Metaglossia: The Translation World

AWA, l’IA qui parle votre langue : quand la tech donne une voix aux oubliés du numérique

"...Dans un monde où l’intelligence artificielle redéfinit les usages, Alioune Badara Mbengue, jeune entrepreneur et fondateur de la startup Andakia, a choisi de relever un défi audacieux : faire parler les machines dans les langues africaines. En donnant naissance à AWA, une interface vocale intelligente capable de comprendre et de répondre en wolof – et bientôt en pulaar et haoussa –, il ne crée pas seulement une technologie innovante, il initie une révolution culturelle et sociale...

 

Quelle a été la motivation derrière le projet AWA ?

En 2015, nous avons conçu Mbal-it, une poubelle intelligente s’exprimant en langues nationales pour sensibiliser au tri sélectif. Cette expérience nous a révélé le fossé technologique concernant les interfaces vocales en langues africaines...

 

Quels sont les défis que vous avez rencontrés au niveau technique et linguistique ?

AWA, c’est un écosystème de plusieurs modules : reconnaissance vocale, LLM, voix de synthèse, etc. Chacun a ses propres défis. Par exemple, les données audio annotées disponibles en wolof sur internet ne dépassent même pas 100h au départ, alors qu’il en faut des milliers, par exemple Whisper, le système de reconnaissance vocale développé par OpenAI, a été entraîné sur un ensemble de données massif de 680 000 heures d’audio multilingue et multi tâche collecté sur le web. Il a donc fallu collecter, nettoyer et annoter des centaines d’heures supplémentaires. Pour le LLM, on a dû construire un corpus textuel solide, et pour la synthèse vocale, enregistrer plusieurs centaines d’heures de qualité en studio.

 

Au-delà des données, la langue elle-même pose des défis : différence entre wolof parlé et écrit, mots wolofisés, absence de norme claire… On travaille avec des linguistes, et même aujourd’hui certaines formulations font débat. Enfin, il y a la question de la puissance de calcul et de l’ingénierie nécessaire pour faire tourner tous ces modules ensemble...

 

Concrètement, quels sont les cas d’usage d’AWA et ses bénéfices pour les populations ?

AWA se positionne comme une interface vocale entre les populations non lettrées et la technologie. Ce que l’IA ou le numérique offrent aujourd’hui à ceux qui maîtrisent le français, l’anglais ou le digital, AWA peut le rendre accessible à ceux qui ne savent ni lire ni écrire dans ces langues...

 

Mais l’enjeu dépasse les services ponctuels : imaginons que l’État digitalise l’accès aux services administratifs (extrait de naissance, demande de papiers, etc.). Sans interface inclusive, des millions de citoyens resteraient exclus car incapables d’utiliser un formulaire en ligne. AWA lève cette barrière...

Notre objectif est clair : couvrir un maximum de locuteurs en Afrique pour que l’IA ne soit pas un privilège réservé aux élites francophones ou anglophones, mais un outil accessible à tous..."

01/07/2025

https://www.socialnetlink.org/2025/07/01/awa-lia-qui-parle-votre-langue-quand-la-tech-donne-une-voix-aux-oublies-du-numerique/

#metaglossia_mundus 

In this paper, a multimodal dataset was collected between July 2023 and April 2024 through purposive sampling from a field survey of proper households (households with at least one parent and one child) in South-South Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria. The dataset includes 543 validated responses captured in real-time using an online survey developed with Google Forms. The survey instrument synthesised attributes derived from the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 2003 Language Vitality and Endangerment (LVE) framework, to capture household-specific data from five households per Local Government Area (LGA). The dataset also includes audio recordings of 108 words selected from the Swadesh wordlist and a transcription of the gloss, and tone patterns of each word, for proper description of the language’s speech system. The multimodal dataset can support the analysis of LVE patterns, linguistic trends, and complex interactions affecting language sustainability. It is reusable in linguistic, cultural and social science research, providing a robust resource for examining language diversity and preservation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05337-6

#metaglossia_mundus 

Learn how to effectively communicate with and accommodate deaf employees by fostering collaboration and cultural sensitivity and adapting to individual needs.

 

"Challenge Your Assumptions About Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Workers

 

July 1, 2025 | Allen Smith, J.D.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, uncomfortable questions can be enlightening. Jay Burkey, SHRM-CP, vice president of human resources at CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas in Dunedin, Fla., who is deaf, challenged attendees at SHRM25 to reconsider their views of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.

 

 

 

 

“When you meet a deaf person, what assumptions do you have?” Burkey asked at a SHRM25 session in San Diego.

 

 

 

 

One attendee said they’d expect the person to be honest and direct, because that’s common in Deaf culture. 

 

 

 

 

“That’s a great point,” Burkey said, “speaking from my own experience. I don’t speak for the Deaf community.”

 

 

 

 

Another attendee said they’d assume the person might struggle to have a conversation with “people like me.”

 

 

 

 

“What if they don’t sign, what do you assume?” Burkey asked.

 

 

 

 

If someone doesn’t sign and instead speaks aloud, people might think the person isn’t deaf, a conference attendee said. The last two assumptions may be incorrect. For Burkey, deafness came after learning how to talk.

 

 

 

 

“There are a lot of strange assumptions,” Burkey said, such as, after learning someone is deaf, others asking, “Can you drive?” or “Can you work?”

 

 

 

 

Other common misconceptions are about a deaf person’s education, Burkey noted. Burkey challenged attendees not to use terms that might offend, including “hearing impaired.” Call someone deaf or hard of hearing instead, Burkey recommended.

 

 

 

 

Forcing someone who is deaf to use their voice risks exhausting them, Burkey added. “I can’t hear while I speak” and it’s consequently tiring to speak, he explained.

 

 

 

 

Communication Tips

 

When communicating with someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, ask the person about their communication preferences, then try to communicate using their preferred method, said Julie DeLuca, SHRM-SCP, recruitment manager for Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in Clearwater, Fla.

 

 

 

 

Those methods might include:

 

 

 

 

Pen and paper.

 

 

 

 

Instant messaging.

 

 

 

 

Speech-to-text apps. 

 

 

 

 

Sign language.

 

 

 

 

Text messages.

 

 

 

 

Emails.

 

 

 

 

Speech reading.

 

 

 

 

Toolkit: BEAM Framework for Inclusion

 

Meeting and Interpreter Etiquette

 

DeLuca also provided meeting etiquette tips, including:

 

 

 

 

Provide an agenda.

 

 

 

 

Have a note taker.

 

 

 

 

If using an interpreter, give the interpreter time to catch up.

 

 

 

 

Always say who is speaking.

 

 

 

 

Only one person should talk at a time.

 

 

 

 

Don’t schedule unnecessary meetings.

 

 

 

 

Keep meetings as short as possible.

 

 

 

 

Interpreter etiquette includes:

 

 

 

 

Speaking directly to the deaf or hard of hearing person, not the interpreter.

 

 

 

 

Allowing the interpreter and deaf client to decide the best place to sit or stand in the room.

 

 

 

 

Using the interpreter to engage the deaf person.

 

 

 

 

Not asking the interpreter for their own opinions or to explain what the deaf person means.

 

 

 

 

EEOC Guidance

 

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance issued Jan. 24, 2023, explained what types of reasonable accommodations applicants or employees with hearing disabilities may need. 

 

 

 

 

Some examples the EEOC gave of reasonable accommodations for employees with hearing disabilities, other than sign language interpreters, are:

 

 

 

 

Assistive technology.

 

 

 

 

Assistive listening devices.

 

 

 

 

Note-taking assistance for those using Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services or sign language interpretation.

 

 

 

 

Work area adjustments (for example, a desk away from a noisy area or near an emergency alarm with strobe lighting).

 

 

 

 

Time off in the form of accrued paid leave or unpaid leave if paid leave has been exhausted or is unavailable.

 

 

 

 

Adjustments to an employee’s nonessential job functions.

 

 

 

 

Reassignment to a vacant position.

 

 

 

 

In addition, live captioning through artificial intelligence may offer reasonable accommodation options for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

 

 

 

 

Burkey said that with real-time AI interpreters, “some of the software is OK.” But Burkey added that it’s not perfect and declined to recommend any particular software. “Try it out and see how it is.” 

 

 

 

 

Takeaways for HR Professionals

 

In summary, DeLuca encouraged HR:

 

 

 

 

Not to make assumptions.

 

 

 

 

Not to share medical information.

 

 

 

 

Not to be unwilling to accommodate.

 

 

 

 

She added that HR should:

 

 

 

 

Ask deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals what a good accommodation might be.

 

Use the individuals’ communication preferences.

 

Be flexible and open about accommodations.

 

It can be a challenge for hearing people to consider what it would be like if everything is visual, she said.

 

 

 

 

Other takeaways include cultural sensitivity, collaboration, and feedback and continuous improvement, DeLuca said."

 

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/challenge-assumptions-about-deaf-hard-of-hearing-workers

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

The Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has announced that Members of Parliament will soon be permitted to use local Ghanaian languages during parliamentary debates.

https://mobile.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/039-We-want-our-native-language-to-be-heard-on-the-floor-039-Speaker-Bagbin-to-Parliament-1989979

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Le Prix Cheikh Hamad pour la traduction et la compréhension internationale dévoile les langues de sa 12ᵉ édition (2026)
Divers 02 Jul 2025 9:40 PM

Doha, le 2 juillet /QNA/ Le Prix Cheikh Hamad pour la traduction et la compréhension internationale a annoncé les langues retenues pour sa 12e édition, prévue en 2026, plusieurs mois avant l'ouverture des candidatures et nominations, fixée du 1er janvier au 31 mars 2026 via le site officiel du prix : www.hta.qa.

Selon le communiqué publié ce mardi, cette annonce anticipée répond à une demande récurrente des traducteurs et éditeurs. Elle vise à améliorer la qualité des œuvres présentées tout en renforçant le niveau d'excellence et de compétitivité.

Catégorie "Ouvrages individuels"
Pour cette catégorie, le Prix a sélectionné l'anglais et le chinois parmi les langues les plus parlées au monde. Le retour du chinois, après deux participations précédentes, met en lumière :

· La profondeur des relations culturelles arabo-chinoises

· Le dynamisme croissant des échanges traductionnels entre ces langues
La dotation pour cette catégorie s'élève à 200 000 USD, répartis entre les trois premiers lauréats pour chaque direction de traduction (de l'arabe et vers l'arabe).

Catégorie "Accomplissement"
Cette section récompense les parcours professionnels exceptionnels et les contributions majeures dans le domaine de la traduction, qu'elles émanent de personnes ou d'institutions. Cinq langues ont été choisies :

1. Italien

2. Azéri

3. Peul (fulani)

4. Anglais

5. Chinois
Chaque langue de cette catégorie bénéficie d'une récompense unique de 100 000 USD.

Appel à participation
Le Prix encourage toutes les personnes et institutions intéressées par la traduction à :

· Consulter régulièrement son site web officiel

· Suivre ses comptes sur les réseaux sociaux

· Préparer dès à présent leur participation à l'édition 2026

Cette prochaine édition devrait attirer des candidatures de haut niveau venues du monde entier, confirmant le rayonnement international croissant de ce prestigieux prix."
https://qna.org.qa/fr-FR/news/news-details?id=le-prix-cheikh-hamad-pour-la-traduction-et-la-comprehension-internationale-devoile-les-langues-de-sa-12-edition-2026&date=2/07/2025

"Gilles Philippe et Julien Piat (dir), La Langue littéraire : une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon, Paris, Fayard, 2009. EAN : 9782213631158.
Alors que la sociologie littéraire sous ses différentes formes privilégie généralement le texte et le contexte, soit d’un côté les discours de l’œuvre et de l’autre les réalités sociales corrélées à ces discours, il m’a semblé important, voire indispensable, suite à ma lecture des livres de Renée Balibar1, d’intégrer les styles littéraires à ce type d’exploration. Attentive aux ouvrages des linguistes et stylisticiens, qui décrivant et analysant les évolutions de la langue fournissent des outils pour penser les faits de style comme réalités sociales et politiques, j’ai beaucoup compulsé, par exemple, le premier volume de L’histoire de la langue française de Gérald Antoine et Robert Martin2, qui couvre la période 1880-1914, comporte des chapitres sur le français enseigné à l’école ou le français populaire, et dont la troisième partie est consacrée aux « Aspects de la langue littéraire ».

Mais un livre a constitué pour moi un apport fondamental. Il s’agit du livre La langue littéraire. Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon paru en 2009 chez Fayard, dirigé par Gilles Philippe et Julien Piat3. Les comptes rendus ont souligné l’extrême unité de l’ouvrage. C’est que ce travail collectif de grande ampleur est en fait pris en charge par un petit nombre d’auteurs. Ils sont six en tout à se partager l’écriture des 13 chapitres et de l’introduction. Aux maîtres d’œuvre, Piat et Philippe, se sont joints Christelle Reggiani, Michel Murat, Stéphanie Smadja et Stéphane Chaudier. Les huit premiers chapitres consistent en une enquête transversale qui s’attache à repérer et à décrire des phénomènes collectifs. Ce sont les traits saillants, les modes, les routines et les innovations qui caractérisent la langue littéraire tout en l’instituant de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle à la seconde moitié du XXe. Sont mis en lumière ici, entre autres, le rapport à l’oralité, l’avènement de la phrase ou, faisant écho au sous-titre de l’ouvrage, l’invention de la prose elle-même. Les chapitres ix à xiii par lesquels l’ouvrage se termine proposent des études de cas et sont organisés autour de noms d’auteurs : Zola, Péguy, Proust, Sartre et Barthes qui emblématisent chacun à la fois un état et un usage de la langue littéraire un rapport à un moment donné.

3Outre la clarté de son architecture, l’ouvrage possède un certain nombre de qualités remarquables qu’on va essayer d’évoquer brièvement ci-dessous.

Le concept de langue littéraire est problématisé. À preuve, l’introduction de Gilles Philippe, « Une langue littéraire ? », se présente avec un point d’interrogation. La possibilité de construire un tel concept est examinée. C’est de cette interrogation que résulte l’élaboration du concept de langue littéraire. À terme, ce concept fonctionne ; il permet d’éclairer certains aspects de la réalité, à savoir, des faits de langues qui apparaissent en littérature.

Une langue littéraire se constitue comme autre de la langue commune. Ce postulat implique qu’une langue commune se constitue, à distance de la langue littéraire. On voit que ce qui s’inscrit dans ce double écart, c’est le processus d’autonomisation de la littérature, saisie dans sa dimension linguistique. La période recouverte par l’ouvrage coïncide de fait peu ou prou avec celle que Bourdieu et son école assignent à l’autonomisation institutionnelle du champ littéraire. Dans le dernier article de l’ouvrage (« Roland Barthes et la langue littéraire vers 1960 »), Julien Piat constate que, à la suite du « tournant énonciatif » négocié par la littérature à partir des années 80, la différence entre langue ordinaire et langue littéraire s’est réduite, est devenue floue et fluctuante, quand elle n’a pas purement et simplement disparu. Le mythe d’une spécificité de la langue littéraire n’exerce plus aujourd’hui sa fonction régulatrice sur les auteurs, les lecteurs, la critique. L’ouvrage ouvre in fine des pistes pour comprendre la réorganisation actuelle du paysage littéraire en formulant l’hypothèse que notre époque est marquée par une sortie de l’autonomie et par la réassignation de la langue littéraire à des contraintes hétéronomes.

L’historicisation des phénomènes de style fait partie intégrante du projet. On assiste donc à un effort de périodisation visant à désigner les épisodes et les étapes qui scandent cette séquence. La période elle-même est inaugurée par une rupture. La langue littéraire s’édifie sur la mort de la rhétorique. On sort des belles-lettres pour entrer dans la littérature. On passe du discours au texte, de la période à la phrase, du latin au français, de l’éloquence à l’écriture, du modèle de la communication à celui de la représentation4. À l’intérieur de ce cadre général sont instaurés des « moments » et des « tournants » : un moment grammatical, un moment linguistique, un moment énonciatif, un tournant autobiographique. On pourrait aussi, suivant Julien Piat et Stéphanie Smadja, parler d’un moment syntaxique et d’un moment déverbal. Les bornes chronologiques ne sont au demeurant pas rigides. Ces moments se succèdent mais ils se superposent également par certains endroits. Le moment grammatical, qui avait déjà fait l’objet d’un livre de Gilles Philippe5, et s’étend de 1850 à 1950 environ, s’entrecroise nécessairement avec le moment énonciatif, puisque c’est dès la fin du XIXe siècle, avec Zola, Flaubert et les réglages du style indirect libre, que la littérature devient, selon l’expression de Christelle Reggiani, un « laboratoire de voix ». Si, à la fin du XXe siècle, la littérature bascule en dehors du paradigme de la langue littéraire et revient au modèle de la littérature-discours, c’est parce que les enjeux énonciatifs ont eux-mêmes été absorbés dans un « tournant autobiographique ». Par ailleurs, la frontière chronologique n’est pas étanche. Des pratiques liées à l’âge de la rhétorique font retour dans la langue littéraire où elles sont soumises à de nouveaux enjeux. Tel est le cas de l’éloquence. Tel est le cas du classicisme dont Stéphane Chaudier étudie la réutilisation dans la prose moderne6, en notant que ces réemplois sont souvent des déformations de l’original et qu’ils obéissent à des visées contradictoires puisqu’ils sont associés aussi bien à la simplicité qu’à la complexité et que, selon les auteurs, la langue classique fantasmée nourrit des postures de droite et de gauche, des prétentions à l’aristocratie et des propensions à la démocratie.

Les événements qui surviennent dans la langue littéraire sont contextualisés. Ils sont, par exemple, référés aux évolutions du système scolaire et à l’enseignement de la langue. Michel Murat montre ainsi (Chap. vi)7 comment la disparition de l’enseignement de la rhétorique entraîne une séparation de la littérature et de la critique. L’émergence d’une fonction critique indépendante a pour corolaire la naissance d’une « prose d’idées » qui dans un premier temps évolue au sein de la langue littéraire avant d’être aspirée par les sciences humaines puis par la sphère médiatique.
La scène philosophique est l’autre horizon de référence de la langue littéraire historicisée. Aux découvertes du phénoménisme, de la phénoménologie, de la psychologie et de la psychanalyse correspondent différentes adaptations formelles de la langue littéraire. À travers des exercices d’oralisation et de vocalisation auxquels se livrent Les Goncourt, Zola, Céline, Aragon ou Sarraute, à travers les expérimentations syntaxiques et l’usage inédit de la ponctuation mises en œuvre de Proust à Claude Simon, s’élaborent les modalités stylistiques de l’écriture de la conscience 8. La langue littéraire s’efforce de traduire les réalités psychiques que Freud, Bergson, Sartre ou Husserl sont en train de conceptualiser : mouvements d’une conscience percevante, travail de la mémoire, méandres d’une « pensée en acte9 », variations du point de vue.

Le concept de langue littéraire permet d’englober à la fois les styles d’auteur et les styles d’époque, montrant comment ils se croisent et se contraignent mutuellement et réciproquement. Chaque auteur fait un usage particulier des consignes stylistiques de l’époque. Ainsi le « triomphe du nom10 » au détriment du verbe, tendance stylistique et même linguistique qui s’impose dès la fin du XIXe siècle, et conduit à écrire « la propreté des vitres11 » plutôt que « les vitres sont propres », produit des effets antithétiques selon les écrivains. Marqueur de préciosité chez les prosateurs symbolistes, il est à l’inverse un marqueur de simplicité chez Charles- Ferdinand Ramuz.
La langue littéraire est l’usage que la littérature fait de la langue dans un intervalle situé entre deux emprises : l’emprise de la rhétorique en amont, et l’emprise de l’énonciation en aval. L’établissement d’une langue littéraire coïncide avec le processus d’autonomisation de la littérature. C’est ce processus d’autonomisation langagière qu’examinent Philippe, Piat et leurs collaborateurs. Leur livre élabore à cet effet une stylistique historicisée et contextualisée où styles d’auteur et styles collectifs se rencontrent.

4L’ouvrage donne des clés pour penser en termes politiques et sociologiques la sortie de l’Ancien régime littéraire et l’institution d’un ordre nouveau. Toutefois dans cet ensemble je voudrais invoquer deux textes en particulier. Il s’agit de l’introduction et du premier chapitre, tous deux rédigés par Gilles Philippe et traitant, l’un de l’avènement de la langue littéraire, et l’autre des rapports de la langue littéraire et de la langue parlée. Ma propre réflexion sur la démocratisation des styles littéraires a reçu de ces textes une nouvelle et précieuse inspiration qui a guidé la rédaction de certains chapitres de Proses du monde12 et influencé la conception du Peuple à l’écrit13.

5Tout d’abord, l’introduction de Philippe m’a permis de mieux comprendre comment l’autonomisation de la langue littéraire malgré ses effets de distinction, était en fait un processus de démocratisation.

6La sortie de la langue commune est la conséquence paradoxale de la rencontre entre littérature et démocratie. En quoi une sortie du commun peut-elle être synonyme d’un événement démocratique ?

7Il faut s’entendre sur le sens la langue commune. La langue commune est une fiction. Elle n’est parlée par personne. Ce n’est ni la langue du peuple ni la langue du plus grand nombre. C’est un idéal de communauté linguistique institué après la Révolution française.

8Que se passe-t-il exactement autour du changement de régime communicationnel par la révolution française ?

9Alors que l’Ancien Régime régissant les arts du langage postulait une concordance entre hiérarchie des styles (bas, moyen, sublime), hiérarchie des genres (roman, drame, tragédie) et hiérarchie sociale (peuple, bourgeoisie, noblesse), le nouveau régime proclame l’égale dignité de tous les sujets et de toutes les manières de dire, ouvrant la voie non seulement à la fiction mais aussi à la diction démocratique.

10Jacques Rancière dans Politique de la littérature rappelle qu’Aristote avait donné le primat à la définition mimétique de l’art littéraire : la diction était soumise à la fiction, les manières de dire étaient déterminées par les choses à dire. Sortie de l’ère mimétique, la littérature est privée de cette régulation ; elle devient « un régime nouveau d’identification de l’art d’écrire.14 ». L’effet le plus troublant de cette bascule démocratique est de conduire à « l’absolutisation du style »15. Entre le style absolutisé de Rancière et la langue littéraire autonormée de Philippe existe une évidente ressemblance. Révélateur de ces affinités est le rôle attribué à Flaubert. Pour Philippe, l’auteur de Mme Bovary est l’inventeur de la prose moderne. Pour Rancière, Flaubert, lorsqu’il affirme que le style est « à lui tout seul une manière absolue de voir les choses », exemplifie la connivence entre démocratisation des lettres et absolutisation du style. Ce que Sartre a dénoncé comme une « pétrification du langage » chez Flaubert était, pour ses contemporains « la marque de fabrique de la démocratie », puisque « Flaubert rendait tous les mots égaux de la même façon qu’il supprimait toute hiérarchie entre sujets nobles et sujets vils, entre narration et description, premier plan et arrière-plan, et finalement entre hommes et choses. »16 Et c’est précisément une telle « pétrification de l’écriture » qui « accomplit la logique démocratique de l’écriture sans maître ni destination, la grande loi de l’égalité de tous les sujets et de la disponibilité de toutes les expressions, qui marque la complicité du style absolutisé avec la capacité de n’importe qui de s’emparer de n’importe quels mots, phrases ou histoires. »17 Rancière pensait en termes politiques une réalité qu’il appréhendait avant tout à travers des catégories esthétiques. En revenant à la langue, Philippe permet de penser les enjeux politiques d’une mutation stylistique.

11La langue littéraire est appelée, pour récupérer sa spécificité, à s’instituer en autre de la langue commune, à se tenir à distance de la norme haute et de la norme basse de la langue nationale. Gilles Philippe a mis en évidence cette nouvelle distribution des rôles. Il montre par ailleurs que, jusqu’au milieu du XXe siècle, la perception classique de la langue littéraire va se maintenir et se superposer — avec des effets tantôt cumulatifs, tantôt contradictoires — à la conception « moderne »18. Sous l’impulsion notamment de l’école, la littérature enseignée continuera à incarner la « norme haute » de la langue nationale, tandis que sous la pression des écrivains, des linguistes et des grammairiens, la littérature vivante va tendre à s’affranchir de l’usage standard. En même temps qu’elle cesse d’être dominée par un principe hiérarchique, la langue littéraire cesse donc de s’identifier unilatéralement à la norme haute de la langue nationale, sans pour autant s’aligner sur l’usage courant.

12En second lieu, Philippe a apporté une la clarification décisive à la problématique de l’oralisation de la langue littéraire. Depuis le début de mes recherches, la mimésis de la langue orale est pour moi synonyme de la démocratisation de l’expression littéraire, pressée de s’ouvrir à la parole du peuple. Mais, comme le remarque Gilles Philippe, « la question de l’oralité se dédouble : il faudrait au moins séparer, d’une part, la volonté de rendre compte, dans le texte littéraire, de la diversité des parlures et sociolectes attestés et, d’autre part, la revendication d’un idiome écrit qui retrouve l’expressivité et la vigueur de la parole prononcée19 ». Il convient donc de distinguer deux oralisations ; la première tend vers la vocalisation, cherche à restituer la parole vive du locuteur dans le système de l’écrit ; la seconde, à visée sociologique, a pour objectif d’assurer la présence de l’oral populaire dans le texte littéraire. Les Goncourt et Flaubert illustrent la première formule, Zola la seconde, et Vallès, une fusion des deux. La science politique (Rosanvallon) nous a appris à déceler les multiples sens du mot peuple en démocratie. Dans son acception politique, il désigne un principe de souveraineté. Dans son acception sociale, il renvoie à deux réalités distinctes et presque opposées : l’ensemble du corps social d’une part, composant une collection d’individus juridiquement égaux ; et d’autre part, la fraction dominée de cette totalité composée par les classes populaires. Laissons de côté le demos souverain, qui pour moi, comme je l’ai développé dans Le Roman de la démocratie, se profile sous la voix du narrateur abstrait dans le roman hétérodiégétique. Cette réserve étant faite on peut se demander si les deux oralisations ne coïncident pas avec les deux interprétations sociales du demos, la vocalisation représentant la société des locuteurs pris dans le flux des échanges ordinaires, et l’oralité populaire donnant voix à la fraction dominée de cette communauté linguistique. Aragon est passé expert dans l’art d’entremêler les différents exercices d’oralité. « Victor en avait marre des chevaux20 ».

13L’ouverture de la langue littéraire à l’oralité ne la rapproche pas de la langue commune, car la langue commune n’est pas la langue réelle mais une fiction de norme linguistique unifiée. Les exercices d’oralité auxquels se livrent les écrivains font éclater cette fiction linguistique. Ils lui opposent une autre fiction, la fiction d’une langue accueillant et entrecroisant une vaste gamme de pratiques et de codes linguistiques. Langue littéraire est une autre fiction qui s’éloigne de la première en mettant à nu la disparate des pratiques.

NOTES
1 Renée Balibar, Les Français fictifs, Paris, Hachette, 1974 ; Renée Balibar et Dominique Laporte, Le Français national, Paris, Hachette, 1974.

2 Gérald Antoine et Robert Martin Histoire de la langue française. 1880-1914, Paris, CNRS éditions, 1999.

3 Gilles Philippe et Julien Piat, La Langue littéraire : une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon, Paris, Fayard, 2009.

4 Gilles Philippe, op.cit, p. 5 ; Christelle Reggiani, Ibid., p. 122.

5 Gilles Philippe, Sujet, verbe, complément : le moment grammatical de la littérature française. 1890-1940, Paris, Gallimard, 2002.

6 Stéphane Chaudier, « La référence classique dans la prose narrative », dans Gilles Philippe et Julien Piat, La Langue littéraire…, op. cit, p. 281-321.

7 Michel Murat, « Phrase lyrique, prose d’idées », Ibid., p. 235-279.

8 Gilles Philippe, « La langue littéraire, le phénomène et la pensée », Ibid, p. 91-119.

9 Julien Piat, Ibid., p. 227.

10 Julien Piat et Stéphanie Smadja, « Le triomphe du nom et le recul du verbe », dans Ibid., p. 155-177.

11 Ibid., p. 159.

12 Nelly Wolf, Proses du monde. Les enjeux sociaux des styles littéraires, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2014

13 Nelly Wolf, Le Peuple à l’écrit. De Flaubert à Virginie Despentes, Saint-Denis, Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2019.

14 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature, Paris, Galilée, 2007, p. 19.

15 Ibid. p. 15.

16 Ibid., p. 16.

17 Ibid, p. 30.

18 Gilles Philippe, « Une langue littéraire ? », Ibid., p. 7-56.

19 Gilles Philippe, « Langue littéraire et langue parlée », Ibid., p. 57.

20 Aragon, Les Cloches de Bâle dans Œuvres romanesques complètes, Paris, Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », 1997, t. I, p. 898.

AUTEUR
NELLY WOLF

Voir ses autres contributions

nelly.wolf14@gmail.com

POUR CITER CET ARTICLE
Nelly Wolf, « La langue de la littérature », Acta fabula, URL : http://www.fabula.org/revue/document19807.php, page consultée le 03 July 2025. DOI : https://10.58282/acta.19807

https://www.fabula.org/revue/document19807.php
#metaglossia_mundus

"Prix de la traduction Inalco-Vo/Vf 2025 : cinq ouvrages en lice

2 juillet 2025

 

Cinq titres ont été retenus pour le Prix de la traduction Inalco-Vo/Vf 2025.

 

Titres en lice pour le Prix Inalco de la traduction 2025 © DR‎

Le prix de la traduction, lancé en 2019 par l'Inalco en partenariat avec le Festival Vo-Vf, récompense une traduction effectuée en français à partir d’une des langues enseignées à l'Institut. Doté à hauteur de 2500 euros, ce prix est destiné à mettre en avant la qualité du travail d’un traducteur ou d’une traductrice ainsi que la richesse de littératures parfois encore peu connues du grand public car souvent moins diffusées.

 

Le Prix de la traduction Inalco 2025 sera remis le dimanche 5 octobre de 11h à 12h par les initiatrices du prix, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov et Nathalie Carré (Inalco), et par le traducteur Olivier Mannoni.

 

Les ouvrages présélectionnés

Cinq titres ont été retenus pour le Prix Inalco de la traduction :​

 

Le livre de l'Una de Faruk Sehic, traduit du bosnien par Olivier Lannuzel (Agullo)                         

Cette corde qui m'attache à la terre de Lorina Bălteanu, traduit du roumain par Marily le Nir (éditions des Syrtes)

A contre jour de Pirkko Saisio, traduit du finnois par Sébastien Cagnoli (Robert Laffont) 

Au soir d'Alexandrie d'Alaa El Aswany, traduit de l'arabe par Gilles Gauthier (Actes Sud)

Petits travaux pour un palais de László Krasznahorkai, traduit du hongrois par Joëlle Dufeuilly (Cambourakis)

Merci aux maisons d’édition qui nous ont fait parvenir leurs ouvrages et félicitations aux traductrices et aux traducteurs !

 

La précédente édition du prix avait récompensé Marie-Cécile Fauvin pour sa traduction du grec du roman Heureux qui dit son nom de l’écrivain Sotiris Dimitriou, paru aux éditions Quidam en 2022..."

https://www.inalco.fr/actualites/prix-de-la-traduction-inalco-vo/vf-2025-cinq-ouvrages-en-lice

#metaglossia_mundus 

Kalyani Warrier

I don’t know what I’d do without translated works. I say that because it’s one of my favourite genres in literature. But also, I wonder what the world would be like if translating works, or any translations for that matter, didn’t exist.

 

 

 

 

Which makes me appreciate the importance of these works so much more.

 

 

 

 

I’m a huge fan of East Asian translations, especially Japanese translations. It exposes me to stories I’ve not yet come across in the English language (that must be because I would not have explored much of niche topics and Indie authors that are written in English. Either way, I’m able to enjoy them because of Japanese authors).

 

 

 

 

Fortunately/Unfortunately, depending on what perspective you choose to look at it from, for quite some time now, English has been the language used widely for pretty much all sorts of communication in the global scale.

 

 

 

 

Therefore, when it comes to the literature landscape and the publishing industry, works written in English naturally dominate other literatures that are written in non-English languages.

 

 

 

 

But I’m not too fond of this. Despite English being my primary language, I wouldn’t want English to dominate a huge part of the industry.

 

 

 

 

That is because, in my opinion, it saturates the market. And why do I think that? Because I feel like the stories narrated and consumed are going to start repeating itself. We would only get to see people of the same culture being talked about time and time again. That means having no exposure to cultures that we are not as familiar with. What is popular, advertised the most, and accepted by publishers will be read by the majority of the readers. Even non-readers will be turned off by having the same stories marketed to them, which will significantly impact the consumption of literature.

 

 

 

 

I love exploring different cultures — their people, history, heritage, region and everything else they have to offer — because that’s one way to expand my knowledge on topics I’m not that familiar with. I love learning about different lifestyles, especially those that differ from mine, at the same time, find similarities between mine and their lives. Translated works really help in broadening that horizon.

 

 

 

 

I have experimented with quite a wide range of genres throughout my life. Which has helped me realise what genres I love to consume and analyse, genres that I always look out for — one of them is translated fiction. Having read a lot of translated fictions, I have realised how unique their storytelling, plot structure, character profile is. To me, they bring such a breath of fresh air to mainstream publishing.

 

 

 

 

They set a background that is surreal, themed on peculiar stories, at the same time, represent ordinary, average characters, who are set beautifully in the backdrop and premise of the work.

 

 

 

 

I can see the arguments being made against translated works. One of them being: people can learn the language the work is written in. Why would you lose the opportunity to learn a new language? But to counter the argument, I have to mention that this isn’t a viable option for many readers as learning a new language fluently is time-consuming; everyone doesn’t have the willpower for that. It must also be said that it is impossible for anyone to multiple languages in the world just to read a text written in a particular language. (Also, let’s be real. Learning an entire language just to read one or a few works would not be worth it for a large chunk of readers.)

 

 

 

 

Another argument I’ve heard is that translations, no matter how precisely done, can never convey a 100% of the intent of the original text. I can understand this argument better because it is, in my opinion, a valid worry. While translating from one language to another, nuance can get lost due to various factors: certain vocabulary would not exist in the target language (or any close equivalents to the original word or phrase), sentence structuring can affect the overall meaning while translating, cultural nuances that exist in the source language can’t be explained properly in the target language, etc.

 

 

 

 

But translation is an actual job. It creates job opportunities for translators who convey the story to those who don’t know the language, but are still interested to read the story. And this is the best way for anyone to have access to works written in a language they’re not familiar with.

 

 

 

 

Translators use a varied number of methods while translating. If the translator is able to translate the text well enough — makes sure that nuance of the text is conveyed thoroughly and accurately, then the second argument can be pacified.

 

 

 

 

Translated Fiction Recommendations

 

I have some recommendations for translated fictions (mind you, they are mostly Japanese):

 

 

 

 

The Lantern of Lost Memories by Sanaka Hiiragi (Magical Realism — Japanese)

 

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Fantasy — French)

 

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (Mystery — Japanese)

 

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Literary Fiction — Japanese)

 

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum (Literary Fiction — Korean)

 

Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Crime — Japanese)

 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqualine Harpman (Dystopian Fiction — French)

 

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (Literary Fiction — Japanese)

 

The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn (Literary Fiction — German)

 

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees by Kenkō (Classics — Japanese)

 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Magical Realism — Japanese)

 

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura (Magical Realism — Japanese)

 

Mrs Rosie and the Priest by Giovanni Boccaccio (Classics — Italian)

 

Almond by Wohn Pyung Sohn (Literary Fiction — Korean)

 

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (Horror — Spanish)

 

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (Magical Realism — Japanese)

 

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Dystopian Fiction — Japanese)

 

Kim JiYoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam Joo (Feminism — Korean)

 

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (LGBTQ+ — Japanese)

 

Miramar by Naquib Mahfouz (Literary Fiction — Arabic)

 

Feel free to voice your opinions in the comments below! I’d love to hear if you agree or disagree with my takes!"

 

https://medium.com/@kalyaniwarrierreads/a-rant-on-translated-works-b3550b4640e2

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

Sur le bout des langues. "La solution n’est ni le tout-français, ni le tout-corse, mais le bilinguisme", estime Jean-François Bernardini, chanteur du groupe I Muvrini.
Par Michel Feltin-Palas
Publié le 01/07/2025 à 06:15"
https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/jean-francois-bernardini-la-corse-a-subi-un-linguicide-OAJFNR7DMRH3FO4NEFKUMFLZNQ/?cmp_redirect=true
#metaglossia_mundus

"À partir du 1er juillet, la rémunération minimale du feuillet de traduction passe à 24 euros au lieu de 23 euros.

 

Par Adèle Buijtenhuijs

le 01.07.2025

Dans un contexte anxiogène pour le monde de la traduction menacé par l'intelligence artificielle, le Conseil d’administration du Centre national du livre (CNL) annonce augmenter la rémunération minimum du feuillet de traduction. Déjà revalorisée en juin 2024 à 23 euros, celle-ci gagne un euro à partir du 1er juillet, passant à 24 euros. 

 

Éligibilité aux aides

L'augmentation s’applique sur des paragraphes de 25 lignes dactylographiés et 1 300 signes en cas de comptage informatique. Ainsi, les traducteurs seront éligibles à différents types d’aides telles que les subventions à la traduction, à la publication pour des ouvrages traduits ou à une bourse de traduction. 

 

À cela s’ajoute l’instauration d’un nouveau mode de calcul en cas de comptage informatique."

https://www.livreshebdo.fr/article/le-cnl-revalorise-le-taux-de-remuneration-minimal-des-traducteurs

#metaglossia_mundus 

"...Tense is whether an action happened in the past, present, or future. Some languages, like Finnish, have a non-past tense that includes both present and future. Other languages have several past tenses depending on how remote the action was.

 

Aspect is whether the action is completed, in progress, planned, iterative, a general truth, and so forth.

 

A language can have tense that implies aspect, or aspect that implied tense.

 

You can also express aspect without tense, but in English you have to use a verb form that has a tense. If you say, “the sun rises every morning” or “justice is important,” or “Daddy comes home at four o’clock,” you are making an assertion about aspect, not tense (which is past, present, and future)..."

What is the difference between aspect and tense? - Quora https://share.google/E8ObE9A6tmhDbtksy

#metaglossia_mundus 

 

Speakers debated the possibility of achieving true multilingualism in universities at the latest Language Debates event on 23 June, hosted by Language Acts and Worldmaking.

"01 July 2025

'Multilingualism is seen as a problem' – valuing languages in university settings
Speakers debated the possibility of achieving true multilingualism in universities at the latest Language Debates event on 23 June, hosted by Language Acts and Worldmaking.

Although diversity in universities has increased, partly in response to widening participation initiatives, the issue of multiple languages is still missing from equality, diversity and inclusion statements across institutions.

As part of the Language Debates series by Language Acts and Worldmaking, this event posed the question: what would the multilingual university look and act like?

Language Acts and Worldmaking explores language as a 'material and historical force' in the world. We have always been interested in how languages circulate, in their contact zones, in how we communicate across language and culture. Our emphasis on the understanding of multilingualism in UK educational institutions allows us to put our research into work in our close environments and to ask ourselves how we can make the most of that richness.

Professor Emerita Debra Kelly from the University of Westminster, who is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow to the centre, co-chaired the debate, beginning by introducing her colleague Professor Terry Lamb.

As Professor of Languages and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy, Professor Lamb founded and leads The Multilingual University – A Westminster Learning Community, which aims to put the university’s multilingualism on the institutional agenda. Professor Lamb set up this learning community in response to the diversity in the university, which he felt offered opportunities to ‘be very excited about its multilingualism’.

Not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about multilingualism as I am. In most places I work it’s seen as a problem – something to be ignored or wished away.

Professor Terry Lamb, University of Westminster
Professor Lamb highlighted that teachers across Europe feel that any other language other than the one of the school of English get in the way of learning, but his research shows this isn’t the case. Instead, he proposes shifting to plurilingualism, where the presence of multiple languages is seen as normal and something to enjoy. He is leading this work at the University of Westminster by building a picture of the extent of language diversity in the institution.

There are seven considerations for creating a multilingual university that will help us to see ‘language as a resource for learning as well as a very important part of our identity’, said Professor Lamb:

Understand the extent of our multi/plurilingualism
Challenge monolingual habitus and the problemisation of bi- and plurilingualism
Valuing our multilingualism and plurilingualism for everybody
Ensuring that our linguistic landscape reflects our linguistic diversity
Developing language sensitivity across our teaching
Building our collaborations with language communities beyond the university
Challenging linguistic discrimination
Cross-linguistic cooperation

Event co-chair Dr Ana de Medeiros, Director of King’s Language Centre, introduced Professor Jo Angouri, Professor in Sociolinguistics and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and Internationalisation at the University of Warwick to present her research.

Professor Angouri explored the European Commission’s commitment to transnational and multilingual collaboration, which aspires for all citizens to be able to speak two languages. However, Professor Angouri argues that this commitment refers only to nation state varieties of languages, ignoring that there are multiple varieties within what we would consider to be “one language”.

Languages are not socially and politically equal. They can be used as the arena for separating “us” and “them” – such as how the onus is on those who come new to prove good citizenship by speaking the language.

She proposed using alliances between universities as connected learning communities across linguistic divides, as ‘the more we create connections, the more students see themselves become members and belong’. This can help to build an inclusive ecosystem that shows the value of all languages.

She also shared her experience of creating MultiDev, an interdisciplinary research module open to all undergraduate students at the University of Warwick, which aimed to make students’ linguistic capabilities relevant to the learning journey. The project gave voice to large communities in universities and societies that are often silenced in policy documents and linguistic maps of Europe. Students worked comfortably in a multilingual environment, saying that it gave them new perspectives on language as something political, as well as legitimising their own linguistic skills.

Decolonising the university
In response to the arguments put forward, Dr Jarad Zimbler, Director of Research at the Global Cultures Institute, said Professor Lamb’s offer is ‘enticing’ for literary scholars – yet he also highlighted the need for pluralising language that is inclusive, non-hegemonic and non-hierarchical.

This requires addressing the idea of hierarchy head-on said Dr Zimbler, who used the example of the University of Nairobi in 1968 who wanted to abolish the Department of English in favour of the Department of African Literatures and Languages. This proposition sparked discussion on why English should be the central pillar as the operational language for literary studies at the university.

The idea mapped the inevitable directions of study in an African university and recommended that studying Swahili, English and French remained compulsory. However, Dr Zimbler argued that this was still a hierarchical vision of the world, despite offering a different perspective for the creation of a new kind of department.

How do we incorporate a gesture that seeks to include a new hierarchy in place of the old?

Dr Jarad Zimbler, Director of Research, Global Cultures Institute
True linguistic diversity?
The debate was followed by an audience Q&A directed by Professor Kelly, in which people asked about whether multilingualism is diverse in terms of class, how it can be better embedded in humanities programmes at university level, and the concept of ‘translanguaging’ – switching between appropriate languages.

We perpetuate a framework of multilingualism that is important – but it’s not the only one.

Professor Jo Angouri, University of Warwick
To learn more about Language Debates by Language Acts and Worldmaking, sign up to the Global Cultures Institute newsletter.

About Language Debates
The Language Debates series fosters a dialogue on the traditions and innovations and the synergies and fissures within Modern Languages, Language Education and allied disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

About Language Acts and Worldmaking
Language Acts and Worldmaking is a flagship project funded by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative, which aims to regenerate and transform modern language learning by foregrounding language's power to shape how we live and make our worlds.

About the Global Cultures Institute
Even in a globalised world, we come into daily contact with limits and boundaries, which divide us in stark and sometimes harmful ways on the grounds of language, culture, community, and identity.

At the Global Cultures Institute, by fostering conversations that are profoundly interdisciplinary, we probe and articulate these boundaries, developing a critical understanding of their origins and development, and sharing this understanding through research, education and public engagement.

Shaping a space at King’s for debate that is generous and robust, we confront the challenge of intensifying divisions and seek ways to talk beyond boundaries.

In this story

Professor Catherine Boyle
Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies

Dr Jarad Zimbler
Reader in English and Global Cultures

Debra Kelly
Research Fellow

Dr Ana Maria Sousa Aguiar de Medeiros
Director of King's Language Centre

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/multilingualism-is-seen-as-a-problem-valuing-languages-in-university-settings
#metaglossia_mundus

"Vers le lancement d’une plateforme dédiée à la traduction des langues nationales
MARDI 24 JUIN 2025 À 19H13

Dakar 24 juin (APS) – Le projet de banque de données terminologiques et de traductique (BDT) dénommé ‘’Sentermino’’, qui vise à harmoniser et uniformiser la production terminologique dans les langues nationales et à faciliter leur traduction, sera officiellement lancé en septembre 2025, a-t-on appris de l’Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire (IFAN).

‘’Le projet ”Sentermino” est une initiative nationale d’envergure, qui vise à harmoniser, centraliser et valoriser les terminologies dans les langues nationales du Sénégal, notamment le wolof, le pulaar et le seereer’’, d’après un communiqué parvenu mardi à l’APS.

Le texte signale que le projet ‘’ facilitera non seulement l’enseignement bilingue, mais aussi la traduction entre les langues nationales elles-mêmes, et entre celles-ci et le français, grâce à la traductique’’.

Ce projet de recherche-action ambitionne de créer une base de données centralisée, évolutive et accessible en ligne, contenant des terminologies validées et adaptées à tous les domaines : éducation, santé, environnement, artisanat, TIC, agriculture, etc.

La plateforme contribue directement à l’opérationnalisation du modèle harmonisé de l’enseignement bilingue au Sénégal (MOHEBS) et à l’atteinte de l’ODD 4 sur une éducation de qualité, inclusive et équitable, ajoute le communiqué.

Le projet ”Sentermino” est mis en œuvre par l’IFAN en partenariat avec l’École Supérieure Polytechnique (ESP), le ministère de l’Education nationale (MEN), avec l’appui de l’UNESCO via le programme CapED, et de l’Institut de la Francophonie pour l’Education et la Formation.

Une rencontre stratégique du comité scientifique de validation du projet est prévue mercredi, indique la source.

‘’En réunissant des linguistes, des spécialistes de terminologie, des experts sectoriels, des développeurs informatiques et des représentants institutionnels, cette journée de travail marque une étape clé avant le lancement officiel prévu en septembre 2025’’ explique le document.

Ce lancement sera l’occasion de présenter la plateforme numérique dans ses quatre langues de départ, ‘’ français, wolof, pulaar et seereer’’, et d’annoncer son extension prochaine à d’autres langues nationales.

‘’Ce moment fort permettra également de mettre en lumière la bibliothèque numérique intégrée, regroupant des documents en langues nationales, ainsi que le réseau pluridisciplinaire d’experts et de personnes ressources mobilisées à travers tout le pays pour faire vivre ce projet novateur’’, ajoute le communiqué.
MF/ABB/AB
https://aps.sn/vers-le-lancement-dune-plateforme-dediee-a-la-traduction-des-langues-nationales/
#metaglossia_mundus

Songscription Launches AI Tool Converting Audio to Sheet Music

#metaglossia_mundus 

One theme for this small language is the importance of quality over quantity in amassing data and developing models.

What The Future Of Translation Tech Means For The Basque Language
ByChristine Ro, Contributor.  Christine Ro is a journalist covering science and development.

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Jun 27, 2025, 03:00am EDT
Jun 27, 2025, 04:23am EDT

In a warehouse-like space on a narrow island in Bilbao, Spain, linguists and technologists are testing the possibilities of automated translation. Their projects include antispoofing work to better detect and combat synthetic voices, which are now highly sophisticated; vocal analysis of calls to potentially identify early signs of neurological disorders; and a limited set of speech commands in elevators, which may be especially useful to people with disabilities.

This is the Bilbao base of Vicomtech, a nonprofit research foundation focused on technology. Its funders include private companies and four layers of government (provincial, regional, national, and European). The strong influence of local governments, in particular, is a common theme across both language-revitalization and technology-development projects in the Basque Country.

An automated translation program that Vicomtech worked on, Itzuli, is used for 300,00 translations a day, according to the organization. Itzuli is embedded on a government website, where it allows general translation between Basque and Spanish, French, and English. It also offers formal translation, appropriate for legal language, between Basque and Spanish. And the developers are working to add an offering specific to the Bizkaian dialect of Basque.

However, Itzuli remains less well-known than Google Translate, which remains convenient for many Basque Country businesses, even if it’s not quite as sophisticated. (Google did not respond to a request for comments regarding Google Translate and Basque.)

Basque’s Hard-Fought Current Status
Basque (euskara), a language spoken in parts of northern Spain and southern France, is unusual for several reasons. Most languages spoken in Europe are Indo-European, but many linguists believe that Basque predates those. It’s now essentially unique in Western Europe.

While many minority languages in Europe are dwindling, Basque is bucking the trends. Over 1 million people can now speak or understand it. Some of the numbers are dramatic. For instance, while in 1997–98, 40% of students in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) of northern Spain chose to take their university entrance exams in Basque rather than Spanish, this shot up to over 70% in 2018–19, according to Euskararen Etxea, a museum and cultural center dedicated to the Basque language.

This points to another unusual feature of Basque: it’s a young language. In contrast, many minority languages remain the preserve of the oldest community members. In Basque, 22% of BAC residents older than 70 speak Basque, dwarfed by the over 90% of 10–14-year-olds who speak Basque.

However, while Basque has grown significantly as a language of education and culture, it is not yet spoken casually to the same degree. “Basque is a young language because it is children and young people who use it most, and that includes use on the street,” according to Euskararen Etxea.

Also, the expansion of Basque has been uneven. It is declining in the French Basque Country, though overall Basque punches above its weight, in terms of representation. For example, there are about the same number of active users for the Basque and Uzbek versions of Wikipedia, although Uzbekistan has roughly 18 times the population size.

Basque has had a tumultuous recent history. It was banned under the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which began in 1936. In the decades that followed, the Basque nationalist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Eta) killed over 800 people while agitating, among other things, for protection of the Basque language. In the Basque regions, language battles have been closely intertwined with tensions, sometimes violent, over identity and power. Controversies have continued over, for example, proposed Basque language requirements for some public jobs.

It wasn’t until 1968 that a standardized version (euskara batua) was created. Language enthusiasts have embraced new technologies such as video games for keeping Basque alive. Now, digitizing Basque is part of the regional government’s drive to both safeguard the language and to invest heavily in technology.

This is symbolized by Zorrotzaurre, the artificial island housing Vicomtech’s Bilbao office. Construction is occurring all over this formerly run-down strip of land, which many industrial companies abandoned after the 1980s. The island still appears modest, but two international starchitects have left their fingerprints on it. Zorrotzaurre’s master plan was drawn up Zaha Hadid, and the island is connected to the mainland by Frank Gehry Bridge (Frank Gehry Zubia), whose Guggenheim Museum design was a controversial and expensive gamble that has hugely paid off. Now, Vicomtech associate director Jorge Posada says of the authorities’ plans, “they want to create a kind of Guggenheim effect” for Zorrotzaurre as well.

A Deliberately Smaller And Slower Approach To Language Tech
The technology has advanced faster than some people’s desire to incorporate it.

A logical source of Basque-language content for tech developers, including Vicomtech, is the public broadcaster, Euskal Irrati Telebista (EITB). EITB has five TV channels, of which two are fully in Basque, and six radio stations, with two of them exclusively in Basque. “As a public service, it is one of our big goals” to preserve the Basque language, says Igor Jainaga Irastorza, the chief technology officer for EITB. “It’s one of our foundational basics.”

So far, the broadcaster is taking a cautious approach to AI-based translation technologies, with automatic transcription being the first critical step. Jainaga has seen much improvement in the services over the last few years. He calls them “good enough for being helpful,” especially for general purposes or non-native speakers. But overall, “we are going slowly with these [AI-based] services, because what we see is that if technology is not mature enough, it can introduce noise in the production processes.”

While they haven’t set a specific accuracy threshold they need to reach, “it’s best effort,” Jainaga reports. It’s particularly important to avoid language-based errors in certain types of content: “If it’s an entertainment program, maybe it’s not as critical as if it’s a news program.”

That balance of caution and context means that EITB allows different levels of AI-powered translation for different types of programming. As Jainaga says, “We have a big mixture of some of the programs being transcribed by humans, some with automatic processes and some with automatic transcription with human checks, mainly with the products that are coming from outside.”

More specifically, for some of EITB’s news programs, the automatic transcription of subtitles may be supervised by humans. Some online broadcasts have automatic transcription with human checks, but not automatic translation. The audio platform Guau has automatic transcription and translation. And the recently launched news site Orain allows automatic translation into Spanish, English, and French (using Itzuli).

Itzuli interface on the euskadi.eus website.
CHRISTINE RO
All of this needs localization into Basque. In weather forecasts, repeated weather-related terms may be easy to automate and achieve 100% accuracy. But AI models may need to be trained to accurately reproduce names of athletes and small towns, for instance. “If you are giving that service to the people of the Basque Country, what they expect is that the names of the towns or local people are properly spelled,” Jainaga says.

One theme that has emerged from the creation of AI language tools for this small language is the importance of quality over quantity in amassing data and developing models. Jainaga comments, “Big companies or other developers can…eat all the info on the internet available,” potentially without obtaining rights. “With minority languages, we have less information, so the only thing that we can do from our point is to have good-quality data.”

An organization currently working on collecting high-quality language data is Euskorpora, a young nonprofit whose partners include government departments, private companies, and language institutes. (EITB and Vicomtech are also partners.) Euskorpora’s flagship project is the Basque Language Digital Corpus, a collection of audio, text, and video samples of Basque from varied settings, with different language varieties represented over time. The intention is for this corpus to be available to anyone who wants to use it, though likely with some sort of payment structure for commercial uses.

This type of corpus is needed, according to Leire Barañano Orbe, Euskorpora’s general manager, because other Basque corpora for training machine learning models have focused on research or academic exploration. She believes that “this distinction is crucial, as research-oriented projects often prioritize innovation and theoretical advancements, while commercial efforts aim to create practical, user-ready tools.”

Another difference with the Basque Language Digital Corpus is that Euskorpora is spending a lot of time and care on making sure that they have all the legal permissions for the content they would like to incorporate. In contrast, some other datasets for machine learning models may have murky origins. For instance, it’s challenging to gather enough spontaneous snippets of audio and video. So Euskorpora is looking into using audio from call centers—though this would require careful consideration to ensure that all such data is anonymous, with no identifying details captured.

Audio is also a challenge for Vicomtech. It can be hard to capture good-quality audio from real-world recordings on the street, or to refine speech recognition in noisy environments like elevators or factory floors. For the moment, direct speech–speech translation is not mature enough, according to Arantza Del Pozo, head of speech and language technologies at Vicomtech. And there is a “concatenation of errors” when AI systems translate between speech and text, she says.

The quality-over-quantity approach means that Basque language tools won’t be the biggest. Nor will they be the quickest, given the European Union’s more careful approach to regulating AI, compared to the U.S. and China. Vicomtech isn’t looking to be the fastest or the first, Posada says.

Another gap in recorded spoken language is in specialized areas like law and engineering, where there may not be many media samples using this type of specific language. So for such areas, Euskorpora is considering using some proportion of synthetic data to supplement the real-world data. There again, care would be needed to avoid distorting the datasets.

Like just about everyone working on Basque language tools, Barañano of Euskorpora wants to ensure the vitality of the language. She believes that the main European languages have been very strong in terms of digital transformation, but there has a been a large and widening gap for other languages.

For this it’s necessary to tap into not only government resources, but also larger networks of collaboration and support. For a language fighting for survival, no one organization can go it alone. Barañano believes that “this collective effort can advance both the preservation and modernization of a minority language in an increasingly digital world.”

Reporting for this story was supported by a press trip organized by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2025/06/27/what-the-future-of-translation-tech-means-for-the-basque-language/
#metaglossia_mundus

"DPR Issues California Notice 2025-08 Adding and Revising Multilingual Translation on Pesticide Labeling

Lisa R. Burchi, Barbara Christianson

 

On June 26, 2025, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) issued California Notice 2025-08 announcing that pesticide registrants may add or revise multilingual translation of its labels by non-notification. With this change, DPR now is consistent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to allow pesticide registrants to add the required Spanish-translated sections on its labels by non-notification as part of the Spanish translation requirements under the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act of 2022 (PRIA 5).

 

Prior to Notice 2025-08, if a registrant wanted to add multilingual translations to its marketing labels, it was required to submit these label changes as an amendment. While Notice 2025-08 now allows the addition or revision of multilingual translation to DPR-registered labels to be made as a DPR non-notification,” DPR adds, however, that registrants may not add or revise “multilingual labeling elements if the English version is not previously listed and has not been reviewed and accepted by DPR.”

 

DPR states it expanded the scope of allowable translated labels falling under non-notification to include “all languages and allow for translation of the entire product label.” DPR notes it is allowing non-notification for translation of the entire product labels, which is not required by EPA, to acknowledge the diversity of the spoken language within California’s agricultural workforce.

 

As part of DPR’s implementation of the new procedure, DPR states it will allow the addition or revision of multilingual translations of previously approved labels either directly on the container or through web-based links (e.g., websites or QR codes) without notification to DPR. DPR notes, however, that registrants are responsible to ensure that all translated language on the label is a true and accurate representation of the accepted English language. For the web-based links, DPR states that explanatory text can be added via non-notification that explains the purpose of the website or QR code, such as “Escanee el código QR para etiqueta española” (i.e., “Scan QR Code for Spanish Label”), but states that it intends to maintain discretion to review the multilingual language and potentially require revisions to translations when appropriate. Additionally, DPR states that the full English-accepted labeling must appear on a product’s container label. Specifically, “[m]ultilingual labeling can be used in addition to English labeling but may not replace the required English label.”

 

When submitting an application through DPR’s new online system, California Pesticide Electronic Submission Tracking (CalPEST), DPR requires the pesticide applicant to agree to DPR’s Terms and Conditions, including a self-certification statement that the multilingual translations are correct and accurate. It states:

 

I certify that all multilingual translations printed on the pesticide product labels or other collateral labeling, including labeling found through web-based links (i.e., website or QR code), submitted for registration, are a true and accurate representation of the English labeling elements."

June 30, 2025

https://www.lawbc.com/dpr-issues-california-notice-2025-08-adding-and-revising-multilingual-translation-on-pesticide-labeling/

#metaglossia_mundus 

"P. Matan & P. Velvizhy 

Scientific Reports volume 15, Article number: 20348 (2025) Cite this article

 

Abstract

Machine translation plays a critical role in expanding access to information across diverse languages and cultures. For children’s literature, there is a need for translation models that can preserve both linguistic accuracy and emotional sensitivity. However, existing automated systems often struggle with the adaptations required for young readers. This study addresses this gap by developing a novel English-to-Tamil translation model for children’s stories, combining the Universal Networking Language (UNL) for semantic representation with emotional paraphrasing techniques. Our approach uses a neuro-symbolic AI framework, specifically integrating the T5 transformer and few-shot learning, allowing effective model adaptation with minimal data. Evaluation with BiLingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), Translation Error Rate (TER), and Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering (METEOR) scores (0.8978, 0.15, and 0.8869 respectively) highlights the model’s high performance in maintaining both accuracy and contextual sensitivity. These metrics underscore the system’s capability to deliver culturally relevant and child-appropriate translations. This research contributes to machine translation by bridging neural and symbolic methods, providing an adaptable, low-resource solution that supports cross-cultural understanding and accessible content for young readers."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03290-3

#metaglossia_mundus 

"The National Fund (BIE Foundation) Awards $6.6 Million in Grants to Strengthen Native Language Immersion in BIE Schools

 

EIN Presswire

Jun 30, 2025, 8:00 AM ET

 

Eight BIE schools receive $6.6M from the National Fund to grow Native language immersion and connect students to culture, identity, and community.

 

This first round of grant awards from the National Fund represents a meaningful investment in culturally relevant education.”— Tony Dearman (Cherokee), director of the Bureau of Indian Education

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, June 30, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The National Fund for Excellence in American Indian Education, the Congressionally chartered foundation for the Bureau of Indian Education, is proud to announce its inaugural round of grant awards totaling $6.6 million. These investments will support eight BIE-funded schools in advancing Native language immersion initiatives.

 

New research and longstanding community knowledge highlight the advantages of Native language instruction, including increased attendance, better academic performance, and safer, more connected schools. As many Native languages are at risk of disappearing, these programs also play a crucial role in preserving culture and identity.

 

A cooperative agreement between the National Fund and the BIE enables flexible, locally driven investments, bringing new resources and innovation to support priorities like language revitalization, teacher recruitment, infrastructure and technology, and expanded learning opportunities...

“These grants are a powerful step toward ensuring our Native languages and cultures thrive in the hearts and minds of our students,” said Heath Clayton (Chickasaw), lead executive officer of the National Fund. “We’re proud to support these schools as they build stronger, language-rich environments for future generations.”

 

Tony Dearman (Cherokee), director of the Bureau of Indian Education, added: “This first round of grant awards from the National Fund represents a meaningful investment in culturally relevant education. These projects reflect the dedication of our communities to preserve and revitalize Native languages for the benefit of all students.”

 

Kara Bobroff (Dine'/Lakota), chair of the National Fund’s Board of Directors, stated: “These grants are a testament to the brilliance of our students and leaders who are ensuring that Native language immersion programs flourish as an essential foundation of education and we are grateful to the educators who are leading this important and vital work.”

 

The National Fund will continue to support high-impact initiatives focused on improving academic performance and preserving Native languages and cultures within the BIE system. For more information, visit https://www.nfeaie.org/.";

https://www.wjbf.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/826805030/the-national-fund-bie-foundation-awards-6-6-million-in-grants-to-strengthen-native-language-immersion-in-bie-schools/

#metaglossia_mundus 

"From business meetings to banter, Google’s new speech translator has its strengths and weaknesses, says Oliver Barham at Locaria. But does this spell the end of learning foreign languages?

 

Barham and his colleagues put Google’s English-Spanish real-time speech translator to the test / Steve Harvey via Unsplash

 

Testing the boundaries of technology is always fun, especially when that technology promises to dissolve one of humanity’s oldest barriers: language. When Google unveiled its real-time English-Spanish speech translator in May, powered by Gemini AI and available to AI Pro subscribers, we at Locaria couldn’t resist the urge to put it through its paces. After all, what’s more fun for a bunch of linguists and localization experts than trying to trip up a machine with idioms, rapid-fire banter, and some serious business jargon?

 

Let’s start with the big picture. Google’s translator is a step towards a world where language differences don’t slow down global business, international teamwork, or even a casual chat between friends on different continents. In structured settings (think business meetings, technical presentations, or corporate updates), the tool is already surprisingly capable. It preserves the core data, gets the numbers right, and mostly keeps the tone professional. For global teams, this is a game-changer: suddenly, a meeting with colleagues in Bogotá, Madrid, and London can flow with far fewer awkward silences and “Sorry, can you repeat that?” moments.

 

Hannes Ben, CEO at Locaria and polyglot, had another perspective to share after he first read the report: "from a linguist’s perspective, the long-term potential of Google’s real-time translation technology is quite exciting, especially for languages that never really get a simultaneous or consecutive interpretation in the majority of international conferences. Mostly, you only get English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Arabic fully covered. Imagine a future where speakers of endangered or regional languages can participate fully in international meetings or share their culture with the world, simply by speaking their mother tongue instead of focusing on how to say something correctly.”

 

Fun… and frustrating

But let’s not pretend we didn’t have some fun trying to break it. We threw everything at it: casual greetings, technical jargon, rapid back-and-forth. Sometimes, the results were genuinely impressive. A business update about response times and efficiency gains came through almost flawlessly: “Response times fell 12%” is exactly what you want to hear in a boardroom, and the Spanish version was just as clear.

 

Other times, the AI’s earnest literalism gave us some interesting results: “Me levanté con el pie izquierdo” (I woke up on the wrong side of the bed) became “I woke up with my left foot”, a phrase that, while anatomically accurate, doesn’t quite capture the spirit of a bad morning. “Derramé el café encima de la camisa” (I spilled coffee on my shirt) transformed into “I broke my coffee on my shirt.”

 

Our structured evaluation (see the full report on Locaria’s website for the detail) paints a clear picture. In the business context, Google’s tool scores in a respectable five to seven (out of 10) range for both languages. But when things get informal, idiomatic, or fast-paced, the cracks show. Scores for casual and idiomatic speech drop to the three to four range. Naturalness and fluency, especially from English to Spanish, can plummet as low as 2/10, meaning the output is often robotic, stilted, or just plain odd.

 

There’s also the issue of timing and delivery. In real conversations, we interrupt, overlap, and finish each other’s sentences. The AI? Not so much. Once you start speaking, it takes a few seconds before kicking in, so there’s a very noticeable delay. For now, that means it’s best suited for turn-based, structured dialogue, not the lively, overlapping chatter of a family dinner or a brainstorming session.

 

 

Still exciting

Despite these growing pains, it’s hard not to be excited. Every test, every awkward translation, every moment of “Did it really just say that?” is a step towards something better. The potential is enormous: seamless multilingual meetings, instant comprehension across continents, and a democratization of communication that could reshape business and society.

 

For Google, and all of us in the industry of multilingual content, the message is clear: keep going. The progress is real, the opportunity is vast, and the fun is just beginning. If the team at Google wants to reach out for further testing, training, and feedback, hit us up. After all, the only way to teach an AI to ‘get’ a joke is to keep talking to it and challenging it.

 

Hannes left me with one final thought as I discussed the report with him: “if real-time translation becomes universally available and reliable, will learning new languages lose its appeal? Or is it that translation and interpretation become skills left only to the grand masters of language, unicorns of the multilingual realm, able to compete with AI?”. Only the future will tell."

By Oliver Barham

JUNE 30, 2025

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2025/06/30/how-good-google-s-real-time-translator-linguists-put-it-the-test

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Like It or Not, Google Got To Where It Is By Being Better

The DOJ’s ongoing crusade against Google has reached previously unthinkable levels of unseriousness. As the trial against the search giant wrapped up last week, the government’s case against Google centered on agreements they made with a variety of tech companies to make them the default search engine. In charging the company with stifling competition, the DOJ is alleging that these agreements crowd out alternative search options that consumers would otherwise use. What they’re really doing, though, is putting the open internet we’ve come to use daily at risk.

I am no fan of Google myself—especially given their abysmal track record on privacy issues. But the government’s argument here is both weak and dangerous. For users who want a different search engine other than Google, it takes under 5 seconds to switch. This is true across all major web browsers.

History proves this point. Back in 2014, Mozilla rather infamously tried to separate itself from Google and accepted a five-year agreement with Yahoo to make them the default search engine for Firefox. It was a joke—few users wanted to keep using that and many quickly switched to Google because it was their preferred choice. Like it or not, Google got to where it is today by being better at search than the alternatives. If Google’s dominance truly stemmed from these default agreements rather than user preference, we'd see mass defections the moment people realized they had other options.

Or, at least that used to be the case. AI has begun to fundamentally reshape how people find information online, with platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok handling millions of inquiries daily. Don’t get me wrong, Google still processes enormous amounts of traditional searches and has rolled out its own AI system, but there nevertheless is a shift happening as we speak away from Google—without government intervention.

Yet, if this case against the search giant was successful, it could have a damaging impact to the broader internet ecosystem. In an interesting twist, Mozilla’s largest revenue source now comes from their search agreement with Google. As the last cross-platform browser that isn’t based on Google’s Chromium engine, Firefox is the last man standing as a “free agent.”

Popular alternatives like Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi all run on Chromium—essentially Chrome with the Google components stripped out, which is then provided open-source for other companies to develop and build their own offshoots on. When Google makes changes to Chromium—like the controversial Manifest V3 update that limits ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin—all Chromium-based browsers must adapt. Firefox, running on Mozilla’s independent engine, does not have to follow these changes.

Cracking down on Google’s deal with Mozilla could actually put an end to the company altogether, leaving users with a browser ecosystem dominated entirely by Google’s Chromium and Apple’s Safari. Mozilla has been very open about all this. Their CFO, Eric Muhlheim, went on the record as saying that the company could be doomed without the search deal. The irony is breathtaking: The DOJ’s crusade to promote competition could eliminate the most meaningful competition Google actually faces in the browser market.

The DOJ has managed to simultaneously invent a non-existent issue and propose a solution that would be deeply damaging to the free internet. They would be better off dropping the case entirely."

Kyle Moran

June 30, 2025

 

 

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2025/06/30/like_it_or_not_google_got_to_where_it_is_by_being_better_1119558.html

#metaglossia_mundus

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize We are excited to announce a partnership with the Society of Authors for a new prize for translations into English of Japanese-language literature.

 

"The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize

We are excited to announce a partnership with the Society of Authors for a new prize for translations into English of Japanese-language literature. The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize is now closed for submittions, with winners receiving £3,000. More information in the announcement from the Society of Authors below.

 

The Society of Authors, in conjunction with the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, is delighted to announce the launch of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize, celebrating translations into English from Japanese.

 

In 2019, Morgan Giles was awarded the TA First Translation Prize for her translation of Tokyo Ueno Station by Yū Miri, from Japanese; and in 2018, Janet Hong was awarded the same prize for her translation of The Impossible Fairytale by Han Yujoo, from Korean. However, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize marks the first Society of Authors prize dedicated solely to translations from an Asian country.

 

In the true spirit of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, we are thrilled by the opportunity this prize presents, to enhance an appreciation of Japanese culture, and in turn bring a new, English-speaking audience to writers and translators working with Japanese.

 

The prize will be awarded for a translation into English of a full-length Japanese-language work of literary merit and general interest. The winning translation will make for faultless reading or reading where there is no indication that the original language was not English.

 

Opening for submissions on 1 January, the prize will become part of the Society of Authors’ stable of translation prizes. Winners of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize will receive £3,000, with the runner-up receiving £1,000, and will be presented with the award in-person at our annual Translation Prizes Ceremony on 12th February 2025. The next deadline for submissions will be 31st March 2025.

 

For full details of how to submit to the prize, please check the prize’s webpage, where there is a form requesting all necessary information.

 

We are delighted to support this new prize for translation from Japanese, in collaboration with the Society of Authors. The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation has always sought to promote mutual knowledge and understanding between the UK and Japan, and there can be few better ways towards this than the creative art of translation, with its ability to open windows into other minds and cultures and to enable us to share different views of the world. We owe translators a debt of gratitude for their sometimes under-appreciated labours: we would be vastly impoverished without them.

 

The Chairman of The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Earl of St Andrews

 

A prize for translation from Japanese feels very overdue as we’ve seen the rise in readership of great Japanese literature in the UK. A celebration of the translators working on those books is in order. All our translation prizes celebrate the art of translation, an often overlooked art, and we can’t wait to work with new judges to celebrate Japanese literature in translation. Our thanks go to the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for their support of this important prize.

 

The Society of Authors Head of Fundraising, Grants and Prizes, Robyn Law

 

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

Lower Ground Floor,

24 Bedford Row,

London WC1R 4TQ

Tel: +44 (0)20 7436 9042

E-mail: gbsf [at] gbsf.org.uk

 

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

Sasakawa Peace Foundation Building

1-15-16, Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

105-0001 Japan

Tel: +81 (0)3 6257 1931

E-mail: tokyo [at] gbsf.org.uk

 

グレイトブリテン・ササカワ財団

東京事務所

〒105-0001

東京都港区虎ノ門1-15-16 笹川平和財団ビル

 

Like GBSasakawa on Facebook

Follow @GBSasakawa on Twitter

https://www.gbsf.org.uk/other-programmes/translation-prize/

#metaglossia_mundus

Europe wants artificial intelligence to understand all its languages. Can it overcome English dominance to make AI truly multilingual?

"The race to make AI as multilingual as Europe
Can Europe stop AI from becoming English by default?

June 30, 2025 - 6:00 am

Image by: AbsolutVision
The European Union has 24 official languages and dozens more unofficial ones spoken across the continent. If you add in the European countries outside the union, then that brings at least a dozen more into the mix. Add dialects, endangered languages, and languages brought by migrants to Europe, and you end up with hundreds of languages.

One thing many of us in technology could agree on is that the US dominates — and that extends to online languages. There are many reasons for this, mostly due to American institutions, standards bodies, and companies defining how computers, their operating systems, and the software they run work in their nascent days. This is changing, but for the short term at least, it remains the norm. This has also led to the majority of the web being in English. An astounding 50% of websites are in English, despite it being the native tongue of only about 6% of the world’s population, with Spanish, German, and Japanese next, but a long way behind, each only between 5-6% of the web.

As we delve deeper into the new wave of AI-powered applications and services, many are driven by data in large language models (LLMs). As much of the data in these LLMs is scraped (controversially in many cases) from the web, LLMs predominantly understand and respond in English. As we find ourselves at the start of or in the midst of a shift in technological paradigm caused by the rapid growth of AI tools, this is a problem, and we’re bringing that problem into a new age.

Europe already boasts several high-profile AI companies and projects, such as Mistral and Hugging Face. Google DeepMind also originated as a European company. The continent has research projects that develop language models to enhance how AI tools comprehend less commonly spoken languages.

The 💜 of EU tech

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This article explores some of these initiatives, questions their effectiveness, and asks whether their efforts are worthwhile or if many users default to using English versions of tools. As Europe seeks to build its independence in AI and ML, does the continent have the companies and skills necessary to achieve its goals?

Terminology and technology primer
To make sense of what follows, you don’t need to understand how models are created, trained, or function. But it’s helpful to understand a couple of basics about models and their human language support.

Unless model documentation explicitly mentions it is multilingual or cross-lingual, prompting it or requesting a response in an unsupported language may cause it to translate back and forth or respond in a language it does understand. Both strategies can produce unreliable and inconsistent results — especially in low-resource languages.

While high-resource languages, such as English, benefit from abundant training data. Low-resource languages, such as Gaelic or Galician, have far less, which often leads to inferior performance

The harder concept to explain regarding models is “open,” which is unusual, as software in general has had a fairly clear definition of “open source” for a while. I don’t want to delve too deeply into this topic as the exact definition is still in flux and controversial. The summary is that even when a model might call itself “open” and is referenced as “open,” the meaning of “open” isn’t always the same.

Here are two other useful terms to know:

Training teaches a model to make predictions or decisions based on input data.

Parameters are variables learned during model training that define how the model maps inputs to outputs. In other words, how it understands and responds to your questions. The larger the number of parameters, the more complex the model is.

With that brief explanation done, how are European AI companies and projects working to enhance these processes to improve European language support?

Hugging Face
When someone wants to share code, they typically provide a link to their GitHub repository. When someone wants to share a model, they typically provide a Hugging Face link. Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs in New York City, the company is an active participant in creating communities and a strong proponent of open models. In 2024, it started an AI accelerator for European startups and partnered with Meta to develop translation tools based on Meta’s “No Language Left Behind” model. They are also one of the driving forces behind the BLOOM model, a groundbreaking multilingual model that set new standards for international collaboration, openness, and training methodologies.

Hugging Face is a useful tool for getting a rough idea of the language support in models. At the time of writing, Hugging Face lists 1,743,136 models and 298,927 datasets. Look at its leaderboard for monolingual models and datasets, and you see the following ranking for models and datasets that developers tag (add metadata) as supporting European languages at the time of writing:

Language Language code Datasets Models
English English en 27,702 205,459
English eng 1,370 1,070
French fra 1,933 850
Spanish Español es 1,745 10,028
German Deutsch de 1,442 9,714
English eng 1,370 1,070
You can already see some issues here. These aren’t tags set in stone. The community can add values freely. While you can see that they follow them for the most part, there is some duplication.

As you can see, the models are dominated by English. A similar issue applies to the datasets on Hugging Face, which lack non-English data.

What does this mean?

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, EU Policy Lead at Hugging Face, said that the tags indicate that a model has been trained to understand and process this language or that the dataset contains materials in that language. She added that the confusion between language support often comes during training.“When training a large model, it’s common for other languages to accidentally get caught in training because there were some artefacts of it in that dataset,” she said. “The language a model is tagged with is usually what the developers intended the model to understand.”

As one of the main and busiest destinations for model developers and researchers, Hugging Face not only hosts much of their work, but also lets them create outward-facing communities to tell people how to use them.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, described Bloom as “the world’s largest open multilingual language model.” Credit: Shauna Clinton/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Mistral AI
Perhaps the best-known Europe-based AI company is France’s Mistral AI, which unfortunately declined an interview. Its multilingual challenges partly inspired this article. At the FOSDEM developer conference in February 2024, linguistics researcher Julie Hunter asked one of Mistral’s models for a recipe in French — but it responded in English. However, 16 months is an eternity in AI development, and neither the company’s “Le Chat” chat interface nor running its 7B model locally reproduced the same error in recent tests. But interestingly, 7B did produce a spelling error in the opening line: “boueef” — and more may follow.

While Mistral sells several commercial models, tools, and services, its free-to-use models are popular, and I personally tend to use Mistral 7B for running tasks through local models.

Until recently, the company wasn’t explicit about its models having multilingual support, but its announcement of the Magistral model at London Tech Week in June 2025 confirmed support for several European languages.

EuroLLM
EuroLLM was created as a partnership between Portuguese AI platform Unbabel and several European universities to understand and generate text in all official European Union languages. The model also includes non-European languages widely spoken by immigrant communities and major trading partners, such as Hindi, Chinese, and Turkish.

Like some of the other open model projects in this article, its work was partly funded by the EU’s High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking program (EuroHPC JU). Many of them share similar names and aims, making it confusing to separate them all. EuroLLM was one of the first, and as Ricardo Rei, Senior Research Scientist at Unbabel, told me, the team has learned a lot from the projects that have come since.

As Unbabel’s prime business is language translation, and translation is a key task for many multilingual models, the work on EuroLLM made sense to the Portuguese platform. Before EuroLLM, Unbabel had already been refining existing models to make its own and found them all too English-centric.

One of the team’s biggest challenges was finding sufficient training data for low-resource languages. Ultimately, the availability of training material reflects the number of people who speak the language. One of the common data sources used to train European language models is Europarl, which contains transcripts of the European Parliament’s activities translated into all official EU languages. It’s also available as a Hugging Face dataset, thanks to ETH Zürich.

Currently, the project has a 1.7B parameter model and a 9B parameter model, and is working on a 22B parameter model. In all cases, the models can translate, but are also general-purpose, meaning you can chat with them in a similar way to ChatGPT, mixing and matching languages as you do.

OpenLLM Europe
OpenLLM Europe isn’t building anything directly, but it’s fostering a Europe-wide community of LLM projects, specifically medium and low-resource languages. Don’t let the one-page GitHub repository fool you: the Discord server is lively and active.

OpenEuroLLM, Lumi, and Silo
A joint project between several European universities and companies, OpenEuroLLM is one of the newer and larger entrants to the list of projects funded by EuroHPC. This means that it has no public models as of yet, but it involves many of the institutions and individuals behind the Lumi family of models that focus on Scandinavian and Nordic languages. It aims to create a multilingual model, provide more datasets for other models and conform to the EU AI Act.

I spoke with Peter Sarlin of AMD Silo, one of the companies involved in the project and a key figure in Finnish and European AI development, about the plans. He explained that Finland, especially, has several institutes with significant AI research programs, including Lumi, one of the supercomputers part of EuroHPC. Silo, through its SiloGen product, offers open source models to customers, with a strong focus on supporting European languages. Sarlin pointed out that while sovereignty is an important motivation to him and Silo for creating and maintaining models that support European languages, the better reason is expanding the business and helping companies build solutions for small markets such as Estonia.

“Open models are great building blocks, but they aren’t as performant as closed ones, and many businesses in the Nordics and Scandinavia don’t have the resources to build tools based on open models,” he said. “So Silo and our models can step in to fill the gaps.”

Under Sarlin’s leadership, Silo AI built a Nordic LLM family to protect the region’s linguistic diversity. Credit: Silo AI
The Lumi models use a “cross-lingual training” technique in which the model shares its parameters between high-resource and low-resource languages.

All this prior work led to the OpenEuroLLM project, which Sarlin describes as “Europe’s largest open source AI initiative ever, including pretty much all AI developers in Europe apart from Mistral.”

While many efforts are underway and performing well, the training data issue for low-resource languages remains the biggest challenge, especially amid the move towards more nuanced reasoning models. Translations and cross-lingual training are options, but can create responses that sound unnatural to native speakers. As Sarlin said, “We don’t want a model that sounds like an American speaking Finnish.”

OpenLLM France
France is one of the more active countries in AI development, with Mistral and Hugging Face leading the way. From a community perspective, the country also has OpenLLM France. The project (unsurprisingly) focuses on French language models, with several models of different parameters and datasets, which help other projects train and improve their models that support French. The datasets include a mix of political discourse, meeting recordings, theatre shows, and casual conversations. The project also maintains a leaderboard of French models on Hugging Face, one of the few (active) European language model benchmark pages.

Do Europeans care about multilingual AI?
Europe is full of people and projects working on multilingual language models. But do consumers care? Unfortunately, getting language usage rates for proprietary tools such as ChatGPT or Mistral is almost impossible. I created a poll on LinkedIn asking if people use AI tools in their native language, English, or a mixture of both. The results were a 50/50 split between English and a mixture of languages. This could indicate that the number of people using AI tools in a non-English language is higher than you think.

Typically, people use AI tools in English for work and in their own language for personal tasks.

Kaffee, a German and English speaker, said: “I use them mostly in English because I speak English at work and with my partner at home. But then, for personal tasks…, I use German.”

Kaffee mentioned that Hugging Face was working on a soon-to-be-published research project that fully analysed the usage of multilingual models on the platform. She also noted anecdotally that their usage is on the rise.

“Users have a conception that models are now more multilingual. And with the accessibility through large models like Llama, for example, being multilingual, I think that made a big impact on the research world regarding multilingual models and the number of people wanting to now use them in their own language.”

The internet was always supposed to be global and for everyone, but the damning statistic that 50% of sites are in English shows it never really worked out that way. We’re entering a new phase in how we access information and who controls it. Maybe this time, the (AI) revolution will be international.

STORY BY
Chris Chinchilla
Technology writer, podcaster, and video maker by day. Fiction, games, and music by night. chrischinchilla.com"

https://thenextweb.com/news/making-multilingual-ai-in-europe
#metaglossia_mundus

Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society - A forum for language professionals in the Pacific Northwest

 

"The Northwest Translators & Interpreters Society (NOTIS) CONFERENCE GRANTS 2025

 

NOTIS's latest round of conference grants is now OPEN! Be sure to submit your application(s) before the deadline: Thursday, July 31, at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Please read the information on this page carefully before submitting your application (links below).

 

This round of grants will allow 6-10 *members* to attend EITHER the NOTIS 2025 Annual Conference OR a different T&I conference of their choosing with considerable financial support from NOTIS.

 

We will reserve up to 5 grants for selected applicants who wish to attend the NOTIS 2025 Annual Conference (September 13, 2025, in Lynnwood, Washington), covering the full cost of registration and a little extra for associated expenses.

The remaining grants, for up to $750* in registration fees and associated expenses, will be awarded to selected applicants who plan to attend a different, non-NOTIS T&I conference scheduled anytime between August 21, 2025, and September 1, 2026. *After reviewing all applications anonymously, the selection committee will determine the total amount of each grant depending on a variety of factors (e.g., conference cost, location, and availability of funds).

Again, please read the information on this page carefully before submitting your application(s). You will find both application links at the bottom of this page.

 

Not a NOTIS member? Click the green button below to learn more about the many benefits of NOTIS membership — and consider joining us!

 

WHY JOIN NOTIS?

 

 

GRANT ELIGIBILITY

To qualify for any conference grant from NOTIS in 2025, you must:

 

be a member of NOTIS in good standing

not be a NOTIS Board member

complete the application before the deadline, replying thoroughly and thoughtfully to the two short essay questions

not have received a NOTIS grant or scholarship in 2023 or 2024

agree to return the full grant amount to NOTIS if you are unable, for any reason, to attend the conference

 

If you are applying for a grant to attend a non-NOTIS conference, you must:

 

fulfill all of the eligibility requirements listed above

know the name, date(s), and registration cost (exact or, if not yet available, estimated) of the conference you wish to attend, and provide this information on your application

 

Please note that you are welcome to apply for both grants in this cycle (for the NOTIS conference and for another), but you will only be eligible to receive one grant. The decision as to which is up to the discretion of the selection committee.

 

 

HOW IT WORKS

NOTE: You do not need to register for the conference before submitting your application; however, if selected, you will need to provide proof of registration before NOTIS issues payment.

 

Candidates will be evaluated anonymously by a committee of their peers using a predetermined set of objective criteria.

NOTIS will announce the results via email by Friday, August 15. Please mark this date on your calendar and keep an eye out for our email!

If you are selected to receive a grant from NOTIS but do not respond to our email by Tuesday, August 19, at 12:00 p.m. PDT, we will offer the grant to a runner-up.

If you are selected to receive a grant for a non-NOTIS conference, we will ask you to include a simple budget of anticipated expenses in your response (by the date mentioned above).

All grantees must register and pay for the conference mentioned on their application. Once we receive proof of payment, we will issue a reimbursement check.

If something comes up and you cannot attend the agreed-upon conference, you must return the full grant amount to NOTIS.

 

PURPOSE

Through its evolving scholarship and grant program, NOTIS aims to support members by facilitating access to essential training and networking opportunities. Another round of grants, to cover training or certification costs, will be announced in early 2026.

 

This year’s conference grants are intended to help NOTIS members attend career-changing conferences — including ours — where they can connect with colleagues, learn alongside experts, share insights, earn CEUs, meet employers, and more…

 

We understand that conference costs can be prohibitive, especially when travel and time off work are involved, and we want to help!

 

We are especially interested in helping early-career language professionals and those who might otherwise find it difficult to attend a conference due to financial constraints, distance, or other factors. Still, we encourage all interested members to apply!

 

 

 

APPLICATIONS

NOTE: While you are welcome to submit applications for both grants, you may only receive one. The final decision will be up to the discretion of the selection committee.

 

Click HERE to apply for a grant to attend the NOTIS 2025 Annual Conference

Click HERE to apply for a grant to attend a different (non-NOTIS) conference

 

QUESTIONS?

Email social@notisnet.org with any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

 

Yours sincerely,

The Member Care & Development Committee at NOTIS

https://notisnet.org/2025-Conference-Grants

#metaglossia_mundus

"CDT Research, Free Expression

Content Moderation in the Global South: A Comparative Study of Four Low-Resource Languages
June 28, 2025
Mona Elswah, Aliya Bhatia, Dhanaraj Thakur

Graphic for a CDT Research report, entitled “Content Moderation in the Global South: A Comparative Study of Four Low-Resource Languages.” An illustration of four different hands, all being touched by / wrapped around a bright blue connective internet cord.

Executive Summary: Insights from Four Case Studies

Over the past 18 months, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has been studying how content moderation systems operate across multiple regions in the Global South, with a focus on South Asia, North and East Africa, and South America. Our team studied four languages: the different Maghrebi Arabic Dialects (Elswah, 2024a), Kiswahili (Elswah, 2024b), Tamil (Bhatia & Elswah, 2025), and Quechua (Thakur, 2025). These languages and dialects are considered “low resource” due to the scarcity of training data available to develop equitable and accurate AI models for them. To study content moderation in these languages spoken predominantly in the Global South, we interviewed social media users, digital rights advocates, language activists, representatives from tech companies, content moderators, and creators. We distributed an online survey to over 560 frequent social media users across multiple regions in the Global South. We organized roundtables, focus group sessions, and talks to get to know these regions and the content moderation challenges they often face. We did this through essential collaborations with regional civil society organizations in the Global South to help us understand the local dynamics of their digital environments.

When we initially delved into this topic, we recognized that the culture of secrecy that surrounds content moderation would pose challenges in our investigation. Content moderation remains an area that technology companies keep largely inaccessible to public scrutiny, except for the information they choose to disclose. It is a field where the majority, if not all, participants are discouraged from engaging in external studies like this or revealing the specifics of their operations. Despite this, we gathered invaluable data and accessed communities that had previously not been reached. Our findings significantly contribute to the scientific and policy communities’ understanding of content moderation and its challenges in the Global South. The data we present in this report also contributes to our understanding of the information environment in the Global South, which is understudied in current scholarship.

Here, we compare and synthesize the insights we gained from studying the four regions and present our recommendations for improving content moderation in low-resource languages of the Global South.

While the insights from this project may be applicable to other non-Western contexts and low-resource or indigenous languages, we have learned that each language carries its own rich history and linguistic uniqueness, which must be acknowledged when discussing content moderation in general. By comparing these four case studies, we can identify some of the overall content moderation challenges that face languages in the Global South. Additionally, this comparison can help us identify the particular challenges inherent in moderating diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, enhancing our understanding of what could possibly be “effective” content moderation for these regions and beyond.

While we acknowledge the uniqueness of each language, when comparing the four languages we examined, we find that:

The content moderation policies currently employed by large tech companies have limitations. Currently, global tech companies use two main approaches to content moderation: Global and Local. The global approach involves applying a uniform set of policies to all users worldwide. While this approach helps prevent external interventions (e.g., by governments) and is in some ways easier, it ignores unique linguistic and cultural nuances. The local approach, exemplified by TikTok, involves tailoring policies, particularly those related to cultural matters, to specific regions. This approach, despite its promise of inclusivity, sometimes poses obstacles and limitations on users trying to challenge local norms that violate their rights. An exception to the two approaches was found in the Kiswahili case: JamiiForums, a Tanzanian platform, has developed its own unique methods for moderating local languages, introducing what is known as “multi-country approach.” Their unique approach, which entails assigning moderators to content from their native language, poses more promise and large user satisfaction, but leaves a question of whether it can be applicable on a large scale.
Users in the Global South are increasingly concerned about the spread of misinformation and hate speech on social media in their regions. All four case studies highlighted user concerns regarding the spread of hate speech and harassment and inconsistent moderation of the same. Additionally, users are increasingly worried about the wrongful removal of their content, particularly in the Tamil and Quechua cases. Tamil and Quechua users linked the content restrictions to the companies’ desire to “silence their voices” more often than Kiswahili and Maghrebi Arabic-speaking users.
We identified four major outsourcing service providers that dominate the content moderation market for the low-resource languages we examined: Teleperformance, Majorel, Sama, and Concentrix.
Across the four cases, we found that content moderators for non-English languages are often exploited, overworked, and underpaid. They endure emotional turmoil from reviewing disturbing content for long hours, with minimal psychological support and few wellbeing breaks. Additionally, we found that the hiring process for moderators lacks diversity and cultural competencies.
Moderators from a single country are often tasked with moderating content from across their region, despite dialectical and contextual variations. In general, moderators are required to review content in dialects other than their own, which leads to many moderation errors. In some cases, moderators are assigned English-language content from around the world, with no regard for their familiarity with specific regional contexts, as long as they possess a basic understanding of English.
Resistance is a common phenomenon among users in the Global South. Many users across the case studies employed various tactics to circumvent and even resist against what they saw as undue moderation. Despite the constant marginalization of their content and their languages, users developed various tactics to evade the algorithms, commonly known as “algospeak.” We found tactics that involved changing letters in the language, using emojis, uploading random content alongside material they believed would be restricted, and avoiding certain words. In examples from our Quechua case study, some simply posted in Quechua (instead of Spanish) because they found that it was often unmoderated.
Lastly, many NLP researchers and language technology experts in the Global South have developed tools and strategies to improve moderation in many low-resource languages. They have engaged with their local communities to collect datasets that represent specific dialects of the language. They enlisted students and friends to help annotate data and have published their work, creating networks to represent their language in global scholarship. However, these scholars and experts often feel underutilized or unheard by tech companies. If consulted and their knowledge utilized, these groups could significantly improve the current state of content moderation for low-resource languages"
https://cdt.org/insights/content-moderation-in-the-global-south-a-comparative-study-of-four-low-resource-languages/
#metaglossia_mundus

Manitoba’s Minister for Accessibility is apologizing to the deaf and hard of hearing community for comments about interpreter

"By Sav Jonsa
Jun 27, 2025

Manitoba’s Minister for Accessibility is apologizing to the deaf and hard of hearing community after comments she made about an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter were made public.

On Thursday, an ASL-English Interpreter provided her services at an event put on by Minister Nahanni Fontaine to celebrate Indigenous women graduating from high school, college and university.

Interpreter Sheryl LaVallee shared the stage alongside various speakers so members of the audience who communicate using ASL, a visual language comprised of hand movements and facial expressions, could be included in the conversation.

Soon after Fontaine made her speech to the crowd, she went to a media scrum off-stage to address reporters.

But not before sharing her grievances to her press secretary, Ryan Stelter.

In front of the media, he congratulated Fontaine on her speech.

“I was thrown off,” Fontaine replied. “It wasn’t great but, because the woman – she shouldn’t have been on the stage.”

Fontaine continued, saying she couldn’t see the left side of the stage due to the interpreter and that “all I could see was her…”

“Frantic hand movements?” he offered.

“Yes! I’m like, f*** why did I have her on the stage,” added Fontaine, “Jesus, I’m like ‘you need to leave’.”

APTN News heard the transgression on its video recording of the news conference Thursday and promptly contacted the Manitoba government for a response.

The media communications team initially denied the request to provide a statement or interview unless APTN handed over the footage to ‘verify’ the transcript. APTN did provide a transcript but did not comply with the request for the raw footage.

Soon after the footage aired Friday afternoon, Fontaine provided an emailed statement that said, in part:

“I sincerely apologize to the deaf and hard of hearing community, and to all Manitobans for my comments,” wrote Fontaine.

“Yesterday, during a private debrief with my staff, I was reflecting on my public speaking performance and remarked I had been distracted by the interpreter’s hand movements. I was expressing frustration on my own poor planning to ensure clear sight lines at the event.”

“My comments did not acknowledge signing is not simply “hand movements,” but a full and rich language used by thousands of Manitoban(s) every day.”

Fontaine says she spoke with LaVallee to apologize and receive feedback on how to improve the experience of deaf and hard of hearing Manitobans at events.

Fontaine continued, “As the Minister responsible for Accessibility I understand that ASL interpretation is integral to our public events, and we must continue to build understanding and respect for sign language and Manitobans who rely on it.”

In May, the NDP government provided funding to the modernized ASL-English Interpretation Advanced Diploma Program at Red River College Polytechnic in the amount of $225,000 for renovation and equipment costs, in addition to $190,000 in annual funding to support the program’s operations.

The use of ASL-English interpreters is part of the Manitoba government’s Public Service Commission Policy on Sign Language, where employees are responsible to “incorporate sign language interpreting services and other accessibility features as part of public engagements and communication.”"
https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/manitoba-accessibility-minister-apologizes-for-comments-about-sign-language-interpreter/
#metaglossia_mundus