Studies accepted in 2023/24 – four out of 42 students.
Williams said: “Perhaps more candidates will apply to Oxford. Hopefully they don’t decide that Modern Languages is not a ‘useful’ degree course.
“My students have learned valuable transferable skills: formulating a persuasive argument, intercultural criticism, close reading, confidence in expressing their ideas in several languages, time management, translation, to name a few.
“Knowing another language is cool, a superpower, not something to be ashamed of.”"
https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/life/30012026-translating-comics-an-oxford-college-leading-language-revival-in-the-uk
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Depuis 2022, l’intelligence artificielle (IA) gagne une ampleur sans précédent dans le monde entier. Les pays du monde arabe ne sont évidemment pas épargnés par cette tendance. Ils se doivent d’intégrer ce phénomène à leur modèle de développement dans leur démarche de rattrapage des économies occidentales. Quels sont les différents défis imposés par l’IA dans le monde arabe ? Cet article va te donner les clés de compréhension de cette thématique pour que tu sois prêt(e) le jour J !
L’IA comme pilier des stratégies nationales dans le monde arabe
Les « Visions » du Golfe et l’urgence de l’après-pétrole
Depuis plusieurs décennies, les pays du Golfe (notamment l’Arabie saoudite) ont des économies qui reposent majoritairement sur les énergies fossiles. 53,4 % des recettes publiques totales de l’Arabie saoudite en 2025 sont liées au pétrole. Toutefois, ces énergies ne sont pas renouvelables et leur exploitation ne peut durer indéfiniment. Ainsi, ces pays (aussi appelés pays rentiers) doivent faire reposer leurs économies sur d’autres piliers. En 2019, la part des recettes publiques saoudiennes liée au pétrole était de 68 %. Cela témoigne d’un recul de l’importance des énergies fossiles dans les stratégies des pays du Golfe.
On assiste alors bien à une transition d’une économie de rente vers une économie de la connaissance. Cette économie de la connaissance doit nécessairement reposer sur le recours à des outils technologiques de pointe. À cet effet, l’Arabie saoudite a lancé son plan Vision 2030. C’est un plan colossal de transformation qui vise à réduire la dépendance du pays au pétrole en diversifiant son économie. L’IA n’est pas seulement un outil dans ce plan. Il s’agit d’un réel moteur technologique qui doit permettre d’atteindre ces objectifs.
Au cœur de cette stratégie, nous retrouvons la SDAIA (Saudi Data & AI Authority). C’est l’autorité suprême qui se charge de gérer l’agenda des données et de l’IA dans le pays. Le Premier ministre s’en charge directement, ce qui souligne son rôle central dans la Vision. Les bénéfices économiques prévus de ce plan sont massifs. L’IA pourrait contribuer à hauteur de 12,4 % du PIB saoudien d’ici 2030 (soit 135 milliards de dollars).
L’enjeu de la souveraineté linguistique et culturelle : l’arabe numérique
La langue arabe présente une complexité unique que les modèles comme GPT-4 peinent à saisir pleinement. On nomme cette complexité la diglossie ; la coexistence de deux variétés linguistiques.
Il y a, en effet, un fossé entre le MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) et les dialectes. Les modèles occidentaux sont principalement entraînés sur le MSA, trouvé dans la presse ou dans Wikipédia. Or, dans la vie réelle, un Saoudien parle le nadji, un Marocain le darija et un Égyptien le masri.
Cette fracture entre l’arabe littéral et les dialectes contribue à creuser ce qu’on appelle un « désert de données » pour les dialectes. L’IA ne comprend pas le masri ou le darija. Cela implique une exclusion d’une grande partie de la population de l’usage de l’IA et donc de la révolution technologique.
Comment les pays arabes vont-ils concrètement intégrer l’IA ?
Les villes intelligentes : un nouvel environnement entièrement régi par l’IA
L’IA est le pilier des projets de Smart Cities. La ville de NEOM est une ville pensée comme cognitive en Arabie saoudite. L’IA pourrait y gérer le transport autonome, la logistique, l’optimisation, la consommation d’énergie et d’eau, etc. NEOM prévoit d’utiliser 90 % des données collectées, contrairement à 1 % dans les villes actuelles.
Un système d’exploitation, nommé NEOS, pourrait anticiper les besoins des habitants avant même qu’ils ne les expriment. En ce qui concerne le domaine de la santé, le projet Dr. NEOM prévoit un suivi biométrique constant par l’IA. Cela permet une médecine préventive très personnalisée et donc une diminution des coûts hospitaliers traditionnels.
L’énergie et l’industrie
Même dans le secteur du pétrole, l’intelligence artificielle est utilisée par Aramco pour la maintenance prédictive des infrastructures. Elle sert aussi à l’optimisation des forages et à la réduction de l’empreinte carbone grâce à une meilleure gestion des ressources.
Le gouvernement numérique
La SDAIA a travaillé sur le développement de l’application Tawakkalna. Initialement, c’était un outil de gestion de la crise de la Covid. Aujourd’hui, c’est devenu une super-app qui regroupe tous les services gouvernementaux, l’identité numérique et les portefeuilles de documents, le tout optimisé par le traitement des données en temps réel.
La santé et l’éducation
Les services de santé arabes peuvent manipuler l’IA pour réaliser le diagnostic précoce des maladies et pour gérer des dossiers de santé unifiés. Dans le domaine de l’éducation, l’apprentissage peut être personnalisé et des programmes universitaires peuvent être créés pour saisir la complexité des technologies de rupture.
Les enjeux de l’emploi de l’IA dans le monde arabe
Renforcer la disponibilité des ressources vitales
Dans un contexte général régi par le stress hydrique au Maroc, l’IA est vue comme une opportunité à saisir. Le groupe OCP utilise ces outils afin d’analyser les sols en temps réel et d’adapter la composition des engrais. Cela permet de maximiser les rendements tout en économisant l’eau.
De plus, des start-up égyptiennes, telles que Mozare3, utilisent des algorithmes pour prédire les prix du marché. Cela aide les agriculteurs à organiser et à planifier leurs récoltes. L’économie rurale parvient à être stabilisée.
L’intelligence artificielle : un moyen de faire émerger des champions nationaux
BioNTech a racheté la start-up tunisienne InstaDeep pour près de 500 millions d’euros. Cela a prouvé que les pays du Maghreb sont capables de produire des leaders mondiaux en IA décisionnelle. Cette success story devrait ainsi motiver les citoyens à entreprendre face à la tentation de l’expatriation ailleurs.
L’Arabie saoudite a aussi conclu des accords avec le président américain Donald Trump autour de l’IA. Le but était de rendre l’entreprise Saudi AI un géant de l’intelligence artificielle en achetant des semi-conducteurs de chez Nvidia.
Vocabulaire sur la thématique de l’IA
Souveraineté numérique : السيادة الرقمية
Économie de la connaissance : السيادة الرقمية
Traitement du langage naturel : معالجة اللغات الطبيعية
Transformation numérique : التحول الرقمي
Villes intelligentes : المدن الذكية
Innovation : الابتكار
La robotique : الروبوتات
La fracture numérique : الفجوة الرقمية
Tu es maintenant préparé(e) pour affronter tout sujet portant sur l’intelligence artificielle dans le monde arabe. N’hésite pas à enregistrer l’article dans tes favoris pour y revenir la veille d’un concours blanc ou du concours !"
28 janvier 2026
Nour Chouai
https://major-prepa.com/langues-rares/intelligence-artificielle-monde-arabe/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Le fondateur de DeepL : « Dans trois ans, chacun parlera sa propre langue lors des réunions de travail »
L’ingénieur Jarek Kutylowski estime que l’essor de l’intelligence artificielle conduira à une traduction automatique toujours plus personnalisée.
« La richesse d’une conversation directe avec une personne d’une autre partie du monde sans l’aide de la technologie reste essentielle », estime Jarek Kutylowski.
Quiconque a déjà eu recours à un outil numérique pour traduire un extrait de texte connaît sans doute DeepL, l’un des services les mieux notés du marché. Lors de son lancement, en 2017, plusieurs analystes l’avaient même jugé supérieur à Google Translate ou Microsoft Translator. Aujourd’hui, l’outil reste à la pointe de la technologie.
Dans sa version gratuite, DeepL permet de traduire environ 250 mots avec un bon niveau de précision et est particulièrement réputé dans le monde universitaire. Développé par l’équipe de l’ingénieur polono-allemand Jarek Kutylowski, 42 ans, le programme s’appuie sur la base de données de Linguee et possède son propre algorithme de réseaux neuronaux, ce qui lui permet de rivaliser avec des solutions de traduction tout aussi efficaces, comme celles de ChatGPT ou Gemini...."
Par Manuel G. Pascual («El País»)
Publié le 28/01/2026
La suite est réservée aux abonnés.
https://share.google/q7qj37araFCioju1V
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Amid cuts to language programs across the country, opportunities for a solution might be in our backyard. Managing Features Editor Belaine Mamo ’27 spoke to the director of the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages for more information on its beginnings, functions, and future.
The Five College Language Center, operating since 1991, offers 30-35 less-commonly taught languages available for students to learn each year. Graphic courtesy of Lucy Jones '27.
For most students at Amherst seeking to learn a language, the experience can feel restricted to the offerings available on campus. French, Spanish, and other commonly taught languages dominate enrollment, while others, less common in American educational contexts, face uncertainty often citing low enrollment.
But what about the other languages of the world that students may be interested in learning for personal, cultural, or familial reasons? This seems like an even greater challenge especially since Amherst students come from all over the world, hailing from 70 countries.
How can we supplement interest in languages spoken by friends, family members, or even just for fun — especially when so many are being cut elsewhere?
One solution might be closer than many people think.
Tucked away in the former Baptist church at 79 Pleasant St. lives the Five College Center for World Languages — where I sat down with Director of the center Janna White and Director of Strategic Engagement for Five Colleges Kevin Kennedy.
White came to the Center in the fall of 2018 seeking an “opportunity to work more directly with students.” A Smith college alum herself, White spent time in India as a study abroad student, learned Hindi, but didn’t know about the Center then. Thus, she is now enjoying “help[ing] other students get to do what [she] didn’t get to do at that time.”
Origins of the Center
The Center itself began in 1991 after Deans hailing from all five campuses came together to form a resource for students wanting to study languages that individual campuses lacked capacity to offer. They appointed Dr. Elizabeth Mazzocco, late professor of Italian at University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass) who later became the first director of the center, to find a solution. The language center intended to maximize the number of languages available to Five College students over a sustained period of time.
Rather than competing with existing courses, the center is supplementary, providing courses that do not have enough interest at individual colleges, but are sustainable across the Five Colleges. In any given year, the center offers about 30-35 languages at a time, including rarely taught languages like Amharic, Serbo-Croatian, Dari, and Tibetan, with an average of 250 students in a year.
The number of languages available for students in total, when accounting for courses across the five colleges, reaches about 60, making the center’s offerings among the highest number available at any institution (or collection of) in the country.
Since 2018, the center has added about five to six languages to their offerings and are currently looking at others to further expand offerings. Their main goal, made possible by their funding and organization style is “to be able to be pretty responsive to changing student needs and interests.”
In regards to their wide range of uncommonly taught languages, White explains that the center is “mostly pulling on the very large and wonderful population of international students that exist on each of the campuses,” as well as the “domestic students and other students who are bi[lingual] or trilingual have multiple languages from other backgrounds.”
The center is funded collectively by the Five Colleges. “Like every other Five College program, our funding comes collectively from the five campuses,” said Kennedy, “we also have an endowment specific for the Language Center that funds a part of our programming as well.”
Creating a Class
A complete language center class needs three things: 1) at least one interested student, 2) an in-person instructor that knows the language, and 3) a professional evaluator. A unique aspect of the program is that it operates with a maximum enrollment or an enrollment cap, rather than a minimum. As long as there's one student interested in learning a language, a conversation partner will be found and the center will provide a textbook for them to run the class. This means there can be multiple languages taught with only one student.“That's one of the things that's really special about our program on the campuses,” White said.
For the second piece of the puzzle, in order to recruit teachers for their offered courses, the center draws on graduates of the program or community members to hire as conversation partners. White explains that the center is “pulling from any communities that we have connection to where we can find speakers of the languages.” Their main goal is to find experts in speaking, not necessarily in teaching. Often, undergraduate students who are speakers are trained as conversation partners even if they lack formal experience.
Students can apply to work as speaking partners in languages they are proficient in. Photo courtesy of Keith Toffling.
The last element needed for a complete language center course offering is an evaluator — a professional instructor of the language from an institution who can assess students at the end of the semester. The center has existing networks to find evaluators and publishers of textbooks whose formats work well with the self-study style. Additionally, the center works with Five College campus groups when looking for speakers and experts. For example, when beginning to offer Igbo, White explained that the center “worked closely with the African Studies Council and the
African Graduate and Scholar Association at UMass to see if [they] could find speakers to work as conversation partners.”
Along with interpersonal practice, the center also provides a variety of material resources to interested students including a textbook and audio resources. Specifically, the LangMedia site created by the center provides self-study resources to any student who wishes to learn. The site is the product of two projects: 1) “Language By Country” and 2) “CultureTalk” both of which aim to preserve and provide spoken language resources. The site houses visual and audio material captured by participants who recorded days in their life and conversations in their countries of origin. Prior to a recent financial investment into upgrading the site, LangMedia was a relic of the early 2000s when most materials were uploaded. The free site supplying videos of regular people with their families and friends provides useful casual material for any language learner in the world to profit from.
Regarding the feasibility of adding classes when there’s student interest, White explains that the center does in fact add languages periodically, with the most recent being Kazakh and Igbo. Typically, to add a track, a student initiates the process by coming to the center and expressing interest in an unavailable language.
The Language Learning Landscape
Amidst recent federal cuts to language programs, the Five College Arabic Language Initiative was terminated last semester, cutting Arabic language education completely at Amherst and partially at UMass due to reports of low enrollment. All over the country, language programs are being cut or downsized, often justified by claims that they do not advance American interests.
White explained, “There have been a lot of highly publicized cases of language programs, closing, and other places. We haven’t seen that locally for the most part.”
Despite increased attention on these programs, White shared, “he campuses collectively are still really committed to continue to be a center for language study, a place where … students from anywhere could come up with a wide variety of other academic interests and pursue a wide range of language study welfare here.”
The Five College Language Center pulls from the rich student body across the five colleges for instructors and students of the program. Photo courtesy of Keith Toffling.
In doing so, they must remain responsive to the times. This year, the center is bringing together groups of faculty from Smith College, Amherst College, and those sponsored by the center for a faculty seminar, “bringing together instructors and faculty from across different languages to promote language study together and think about the role of AI and language study,” White notes.
In response to these cuts, there are attempts to make language learning something appealing to people of any area of study. “[Think] about how you can sort of infuse language study across the curriculum,” White said. “If you're an engineering student, can you still make space for language study and maybe actually pair that with your engineering study?”
In some cases, the daunting national trends have inspired more efforts to protect language learning. “If anything, I think that some of the threats to language programs have led the language folks here … to work and collaborate even more closely together to try to support one another and continue to make language studies viable and attractive as possible,” White noted. “And we’re lucky because the Five Colleges as an organization already exists and the campuses are already collaborating in so many ways we have this existing sort of platform and relationships for all of that to happen.”
Adapting to the Times
White sees the center as a place to bridge the gap between commonly spoken and commonly taught languages. For example, White notes that while there are hundreds of millions of Hindu speakers, it's not commonly offered in higher education.
On the importance of the efforts of the center, White elaborated on its particular focus on so-called “less commonly taught” languages. While there is often overlap between less taught and less spoken languages, White shared that there is often a disconnect between languages that are taught in educational settings and what languages are most popular: “What’s commonly taught doesn’t necessarily mean less commonly spoken.”
The center fills a gap within language education that opens up doors for personal, professional, and travel opportunities to students, regardless of how often their language is spoken or taught. “I think [exposing] yourself to that [learning] is going to be a great opportunity for personal growth, in addition to academic growth, [for people] to connect with different parts of themselves,” White said.
To someone who wants to start learning a language, but maybe feels apprehensive at the beginning? White would tell them: “Language is so fun.”
According to White, this sentiment is shared widely among the center’s users. “We hear from a lot of our students that it's actually a really nice break and counterbalance from the rest of their academic work…and it's not that learning a language isn't academic, but it's different,” White said. “It's much more interactive and human, and promotes connection.”
White acknowledges that, for some, “it can be intimidating especially [because] people aren't necessarily comfortable making mistakes and putting themselves out there.” But the center’s unique approach to language learning allows students to work with a peer so they can practice their language with somebody who has no role in grading or evaluating them.
“We hear from students that that makes it a lot more comfortable for them to just try and practice and to make mistakes and not feel as scared by that,” White said. “And that can really promote more comfort and more confidence.”
As for the future of the center, White said she hopes they can “continue to be really responsive to Five College students.” As new students come in, who are interested in new languages or speak languages currently not offered by the center, they can “put the pieces together and continue connecting our students and creating those learning opportunities.”
White added that, “we’re very lucky to have such a diverse population despite being in a relatively rural area.” Both for speakers to utilize, but also for learners across the campuses. She explains that, “about a third of our students are heritage speakers of the languages they're studying, meaning they have some kind of family or community connection to the language … so they can come here and further connect to themselves ... And that's a really special opportunity that we're privileged to make possible.”"
Belaine Mamo '27
Jan 28, 2026
https://amherststudent.com/article/translating-across-campuses-the-five-college-center-platforming-under-instructed-languages/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Google DeepMind researchers have introduced ATLAS, a set of scaling laws for multilingual language models that formalize how model size, training data volume, and language mixtures interact as the number of supported languages increases. The work is based on 774 controlled training runs across models ranging from 10 million to 8 billion parameters, using multilingual data covering more than 400 languages, and evaluates performance across 48 target languages.
Most existing scaling laws are derived from English-only or single-language training regimes. As a result, they provide limited guidance for models trained on multiple languages. ATLAS extends prior work by explicitly modeling cross-lingual transfer and the efficiency trade-offs introduced by multilingual training. Instead of assuming a uniform impact from adding languages, the framework estimates how individual languages contribute to or interfere with performance in others during training.
At the core of ATLAS is a cross-lingual transfer matrix that measures how training on one language affects performance in another. This analysis shows that positive transfer is strongly correlated with shared scripts and language families. For example, Scandinavian languages exhibit mutual benefits, while Malay and Indonesian form a high-transfer pair. English, French, and Spanish emerge as broadly helpful source languages, likely due to data scale and diversity, though transfer effects are not symmetric.
ATLAS extends scaling laws by explicitly modeling the number of training languages alongside model size and data volume. It quantifies the “curse of multilinguality,” where per-language performance declines as more languages are added to a fixed-capacity model. Empirical results show that doubling the number of languages while maintaining performance requires increasing model size by roughly 1.18× and total training data by 1.66×, with positive cross-lingual transfer partially offsetting the reduced data per language.
The study also examines when it is more effective to pre-train a multilingual model from scratch versus fine-tuning an existing multilingual checkpoint. Results show that fine-tuning is more compute-efficient at lower token budgets, while pre-training becomes advantageous once training data and compute exceed a language-dependent threshold. For 2B-parameter models, this crossover typically occurs between about 144B and 283B tokens, providing a practical guideline for selecting an approach based on available resources.
The release has started a discussion about alternative model architectures. One X user commented:
Rather than an enormous model that is trained on redundant data from every language, how large would a purely translation model need to be, and how much smaller would it make the base model?
While ATLAS does not directly answer this question, its transfer measurements and scaling rules offer a quantitative foundation for exploring modular or specialized multilingual designs."
About the Author
Robert Krzaczyński is a software engineer with solid experience in developing web applications."
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/google-deepmind-atlas/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"...« La langue est notre première école d'identité », a déclaré le frère Lopes, ajoutant : « Perdre une langue, c'est perdre une partie de notre mémoire, de notre culture et de notre relation au monde. »
Dans « Image miroir », les participants réfléchissent à l'apparence, aux cheveux, à la couleur de peau et à l'esthétique, remettant en question les normes externes et revendiquant la beauté et l'héritage africains.
Un autre atelier, « Briser l'école », se concentre sur la manière dont les systèmes éducatifs peuvent fragmenter l'identité des enfants en dévalorisant la culture africaine.
Friar Lopes a rappelé des cas de discrimination liés à la texture des cheveux et à la couleur de peau, insistant sur le fait que l'éducation doit former des citoyens plutôt que reproduire l'exclusion.
« Nous avons besoin d'écoles qui renforcent l'identité africaine et enseignent les valeurs de notre continent », a-t-il déclaré.
L'atelier « Uncolonized Future » invite les participants à imaginer des modèles de développement ancrés dans les réalités africaines.
« Il est temps de penser à notre avenir sans copier aveuglément des modèles extérieurs », a déclaré le frère Lopes, ajoutant : « Nous devons créer nos propres solutions qui respectent notre histoire, notre culture et notre potentiel. »
« Ressentir l'Afrique, c'est reconnaître notre histoire, respecter notre mémoire collective et intégrer ces dimensions dans la vie quotidienne », a-t-il déclaré, ajoutant que ce processus renforce à la fois la société civile et l'Église dans leur mission de promotion de la dignité et de la participation consciente.
Le frère Lopes a exprimé l'espoir que les participants repartiront avec une compréhension plus profonde de leur identité et un sens renouvelé de leur responsabilité envers leurs communautés.
« Lorsque nous nous connaissons mieux et reconnaissons notre culture, nous sommes mieux préparés à dialoguer avec les autres, à participer de manière constructive et à contribuer à une société plus consciente et à une Église qui marche avec son peuple », a-t-il déclaré."
João Vissesse
https://www.aciafrique.org/news/19375/perte-didentite-africaine-affaiblit-la-mission-de-leglise-avertit-un-frere-dominicain-angolais-lors-dune-conference
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"The National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to translate some of its products into non-English languages but hasn’t crafted a long-term plan for how it intends to do so, according to a new watchdog report.
The Government Accountability Office’s analysis — released on Monday as residents in dozens of states dig out from a massive winter storm that swept through much of the eastern half of the country — said AI “could play a key role in expanding the accessibility of weather products,” but added that the translation project is hampered by some challenges, including funding issues and widespread adoption.
According to Census Bureau data that GAO included in the report, approximately 26 million people in the U.S. have a limited ability to read, speak, write or understand English. To better reach these non-English speakers, NWS first began using AI to translate some of its services into other languages in 2021. The weather service has been using AI to translate some of its forecasts, watches and warnings into five languages: Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan.
“About a quarter of its weather forecast offices and the National Hurricane Center were participating in this project as of December 2025,” GAO said. “Officials said using AI could help NWS disseminate information in other languages more quickly and at lower cost.”
These AI-translated products do not apply to the Emergency Alert System or Wireless Emergency Alerts, although the Federal Communications Commission has adopted requirements for wireless carriers to support WEAs in English and 14 other languages.
“NWS does not use AI translations to provide Spanish WEA messages because of limitations on the characters that wireless carriers support,” the report said, adding that the weather service “collaborated with FEMA and FCC to develop templates for its Spanish WEA messages that avoid using unsupported characters.”
NWS officials told the watchdog that the agency’s goal is to make AI translations “available through NWS’s normal dissemination channels, such as the NWS website and NOAA Weather Radio,” but that the agency has not fully fleshed out these efforts and the broader deployment of these tools remains somewhat unclear.
“According to these officials, NWS has not developed a long-term plan for the AI translation project because of current uncertainty on how the project will fit into broader NWS efforts, such as the redesign of its website,” GAO said. “Furthermore, NWS has not updated its plan for translating its weather products because it has not been required to do so by Congress, according to the officials.”
The watchdog recommended that the weather agency develop an updated implementation plan for its AI translation project that includes “measurable performance goals tied to specific time frames; resources needed to achieve each goal, such as funding, workforce, and IT needs; and internal and external factors that could affect NWS’s ability to achieve its goals and strategies to address these factors.”
NOAA — the agency that oversees NWS — agreed with the watchdog’s recommendations and said it would “develop an updated implementation plan for the AI language translation project as part of a comprehensive language access plan.”
NWS’ AI translation project is also continuing amid the White House’s ongoing push to prioritize English-only government services, following President Donald Trump’s executive order last March declaring English the official language of the U.S.
The Justice Department issued a memo last July that built upon the president’s order by directing agencies to reduce multilingual services deemed “non-essential,” and to use technology and AI “to produce cost-effective methods for bridging language barriers and reducing inefficiencies with the translation process.”
GAO’s report noted that “NWS did not request funds for the AI language translation project in fiscal year 2026 because it was awaiting guidance on the implementation of Executive Order 14224, which designated English as the official language of the U.S.,” but that the agency’s FY26 congressional budget justification “stated that NWS would continue to translate key products into Spanish, Samoan, Chinese, Vietnamese, and French.”
NWS has also contracted with a commercial vendor to develop its AI translation tools, with the agency allocating approximately $2.7 million total on the project in fiscal years 2022 through 2025. The weather service’s AI translation contract expired in March 2025, GAO said, which led to a brief lapse in services until NWS signed a revised contract roughly three weeks later.
“The revised contract has a reduced scope, and the annual contract amount decreased from about $1 million to $600,000, NWS headquarters officials said,” according to the report. “NWS plans to continue translations in the five previously supported languages, but the agency will not be able to start developing AI models for additional languages before April 2026. NWS also has limited ability to update and improve the language translation models under the new contract, according to the officials.”"
https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/01/national-weather-services-ai-translation-project-lacks-long-term-plan-watchdog-says/410954/?oref=ng-homepage-river
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
RFPs: Latvian Literature Grant Program for Translators
Deadline: 15-Feb-2026
The Latvian Literature Grant Program for Translators provides financial support to professional translators translating Latvian literary works into foreign languages. Open through biannual calls, the program funds direct, high-quality translations with confirmed publisher interest and supports a wide range of literary genres, excluding AI-generated translations.
Program Overview
The Latvian Literature Grant Program for Translators is a funding initiative designed to support professional translators who wish to translate Latvian literary works for publication abroad.
The program aims to increase the international visibility of Latvian literature by supporting high-quality, publisher-backed translations across multiple genres, including fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and selected non-fiction.
What the Grant Supports
The program provides financial support specifically for translation work.
Eligible Genres
The following genres are covered under the program:
Prose
Poetry
Literature for children and young adults
Journalism
Drama
Comics and graphic novels
General non-fiction
Essays
Memoirs
Academic or technical non-fiction is not included unless it falls clearly within general non-fiction or essay categories.
Grant Amount and Payment Calculation
Grant amounts are calculated based on the volume and genre of the translated text.
Prose: 19 EUR per 1,800 characters (including spaces)
Poetry: 2 EUR per line
The final grant amount depends on the approved translation scope and quality assessment.
All awarded financial support includes applicable taxes according to Latvian law.
Application Calls and Timeline
The Grant Program operates through open calls held twice a year.
Applications must be submitted according to the official schedule published by the Latvian Literature platform.
Key deadline to note:
Final completed translation submission deadline: December 8, 2026
Failure to meet project deadlines may result in termination of the agreement.
Who Is Eligible to Apply?
The program is open to professional literary translators who meet all eligibility conditions.
Applicants must:
Be experienced translators with a proven track record
Translate into their mother tongue
Have signed an agreement with the copyright holder, representative, or license holder of the original work
Have a letter of intent or a publishing contract with a foreign publisher
Apply for a work that has not already been fully translated
Already completed translations are not eligible for funding.
Translation Eligibility Conditions
To qualify for support, translations must meet the following conditions:
Direct translations from Latvian are required
Indirect translations are allowed only if no qualified translator exists for the source language
Translations created using translation bots or AI tools are not funded
The original work must be recognized within Latvian literature
The translated work must show potential for foreign or international markets
Required Application Documents
Applicants must submit a complete application package.
Required documents include:
Completed application form
Translator’s CV, highlighting previously translated books
Sample translation with corresponding original text
Signed agreement with the copyright holder or license holder
Letter of intent or publishing agreement with a foreign publisher
Sample Translation Requirements
Poetry: 70–200 lines
Prose: approximately 5,000–10,000 characters (with spaces)
All documents requiring signatures must be printed and scanned or signed using a valid and secure electronic signature.
How Applications Are Evaluated
Applications are assessed by a Committee of Experts appointed by the IWTH.
Evaluation criteria include:
Literary quality of the original work
Quality of the sample translation
Translator’s professional experience
Compliance with program priorities
Market potential of the translated work
The Committee follows strict rules regarding composition, voting, conflict of interest, and documentation.
Decisions are final, and detailed reasons for rejection are not disclosed.
Notification and Agreement Process
Applicants are informed of the results electronically within one week of the Committee’s decision.
Successful applicants must:
Sign and return the grant agreement within 60 days
Complete the translation by the agreed deadline
Submit the final translation and delivery-acceptance document
Payment of the Grant
The assigned financial support is paid:
No later than 10 working days after submission of the complete translation
After signing and submitting the delivery-acceptance document
Rights and Usage Conditions
By signing the agreement, the translator:
Retains full economic rights to the translation
Grants IWTH non-exclusive rights to use the translation for foreign publishing and promotional purposes
The publication must acknowledge the funding support using the following wording:
“This book was published with the support of the Latvian Literature platform.”
Use of the Latvian Literature platform logo is recommended.
Why This Grant Matters
The Grant Program for Translators plays a key role in promoting Latvian literature internationally.
It helps to:
Reduce financial barriers for professional literary translation
Ensure high-quality, human-led translations
Strengthen international publishing partnerships
Increase global access to Latvian cultural and literary works
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Submitting already completed translations
Applying without a signed copyright agreement
Using AI or machine translation tools
Missing required sample translation specifications
Applying without confirmed publisher interest
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How often can translators apply for this grant?
Applications are accepted twice a year during open calls.
Are AI-assisted translations eligible for funding?
No. Translations created using translation bots or AI tools are not funded.
Is publisher interest mandatory?
Yes. A letter of intent or publishing contract with a foreign publisher is required.
Can indirect translations be funded?
Only if no qualified translator is available for direct translation from Latvian.
When is the final translation due?
All completed translations must be submitted by December 8, 2026.
How is the grant paid?
Payment is made within 10 working days after submission of the complete translation and signed delivery documents.
Conclusion
The Latvian Literature Grant Program for Translators is a targeted funding opportunity for professional translators committed to bringing Latvian literary works to international audiences. With biannual calls, transparent quality-based evaluation, and strong publisher requirements, the program ensures that Latvian literature is translated, published, and promoted abroad to the highest professional standards.
For more information, visit Latvian Literature.
https://www2.fundsforngos.org/children/rfps-latvian-literature-grant-program-for-translators/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
A study of 100,000 people shows AI can match average creativity—but the most creative humans still outperform machines.AI Can Match Average Human Creativity—But We Still Hold the Edge Where It Matters Most, New Study Finds
Tim McMillan·January 27, 2026
Advances in artificial intelligence have fueled a growing belief that machines are on the verge of matching, or even surpassing, human creativity. Large language models can now write poems, spin short stories, and generate clever wordplay in seconds. To many, these outputs feel creative enough to blur the line between human imagination and machine-generated language.
However, a new large-scale empirical study suggests that while today’s most advanced AI systems can rival the average human on certain creativity measures, they still fall short of the most creative minds—and that gap remains significant.
The research, published in Scientific Reports, offers one of the most comprehensive head-to-head comparisons yet between human creativity and large language models (LLMs).
By benchmarking multiple AI systems against a dataset of 100,000 human participants, the study moves the conversation beyond anecdotes and viral examples, replacing speculation with quantitative evidence.
“Our study shows that some AI systems based on large language models can now outperform average human creativity on well-defined tasks,” co-author and Professor at the University of Montreal, Dr. Karim Jerbi, said in a press release. “This result may be surprising — even unsettling — but our study also highlights an equally important observation: even the best AI systems still fall short of the levels reached by the most creative humans.”
Measuring creativity without subjectivity
One of the biggest challenges in studying creativity is measurement. Traditional creativity tests often rely on subjective ratings or expert judgment, making comparisons between humans and machines difficult.
To address this, researchers focused on divergent thinking—the ability to generate ideas meaningfully different from one another—using computational tools that can be consistently applied to both people and AI.
Researchers focused on the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a well-established test in creativity research. Participants are asked to generate a list of words that are as different in meaning as possible.
The creativity score is then calculated using semantic distance: how far apart the words are from each other in a high-dimensional language space. Larger distances indicate more diverse associations and, by extension, higher divergent creativity.
“These divergence-based measures index associative thinking—the ability to access and combine remote concepts in semantic space—an established facet of creative cognition,” researchers explain.
Because the DAT relies on objective mathematical scoring rather than human judgment, it offers a rare opportunity to compare human and machine creativity on equal footing.
Where AI beats the average human
Using identical scoring methods, researchers tested a wide range of language models, including GPT-4, GPT-4-Turbo, Gemini Pro, Claude, and several open-source systems. The results were intriguing.
On average, some models—most notably GPT-4—matched or even exceeded the mean DAT score of the human population. Gemini Pro performed statistically on par with humans, while several other models fell just below.
This finding helps explain why AI-generated text can feel surprisingly inventive. Compared with everyday human performance, top-tier models can produce word combinations spanning a wide semantic territory. In purely statistical terms, they can appear impressively creative.
However, the study emphasizes that this is only part of the story.
The ceiling AI still cannot break
When the researchers ranked human participants by their performance on the Divergent Association Task and compared AI systems against those highest-scoring groups, a clear gap emerged. Humans in the top 50% of DAT scores, and especially those in the top 10%, consistently outperformed every tested language model.
Even GPT-4, the highest-performing system in the study, failed to reach the creativity levels of humans in the upper tail of the distribution.
“The top performing LLMs are still largely surpassed by the aggregated top half of human participants, underscoring a ceiling that current LLMs still fail to surpass,” researchers write.
In practical terms, this suggests that while AI can imitate creative behaviors common in the general population, it struggles to replicate the kind of associative leaps made by highly creative individuals—writers, artists, and innovators who regularly push conceptual boundaries.
Creativity can be tuned—but only so far
The researchers also explored whether AI creativity could be enhanced through technical adjustments. By increasing a model’s “temperature”—a parameter that controls randomness in word selection—they observed higher creativity scores. Higher temperatures reduced repetitive word choices and encouraged broader exploration of semantic space.
Prompting strategies mattered as well. When models were explicitly instructed to use certain approaches, such as drawing on word etymology, their divergent creativity scores improved. These findings suggest that AI creativity is not fixed, but responsive to how models are guided and configured.
Still, these gains did not eliminate the gap between AI and the most creative humans. Tuning improved performance, but it did not fundamentally change the ceiling.
From word lists to stories and poems
To test whether DAT performance translated into more realistic creative tasks, the study also examined creative writing. Models were asked to generate haikus, movie synopses, and flash fiction, which were then evaluated using automated measures of semantic diversity and textual complexity.
Here again, AI systems demonstrated impressive abilities, particularly in longer formats such as synopses and short stories. Yet human-written texts retained a consistent advantage, especially in structured, stylistically constrained forms such as haiku.
The results suggest that while AI can approximate certain surface features of creative writing, deeper patterns of originality and integration remain more characteristic of human authors.
What this means for creative work
The findings cut against both extremes of the AI creativity debate. On the one hand, they undermine claims that creativity is an exclusively human trait beyond the reach of machines. On the other hand, they challenge fears that AI is poised to replace top-tier creative professionals.
“The persistent gap between the best-performing humans and even the most advanced LLMs indicates that the most demanding creative roles in industry are unlikely to be supplanted by current artificial intelligence systems,” researchers write.
Rather than a story of replacement, the research points toward collaboration. AI systems may serve as creative amplifiers—useful for brainstorming, variation, and exploration—while humans remain essential for the highest levels of originality, judgment, and synthesis.
A clearer picture of human creativity
Beyond AI benchmarking, the study also reframes how scientists think about creativity itself. If machines can score well on some creativity tests without human-like cognition, it raises important questions about what those tests truly measure.
By combining large human datasets with objective semantic metrics, the research offers a more nuanced view: creativity is not a single ability, but a spectrum. AI may operate convincingly in the middle of that spectrum, while the upper extremes remain distinctly human. At least for now.
As AI systems continue to evolve, this kind of rigorous, data-driven comparison will be essential. Ultimately, the evidence is clear that machines can imitate creativity, but the deepest wells of human imagination are not so easily replicated.
“Even though AI can now reach human-level creativity on certain tests, we need to move beyond this misleading sense of competition,” Dr. Jerbi says. “Generative AI has above all become an extremely powerful tool in the service of human creativity: it will not replace creators, but profoundly transform how they imagine, explore, and create — for those who choose to use it.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com "
https://thedebrief.org/ai-can-match-average-human-creativity-but-we-still-hold-the-edge-where-it-matters-most-new-study-finds/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Translator and interpreter Elsa Pérez and biologist Justin Jones provide expertise for Spanish-language 'Camaleon' podcast, teaching thousands of budding science enthusiasts around the world about a mysterious marine creature.
By Mary-Ann Muffoletto | January 27, 2026
If you were recruiting an ambassador to get kids excited about science, you might not immediately think of the homely hagfish. Eel-shaped with tentacles and a protruding mouth, the primitive marine creature, which emits gooey slime to foil predators, presents a menacing appearance.
And yet, the unusual sea critter is wowing youngsters in the episode “Pez Bruja (Hagfish)” on Spotify and YouTube, through the Spanish-language podcast Camaleón: Animales para niños curiosas (Chameleon: Animals for Curious Children). The creative effort features the volunteered expertise of Utah State University faculty members Elsa Pérez and Justin Jones.
Geared to children ages 3 to 10, Camaléon is a series of 20-minute podcasts about varied animals produced by Austin, Texas-based production company Cumbre Media and hosted by podcaster Gerwuin Riera. Each episode focuses on questions submitted by children and answered by zoo and university experts. The Pez Bruja episode, featuring Pérez and Jones, was released in November 2025 and has garnered more than 8,700 plays, representing more than 3,000 hours of STEM engagement, along with 20,000 hours of listening by children and parents in multiple countries.
“This is great news — we’re glad our episode is resonating with listeners,” says Pérez, assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and co-director of the translation and interpretation studies degree program. “The producers told us it has been one of their most popular episodes.”
Pérez teamed with Jones, associate professor in the Department of Biology, at the suggestion of the USU Office of Research, which was approached by Cumbre Media.
Jones, who is director of USU’s Spider Silk Laboratory on Innovation Campus, studies hagfish intermediate filament proteins for their potential in creating novel biomaterials for varied applications in medicine, manufacturing, materials science and defense.
“I was excited by the chance to share real science through storytelling in a way that’s accessible and engaging for kids,” Jones says. “The hagfish is such a strange and fascinating organism that it naturally sparks curiosity, making it an ideal gateway into biology beyond the classroom.”
That gateway originated from actual questions from children in Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, the United States and other countries, submitted to Camaléon producers. Jones wrote responses, which he shared with Pérez for translation and interpretation.
The process, Pérez says, meant not only learning about the unique characteristics of hagfish from Jones and translating them to Spanish, but expressing the information is a way that was engaging and accessible for young children.
“I carefully chose words children would understand and use themselves,” she says. “The podcast is driven by the children’s questions, so it was important to focus on the knowledge they were seeking.”
The name of creature itself, Pez Bruja, evoked some trepidation about the animal.
“Bruja means ‘witch’ in Spanish and several children described the creature as ‘scary, magical and ugly’ in their questions,” Pérez says. “But that was an opportunity to explore the animal and dispel some myths.”
For example, the children learned that by feeding on dead marine creatures — which sounds creepy, at first — hagfish perform a vital ecological service by functioning, essentially, as oceanic garbage disposals.
“From there, I described how hagfish are being studied in Justin’s lab to produce products that will help people and make their lives better,” Pérez says. “The process of making scientific knowledge fun and exciting for children was very rewarding.”
Jones applauds the opportunity to communicate science in more than one language.
“Science should be accessible to everyone, and language should never be a barrier to curiosity and learning,” he says. “It was genuinely fun and refreshing to step outside the traditional academic space. Working with Elsa and the Camaléon team was a great experience. I was surprised how creative the process was and how effective storytelling can be for communicating science.”
Jones says that working with young children is especially meaningful to him.
“Younger kids are still forming how they view science,” he says. “At that stage, small moments can have a big impact. Engaging them early gives us the chance to plant seeds of curiosity that can grow over time.”
Pérez says she was inspired by the multidisciplinary effort.
“It opened my eyes to all the amazing knowledge, research and talent we have within the College of Arts and Sciences,” she says. “It showed me what amazing things we can accomplish when we unite in a common goal to serve the greater community.”
WRITER
Mary-Ann Muffoletto
Communications Specialist
College of Arts & Sciences
435-797-3517
maryann.muffoletto@usu.edu
CONTACT
Elsa Pérez
Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpretation
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
801-358-9085
elsa.perez@usu.edu
Justin Jones
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
435-797-9292
justin.a.jones@usu.edu"
https://www.usu.edu/today/story/curious-kids-usu-interpreter-and-scientist-team-to-create-science-learning-magic-for-children
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"...Vous écrivez en langue amazighe. Que représente cette langue pour vous en tant que jeune romancière ?
J’écris en langue amazighe, plus précisément en kabyle, parce que c’est ma langue maternelle et qu’elle mérite d’être vivante et entendue. Je vois combien d’autres langues ont leurs écrivains, leurs institutions, leur richesse littéraire. Mon choix n’est pas par ignorance des autres langues, mais parce que notre langue a besoin de nous : elle a besoin qu’on la fasse vivre, qu’on l’aide à avancer et à libérer des idées qui y sont encore trop souvent prisonnières.
Pensez-vous que la littérature amazighe est aujourd’hui en train de se renouveler ?
Bien sûr. Avec ses chercheurs, ses écrivains et ses traducteurs, la littérature amazighe se renouvelle et s’ouvre à de nouvelles formes et horizons. Elle a aujourd’hui le potentiel d’aller bien au-delà de ses frontières, de toucher un public universel et de faire entendre sa richesse partout dans le monde.
Quel message souhaitez-vous laisser au lecteur à travers ce roman ?
À travers Les fragments de la mémoire et Les chambres du cerveau, je souhaite inviter le lecteur à réfléchir sur la conscience et l’identité. La mort n’y est pas une fin, mais une traversée, un passage où l’identité se défait pour laisser émerger une autre forme de conscience. C’est avant tout une exploration de ce que signifie être vivant et penser.
Après ce prix, comment envisagez-vous la suite de votre parcours, entre sciences et littérature ?
Ce prix m’encourage surtout à continuer d’écrire. J’ai beaucoup d’envies : explorer de nouveaux thèmes, publier d’autres romans et approfondir mes réflexions sur le cerveau, la mémoire et la conscience. Je souhaite poursuivre ce lien entre sciences et littérature, en laissant ces deux univers se nourrir mutuellement dans mes prochains ouvrages. Y. Z."
https://elwatan.dz/lisa-serik-laureate-du-prix-du-president-de-la-litterature-et-la-langue-amazighes-recevoir-un-tel-prix-est-un-encouragementa-continuer-doser/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Minister of State for European Affairs and Defence, Thomas Byrne TD, has today (26 January) signed an Administrative Cooperation Agreement, for the provision of simultaneous interpretation services, including Irish, at informal Ministerial meetings and summits to be held in Ireland during the EU Presidency.
The agreement marks a significant milestone in Ireland’s linguistic and cultural engagement with the European Union and provides an opportunity to reaffirm Ireland’s commitment to multilingualism, and the full integration of the Irish language, in European affairs.
Minister Byrne was joined by the Director-General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Interpretation, Ms Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, for the signing of the agreement.
Speaking at the signing, Minister Byrne said: “Ireland’s 2026 EU Presidency is a landmark because it is our first EU Presidency since the Irish language assumed its full status as an official and working language of the EU. As a result of this agreement, Irish will be used at informal EU Presidency Ministerial meetings and summits held in Ireland.”
Minister Byrne added: “The signing of this agreement reflects our ongoing and intense preparations for Ireland’s forthcoming Presidency of the Council of the European Union, providing the linguistic framework necessary for a successful term. I believe that the ability for Ministers and officials, from across the EU, to engage fully in their own languages supports meaningful dialogue, effective negotiations and good decision making.”
The Directorate‑General for Interpretation team of interpreters has extensive experience of providing conference interpretation in the 24 official languages of the European Union, and of working with successive rotating Presidencies of the EU Council.
The capacity of the Directorate-General for Interpretation to provide simultaneous interpretation services in the Irish language during the upcoming Presidency will support these efforts.
26 January 2026
Notes
DG SCIC is the European Commission’s interpreting service. It is the world’s largest interpreting service, routinely providing interpretation in all 24 official EU languages for the European Commission, European Council, Council of the EU, rotating Presidencies of the Council of the EU, and other EU bodies and agencies.
Ireland last held the Presidency of the Council of the EU from January to June 2013, at a time when Irish was an official and working language of the EU but still subject to a derogation limiting the scope of translation and interpretation services. This derogation was lifted on 1 January 2022."
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-foreign-affairs/press-releases/minister-byrne-signs-interpretation-agreement-for-irelands-eu-presidency/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"The UB launches a pioneering vocabulary of scientific terminology in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)
A deaf student can follow university classes with a sign language interpreter, but they often encounter the problem that there are no specific signs for many of the scientific terms used in the classroom. In these cases, the word must be spelled out or a sign must be “agreed upon”, even if only for that particular occasion.
The University of Barcelona has launched a pioneering project: a vocabulary of scientific terms in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). The aim is to make university classes more accessible to deaf signers and to promote equal opportunities in the academic sphere. This vocabulary is published as videos on the UBTERM terminology portal, managed by the UB Language Services, which have also created a web portal of resources on LSC.
“For each term, there must be a clear and easy-to-understand sign that also respects the phonological structure of Catalan Sign Language,” SAYS Raúl Ruiz, coordinator of the project’s team, which includes professors, interpreters, and linguists specialized in LSC. This Biochemistry student and Catalan Sign Language professor emphasizes that, until now, there has been no structured initiative to develop specialized scientific terminology in LSC at the university level, beyond occasional glossaries or specific thematic projects. This contrasts with the existence, for years, of well-established resources in other sign languages, such as American (ASL) or British (BSL).
A powerful tool for understanding science
To carry out this task, a process had to be developed from scratch: first, the term in Catalan is selected, and a search is conducted among existing LSC signs to see if an equivalent already exists or if a new sign needs to be created, based on the resources of Catalan Sign Language. At the same time, the concept is analyzed with the help of professors who are experts in the specific discipline to which the term belongs. Once this work is completed, the sign is created if necessary and validated by experts and users from scientific fields in LSC. Finally, the recording is made and reviewed again by experts. Once the accuracy of the signed term recording is confirmed, it is published on the UBTERM portal, included as an additional equivalent in the corresponding terminological entry.
Currently, the first published signed terms — 59 in total, all from the field of mathematics — can already be consulted. For each term, there is a GIF file and three videos showing the same signed term from three different angles: front, from the right, and from the left, to facilitate visual perception.
A web portal WITH resources in LSC is also created to facilitate learning and promote equal opportunities.
After receiving support from the Vice-Rector’s Offices for Teaching Policy and Language Policy, the Language Services have taken on the management and publication of the project. They have done so as part of their regular terminological work, but with the particularity that this time a signed language is involved, which requires a specific approach. Àngels Egea, head of Terminology at the Language Services, recalls: “As with any other language, updating the terminological repertoire is an ongoing task with no end date. This means that this newly launched project does not have a fixed timeline, but rather a long road ahead.”
Raúl Ruiz emphasizes that the project is important not only for the deaf signing community but also for society as a whole: “Catalan Sign Language can become a very powerful tool for understanding scientific concepts, thanks to its visual nature and use of space. For example, in fields such as mathematics, where we work with graphs, coordinates, or X, Y, and Z axes, the fact that LSC uses three-dimensional space greatly facilitates the representation of these concepts. In this sense, LSC not only makes science more accessible to deaf signers, but also enriches the way anyone can understand and communicate scientific knowledge.”
This strategic project is part of the initiatives funded by the Government of Catalonia’s Interlingua grants, which aim to promote and support the use of languages in the inter-university context."
(27/01/2026)
https://web.ub.edu/en/web/actualitat/w/scientific-terminology-catalan-sign-language
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"L’auteur et éditeur Frédéric Boyer signe une nouvelle traduction d'Hamlet, pour la mise en scène qu’en propose Ivo Van Hove. L’occasion de relire avec lui la plus fameuse des tragédies de Shakespeare et de faire entendre sa portée contemporaine.
Avec
Frédéric Boyer, écrivain, traducteur et éditeur
Dans La Tragédie d'Hamlet, Prince du Danemark cette pièce parue au tout début du XVIIe siècle, le prince du Danemark a tout récemment perdu son père, il est chamboulé quand il apprend que son spectre rôde. Le fantôme révèle bientôt la véritable cause de sa mort, il a été assassiné par son propre frère Claudius, désormais roi à la place du roi, et remarier à la reine, sa veuve. Hamlet veut venger la mémoire de son père, il singe la folie, délaisse son amoureuse et imagine une pièce de théâtre piège, susceptible de forcer les uns les autres à la vérité. Ce texte est une tragédie sur le langage, l'action et la lâcheté.
Une pièce baroque
Frédéric Boyer explique que "ce qui fait d'Hamlet une pièce baroque est le rapport au temps que cette pièce propose. Il vrille, sort de son axe, est désarticulé. Hamlet est d'une prétention folle en se donnant pour mission de le remettre d'aplomb. Son chagrin et son deuil impossible le poussent à se donner cette grande responsabilité mais il n'y arrive pas du tout."
Le théâtre shakespearien, lieu de révélation
Hamlet est metteur en scène et dramaturge, au milieu de la propre pièce de Shakespeare au tout début du XVIIe. "À un moment il dit laissez entrer les comédiens, ils sont la quintessence de notre époque. Shakespeare fait alors du théâtre le lieu de la révélation."
Traduire une langue carnavalesque
Pour sa traduction de La Tragédie d'Hamlet, Prince du Danemark Frédéric Boyer essaye "de rester au plus proche du texte. Nous croyons que parce que nous traduisons Shakespeare, nous devons forcément trouver un langage qui soit à la fois châtié, académique et recherché. Finalement la langue shakespearienne est carnavalesque car elle mélange les registres et les niveaux de langue. À trop vouloir gommer cette langue dans la traduction, nous perdons quelque chose de très fort dans le texte shakespearien. C'est une affaire de choix."
La question de l'auditeur
La question d'Édouard @endoudlettres à l'attention de Frédéric Boyer : "Est-ce que le choix que vous avez fait pour votre traduction d'une forme de nudité de la langue est volontaire pour rester au plus près de l'expérience intérieure qui se joue dans le personnage d'Hamlet, quitte un tout petit peu à perdre du lyrisme de la langue de Shakespeare ?""
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-book-club/to-be-or-not-to-be-hamlet-retraduit-avec-frederic-boyer-4689542
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Multicultural identity in intercultural dialogue
The first event in the international online conference series entitled “Global Encounters: Intercultural Dialogues” was hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Language and Communication Research Group at the University of Miskolc on January 22 and 23. The central themes of the discourse were intercultural communication, competence development, and identity construction.
BTK Campus Partners Research Science University
2026. January 26.
The conference was organized in cooperation with Chouaib Doukkali University (Morocco), Sunway University (Malaysia), St. Cyril and Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria), and II. Ferenc Rákóczi Hungarian University of Transcarpathia (Ukraine).
The two plenary lectures were given by Dr. Irina Golubeva (University of Baltimore, USA) and Dr. Tamás Kiss (Sunway University, Malaysia), who discussed the development of intercultural citizenship in the service of inclusive higher education and the encouragement of critical thinking through student questions.
A total of 33 presentations in eight sections examined issues of inter- and multicultural identity construction from the perspectives of literary representation, translation and the responsibility of translators, as well as professional and educational contexts.
Sixty participants from eight countries shared their research findings and educational experiences and took part in inspiring professional discussions. The conference provided an excellent opportunity to strengthen cooperation between the participating universities, as a result of which the partners are planning to publish a joint conference volume and continue the conference series in 2027."
https://www.uni-miskolc.hu/en/news/multicultural-identity-in-intercultural-dialogue/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Artists Farida and Rasilaben weave together during the workshop, exchanging stitches shaped by generations.
In a sunlit wooden hall in New Delhi, women sit together with needles moving steadily through cloth. Some work while seated on sofas; others gather in small circles on the floor, stitching side by side. Children move freely through space — watching, laughing and forming friendships of their own. The workshop feels less like a training room and more like a shared home, filled with creativity, care, and conversation.
Artisans from Kutch, a district in Gujarat in Northwestern India, and Afghanistan have come together to exchange embroidery techniques passed down through generations. Mirrored Kutch motifs meet delicate Afghan traditional patterns as hands demonstrate, repeat and adapt each stitch. What begins as shared practice slowly grows into collaboration — and then into trust and friendship.
For Parween Kakkar, a 47-year-old Afghan refugee who arrived in India in 2017, the exchange offered more than technical learning. Working alongside Kutch artisans felt natural to her. “It is a cultural exchange,” she says. With support from UNHCR, Parween was able to display and sell her embroidered products, earning income while strengthening her confidence. Reflecting on the experience, she adds, “I am happy that two countries are coming together and learning from each other. In these 10 days, I forgot all the troubles of my life.”
Across the hall, Dharmila Ahir, a 32-year-old artisan leader from Kotay village in Kutch, guides younger women as they work. Embroidery has been part of her life since childhood — from stitching her own bridal attire to now leading a collective of 80 women. “We learned from each other — teaching, learning and creating together,” she says. Through shared learning, new market opportunities are beginning to emerge.
pix: Dharmila Ahir and Khalida Mahmodi co-create a joint embroidery piece, blending Kutch and Afghan traditions.
© UNHCR / Paridhi Jain
Recalling how the collaboration began, Dharmila adds, “I learned about UNHCR and IICD’s workshop through the Kaarigar Clinic (an NGO in Gujarat helping women in marketing their products) and we were invited to work together — Kutch women and Afghan women. Even though we speak different languages, our hands speak the same language. In just 10 days, we learned from each other, created joint work and became good friends.”
Khalida Mahmodi also practiced Kutch embroidery techniques taught to her by Sitaben Rabari. For 20-year-old Rasila Rabari, the experience has been transformative. “I earn daily now,” she says. “I also found friendships that will stay with me.”
The collaboration has continued well beyond the workshop. Women from both communities stay connected through a shared WhatsApp group, where they exchange ideas, designs and client requests. Dharmila began promoting Afghan-made products on her Instagram page, introducing them to her existing customer base. When clients requested pocket purses, the message was shared across the group.
Parween and other Afghan women responded by creating the products collaboratively. As a result, Parween sold 10 pocket purses to a single client, earning an income and building confidence as an artisan entrepreneur. With more orders now coming in, the women are seeing stronger and more sustainable livelihood opportunities — created together across borders.
Taking the project forward
The workshop was part of Embroidery Without Borders, a collaborative initiative supported by UNHCR India and the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design (IICD), Jaipur. Over 10 days, Afghan refugee women and Kutch artisans exchanged embroidery skills and co-created contemporary, market-ready textile products. Alongside skill development, the initiative fostered dialogue, strengthened community connections, and supported pathways to sustainable livelihoods.
As the days passed, shared techniques transformed into embroidered pieces carrying stories of resilience, displacement, and belonging. The initiative shows how, when women from refugee and host communities create together, stitches can do more than decorate fabric — they can connect cultures and build shared futures with dignity.
Building on the success of this first phase, UNHCR India is seeking financial and additional support for the second phase of the project, with a focus on developing specific, high-quality products for wider markets. Discussions are also underway with MADE51 to explore pathways to global markets, while collaboration with IICD will continue to strengthen design, production and market readiness. to explore pathways to global markets, while collaboration with IICD will continue to strengthen design, production and market readiness.
MADE51 is a flagship initiative of UNHCR that empowers refugee artisans by promoting their skills, cultural heritage, and livelihoods through dignified work. UNHCR India has implemented MADE51 since 2018, working with local social enterprises to support more than 350 refugee artisans across three states.
With these efforts, the initiative is set to expand further in 2026 — creating more opportunities for refugee and host-community artisans alike."
https://www.unhcr.org/asia/news/stories/when-stitches-speak-across-borders-afghan-refugee-india
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Is AI Translating Tamil Literature? Publishers On New Technology
Sadek's book was translated into Tamil by publisher Senthil Nathan
A recent Tamil translation of Umberto Eco’s ‘The name of the rose’ made headlines not for its long-awaited release, but for criticism online that AI tools may have been used in the translation process.
Translator M D Muthukumaraswamy and publisher Anush Khan of Coimbatore-based Ethir Veliyeedu have rejected the allegation. “The translator has not used AI at any stage of the translation. Eco is known for his fragmented sentences, which the translator retained in Tamil. We did not expect that this would be seen as a sign of AI use,” says Anush. “Still, while we are not using AI for translations, we should not be wary of adopting new technologies.
”India has 9,000 publishers, but even among large publishing houses that release several hundred English-language titles annually, only a small fraction is translated into Indian languages, though there is a growing demand for regional-language content. Publishers say it is primarily because translation is time-consuming and resource-intensive. AI-powered solutions are now entering the scene to close that gap.
Bengaluru-based NAAV AI, for instance, launched in 2025 and uses models such as Claude and GPT-4 to support translations from English into Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.
Chennai-based Ailaysa, a multilingual AI platform, has processed 200 books, reportedly charging about Rs 100 per 1,000 words for translation. It treats entire manuscripts as cohesive works instead of sentence-by-sentence conversions.
“We use AI to translate non-fiction and academic work as it saves cost and time,” says Senthil Nathan, CEO of Ailaysa and Aazhi Publishers. “For example, translators may need at least four to five months to translate a book. It also comes with hefty pay for the translator. With AI, the work is done in a week and with no cost. But we still need people to oversee the work.”
Senthil Nathan, who translated consumer psychologist Nadim Sadek’s book ‘Shimmer, Don’t Shake’ using his AI translation software, says he still had to edit the translation at the end. “It just bettered the end product. While AI works well for non-fiction, it’s still at a nascent stage for fiction or poetry. But it’s just a matter of time,” he says. “Another advantage of using AI tools is that you can translate Tamil work into English as well.”
At the recently concluded Chennai International Book Fair, Davide Daghia, director of digital at Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Italy, said publishers need to be cautious about using AI when it comes to children’s literature.
“Two years ago, Italian publisher Castoro got a story written by a children’s author and ChatGPT using the same prompt. While adults could tell the difference between the two stories, children could not. The AI-generated story followed all the rules of writing, but lacked the casual, illogical details that give children’s books their depth and appeal. AI cannot give you that human sensibility essential in writing for children.”
AI, though, can be helpful in marketing books, said Daghia. “In 2015, Italian author Michela Murgia created a Facebook page for the protagonist of her novel ‘Chiru’ to push sales. Chiru, the character, would write to followers and reply to their questions. I wrote to Chiru. Now imagine if you give this creative input to AI, a perfect communication plan can make your book sales explode,” said Daghia.
While Tamil publishing houses have just begun their AI journey, many foreign publishers are adding clauses to their contracts regarding AI use.
“Several publishers are cautious about using AI for content or design,” says Ananth Daksnamurthy, founder of Two Shores Press. “When they give translation rights for books, they insist AI should not be used. AI could still be useful in streamlining a publishing house’s workflow such as in copy editing and proofreading, and in correcting pronunciation errors in audiobooks.”
Writer Marudhan says AI does a better job of translating Tamil texts into English, not vice versa. “So now there is an opportunity where a Tamil writer with the help of AI can translate his own work into English,” he says. "But now comes the bigger question. Will the publishing industry say it is translated with the help of AI, or just use the author's or translator's name alone in the book covers?”"
Vinoth Kumar N / TNN / Jan 25, 2026
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/is-ai-translating-tamil-literature-publishers-on-new-technology/articleshow/127488965.cms
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
Arunava Sinha recounts how his career in translation began with ‘Chowringhee’
"Celebrated translator Arunava Sinha on Sunday talked about his 100th published translation and the evolving craft of carrying Bengali literature to a global readership. In conversation with theatre director and cultural commentator Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee at the Kolkata Literary Meet, Sinha said much of his career began “almost by accident”.
Sinha traced the unlikely beginnings of his journey to Chowringhee. “I translated Chowringhee in 1992 — 30 years after the novel came out in Bangla,” he said. “And then it lay in cold storage for 14 years.” The manuscript resurfaced only when a Penguin editor asked the author Shankar for it. “He had forgotten who’d done it,” Sinha recalled. “Fortunately, I’d put my name on it. And that was how it all began”.
Asked about translating living authors, Sinha said the process rarely changes. “I translate any author the same way,” he said, whether they are alive or not. What differs, he said, is the occasional luxury of clarification — being able to call an author to ask what a word or phrase truly intends. That said, he added, such moments are rare.
The discussion turned to the difference between translating prose and poetry. “With poetry, it’s elliptical,” he said. “It’s probably a failed endeavour to try and arrive at a singular meaning.” A translator, he explained, must pay attention to “sound, rhythm, music, imagery,” often choosing to foreground only one or two elements. “That’s why two translators will never converge in poetry the way they sometimes do in prose.”
Asked why he chose translation over writing original fiction, Sinha said it wasn’t a conscious choice. “It’s not even a career that earns me a living,” he said, “It was just something I tried. I enjoyed it. Other people enjoyed it too.”
Timing, he added, mattered. “English-language publishing in India was just starting out. They were desperately looking for books — and not all of them could be written in English.”
Sinha acknowledged that a translator’s personal politics can clash with the worldview embedded in a text. Referring to a historical novel that portrays outsiders as enemies, he said, “My politics is opposed to the latent politics of the text.”
Still, he chose to translate it. “I didn’t want to take the easy option of not translating,” he said. Instead, he added a note: “Don’t shoot the messenger. The translator is only telling you what the text says in another language.”
‘All of India is in Kolkata’: Jhumpa Lahiri on language and the city that never left her..."
Agnivo Niyogi
Published 25.01.26
https://www.telegraphindia.com/my-kolkata/people/arunava-sinha-recounts-how-his-career-in-translation-began-with-chowringhee-at-kolkata-literary-meet/cid/2144324
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