Metaglossia: The Translation World

"Microsoft lance une IA capable de transcrire la parole en temps réel dans 60 langues

Par
Chloé Claessens
Spécialiste cybersécurité
Publié le 02 octobre 2026 à 10h12

Microsoft étoffe sa gamme de modèles maison avec MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, une IA pensée pour retranscrire la parole au fil de la conversation. Elle prend en charge 60 langues et commence à produire du texte un peu plus de 100 ms après réception de l’audio.

Après MAI-Transcribe-2, destiné aux fichiers audio déjà enregistrés, Microsoft passe au direct. Son nouveau modèle MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming analyse la parole en continu, détecte automatiquement la langue utilisée et révise sa transcription à mesure que la phrase progresse. Un fonctionnement taillé pour les usages qui supportent mal les temps morts, comme la dictée, le sous-titrage en direct ou les assistants vocaux.

Une transcription qui commence avant la fin de la phrase
Dans le détail, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming n’attend pas que la personne ait terminé de parler pour afficher du texte. Le modèle produit de premières hypothèses un peu plus de 100 ms après réception de l’audio, puis les affine au fil de la phrase. Si la suite lève une ambiguïté ou modifie le sens d’un mot déjà transcrit, il peut donc revenir sur les premiers résultats avant de les figer dans une version définitive.

Pour ce faire, le modèle traite le flux audio au fur et à mesure qu’il arrive, plutôt que d’attendre de disposer de l’enregistrement complet. Chaque nouvelle portion de parole vient enrichir le contexte déjà analysé et peut conduire l’IA à conserver, corriger ou compléter les mots affichés quelques instants plus tôt. La transcription peut ainsi suivre presque immédiatement la voix, tout en conservant assez de souplesse pour évoluer à mesure que le sens se précise.

Cette transcription en continu fonctionne dans 60 langues et détecte automatiquement celle utilisée au fil de la conversation. Sur le terrain de la précision, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming arrive actuellement en tête du benchmark AA-WER Streaming d’Artificial Analysis, aussi bien pour les transcriptions provisoires que définitives. À titre indicatif, ce classement repose sur le WER, ou taux d’erreur de mots, qui mesure la proportion de mots mal reconnus par rapport à une transcription de référence : plus ce taux est faible, plus le résultat est précis. Le benchmark repose toutefois sur environ huit heures d’audio issues de trois jeux de données et ne permet pas de comparer les performances du modèle dans chacune des 60 langues prises en charge.

Au 2 octobre 2026, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming affiche le taux d’erreur sur les mots le plus faible du benchmark Artificial Analysis pour la transcription finale, à 2,5 %. Plus le WER est bas, plus la transcription est précise. © Artificial Analysis
Microsoft veut réduire les blancs des assistants vocaux
En marge de ce nouveau modèle de transcription, Microsoft lance aussi MAI-Voice-2.1 et MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, deux modèles capables de transformer du texte en voix. La variante Flash privilégie la rapidité et peut générer 45 secondes d’audio, pour une latence de bout en bout annoncée autour de 150 ms.

Dans l’idée, Microsoft veut faire travailler MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming et ses modèles Voice au sein d’une même chaîne pour rendre les échanges avec les assistants vocaux plus naturels. Pendant que le premier transcrit la parole, l’agent peut déjà commencer à traiter la demande, raisonner ou appeler des outils. Une fois la réponse prête, MAI-Voice se charge de la restituer à l’oral. Microsoft espère ainsi réduire le silence qui sépare encore souvent la fin d’une question de la réponse de l’assistant.

Le même principe pourrait servir aux assistants multilingues, au service client ou à la traduction vocale, l’agent prenant alors en charge le passage d’une langue à l’autre entre la transcription et la synthèse.

Les trois modèles sont disponibles dès maintenant via Microsoft Foundry, MAI Playground, Vercel et Azure Voice Live. MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming est proposé au tarif de lancement de 0,54 dollar par heure d’audio jusqu’à la fin de 2026. Côté synthèse vocale, MAI-Voice-2.1 coûte 22 dollars par million de caractères, contre 15 dollars pour la variante Flash. Les deux modèles Voice sont également accessibles via OpenRouter, tandis qu’une intégration à LiveKit est annoncée prochainement.

Chloé Claessens
Par Chloé Claessens

Microsoft lance une IA capable de transcrire la parole en temps réel dans 60 langues
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-632266-microsoft-lance-une-ia-capable-de-transcrire-la-parole-en-temps-reel-dans-60-langues.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Ce 30 septembre, la Journée mondiale de la traduction met à l'honneur les professionnels des langues. L'occasion d'en savoir sur une profession en pleine mutation avec Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière, directeur de l'agence de traduction Glim.

En 2026, difficile de parler de traduction sans évoquer l'intelligence artificielle. Pourtant, malgré ChatGPT et les progrès de la traduction automatique, les étudiants poussent toujours la porte des formations. "Il y a beaucoup de Masters en traduction sur l'ensemble du territoire. Les jeunes veulent toujours se lancer dans le métier car il y a encore besoin de traducteurs et d'interprètes", constate Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière. Cofondateur de Glim avec Nicolas Cantatore, l'Azuréen cite ainsi l'Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) parmi les écoles reconnues. Car, la révolution technologique n'a rien de totalement nouveau pour ce métier depuis longtemps très informatisé. "Quand j'ai commencé il y a vingt ans, on disait déjà : dans deux ou trois ans, il n'y aura plus de traducteurs", se souvient l'entrepreneur. Si l'IA ne condamne pas le traducteur, elle déplace néanmoins les lignes. Elle permet désormais de proposer différents niveaux de service, avec des traductions automatisées beaucoup moins chères. "Elle pousse tout le monde à mettre beaucoup plus de valeur ajoutée dans le travail". Mais, selon Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière, l'intelligence artificielle reste moins performante hors de l'anglais, faute d'un volume comparable de données disponibles dans les autres langues. "Une étude a montré qu'aucune traduction réalisée par une IA ne peut passer au travers d'une relecture et d'une correction humaine", ajoute le directeur. L'humain reste ainsi plébiscité sur les prestations les plus exigeantes. Les conséquences ? Le marché se polarise. D'un côté, les offres automatisées à bas coût se développent, tandis que de l'autre, les prestations à forte valeur ajoutée conservent leur part de marché. Entre les deux, la place se réduit.

Nicolas Cantatore et Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière.

Depuis plusieurs années, l'entrepreneur a ainsi vu disparaître des concurrents dont les clients, sensibles au prix, se sont tournés vers la traduction automatique. Mais la menace numéro un n'est pas forcément l'IA décrite comme "un outil supplémentaire". "Les métiers de la traduction sont des sismographes de l'activité économique. La conjoncture économique reste notre principale menace". Moins d'exportations, d'investissements ou de projets internationaux entraînent mécaniquement moins de contrats, de documents et d'échanges à traduire. "Le plus grand péril, c'est vraiment ça", insiste Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière à propos de la dégradation de la conjoncture économique et géopolitique. À l'échelle internationale, le chef d'entreprise constate d'ailleurs une contraction du marché en valeur en 2025 et 2026, qu'il attribue à la fois aux gains de productivité permis par l'IA et à la situation économique. "Après, certaines grandes entreprises sont en croissance, tout comme celles qui ont développé des services annexes comme le doublage ou le sous-titrage".

Un service premium
À Sophia, Glim donne une traduction assez concrète de ces mouvements de fond. L'agence de traduction et de services linguistiques premium et humains, qui a fêté ses dix ans en 2025, avait réalisé environ 965.000€ de chiffre d'affaires cette année-là, sa deuxième meilleure année. En 2026, la courbe s'est retournée avec un recul d'environ 10%. "La traduction, c'est un métier qui fonctionne lorsqu'il y a des échanges internationaux, lorsqu'il y a du commerce international, lorsqu'il y a des investissements, des nouveaux projets", rappelle Philippe Bouquet de Jolinière. Le phénomène touche particulièrement son pôle juridique et financier, qui représente près de la moitié de l'activité. Moins d'investissements signifie moins de créations de filiales, de contrats ou de procédures à traduire. L'industrie recule également, tandis que le marketing et le tourisme se maintiennent. À rebours, le médical et le pharmaceutique, environ un quart de l'activité, progressent fortement. "C'est un premier semestre qui n'est pas catastrophique, ni fantastique. Il est mitigé".

C'est sur ces marchés, qui répondent à des demandes très pointues, avec des combinaisons linguistiques rares, que se positionne. L'agence travaille avec un réseau d'environ 785 traducteurs indépendants, recrutés et testés selon leurs spécialités, et revendique une offre humaine haut de gamme encadrée par la norme ISO 17100 (norme internationale de référence qui définit les exigences pour les processus, les ressources et la qualité des services de traduction professionnelle). L'anglais reste de très loin la première langue traitée, avec un tiers de l'activité. Dans ce paysage mouvant, Glim, qui compte bien "rattraper" sa baisse de CA sur le deuxième semestre, conserve son projet d'implantation à Paris. Il se concrétisera soit par l'ouverture d'un bureau, soit par le rachat d'une entreprise. L'entreprise envisage aussi de participer à nouveau à un grand salon international en 2027.

A Nice, la traduction défend le droit de se faire comprendre
Traducteurs, professionnels des langues et experts se donnent rendez-vous à Nice, ce mercredi 30 septembre, à l'occasion de la Journée mondiale de la traduction. Drivée par la Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT), cette édition 2026 s'intéressera à la diversité des langues et aux droits linguistiques, autour de la problématique suivante : "diversité des langues et des droits linguistiques : le pouvoir de se faire comprendre". Un panel croisera les expériences de plusieurs métiers avant un temps d'échange avec le public.
Rendez-vous de 17h30 à 20h30 au MiTWiT Gare Thiers, à Nice. Le panel débutera à 18h, suivi d'une session de questions-réponses à 19h et d'un cocktail à 19h30."

https://tribuca.net/traduction-pourquoi-lia-nest-pas-la-premiere-menace-pour-le-marche/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The U.K. National Centre for Writing Announces Translators Selected for International Mentorship Program
In Feature Articles by Andrew AlbaneseSeptember 30, 2026Leave a Comment

Founded in 2010 by translator, writer, and editor Daniel Hahn, the Emerging Translator Mentorships program pairs early-career translators with experienced mentors for six months of focused development.

By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief

The U.K. National Centre for Writing (NCW) today announced the nine early-career literary translators selected for its Emerging Translator Mentorships Program for 2026/27. The new class—whose work spans a diverse range of languages, including Dutch, Mandarin and Malayalam—was revealed today with the translators set to introducing themselves at a special event marking International Translation Day.
Now in its 17th year, the program champions “outstanding new voices in literary translation into English” with a focus on literatures underrepresented in translation. An emerging translator is someone who has published no more than one full-length work of literary translation.

The 2026/27 Emerging Translators Are:

Sheila Nyholm DSouza (credit: Daniel Linaric).

Sheila Nyholm D’Souza (Danish, mentored by Paul Russell Garrett): “D’Souza is a Danish-to-English literary translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She is particularly interested in contemporary Danish literature, social realism, and historical fiction, and is drawn to work that centers women and marginalized voices and explores questions of identity and belonging. In 2025, she was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize, which recognizes an emerging translator of Nordic literature.”

Hanna Wheeler (Dutch, mentored by Jonathan Reeder): “Wheeler is a Belgian Canadian who lives and works in Toronto as a copywriter and Dutch-to-English translator.  She has attended an array of specialized workshops, translated a few romance novels, and most recently worked on the nonfiction title The Six: The Untold Story of the Antwerp Six by novelist Oscar van den Boogaard.”

Lil Boyce (Italian, mentored by Elena Pala): “Boyce is an emerging literary translator, working from Italian into English. She shares her time between Sassari, Sardinia, and Coventry in the U.K. In 2026, Lil completed a Masters in Translation at the Open University and participated in the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Summer School. Her first publication is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review.”

Tiffany Chang (credit: Hannah Lin).

Tiffany Chang (Korean, mentored by Clare Richards): “Chang is a Korean-English literary translator from Los Angeles and is currently based in Wisconsin. She is interested in translating lesbian, feminist, and diaspora literature and expanding the global literary landscape for contemporary Korean women writers. Tiffany is also a translation submissions reader for ANMLY, an international journal of experimental literature and the arts.”

Cheryl Schmitz (Literature from Taiwan, mentored by Jeremy Tiang): “Cheryl Schmitz is a literary translator working from Chinese and Portuguese into English. An anthropologist by training, she is especially interested in fiction by women and queer authors. Schmitz is originally from the United States and has lived in Brazil, China, Angola, and Germany. She currently resides in Taipei.”

Aparna Thomas (Languages of India, mentored by Mohini Gupta): “Aparna Thomas is a literary translator working from Malayalam into English, with a particular interest in sound, rhythm, and performance. Her translations of the poet Anvar Ali have appeared in Muse India, Weavers Literary Review, and the international anthology 127 Poetry Voices. She is currently working on a full-length collection of Anvar Ali’s poetry in translation. She is based in Ernakulam, Kerala.”

Jordan Barger (credit: Nynorsk Kultursentrum.)

Jordan Barger (Norwegian, mentored by Rosie Hedger): “Jordan Barger is a translator of Norwegian literature based in Philadelphia with a keen interest in Nynorsk poetry. His translations have been featured in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, FENCE, Circumference and beyond. His translation of Leander Djønne’s Eat All is forthcoming with Daunt Books in 2028.”

Azja Kulpińska (Polish, mentored by Sean Gasper Bye): “Azja Kulpińska born, raised and educated in Poznań (Poland), currently based on unceded Wurundjeri land of the Kulin Nations (aka Melbourne, Australia). A language-lover, an emerging literary translator between Polish and English, a zine-maker, a queer community worker, a parent, a member of a grassroots collective Incendium Radical Library. Azja attended the BCLT Summer School in Polish prose taught by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2026.”

Gemma Craig-Sharples (Swiss German, mentored by Jamie Lee Searle): Gemma Craig-Sharples is a translator from London currently living in Berlin. She has previously worked for New Books in German and the German Translation Fund and is currently an assistant poetry editor at Asymptote. A participant in the German strand of the 2026 BCLT Summer School, her co-translations of poetry and prose have appeared as part of the project Que(e)ry Points. At the moment, she’s working on a proposal for a creative-critical PhD exploring translation’s negative spaces.

‘Over 150 Emerging Translators’

Daniel Hahn (credit: Camila França Photography).

“This year’s cohort is our most wide-reaching yet, as our nine wonderful mentees are spread across the globe from Vancouver to Melbourne, helping us to mark a milestone: since its inception, the Emerging Translator Mentorships Program has now supported over 150 emerging translators,” said Rebecca DeWald, Emerging Translator Mentorships Program Manager said, in a release. “With our very first Australian mentee and the introduction of our new Literature from Taiwan strand, we are continuing to break new ground—and looking at the mentees’ diverse proposals, I know their work will do the same and add a host of new and previously unheard voices to the canon of books available to English-language readers.”

Founded in 2010 by translator, writer, and editor Daniel Hahn, the Emerging Translator Mentorships program pairs early-career translators with experienced mentors for six months of focused development. Mentees work on a practical translation project, receive a £800 stipend, and one year’s membership to The Society of Authors/Translators Association, and participate in training weekends, publishing industry events (including International Translation Day and London Book Fair), and a final digital showcase.

According to a release, the program has supported 150 translators working from 37 different languages. Alumni of the program have gone on to win several major awards, including Nichola Smalley, who was twice longlisted for the International Booker Prize and whose translation of Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize; Reuben Woolley, whose translation of Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov was also longlisted for the International Booker Prize; and Sophie Hughes, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in both 2019 and 2020 for her translations of The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán and Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.

About the Author
Andrew Albanese
Andrew Richard Albanese is the editor-in-chief of 'Publishing Perspectives' and founder and editor of 'Words & Money,' a media site that centers the role of libraries in the 21st Century publishing business. A veteran library and publishing industry reporter, he has previously worked for 'Publishers Weekly' and 'Library Journal,' where he was widely known for his in-depth coverage of the Google Books and Apple E-book price-fixing cases, developments in the digital library market, book bans and freedom to read issues, the open access movement, and copyright issues. He is a former associate editor at Oxford University Press, and the author of 'The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight.'"
https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/09/the-u-k-national-centre-for-writing-announces-translators-selected-for-international-mentorship-program/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

For the integration of guideline-based PE training into translator education

"Training Enhances Post-Editing Speed in Iranian BA Translation Students: A Case of Google-Translated Financial Texts

Abstract

The increasing adoption of machine translation post-editing (PE) in the language industry underscores the need for effective training to improve PE speed. However, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of PE training remains limited, particularly for the English–Persian language pair. This study investigated the effect of a guideline-based training program on PE speed among undergraduate English Translation students in Iran. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (n = 10), which received a structured 16-session PE training program based on the TAUS (2017) PE guidelines, or a control group (n = 10), which received no formal PE instruction. Before the intervention, participants completed a 15-item Likert-scale questionnaire assessing their perceptions of PE speed and efficiency. Following the training period, partici-pants post-edited the same 400-word English–Persian financial text, pre-translated using Google Translate, on the MateCat platform. PE speed was measured using actual task completion time and words per minute (WPM), calculated from the MateCat editing log. The experimental group completed the task significantly faster than the control group (M = 44.20 vs. 68.90 min), Welch's t(15.61) = −7.28, p < .001, d = 3.25, and achieved a significantly higher WPM rate (9.20 vs. 5.89), Welch's t(14.97) = 7.13, p < .001, d = 3.19. Participants in the experimental group also reported significantly more positiveperceptions of PE speed and efficiency, controlling for pre-test scores (ANCOVA, p = .002). These findings support the integration of guideline-based PE training into translator education.

Keywords
Financial Text; Google Translate; Machine Translation; Post-Editing

https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/156454/212197
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

The politics of translation: A two-way conspiracy
Intercepting high-stakes messages before their recipients can understand them and passing them along on frequencies only certain listeners can pick up. All translators are also interpreters, charged with plotting a route from the original words...

"Claremont Review of Books

Fall 2026 Essays
Fightin’ Words
The politics of translation.

by Spencer A. Klavan

Shortly after leaving the White House, President Jimmy Carter traveled to give a commencement address at a college near Osaka, Japan. He told a short joke to open the speech and waited anxiously while the interpreter translated it into Japanese. To Carter’s surprise, the audience roared with laughter. Later, when he asked the translator how he had reproduced the punch line so effectively, the man kept dodging the question. “He was very evasive,” Carter recalled on David Letterman’s Late Show. But at last the translator broke down and explained: “I told the audience, President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh.”

Translators are in an odd position. People sometimes think of them as humble messengers who ferry meaning between the main parties in an exchange—President Carter and his Japanese audience, a Chinese investor and a Silicon Valley CEO, the author of an international novel and his readers. But like trusted courtiers or highly-placed assistants, translators wield serious power in their apparently subordinate role. They are basically engaged at all times in a two-way conspiracy, intercepting high-stakes messages before their recipients can understand them and passing them along on frequencies only certain listeners can pick up. All translators are also interpreters, charged with plotting a route from the original words..."
 
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/fightin-words/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Dissent in translation
The View From Here and Hyphen represent an irrepressible impulse in India’s literary cultures to give voice to the human imagination, and reject the silence imposed by authoritarian states.

There are at least two excellent reasons to look at The View From Here: Stories and Poems of Many Indias edited by Githa Hariharan and K. Satchidanandan, and the first issue of the journal Hyphen: Connecting Literatures, founded and published by Vivek Shanbhag and edited by Deepa Ganesh, alongside one another.

The first is that both volumes bring together a feast of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama and interviews, all of which are either written in Indian languages (translated into English), or about literature in Indian languages, and celebrate the linguistic, literary, and cultural diversity of India. The View From Here selects and compiles short stories and poems published in what used to be the online quarterly journal of the Indian Writers’ Forum, called Guftugu, of which 22 issues appeared between October 2015 and September 2022. Hyphen is a new venture, launched in the monsoon of 2026, and it admits not just words, but also images (Guftugu did too, but The View From Here carries only text). Both books include familiar figures as well as hitherto undiscovered writers; both collect their riches from all parts of India.

The second feature that these two books share is their concern with translation—making works from a multiplicity of Indian languages accessible via English. English is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides a common language for speakers of distinct Indian languages to be able to understand one another. On the other, the temptation to default to English means that we are not making an effort to learn other Indian languages except the one or two we might already know because of our upbringing.

Summary
This article reviews two literary ventures, "The View From Here" and "Hyphen," highlighting their shared commitment to showcasing diverse Indian literatures through translation into English. "The View From Here" compiles works from the former online journal "Guftugu," known for its dissent against authoritarianism. "Hyphen," a newer initiative, aims to connect languages and literatures, emphasizing translation and fostering dialogue across India's linguistic and cultural landscape. Both projects celebrate multilingualism, freedom of expression, and aim to counter homogenizing narratives, drawing inspiration from figures like A.K. Ramanujan and Rabindranath Tagore.

https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/indian-literature-in-translation-view-from-here-hyphen/article71523669.ece
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Language rights, Arabic content as technology and artificial intelligence rapidly reshape the translation profession

"Friday, October 02, 2026
Translation in the age of AI
On International Translation Day, experts discuss language rights, Arabic content as technology and artificial intelligence rapidly reshape the translation profession
QNA Doha
Published on September 30, 2026 | 12:00 AM

The right to be understood is at the heart of this year’s International Translation Day, as the global observance spotlights linguistic diversity and language rights and the vital role of translation, interpreting and terminology in ensuring access to essential services, information and knowledge.

Observed annually on September 30, International Translation Day 2026 is being marked by the International Federation of Translators (FIT) under the theme Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights, centered on ‘The Power of Being Understood’. As technology and artificial intelligence rapidly reshape the translation profession, experts told Qatar News Agency (QNA) that the future of the sector will depend not only on embracing new technologies but also on protecting language rights, strengthening knowledge production and ensuring that translators retain the skills and judgment needed to navigate an increasingly digital landscape. They stressed that AI can enhance the translator’s work but cannot replace the human judgment, cultural understanding and linguistic expertise that give translation its depth and precision.

Dr Khalifa Abdullah al-Hazzaa, a translator and academic at Qatar University, said language rights begin with the freedom to preserve and use one’s mother tongue, while linguistic diversity requires creating environments in which languages remain active in education, media and public life.

Translation and interpreting, he explained, do more than transfer meaning between languages; they also drive linguistic development by introducing equivalents for emerging foreign terms and helping new expressions enter common usage and evolve. Al-Hazzaa warned that war-driven displacement poses a serious threat to less widely spoken languages, as communities forced into new linguistic environments can gradually lose their mother tongues.

Digital content

The decline of written-language use amid the rise of fast-moving digital content presents another challenge to the survival and development of some languages. He also highlighted the role of educational and cultural institutions and translation initiatives such as the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding in sustaining linguistic diversity by supporting translators, facilitating intellectual and literary exchange and encouraging speakers of less widely represented languages to continue producing work in their own languages.

Turning to Arabic’s place in the modern knowledge and technology landscape, Prof Shokry Megahed, a translator and professor of literature and translation at Ain Shams University, said the language’s position must be assessed against stark disparities in investment, economic weight and institutional infrastructure among the world’s languages.

Major languages benefit from substantial investment and sophisticated ecosystems of companies and institutions developing language technologies and digital solutions, while Arabic has yet to receive comparable resources, he told QNA. Megahed stressed that a language’s strength is measured not only by the number of its speakers, but also by its economic, institutional and cultural reach and its capacity to produce knowledge and develop the tools to disseminate it. With Arabic spanning multiple countries and institutions, greater coordination is needed to develop the language and strengthen its presence in the global knowledge economy, he said.

He linked Arabic’s standing in scientific research directly to the language in which knowledge is taught and produced, noting that most Arab researchers study and publish their work in English or other foreign languages. For the translation profession, Megahed called for stronger economic and institutional foundations. While freelancing remains the dominant model for many translators, he said sustainable translation institutions need to provide training, professional development, technological tools and employment opportunities alongside viable economic models.

He advocated a two-track approach: identifying and nurturing new translation talent while helping self-trained translators strengthen their skills and harness new technologies. Such efforts, he said, are essential to expanding Arabic’s presence in the digital sphere. Yet technology cannot substitute for the translator’s professional and intellectual foundation, Megahed stressed.

Mastery of language and culture, continuous reading and critical judgment remain indispensable. The translator, he said, is a “special kind of reader,” making translation one of the highest forms of critical reading. As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the profession, Mowaffaq Faiq Tawfiq, a translation and interpreting expert at Al Jazeera Media Network, said the technology has brought a major transformation to both written translation and interpreting, making engagement with it inevitable. But he stressed that AI should remain a tool for enhancing human work rather than an end in itself.

Concerns over technology displacing human roles are not new, Tawfiq noted, having accompanied the emergence of writing, the printing press, computers and the internet without eliminating the need for human expertise. The greater challenge, he said, is developing the awareness and skills required to use technology responsibly. Tawfiq also pointed to a broader knowledge challenge in the Arab world, citing declining systematic reading and growing reliance on ready-made solutions.

Translation, he stressed, is far more than proficiency in two languages; it requires deep knowledge of both languages and cultures, together with an understanding of the contexts in which texts and meanings are produced. The limited volume of Arabic knowledge content available online compared with global output is another constraint, he said, making greater Arabic knowledge production essential to strengthening the language’s presence in AI technologies.

Human knowledge
AI models do not generate knowledge independently, but draw on human knowledge used in their training, with their principal strengths lying in their ability to rapidly search, retrieve, process and synthesize information. Tawfiq acknowledged AI’s growing usefulness in gathering, reviewing and summarizing information, particularly in scientific research and legal work. But he cautioned against leaving judgments or final decisions to machines, which lack essential human capabilities such as interpreting intent, body language and facial expressions.

AI is currently more effective in written translation than in interpreting, he said, where performance can be complicated by dialects, accents, pronunciation, pauses and other vocal and expressive cues. Its effectiveness also varies by text: technical and scientific material tends to be more straightforward, while philosophical, religious, emotional and literary texts require a far more nuanced understanding.

For Tawfiq, abandoning AI is neither realistic nor desirable. The priority, he said, is to learn how to use the technology effectively while keeping humans responsible for final judgments and rigorously reviewing its output for accuracy and quality. The International Translation Day is observed on September 30 to recognize the contribution of translators, interpreters and other language professionals to communication and understanding among peoples. The International Federation of Translators has marked the occasion since 1991, while the United Nations General Assembly formally proclaimed September 30 International Translation Day in 2017 through Resolution 71/288, recognizing the role of professional translation in promoting international understanding, communication and cooperation. The draft resolution was backed by 11 countries, including Qatar."
https://www.gulf-times.com/article/734468/opinion/translation-in-the-age-of-ai
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Artificial intelligence doesn't eliminate the translator, it transforms their expertise!

On the occasion of September 30 International Translation Day, Asst. Prof. Sabri Gürses, Head of the Translation and Interpreting Department, evaluating the effects of artificial intelligence and translation technologies on the translation and interpreting profession, stated that technology does not eliminate the need for translators, but rather moves the profession to new areas of expertise.

Gürses, expressing that the fundamental difference between humans and machines is experience, said, “This is the human translator's superiority over machines; machines can provide quick solutions by synthesizing the data they have recorded, but humans provide a real experience.”

Asst. Prof. Sabri Gürses, Head of the English Translation and Interpreting Department at Üsküdar University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, evaluated the effects of artificial intelligence-based translation tools on the translation and interpreting profession on the occasion of September 30 International Translation Day.

“The need for humans will never disappear”
Asst. Prof. Sabri Gürses stated that despite Google Translate and AI-based tools being able to translate in seconds, the need for human translators will continue, adding that professions, rather than disappearing with technology, transform and gain new areas of expertise.

Dr. Gürses said, “Throughout human history, professions don't actually disappear; new professions and specializations are always added to them. The need for human existence will never disappear just because machines have arrived, because we live in a human world. Technology exists to facilitate people's lives and work, not to eliminate them.”

A translator is no longer just someone who knows a language
Gürses emphasized that in contemporary translation and interpreting education, merely knowing a foreign language is not enough; translators must also specialize in culture, methods, history, and social needs.

“In our era, translators and interpreters are trained not just as people who know languages, but as specialists who understand the methods and history of translation, cultural differences, and social needs,” said Gürses, noting that Türkiye's translation tradition continues today in university translation and interpreting departments with new technologies.

“A machine can pretend to know, a human provides a real experience”
Dr. Gürses also touched upon artificial intelligence's capacity to comprehend culture, humor, irony, and social context, stating that AI can learn human behavior and culture through the human-generated data it is fed.

Dr. Gürses said, “Artificial intelligence or machines only know social context as much as they learn from human texts and films they read and copy. Machines do not recognize, experience, or live humanity's unpredictability, soul, psychology, or creativity. They can only pretend to know by looking at the data they have collected.”

Gürses, stating that the fundamental difference between humans and machines is experience, continued:

“This is the human translator's superiority over machines; machines can provide quick solutions by synthesizing the data they have recorded, but humans provide a real experience.”

“AI translation can be fast, but its disasters can also be fast”
Dr. Gürses pointed out that AI translations must be supervised in fields like law, health, diplomacy, and international relations, where even a single wrong word can lead to serious consequences, and stated that control mechanisms are indispensable in professional production processes.

Emphasizing that directly using a translation generated solely by a machine is risky, Dr. Gürses said, “It is always risky to simply take and use a translation made by a machine alone. We know that incorrect, uncontrolled human translations have brought us to the brink of wars. AI translation can be fast, but its disasters can also be fast.”

“We are now in the post-AI era”
Gürses stated that translation and interpreting education has also changed in parallel with technological transformation, adding that artificial intelligence is not a new technology in the field of translation.

“I now believe that we are not in the age of artificial intelligence, but in the post-artificial intelligence era,” said Gürses, continuing his words:

“The age of artificial intelligence began in the 1950s, when the first computers were built, and was almost completed when the entire world connected to the internet. Translation and interpreting education developed similarly. Translators have been using computers, translation memories, and online dictionaries for a long time. In this post-AI era, translation is not about living alongside machines, but living intertwined with them.”

The translator of the future must also understand technology
Gürses stated that technology accelerates translators' access to information and multiplies their resources, expressing that translation fields will diversify even further in the future.

Dr. Gürses said, “Thanks to the easing of their work, faster access to information, and the proliferation of resources, the translator's cultural power and skills have increased. Humans and machines are gradually spreading into space; as colonies are established on the Moon and nearby planets, we will see much more unexpected translation problems and fields emerge.”

Pointing out that many countries are developing their own artificial intelligence systems, Gürses emphasized that future translators must understand not only the subtleties of languages but also technological systems, concluding his words by saying, “Even now, many countries have their own artificial intelligence systems. These ostensibly speak human language, but there is even a need for translators to facilitate communication between them. In this new environment, translators must learn and be able to use the new technologies that shape languages, along with the intricacies of those languages.”

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https://uskudar.edu.tr/en/new/artificial-intelligence-does-not-eliminate-translators-it-transforms-their-expertise/92435
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‘Bimpert,’ ‘douen’ and ‘canboulay’ are the newest adds to the Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary has added more than a dozen words from Bermuda and the Caribbean.
New entries include “bimpert” for a foolish person, “hornerman” for an unfaithful man.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — More than a dozen words long used in Bermuda and across the Caribbean have the official nod from the Oxford English Dictionary.

First in line is “bimpert,” a Bermudian word of unknown origin that is used to describe a stupid or foolish person. People on the tiny island in the north Atlantic often use it in this traditional phrase: “A bimpert is justah wuffless bye,” which roughly translates to: an idiot is just a worthless boy.

Another colorful addition is “hornerman,” a word used in the eastern Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago since 1975 to describe an unfaithful man or a man having a relationship with someone else’s partner.

Leonard Alexander, a grocery store owner in Trinidad, chuckled at the inclusion of the word “hornerman.” He explained that to “horn” means being unfaithful, and now the world would know the term for a man who commits such an act.

“That’s our heritage, that’s what we grew up with,” Alexander said.

Among other dark words that made the list is “jablesse,” defined as “a malevolent shape-shifting female spirit with one cloven hoof, which at night is said to assume the form of a beautiful woman to lure men to their deaths.” It is derived from “diablesse,” the French word for female demon.

Another supernatural entry is “douen.” It is “typically depicted as short in stature, with backward-pointing feet, and wearing a large hat, said to be the spirit of a child who died before it could be baptized, and believed to lure children into the forest by calling their names,” according to the dictionary. It is a variation of the Spanish word “duende,” which means elf.

Several food-related words were included this year: “shadeesh,” the Bermudian word for chorizo; “sugar cake,” made of grated coconut boiled with sugar, water and spices; and “peanut punch,” a wildly popular rich and frothy beverage made with peanuts or peanut butter, milk, sugar and several spices.

The final Caribbean English words added this year are “Trinbagonian,” which refers to people from both the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and “canboulay,” which refers to Carnival festivities in Trinidad in the 1800s that celebrated the emancipation of slaves.

There are some 500,000 words and phrases in the Oxford English Dictionary, which details the history of words, some of which go back to the 11th century.

Coto writes for the Associated Press. AP correspondent Anselm Gibbs in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, contributed to this report."
By Dánica Coto
Sept. 29, 2026 3 AM PT
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-09-29/caribbean-words-added-to-official-dictionary
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"International Translation Day 2026
Beyond equivalence: Translation and the politics of being understood
Updated : 30 September 2026, 00:05

Faridul Alam
Linguistic diversity and language rights

Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights is the theme of International Translation Day, September 30, 2026, with “The Power of Being Understood” as its subtitle. The International Federation of Translators places translation, interpreting, and terminology at the centre of linguistic inclusion, emphasising their role in education, healthcare, justice, public services, and civic life.

The theme is timely because linguistic diversity exists under profoundly unequal conditions. Languages may be spoken by millions or by a small community; they may flourish in schools, government, publishing, media, and digital platforms, or remain marginalised, under-resourced, and increasingly vulnerable. Linguistic diversity is therefore not simply a celebration of the number of languages spoken in the world. It is a question of which languages have institutional recognition, technological resources, educational support, and the power to survive across generations.

This linguistic disparity is particularly evident in education. UNESCO notes that more than 7,000 languages are spoken or signed around the world today, yet only 351 are used as languages of instruction. It estimates that up to 1,500 languages may disappear by the end of this century, with the loss extending beyond vocabulary to cultural and historical knowledge.

Image
More than 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, yet linguistic diversity exists under profoundly unequal conditions. Visual: Collected.
Language rights consequently mean more than the formal right to speak one's language. They include access to information, justice, education, healthcare, and public services in a language one understands, but also the right to preserve and transmit linguistic and cultural heritage. Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) rightly emphasises translation and interpreting as practical mechanisms through which such rights can become meaningful.

Yet this creates an important paradox. Translation can make linguistic differences communicable. But can it preserve the linguistic difference itself? In other words, can we understand another language without reducing its distinctive ways of seeing, remembering, and expressing the world to our own?

When a language disappears, therefore, what disappears is not simply a collection of words. A way of wording, and thereby of worlding, the world may disappear with it.
The question matters because a language is not merely a container for information. It carries historical memory, cultural associations, social relationships, ecological knowledge, metaphors, conceptual distinctions, and particular ways of making experience intelligible. When a language disappears, therefore, what disappears is not simply a collection of words. A way of wording, and thereby of worlding, the world may disappear with it.

This is where the political significance of translation becomes more complicated. Translation can carry stories, knowledge, memories, and ideas across linguistic boundaries. But it cannot by itself preserve a language as a living medium. Translation can preserve communicability, but only linguistic survival can preserve the world from which that communicability arises.

The problem also has a transnational dimension. Languages do not remain neatly contained within nation-states. They cross borders through migration, displacement, colonialism, trade, education, and increasingly digital communication. A language carried by migrants may acquire new forms of life in another country; a diaspora can preserve a language while simultaneously exposing it to pressures of linguistic erosion. Linguistic rights, therefore, cannot be reduced to national language policy. They also concern the right of communities to sustain a living linguistic world within and beyond national boundaries.

We learn English for years, but learn too little. Why?
The phrase The Power of Being Understood consequently invites a question more difficult than it initially appears: What does it mean to be understood?

To be understood is among the most fundamental of human needs. Yet understanding is never simply a matter of hearing words or converting them from one language into another. To understand another person is to encounter a world of meanings shaped by history, culture, memory, identity, experience, and circumstance. Translation begins where linguistic difference becomes an obstacle to that encounter, but it does not end with the substitution of one set of words for another.

This is where the conventional ideal of equivalence begins to falter.

The trouble with equivalence

Equivalence suggests that something said in one language can be matched by something that means essentially the same thing in another. At one level, this is indispensable. Without some correspondence between languages, translation would be impossible. Yet the closer we look, the more elusive equivalence becomes.

Words do not carry meanings as self-contained objects that can simply be removed from one linguistic container and deposited into another. They carry histories, associations, tonalities, cultural memories, social positions, and worlds of reference.

Equivalence concerns words. Understanding concerns worlds.

This distinction extends an argument I explored in my earlier essay, “Wording the word and worlding the world: Poetics and politics of translation,” published in The Daily Star on International Translation Day 2025. Language does not merely describe a world that exists independently of it; it participates in making experience intelligible—indeed, in worlding the world. The word is never entirely detached from the world it helps constitute.

Translation, therefore, cannot be understood simply as the transportation of words between already completed worlds. It is an encounter in which different ways of wording and worlding are brought into relation. Questions of representation, power, and intelligibility inevitably arise.

And that encounter is never politically innocent.

The dream of perfect equivalence has always been haunted by the irreducible differences between languages. A word may have a dictionary counterpart in another language and yet fail to carry the same emotional, historical, cultural, or philosophical resonance. An idiom may be translated literally and become unintelligible; translated freely, it may become intelligible at the cost of its strangeness. A metaphor may survive grammatically while losing the cultural memory that gave it force.

Translation, therefore, inhabits an uncomfortable space between sameness and difference. It must make something recognisable without pretending that the two languages are identical.
The paradox is that fidelity may sometimes require non-equivalence.

A translation that reproduces the words of an original with mechanical precision may betray its meaning, while a translation that departs from the original wording may preserve something more important: its irony, rhythm, emotional force, cultural implication, or pragmatic effect.

Translation, therefore, inhabits an uncomfortable space between sameness and difference. It must make something recognisable without pretending that the two languages are identical. It must cross a distance without claiming that the distance has disappeared.

The difficulty deepens when we move from translating words to translating human experience.

Image
Equivalence concerns words. Understanding concerns world. Photo: Collected.
A culturally specific concept may have no exact counterpart in another language. A community's historical memory may resist reduction to the vocabulary available in the receiving culture. A speaker's identity may be inseparable from linguistic forms that cannot be reproduced elsewhere without modification. Even silence can carry meaning: what is left unsaid, what need not be explained to members of one linguistic community, may become invisible when translated into another.

I encountered the intricate interplay of such silence much earlier, as an undergraduate, when I attempted to translate Ernest Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants” into Bangla. The story's central conflict is never named: the word abortion does not appear, and its meaning emerges through euphemism, repetition, hesitation, and what the characters leave unsaid. I found myself listening not only to what the characters said but to what their words could not say. In trying to carry that silence across languages, all I could hear was Harold Pinter's paradoxical—and to me particularly daunting—formulation from The Homecoming: “You never heard such silence.”

Translation consequently confronts an enduring ambivalence that cannot be resolved merely by greater lexical accuracy:

How can the other be made intelligible without making the other identical to oneself?

That is the deeper problem of translation—and, ultimately, of being understood.

The politics of being understood

The politics of translation does not begin only when someone deliberately mistranslates, censors, distorts, or manipulates a text. It is already present in the act of interpretation itself.

Every translation involves choices. What should be retained? What can be omitted? What should be explained? Which cultural reference should be preserved in its foreignness, and which should be rendered through an approximate equivalent familiar to the target audience? When ambiguity exists, should the translator preserve the ambiguity or resolve it?

These are linguistic decisions, but they are also decisions about whose categories of meaning will govern the encounter.

Who is being translated?

Who is doing the translating?

For whom?

And according to whose understanding of what counts as intelligible?

The questions become especially consequential when languages meet under conditions of unequal power. Colonial histories provide stark examples. A colonised people could be rendered linguistically intelligible through the vocabulary of the coloniser while remaining profoundly misunderstood. Indigenous concepts could be translated into European categories that made them legible to colonial administration precisely by stripping away the conceptual systems from which those concepts emerged.

The problem also persists in less dramatic forms. A migrant's experience may be translated into bureaucratic language and thereby become administratively legible while losing the complexity of the life behind the documentation. A patient's words may be interpreted into the clinical vocabulary of medicine and become medically intelligible, while the cultural meaning of illness remains inadequately conveyed. A person's testimony may be translated into the formal language of law and thereby enter the institutional record, while something of the speaker's lived experience disappears in the process.

A person can be made linguistically intelligible without being fully understood, let alone authentically represented.
Here, a crucial distinction emerges:

A person can be made linguistically intelligible without being fully understood, let alone authentically represented.

Indeed, intelligibility itself can become a form of power. To render another person understandable is not always to encounter that person on their own terms. It can also mean fitting their experience into categories that the receiving culture already possesses. What appears to be successful translation may therefore sometimes become an act of assimilation: difference becomes intelligible because it has been reduced to what the listener already knows how to recognise.

The right to be understood, then, cannot mean the right to be made equivalent to the dominant language. It must include the right to remain different while still being heard. Yet inclusion alone does not dissolve hierarchy. Translation may bring a marginalised language into the field of recognition while leaving intact the terms by which recognition is granted. It can bridge linguistic distance while leaving linguistic hierarchy untouched. Linguistic justice, therefore, requires reciprocity over asymmetry: translation must become a two-way encounter in which neither language is simply the measure of the other, and each remains open to being altered by the encounter.

Image
The power of being understood lies in the willingness to remain in conversation across irreducible difference. Visual: Collected.
The impossible task

Translation is therefore a daunting, if not impossible, task—not because nothing can ever be translated, but because nothing can be translated without remainder.

Something always exceeds the translation: a connotation, a historical association, a rhythm, a cultural memory, a conceptual distinction, an ambiguity, an emotional register, or simply the fact that the original expression belongs to another linguistic world.

But the impossibility of translation is not an argument against translating. Quite the opposite.

Human beings translate precisely because complete equivalence is unavailable.

Translation is an activity of negotiating the distance that cannot finally be eliminated. Its achievement lies not in abolishing difference but in making communication possible without pretending that difference has ceased to exist.

The translator, therefore, works within a field of approximation, judgement, interpretation, and responsibility. Too little difference indicates that the translation has domesticated the other. Conversely, too much difference suggests that the target language may remain inaccessible.

The translator works within an unstable interval between intelligibility and alterity.

That is why translation has never been merely a technical activity. It is an interpretive practice in which the limits of understanding itself become visible, revealing an underlying incommensurability: some meanings cannot be fully rendered within the conceptual terms of another language without being altered in the process.

Being understood and the right to be heard

The political implications of translation become particularly clear when we consider language rights.

The right to speak one's language is not fully realised if no one is able—or willing—to listen to it. Likewise, access to healthcare, education, justice, government services, and civic participation cannot depend upon a person's ability to abandon their linguistic world at the institutional threshold.

But there is a difference between having one's words translated and having one's meaning recognised.

A person may receive an interpreter and still encounter an institution whose conceptual framework leaves little room for the experience being expressed. A language may be formally accommodated while the worldview embedded within that language remains marginalised.

Language rights consequently involve more than access to words. They involve recognition.

The deeper promise of translation is not simply that I can understand what you have said. It is that I might become capable of recognising that your way of saying it—and perhaps your way of seeing the world—is not reducible to mine.

Language death, translation, and transnational belonging

This distinction becomes even more urgent when a language itself is endangered.

Language death is sometimes described as the disappearance of vocabulary or grammar. But the loss is deeper. Languages encode relationships between people and place, memory and identity, generations and ancestors. They may preserve ecological knowledge, social distinctions, oral histories, metaphors, and concepts for which another language has no ready equivalent.

Translation can document and circulate some of these meanings. It can introduce a disappearing language's literature, stories, and knowledge to speakers of other languages. But translation cannot substitute for the continued life of the language itself.

This is where the translational and the transnational converge.

A language carried across borders can become a site of belonging for migrants and their descendants. It can survive in households, religious and cultural associations, literature, music, and digital communities, even when it occupies a marginal position in the surrounding society. Yet migration can also accelerate linguistic erosion as younger generations move towards the dominant language of education and public life.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to translate minority languages into dominant ones. It is to ensure that linguistic inclusion does not become another name for linguistic assimilation.

A genuinely plural understanding of language rights must allow communities to participate in the dominant institutions of a society without requiring them to surrender the linguistic world through which they remember, relate, and imagine.

Translation can preserve communicability, but only linguistic survival can preserve the world from which that communicability arises.

Translation in the age of artificial intelligence

The problem becomes newly urgent in an age of machine translation and artificial intelligence.

AI can now translate enormous quantities of language at extraordinary speed. Large language models (LLMs) extend this capacity beyond conventional machine translation by generating translations that can account for context, idiom, tone, and stylistic variation with remarkable fluency. Such systems can significantly expand access, especially where professional translation is unavailable.

But contextual fluency should not be confused with situated understanding.

A model can infer patterns across vast multilingual corpora without inhabiting the historical, cultural, or experiential world from which an utterance emerges. It can produce a fluent rendering while missing the significance of what cannot be reduced to correspondence. It may translate an idiom smoothly while erasing the strangeness that matters, or resolve an ambiguity whose unresolved quality is part of the meaning.

The danger, then, is not simply that machines will mistranslate.

It is that fluency may be mistaken for understanding.

The problem is especially significant for languages with fewer digital resources. FIT notes that technological development has highlighted disparities between high-resource and low-resource languages and stresses the continuing importance of human language professionals in safeguarding quality, ethics, and inclusion.

The technological question is therefore not whether machines can translate more languages. They plainly can. The deeper question is what conception of language is being embedded in the systems that increasingly mediate communication.

Read more
End of reading? A post-literate society in the making
If language is treated primarily as translatable data, what happens to the aspects of language that resist datafication: cultural memory, situated knowledge, ambiguity, irony, silence, embodied experience, and historical meanings carried by particular forms of expression?

The machine may translate the sentence.

But who—or what—translates the world behind the sentence?

The human remainder

This is where the continuing importance of the human translator becomes clearer.

The human translator does not simply possess information unavailable to the machine. More fundamentally, the translator occupies a position between worlds. Translation requires judgement precisely because languages are not closed systems of equivalent signs. The translator must decide what the text is doing, not merely what its words denote.

This does not make human translation infallible. Human translators can misunderstand, distort, impose assumptions, and reproduce cultural biases. Nor does it mean that machine translation has no interpretive value. Rather, it means that translation remains a domain in which judgement cannot be separated from meaning.

The translator's task is therefore not to eliminate uncertainty but to negotiate it responsibly.

Perhaps this is why translation remains an art even when it becomes increasingly technological. The ultimate challenge is not to make language perfectly transparent. It is to preserve enough opacity for differences to remain differences while making enough meaning available for communication to occur.

That balance can never be permanently achieved.

It must be negotiated again and again.

Beyond equivalence

The politics of being understood is thus perpetually fraught because understanding itself is never innocent. To understand another person is not simply to receive information from them. It is to interpret them through categories that are themselves historically and culturally situated.

Translation exposes this problem because it places two linguistic worlds in direct relation.

It reminds us that meaning is neither entirely inside words nor entirely outside them. Meaning emerges through relations among words, speakers, histories, contexts, and worlds. To translate is therefore to enter that relational space.

This is why translation cannot finally be reduced to equivalence.

Equivalence asks whether two expressions correspond. Translation asks what becomes possible when two worlds encounter one another.

Image
Translation begins where linguistic difference becomes an obstacle to the encounter. Visual: Adrin Sarwar.
The distinction matters. If we imagine translation as the perfect transfer of meaning, every difference becomes an error to be eliminated. If, instead, we understand translation as an encounter with difference, the inevitable remainder is not simply a failure. It is evidence that another linguistic world has not been completely absorbed into our own.

In this sense, the failure of perfect translation may be part of its achievement.

For what would it mean to understand another completely? Would complete understanding finally erase the distance between self and other—or would it erase the very otherness that made understanding necessary?

Perhaps the goal of translation is therefore not to arrive at a point where nothing remains untranslated. It is to create a space in which what cannot be fully translated can nevertheless be encountered.

The power of being understood lies not in the fantasy of perfect equivalence, but in the willingness to remain in conversation across irreducible difference.

Translation does not eliminate linguistic diversity. At its best, it makes diversity communicable without making it disappear.

And if language participates in worlding the world, translation participates in bringing worlds into relation. It does not simply move words across boundaries. It negotiates the boundaries through which human beings recognise one another.

That negotiation is necessarily incomplete. Perhaps even necessarily impossible. But it is an impossibility we cannot afford to abandon. For without translation, differences can become isolation.

Without difference, understanding becomes mere recognition of ourselves. Between the two lies the difficult, perpetually unfinished work of being understood.

Dr Faridul Alam, a former academic, writes from New York City..."

https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/wisdom/news/beyond-equivalence-translation-and-the-politics-being-understood-4286116
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Between the Words Is Where Translation Happens
30 September 2026
United Nations Volunteers

On International Translation Day, we look beyond words. Translators and editors shaping volunteer stories across continents carry a greater responsibility: to ensure meaning survives the journey from one language to another.

Literal translation can preserve words while losing culture, emotion and intent. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make translation faster, more accessible and far-reaching, but speed is not the same as understanding. Human oversight remains essential. The strongest approach is not AI replacing translators, but supporting them, while human judgment provides the context, cultural sensitivity and nuance technology may miss.

Ultimately, the craft lies in reshaping language without rewriting experience, because the most literal translation is not always the most faithful one.

 

In this video, voices from United Nations Volunteers (UNV) come together in 12 languages, celebrating the richness of language and all that it carries.

From utu and umoja in Kenya to ayni in Bolivia, and sewa in Nepal, to asar or ashar in Central Asia to servir in Latin America—acts of service, humanity, humility, care, duty—are deeply rooted in local traditions. These words can be translated, but what they carry cannot always be contained in another word. Perhaps that is where translation truly begins.

Languages in the video: Arabic, English, French, Luo, Nepali, Portuguese, Quechua, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Urdu."
https://www.unv.org/story/between-words-where-translation-happens
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The Iceberg of Translation
Tiffany Tsao
30 September 2026

Roughly 10% of an iceberg sits above the waterline, meaning the other 90% goes unseen (at least to us surface-dwellers). Literary translation is not unlike an iceberg: only a small part of the labour involved is visible in the finished copy. The rest is not so apparent – a submerged and hidden base, upon which sits the beautiful blue craggy structure bobbing along up top.

I feel this analogy to be acutely applicable to my experience translating Olenka – a novel by the Indonesian writer Budi Darma, originally published in 1983. My English translation has just come out with Penguin Classics. It is physically small: a mere 12.7 by 19.5 by 1.5 centimetres, weighing 228 grams (only 12 grams more than the apple I place afterwards on my kitchen scale for comparison).

Do not be deceived. This lightweight paperback is, as they say, merely the tip of the iceberg. To give you a sense of the loving, and admittedly obsessive, labour that went into its English-language rendering, I compile here, for your reading pleasure, a few of the pains I took to bring the Anglophone world this annotated edition of Budi Darma’s work.

Olenka itself encourages meticulousness. It keeps track of its copious literary, cinematic, and cultural allusions via 54 end notes. It includes an author’s afterword about the process of writing the novel. It enhances the factuality of its fictional narrative via clippings from real-life magazine and newspapers, captioned and interspersed throughout the text. In short, its author, Budi Darma, set a certain standard. As its translator, tasked not only with rendering it into English but also with furnishing relevant notes and an introduction, it seems only right to follow in his tracks.

My resolve begins with the first end note, which mentions Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and most importantly, a story titled ‘Manu’ by a Marathi-language writer from India named P.S. Rege who also wrote under the pen name Roop Katthak (spelled also Kathak). The 2018 edition of Olenka I am translating from has misspelt Rege as Rage, which results in me finding nothing about him despite my Google Books and Google Scholar search prowess.

So I ask my agent, who is from – and based in – India. ‘It could be Rege,’ she texts. She’s right. From there, more sleuthing reveals that the story in question was included in an anthology titled Contemporary Indian Short Stories, published in New Delhi in 1959. Fortuitously, the State Library of New South Wales has a copy. I place a request and descend eagerly to the library’s bowels to peruse it.

I discover that the first few scenes of Olenka clearly take their tonal cue from Rege’s ‘Manu’ (which Rege himself translated into English). This is gold: I can, and should, use its prose to inflect my own.

From this point, there’s no turning back. I know I’ll follow every lead I can.

Olenka is set in the US’s Midwest, and one scene takes place in a bus station in Indianapolis. The narrator, stranded overnight, makes use of a kursi televisi – literally, a ‘television chair’. I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing, so I spend far too much time hunting for a picture online so I can get a sense of what it looks like. I finally discover this photo in the ‘r/nostalgia’ subreddit on Reddit, which results in me rendering it as ‘coin-operated TV’.

I read, for the first time, the short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne because one of Budi Darma’s characters recounts it to another. As with Rege’s ‘Manu’, I take my cues from its language in order to render its retelling.

Other literary works I read or revisit because they are alluded to or quoted include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, and ‘The Darling’ by Anton Chekhov. One of the more obscure stories is ‘The Fish Trap’ by Peter Leach. As with ‘Manu’ I discover it housed in the State Library of NSW – in an anthology of O. Henry Memorial Award prize stories from 1974. The State Library: a treasure indeed.

The novel takes place partly on the Indiana University Bloomington campus, and I contact the Indiana University archives with queries on various matters – among them, what the approximate circulation numbers for the Indiana Daily Student newspaper were in the year 1979. (Answer, from a diligent grad student employee who went digging in ‘Collection 142’ of the School of Journalism records to answer my question: 14,000 during the school year.)

Because of a sustained reference in the novel to a scandalous Playgirl interview with Margaret Trudeau (ex-wife of Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and mother to prime minister Justin Trudeau), and the inclusion of an Indonesian magazine clipping that provides a synopsis of said interview, I decide to track the original down. I can find back copies of the Australian edition of Playgirl in libraries here, but the interview appeared in the American one.

I ask a friend who is spending a year as a fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in the US if she can request a digitised copy of the interview from the September 1979 issue of Playgirl. My friend kindly obliges. This takes a while and I get impatient, so I also ask my husband, who works at the University of Sydney, to request a digitised copy via interlibrary loan.

Both copies arrive by email at around the same time, and I use them to confirm some details that were a little unclear from the Indonesian rendering. I also derive great amusement from the ads – one of which is for a subscription to the Fredrick’s of Hollywood catalogue. There is a photo of a man’s underwear-clad torso, and a woman hugging his hips and looking at the camera. Her face is at groin level and she has an enthusiastic expression on her face. The man’s stomach and legs are carpeted in dark hair. The underwear is white, but has a drawing of an apple over the groin. The apple has a bite taken out of it and text superimposed across it. The text reads ‘Love at First Bite’.

Speaking of images, from the moment I embark on the project, I’m thinking about how to best render the included newspaper and magazine clippings if they can’t be reproduced for the English edition. My editor at Penguin Classics confirms: alas, we can’t include them. So I hit upon a solution, which she agrees is ingenious: boxes of descriptive text will appear where the images appear in the original version of the text (along the lines of my description of the ad, above).

I watch the movie Breaking Away, which is mentioned in the novel, and which is also set in Bloomington, Indiana, where most of the novel takes place. My husband and my oldest son watch with me. We enjoy it very much. My son especially loves the bicycle race scenes. I think that the name of the pizza restaurant mentioned in the novel, Pagliani, must be inspired by the real-life pizza place featured in the movie, called Pagliai’s. The internet tells me that it is now called Opie Taylor’s.

To write the introduction, I drive to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. I spend two and a half days in the library, scouring every issue of Horison and Basis – the premier Indonesian literary and culture magazines, respectively, of their day. I request all issues from 1970 to 1987, scanning for references to Olenka and pieces written by or mentioning Budi Darma. (I get distracted by many things, like authors feuding back and forth over multiple issues, and photos of famous authors in their prime who are either now old or with us no more.)

I discover in the July 1984 issue of Horison an essay by Budi Darma in which he mentions a review of Olenka by the writer and journalist Satyagraha Hoerip. This is not one of the reviews I already know about. There is no mention of the outlet in which it appeared, nor a date. Nothing but the title. As Indonesian newspapers from this era are generally not digitised, their text is not searchable. Once again, I deploy my detective skills: I know that Satyagraha Hoerip was an editor at Sinar Harapan, so I search there. The National Library, thankfully, holds copies from the period I need (most of 1983 through the first half of 1984).

The newspapers arrive in plastic-wrapped bundles, and I begin combing through, focusing on the literary and arts and culture sections. I hit pay dirt relatively quickly, in the issue published on 2 March 1983. I’m so proud of this achievement that I share the good news with the high-school students at the table with me, who are studying for a maths exam. I also reward myself with a walk outside.

I write my own set of translator’s end notes for the novel, to complement Budi Darma’s end notes. Some are notes on his end notes. This seems somehow eminently in the spirit of the work.

During my translation of Olenka, a writer friend checks in on me every now and then: ‘How goeth things, young Tiff?’ she asks. I, and she, are both 41 years old.

My replies are always the same. ‘I feel like my brain is steeped in Olenka.’ ‘I feel I am wandering the maze that is Olenka.’ ‘I feel I am submerged in water, and the water is Olenka.’ And so it goes, until I finally turn in the translation manuscript and accompanying introduction to my editor on 10 February 2025.

Again, these are just several, not all, of the rabbit holes I went down and the puzzles I encountered while translating Olenka. As mentioned, my English translation weighs only 228 grams. Extrapolating from the proportions above, if the finished copy of Olenka were the tip of a literal iceberg, then the remainder of its bulk – my herculean behind-the-scenes submarine labours – would amount to a little over two kilos: 2,052 grams, to be exact.

Objectively speaking, this is not much. More ice cube than -berg. Still, I console myself. The human brain weighs, on average, only 1.3 kilograms. But look at what it can do.

…

Tiffany Tsao is a translator of Indonesian literature and the author of the novel But Won’t I Miss Me. She holds a PhD in English from UC-Berkeley and is Deputy Editor at Sydney Review of Books.

The cover artwork featured from this Penguin Classic edition of Olenka is by Tom Gauld.

This new work is made possible by the Copyright Australia Cultural Fund; Meanjin is grateful for this support."
https://meanjin.com.au/latest/the-iceberg-of-translation/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Traduire : l’universel en mouvement
Actualités, En librairie, Lecture, Page d'accueil, Publication

"L’ouvrage collectif Traduire : l’universel en mouvement, dirigé par Florence Zhang et Nicolas Froeligern, est paru aux éditions du Collège de France, en OpenEdition, dans la collection CAO (Civisilations de l’Asie orientale). Les contributions sont entièrement disponibles en ligne, à lire, à télécharger, à partager, à critiquer …

Cet ouvrage aborde la question de l’universel par le prisme des contacts entre Extrême-Orient (principalement Chine et Japon) et Occident, à travers douze chapitres étudiant des cas de traduction, mettant successivement l’accent sur les mouvements des idées, sur les singularités des écritures, et sur les décentrements des attentions, le tout dans une véritable danse des universels, décidément compliqué et complexe. Ouverte par l’écrivaine Yoko Tawada et l’historienne Anne Cheng, cette danse fait participer des chercheurs intéressés par divers aspects de la traduction ; elle brouille les frontières de langues, compose des va-et-vient incessants, touche la littérature, la philosophie, le manga, la science-fiction, révèle des manœuvres, des manipulations, des malentendus, des détournements, des initiatives créatives ou tentatives d’essentialisation. Les différents chapitres, en anglais ou en français, nous montrent que dans un univers mouvant, la traduction n’est pas un vecteur stable de l’universalisme, elle bouscule les idées et les langages, les rendant universalisables, partageables. C’est ainsi que nous rejoignons Souleymane Bachir Diagne pour en appeler un « universel de rencontre et de traduction ».

À retrouver ici : https://books.openedition.org/cdf-idc/18#anchor-resume

Titre : Traduire : l’universel en mouvement
Auteur : Florence Zhang et Nicolas Froeliger
Éditeur : Collège de France – Institut des Civilisations
Date de publication : 2026
Nombre de pages : 294
ISBN numérique : 978-2-488899-02-4
ISBN : 978-2-488899-01-7"
https://u-paris.fr/lcao/traduire-luniversel-en-mouvement/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Every patient deserves to be heard, understood and supported, especially when clear communication shapes their experience of care. In honor of International Translation Day, which celebrates the Feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator considered the patron saint of translators, PeaceHealth Language Services is hosting “The Language of Belonging: Language Rights, Access & Inclusion,” from noon – 1 p.m. PT on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

PeaceHealth invites the community to join the virtual panel featuring professional interpreters and PeaceHealth caregivers who will share real stories about language diversity, language rights and everyday practices that build trust with patients and families from diverse linguistic, cultural and communication backgrounds.

Register to join the Zoom webinar.

About PeaceHealth: PeaceHealth, based in Vancouver, Wash., is a non-profit Catholic health system offering care to communities in Washington, Oregon and Alaska. PeaceHealth has approximately 16,000 caregivers, nearly 3,200 physicians and clinicians, more than 160 clinics and 9 medical centers serving both urban and rural communities throughout the Northwest. In 1890, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace founded what has become PeaceHealth. The Sisters shared expertise and transferred wisdom from one medical center to another, always finding the best way to serve the unmet need for healthcare in their communities. Today, PeaceHealth is the legacy of the founding Sisters and continues with a spirit of respect, stewardship, collaboration and social justice in fulfilling its Mission. Visit us online at peacehealth.org.

###

Media Contact
Jim Murez
458-205-6845
jmurez@PeaceHealth.org"
https://www.peacehealth.org/news/2026-09-24/peacehealth-invites-community-virtual-event-celebrating-international-translation
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

As World Translation Day is being celebrated on September 30, events surrounding it will inevitably consist of discussions on the challenges faced by translation in the age of Artificial Intelligence and the increased use of digital technologies.
But translation has been around us since the beginning of time, or at least since the first time that different people or communities came together. Over time, scripts and languages have been lost and the windows to the past remained closed. We lacked the ability to understand past civilisations as we had no access to their languages.
From ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian cuneiforms and Maya Glyphs from the Mayan civilisation of South America, the 20th century invested much time and effort in deciphering and then translating ancient scripts by meticulously comparing them to later works in adjacent languages. The results were amazing. They opened doors and windows to civilisations which were tantalising but closed to us because of inaccessible language.
Subsequent translations allowed us to encounter myriad worlds of the past, their ideas, beliefs, and experiences which were separated from us by language, geography, and time.
Nor is this the end of the road. There are scripts from the past that remain inaccessible even now. The Indus script from Mohenjo-daro, for example, is yet to be deciphered. Its secrets remain one of the many cultural stories of ancient history which are still to be told.
Today, translation plays a significant role in preserving cultural memory. Without it, many works, and worlds, would have remained undiscovered and invisible. Translation gave these works another life and allowed them to enter new intellectual and cultural contexts.
In this sense, translation is not simply about transferring meaning; it is about creating access to the past while enabling conversations in the present.
Nowhere is this truer than in literary works. Literature translated from languages in any part of the world allows readers to encounter perspectives that may challenge the assumptions of their own cultural environments. A translated novel can make a distant society more intelligible; a poem can communicate an experience of exile or belonging; a historical narrative can reveal how a community understands its own past. Translation thus creates opportunities for dialogue rather than simply providing linguistic equivalence.
Literary language often depends on metaphor, rhythm, irony, cultural memory, and multiple meanings. A translation can therefore become an interpretation of the original text, changing from one translated language to another.
An important component of intercultural understanding, translation is almost inevitable today. As the world has famously shrunk into a global village, there is a tendency to erase all differences. But the resistance to that comes in the form of celebration of uniqueness in traditions, stories, and memories.
This uniqueness is shared through the stories of our ancestors. It is these stories that root us and give a sense of identity. As people are becoming increasingly monolingual, translation will become central to understanding our unique past and the stories that create a community memory.
The instinct to preserve a unique culture comes with a desire to disseminate it as well. Translation is central to this project.
Beyond being merely the transfer of words between languages, translation enables readers to encounter unfamiliar cultural values, histories, and ways of seeing the world.
In doing so, translation becomes a form of intercultural understanding, creating dialogue between cultures while also revealing the differences that shape how meaning is produced and understood.
The continuing significance of translation lies precisely in this capacity to connect worlds that would otherwise remain apart. To that extent, translation remains an exciting journey, unpacking our past in ways that help us to understand our future."

Published: 04:09 PM,Sep 27,2026 | EDITED : 08:09 PM,Sep 27,2026

https://www.omanobserver.om/ampArticle/1196878
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Turn recordings into subtitles, translate them and prepare video for sharing
"Polyglot brings local AI subtitles and translation to the Mac
Press Release · Utrecht, Netherlands · 28 September 2026
Independent developer Dylan de Heer introduces Polyglot, a native Mac app that helps filmmakers, educators, podcasters and other creators turn recordings into subtitles, translate them and prepare video for sharing. Transcription, translation and video enhancement run on the user’s Mac, without uploading recordings or subtitle text for cloud processing.

Polyglot brings the subtitle workflow into one app: import audio or video, generate timed subtitles, add translations, review the text alongside playback and export the finished files. Users can also open existing SRT or WebVTT subtitles and work with them without the original recording.

The app keeps original and translated tracks together in a local library, with search, language filters, batch translation and batch export. Source timings are preserved during translation. When users correct the original text, affected translations are marked for review while completed translations and manual edits are retained.

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Polyglot supports SRT and WebVTT export, readable TXT transcripts and bilingual subtitles that pair the source text with a translation. Editing, format conversion and timing adjustments help users prepare files for their next step, whether that is a course, an independent film or a video podcast.

Video tools provide controls for resolution, noise, sharpness and motion, alongside optional local AI enhancement models. Users can preview changes and export a new MP4 while preserving the original. Compression also supports a chosen maximum file size, which Polyglot checks against the finished export.

Speech recognition supports 25 European languages. Translation targets are selected separately, and AI-generated text should be reviewed before publication. Once the required models are downloaded, local media can be processed offline. Downloads, purchases, licensing and update checks use the internet. Usage analytics are enabled by default and can be turned off; they exclude media and subtitle contents.

Polyglot is available now at https://getpolyglot.io for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14.4 or later, with at least 8 GB of memory. Optional SeedVR2 enhancement requires at least 16 GB.

The seven-day trial starts with the first transcription or translation job and includes unlimited files, with no account or payment details required. Polyglot Pro costs €29.99 once, including applicable VAT, for one person on two Macs. Pro keeps transcription and translation available after the trial. Editing, conversion, exports, timing adjustments and video tools remain free..."

https://podnews.net/press-release/polyglot-ai

"AI Without Glosses: How Large Language Models Are Learning to Translate Sign Language
by Bioengineer September 27, 2026Reading Time: 5 mins read

For more than 70 million Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people worldwide, everyday communication still depends on human interpreters or imperfect technology. A new survey published in the International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics argues that a quiet revolution is underway: the same large language models and vision-language models that power chatbots and image captioning are now being harnessed to translate sign language video directly into fluent spoken-language text, without the crude intermediaries that have constrained the field for decades. The review, led by Sufyan Danish and colleagues at Sejong University, Khalifa University and Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, maps this emerging landscape and offers a roadmap for what comes next.

At the heart of the transformation is a shift away from so-called gloss-based translation. Historically, most sign language translation systems did not translate signing directly into sentences. Instead, they first converted signs into glosses, textual labels that roughly transcribe each sign into a word-like form. Glosses, however, are a lossy shorthand. Sign languages are fully-fledged languages with their own grammar, expressed through handshape, motion, facial expression and body posture, and the gloss layer discards much of this rich structure. It also requires expensive annotation by experts, which has kept progress confined to a handful of well-resourced languages. Gloss-free approaches, by contrast, learn to map continuous sign video straight to natural language, cutting out the bottleneck entirely.

The survey organizes the current wave of gloss-free systems into three architectural paradigms. The first involves adapter-based language models, in which compact neural modules are inserted into frozen large language models so that visual features extracted from sign video can be injected into a powerful text generator. Techniques such as low-rank adaptation, popularized by the LoRA method, allow researchers to tune these systems on relatively small sign language datasets without retraining billions of parameters. Systems like Sign2GPT and related work demonstrate that the linguistic knowledge already baked into large language models can be repurposed to produce grammatically coherent translations from signing alone.

The second paradigm centers on hierarchical tokenization frameworks. Sign video is dense and continuous, and naive approaches tend to compress it into representations that are either too coarse to capture nuance or too diffuse to decode. Newer methods reduce what researchers call representation density, structuring visual features at multiple temporal scales so that fast, fine-grained movements and slower, sentence-level rhythms are both preserved. Combined with sign back-translation, a data augmentation trick that generates synthetic training pairs, these frameworks have pushed benchmark scores upward on standard evaluation sets.

The third and arguably most exciting paradigm is vision-language pretraining. Models first trained on enormous collections of paired images and text, such as CLIP-style encoders and DINOv2 visual backbones, already possess a shared visual-linguistic space. Gloss-free translation systems exploit this by treating sign video as just another visual input to a pretrained vision-language model, then fine-tuning on sign data. The survey highlights systems including SignLLM, DiffSLT, and LLaVA-SLT, which extend this idea with diffusion-based generation and visual instruction tuning. The result is a family of models that translate signing with increasing fluency while also opening the door to sign language generation, producing signing avatars from text.

Underpinning all of this is the question of data. The survey reviews the modern dataset landscape, from How2Sign and the BBC-Oxford BSL corpus to Arabic sign language resources such as ArabSign and KaSL, and multilingual efforts like AfriSign. The imbalance is stark: American and British Sign Language dominate, while most of the world’s hundreds of sign languages remain severely under-resourced. This is where the motivation of the survey’s authors becomes concrete. During Hajj and Umrah, millions of pilgrims, including Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals, gather annually in Saudi Arabia, and accessible translation in Arabic Sign Language is a matter of safety and dignity. Saudi Arabia has reported some 20 million deaf visitors expected to benefit from sign language services at the two holy mosques, a scale that no human interpreter workforce can match.

Evaluation remains a thorny problem. The survey examines the standard metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE, CIDEr and translation edit rate, and notes ongoing debates about standardized BLEU computation and the clarity of reported scores across papers. Automatic metrics, originally designed for text-to-text machine translation, struggle to judge whether a signed utterance has been rendered into semantically faithful English, particularly when valid paraphrases exist. Emerging evaluation approaches and human judgment studies are therefore essential complements, and the authors call for more consistent reporting so that comparisons between gloss-free frameworks are meaningful.

The survey also takes stock of practical knowledge-based systems already deployed to assist Deaf users, including real-time multilingual translation applications built on frameworks like MediaPipe for hand landmark tracking. These tools show promise but also expose limitations: signer variability, differing signing rates that alter the timing of manual signs and non-manual markers, and the challenge of mouthings, which research shows do not always align neatly with hand movements in languages like British Sign Language. Skeleton-based approaches and motion-visual fusion architectures are among the strategies being explored to make recognition robust across diverse signers and recording conditions.

Looking forward, the authors identify low-resource adaptation, ethical AI development and global accessibility as the defining frontiers. Low-rank adaptation and prefix-tuning techniques make it feasible to bootstrap systems for sign languages with only small corpora, while multilingual pretraining methods like mT5 hint at translation models that span many languages at once. Ethics is not an afterthought: Deaf communities have historically been skeptical of technologies developed without their involvement, and the survey’s framing of translation as a bridge for equitable access implicitly demands that future systems be co-designed with Deaf users rather than imposed on them.

The significance of this survey lies less in any single breakthrough than in its synthesis of a fast-moving field at an inflection point. Gloss-free sign language translation, once a niche goal, is now the mainstream research program, powered by the same foundation-model infrastructure reshaping the rest of artificial intelligence. If the roadmap holds, the coming years could see Deaf and hearing people converse directly through cameras and phones, with neural models handling the linguistic heavy lifting, a development that would rank among the most socially consequential applications of the large language model era.

Subject of Research: Gloss-free sign language translation using large language models and vision-language models for Deaf communication

Article Title: Leveraging large and vision language models for gloss-free sign language translation in deaf communication: a survey

Article References: Danish, S., Khan, S. U., Alghamdi, R. A., & Alghamdi, N. S. (2026). Leveraging large and vision language models for gloss-free sign language translation in deaf communication: a survey. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 17(10), Article 479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-026-03323-x";

https://bioengineer.org/ai-without-glosses-how-large-language-models-are-learning-to-translate-sign-language/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Helping immigrant parents navigate unfamiliar systems can be loving, but the responsibility becomes unfair when one child carries it alone.

Since age eleven, one daughter has sacrificed school, work, and personal events to serve as her family’s translator and administrator.

Now her adult brother is home and receiving constant praise, yet every difficult form, appointment, and phone call still lands on her.

Can she finally step back?

AITA for refusing to translate for my parents after my brother moved back in and took over my role in the house ?
I (19F) am the only one in my family who is fully fluent in English.

My parents immigrated when I was a baby, and my older brother (22M) moved back to our home country when he was 10 to be raised by our grandparents.

He recently moved back in with us after 12 years abroad.

For most of my life, I’ve been the one handling everything for my parents: filling out forms, translating at appointments, reading legal documents, talking to banks, scheduling anything.

She felt useful.

I’ve done this since I was about 11.

It was exhausting, but I didn’t question it because I knew they needed help.

Since my brother came back, things have changed. He speaks decent English now, not perfect, but enough to help.

Except… he doesn’t.

He just acts like he’s too good for it. And somehow, my parents act like he’s the golden child.

They dote on him, praise him constantly, and now they only speak to me when they need something.

He could help and alleviate her load…

A week ago, they asked me to take time off work to translate at an immigration appointment for my mom.

I said I couldn’t, because I had a shift I couldn’t miss, and I suggested they ask my brother instead.

My mom said, “He’s not used to this stuff. It’s easier with you.”

I snapped a little and said, “yeah, because I’ve been forced to do it for years.”

She finally let them know how she feels.

I told them I was tired of being treated like a tool just because I happen to speak English better, especially now that they have another adult child living here.

My dad told me I was being ungrateful and that” family helps without complaining.”

Since then, they’ve been cold with me. My brother said I was being “dramatic” and that it’s not his fault they trust me more.

But it’s not about trust, it’s that they’ve never even asked him.

I’ve missed school, work, and social events to translate for them. He’s been here three months and hasn’t lifted a finger.

Now I feel guilty.

I don’t want to abandon them, but I also don’t want to keep carrying this alone just because I was born here and he wasn’t..."
https://twistedsifter.com/2026/09/young-woman-spent-years-translating-for-her-family-but-finally-lost-patience-when-her-fluent-brother-refused-to-help/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — More than a dozen words long used in Bermuda and across the Caribbean got an official nod on Wednesday from the Oxford English Dictionary.

First in line is “bimpert,” a Bermudian word of unknown origin that is used to describe a stupid or foolish person. People on the tiny island in the north Atlantic often use it in this traditional phrase: “A bimpert is justah wuffless bye,” which roughly translates to: an idiot is just a worthless boy.

Another colorful addition is “hornerman,” a word used in the eastern Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago since 1975 to describe an unfaithful man or a man having a relationship with someone else’s partner.

Leonard Alexander, a grocery store owner in Trinidad, chuckled at the inclusion of the word “hornerman.” He explained that to “horn” means being unfaithful, and now the world would know the term for a man who commits such an act.

“That’s our heritage, that’s what we grew up with,” Alexander said.

If someone in the Caribbean were to find out about such infidelities, they might be known “to get on,” which means to have an emotional outburst or make a scene, or “to cut someone’s tail,” meaning to beat someone.

Depending on the fallout from such infidelities, a woman might need “vex money,” which refers to “money carried or kept in a safe place by a woman, for use in an emergency or in any unexpected eventuality.”

Among other dark words that made the list is “jablesse,” defined as “a malevolent shape-shifting female spirit with one cloven hoof, which at night is said to assume the form of a beautiful woman to lure men to their deaths.” It is derived from “diablesse,” the French word for female demon.

Another supernatural entry is “douen.” It is “typically depicted as short in stature, with backward-pointing feet, and wearing a large hat, said to be the spirit of a child who died before it could be baptized, and believed to lure children into the forest by calling their names,” according to the dictionary. It is a variation of the Spanish word “duende,” which means elf.

Avionne George, a 45-year-old maintenance technician in Trinidad, said formal recognition of such words helps preserve tradition for the younger generations: “Most of them are ignorant of certain terms from long ago like ‘douen.’ They don’t know about ‘la jablesse.’”

Several food-related words were included this year: “shadeesh,” the Bermudian word for chorizo; “sugar cake,” made of grated coconut boiled with sugar, water and spices; and “peanut punch,” a wildly popular rich and frothy beverage made with peanuts or peanut butter, milk, sugar and several spices.

In the Caribbean, one might sit down to have a peanut punch with one’s “nana” or “nani,” Hindi words that are used to address one’s maternal grandparents. In Bermuda, one would sit down to partake with a “hamma,” or friend.

The final Caribbean English words added this year are “Trinbagonian,” which refers to people from both the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and “canboulay,” which refers to Carnival festivities in Trinidad in the 1800s that celebrated the emancipation of slaves. They stem from a 1700s harvest festival that the British tried to quash, leading to riots reenacted to this day to mark the start of Carnival. Canboulay is derived from “burning cane,” which the dictionary noted was associated with “acts of defiance and rebellion.”

Sherwin Williams, a construction worker in Trinidad, said the inclusion of such words in the Oxford English Dictionary would help people around the world understand their Trinidadian origins. “People recognize us by our slang,” he said.

There are some 500,000 words and phrases in the Oxford English Dictionary, which details the history of words, some of which go back to the 11th century."
September 26, 2026 
Associated Press
By  DÁNICA COTO
https://www.wxxv25.com/words-long-used-in-the-caribbean-and-bermuda-are-now-part-of-the-oxford-english-dictionary/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Live subtitles are coming to Luxembourg's Parliament, translation could follow
Loretta Marie Perera
Luxembourg's parliament is preparing live Luxembourgish subtitles for its debates, a first step toward AI translations that could help more residents follow the decisions that affect them.
Published: 26.09.26 08:00, Update: 26.09.26 08:04

"We want people to integrate in Luxembourg, to feel at home, and at some point of their life to take Luxembourgish nationality and to be interested in what's happening, being interested in politics", Chamber President Claude Wiseler explained in conversation with RTL Today.
© Flickr / Chambre des Députés
Prof Dr Peter Gilles from the Institute of Luxembourgish Linguistics at the University of Luxembourg has for years been working on making parliament more accessible to Luxembourg's diverse population.

While French remains the administrative language and is used for all official and legal texts in Luxembourg, much of the debate in the Chamber of Deputies is held in Luxembourgish.

"Considering that this represents only 50% of the population who can understand", Gilles explains in conversation with RTL Today, "there is clearly a need to offer these public decisions, organisation, and institutions to the entire population."

Shifting trends
Luxembourg's foreigners: Who are the 48%?
08.08.2026
How to train a Luxembourgish LLM
It was only around 10 years ago that the possibilities changed entirely with the arrival of deep learning algorithms. And with that in 2022, the professor, whose academic background is in computational linguistics, finally found an avenue to realise his goals.

"I found the possibility to collaborate with the Chamber of Deputies to develop [deep learning for Luxembourgish] further", he said. "Especially for a small language. All these small languages are not left behind, but it is more difficult to develop the systems for them."

It is only through flexibility that we as a Luxembourgish nation can define an optimal or workable way of living together and using multiple languages.
Prof Dr Peter Gilles
Speaking to RTL Today, doctoral researcher Nils Rehlinger elaborated: "Google Translate can translate from Luxembourgish, into Luxembourgish. In terms of quality, if you compare it to bigger languages like German, French, English, the quality is lagging behind. So, we're trying to improve this."

An ambitious and multi-step initiative by the University of Luxembourg, funded and developed in collaboration with the Chamber, was eventually launched in 2022.

"We first developed our system, LuxASR, for transcribing Luxembourg speech", said Gilles. This technology is already being used in the Chamber: for everyday work internally and to transcribe meetings and speeches.

The way a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained in Luxembourgish is the same as with any other language: on a vast amount of text for natural language processing tasks.

LuxASR is trained to a large part on speeches from Parliament, as well as data from RTL, local communes, and radio stations such as Radio 100.7. But all that data is still insufficient to train a good model.

"We don't create the models from scratch because that would require huge amounts of resources", said Rehlinger. "[Instead] we let bigger and better models translate the data, and then we give it to our model so that our smaller model can still improve a bit."

After years of training and almost 50 models developed and improved over the years, LuxASR is ready for production.

Historic accessibility
President of the Chamber of Deputies Claude Wiseler provided us with further insights on the adoption of the new technology so far.

"We use it for our internal purposes to facilitate the work we have to do and just to schematise – to make a transcription of what is said in Parliament", he noted, pointing to the constitutional obligation to document every word said in public sessions.

Publicly available parliamentary discussion and debate is not something new, it has been done manually since the 19th century.

During commission sessions, the AI transcription technology is also used for taking notes or summarising discussions. In this case, the AI-generated transcriptions can be checked for grammar and accuracy after they are produced.

With the technology already ready, the next step is near completion: to translate Luxembourgish dialogue into Luxembourgish text in real time.

"Putting subtitles online will help us with two things: first, of course, with people who have hearing difficulties, and because a lot of people watch TV without [audio], on the bus or train, or on their phone. And they [could] read subtitles without having to listen", said Wiseler.

Another benefit of Luxembourgish audio-to-text subtitles is that it can help those who know some Luxembourgish, but have not yet reached full fluency. "Reading is easier [than listening], so people with a low knowledge of Luxembourgish are better able to follow if they have the help of subtitles", the Chamber president added.

The ultimate goal is more ambitious still: LuxMT, a model being developed to automatically transcribe, document, and translate live-streamed Luxembourgish parliamentary debates by providing multilingual subtitles in real time – in French, German, Portuguese, and English.

The human element
As good as a model can be, when faced with something as consequential as parliamentary debate, there are, without question, risks. In the case of LuxMT, the question is where the line for risk tolerance is.

"Whatever you use AI for, in our case transcription or translation, you need to do a risk assessment. So, how risky is it to have mistakes? Will there be big consequences for mistakes, or is it okay if there are small mistakes?", Rehlinger said.

"If you're in a situation where there's a high risk, for example, medical or the law, where there will be very real repercussions, then, of course, there needs to be a human in the loop."

For LuxMT, it is the speed and quantity of material being worked on that makes it suitable for AI use – but the team acknowledges its limitations.

"No model, not even for English, or the best one, is 100% reliable", Gilles stressed. "Parliament, of course, is quite a sensitive issue and you could create severe misunderstandings if it is real time, because you cannot correct it – it is on the TV, it is in the world."

More challenges present themselves through specific words and phrases a machine cannot know.

"And that will continue to be the case, especially idiomatic expressions, names, brand names, specific institutions, names for institutions, which are very specific for a country, for example", Gilles added. "This, I think, can only be solved by humans.”

Rehlinger shared that the next steps are working with professional translators: "To really focus on language that's very specific to the Luxembourgish parliament, so all the terminologies, the special terms related to the law and so forth – to really specialise the model for this use case."

One solution could be a delayed response, where a human acts as a middle person to control the output of the translation and make corrections. Another is what most of modern society has already become accustomed to: understanding that real-time captions serve a purpose, rather than strive for perfection.

Advocating for multilinguality
Growing up in Luxembourg and appreciating diverse linguistic backgrounds among his peers from a young age, Rehlinger considers himself an advocate for multilinguality and sees this project as a real opportunity to improve accessibility in Luxembourg.

"The topic of multilingualism in Luxembourg to me always is quite often split between advocating for Luxembourgish and advocating for multilinguality", he said. "I find it a bit odd that it seems to be difficult to do both. Multilingualism is part of what makes Luxembourg so special."

Gilles added that the country’s trilinguality and a strong international presence reassert the need for greater accessibility.

"It is only through flexibility that we as a Luxembourgish nation can define an optimal or workable way of living together and using multiple languages", he said.

For Wiseler, the reality of real-time translations in Parliament is an exciting and encouraging one.

He explained: "If you live in a country, you should have access to what's happening. Even if [residents] can't vote or don't want to vote, they will be concerned. And if you are concerned, you have the right to understand."

What is also important, he stressed, is integration.

"We want people to integrate in Luxembourg, to feel at home, and at some point of their life to take Luxembourgish nationality and to be interested in what's happening, being interested in politics", Wiseler said. "I think it's important to at least make the offer to them to understand."

What's next?
While the possibilities continue to grow, the first step for using this technology is clear for Parliament.

"What we are trying to do in Parliament [is] having an AI instrument to make subtitles in Luxembourgish for the parliamentary debates", Wiseler said. "We are almost ready to do that. The next step will be to have the automatic translation in French and English at least, so that you can follow on YouTube: Parliament with subtitles."

Alongside the ongoing work of the University, more is being done still.

A bot that allows Q&A and conversation in Luxembourgish is being developed. Currently, a smartphone application that transcribes Luxembourgish voice messages into Luxembourgish text is available for Android and iOS. A web version is also available for use.

Later in 2026 or at the start of 2027, the team also plans to launch a survey for rating the AI translations, which will provide more information on what needs further improvement."

Loretta Marie Perera
Published: 26.09.26 08:00, Update: 26.09.26 08:04
https://today.rtl.lu/news/luxembourg/ai-in-parliament-making-luxembourgish-debate-accessible-1556033069
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Say What? Translation as Creation: A Guest Lecture by Lisa Dillman

Join us on October 8 for "Say What? Translation as Creation," an interactive talk with Lisa Dillman, a literary translator and Professor of Practice at Emory University. Dillman has translated acclaimed authors such as Yuri Herrera, Pilar Quintana, and Sabrina Berman, and her work has received numerous honors, including the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize,  and the 2025 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her translation of Season of the Swamp, by Yuri Herrera.

 

This is a unique opportunity to learn about the art and practice of literary translation, the challenges of bringing Spanish-language works to English-speaking audiences, and careers in translation and publishing.

Event Details
When
Thursday, October 8, 2026, 2 - 3:15pm
Where
Anatol Center
CSULB
Long Beach, CA 90840
United States"
https://www.csulb.edu/college-of-liberal-arts/event/say-what-translation-as-creation-a-guest-lecture-lisa-dillman
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The lecture will present how basic emotions are conceptualised and expressed in Serbian and German phraseology, focusing on FEAR, ANGER, SADNESS and JOY. Since basic emotions are partly grounded in shared human physiology, the two languages often rely on strikingly similar phraseological images. Serbian krv se nekome ledi u žilama and German jemandem gefriert das Blut in den Adern, for example, express fear through the same bodily experience and con¬ceptual pattern. In other cases, however, a comparable emotional experience is structured thru related but different images. Serbian and German share the scenario of the heart moving downwards, but conventionalise it differently. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, contrastive phraseology and corpus data, the talk will give examples of different degrees of semantic and conceptual correspondence and will distinguish between phraseological units based on the same embodied experience and image, units sharing a broader conceptual model but differing in their linguistic imagery, and language-specific conventionalisations without a direct conceptual counterpart. It will be demonstrated how these findings can be represented in a concept-based bilingual phraseological resource. Using FEAR as a case study, phraseological units will be organised through intermediate conceptual scenarios such as COLD/FREEZING, TREMBLING AND LOSS OF BODILY CONTROL, DOWNWARD MOVEMENT OF THE HEART, and HAIR STANDING UP. This model illustrates the central idea of EMOBRIDGE: moving beyond lists of translation equivalents towards a representation of how emotion concepts are structured, related and differently lexicalised in Serbian and German phraseology.

Svetlana Slijepčević Bjelivuk is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Standard Language at the Institute for the Serbian Language of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA). Her research focuses on lexicology and lexicography, phraseology, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis and digital language resources. She has worked on the Dictionary of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in the development of digital lexicographic resources. Her current research examines Serbian–German phraseological equivalence and the conceptualisation of emotions in phraseology, with a particular focus on concept-based bilingual digital phraseography. She is the author of several monographs on crisis and political discourse, as well as several dictionaries, and has published widely on lexical innovation, conceptual analysis, public discourse and digital lexicography."

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ihb/detail/event/from-shared-emotion-to-different-images-emotion-concepts-in-serbian-and-german-phraseology
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Manuel González Moreno, president of Liber, discusses the future of the publishing industry, changing reading habits, the internationalisation of books and the impact of artificial intelligence.

"The New Barcelona Post

AI-translated and reviewed by a professional translator

A Catalan author pens a novel, published by a Barcelona imprint, which ultimately lands in a display window of a Buenos Aires bookshop. Another title crosses the Atlantic bound for New York, while a third is translated into new tongues to reach readers across Frankfurt, New Delhi, or Beijing. At times, the story even leaps off the printed page to become a film, a television series, or a video game. Literary narratives often travel much farther than we tend to think, and fairs like Liber – which holds its 44th edition from 29 September to 1 October at Fira de Barcelona – serve as key bridges making that journey possible, connecting Spanish publishers with international professionals, agents, and buyers.

Welcoming nearly 250 exhibitors and 9,000 professionals for its upcoming edition, Liber does more than simply propel books from Spain's publishing industry onto the global stage: it also captures the transformation of a sector in perpetual motion. Shifting reading habits, emerging markets, and new formats now share space with pressing concerns like reading comprehension – back in the spotlight following the latest PISA report – and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. We sat down to discuss these industry shifts and the future of the printed word with Manuel González Moreno, the newly appointed president of the Spanish Federation of Publishers' Guilds (FGEE) and of Liber, representing an industry that, amid widespread disruption, continues to seek fresh pathways to make stories travel.

— The death of the book has been predicted time and again: first with television, later with the internet, and now with social media and artificial intelligence. Why does it continue to endure?

— As a historian, I have a habit of looking all the way back to prehistory. Yet the simple truth is that even then, human beings felt an innate drive to pass down stories, knowledge, and ideas. First came oral storytelling; later arrived writing and various methods of recording and reproducing texts, from clay tablets and parchment through to paper.

The format, therefore, has constantly evolved, but that fundamental human impulse to tell stories has not. For all these reasons, the future of the book is not under threat: the publishing industry has consistently shown an ability to adapt to every major technological revolution. The printing press transformed the circulation of the written word, yet it did not wipe out other forms of transmission; nor did radio, television, the internet, or audiobooks. These different formats coexist, responding to distinct ways of reading and engaging with content.

Manuel González Moreno, new president of the Federation of Publishers' Guilds of Spain and of Liber. © Fira Barcelona
To understand the growth of the publishing sector, however, one must also look at where we started. In 1975, around 25% of the Spanish population struggled to comprehend texts of even moderate complexity. Spain recorded reading levels far below those seen today, leaving the industry with substantial room to expand. Following the 2008 financial crisis, which hit publishing hard, the sector embarked on a sustained recovery that has continued through to the present day.

"Being able to read, yet unable to fully comprehend what one reads, leaves us far more vulnerable to simplistic messaging and manipulation"

— Yet despite upbeat sales figures and turnover, the latest PISA report sounds the alarm on reading comprehension. What do these findings tell us about the way young people read today?

— Young people read more than any other demographic group, but that does not automatically mean they grasp what they are reading any better. The latest PISA study has raised a major red flag: reading comprehension among evaluated students remains poor. We are not expecting them to plough through monumental works like The Brothers Karamazov; the issue is whether they can analyse, reflect, and genuinely understand what is on the page, moving beyond the bite-sized messaging of the digital space.

— What lies behind this decline?

— It has a great deal to do with the way we consume information today, especially across social media networks, where short, fragmented, and heavily simplified content dominates. This makes it difficult for many young people to build the stamina required to engage with texts that demand greater focus and cognitive depth.

And all of this carries real risks. Deficient reading comprehension can easily slide into a form of functional illiteracy: being able to read, yet unable to fully comprehend what one reads, leaves us far more vulnerable to simplistic messaging and manipulation. That is why it is essential for readers to have access to a rich diversity of books, authors, and viewpoints, allowing them to compare ideas, think critically, and form their own opinions.

— Given the sheer volume of titles published every year, is there a genuine danger of overproduction?

— I do not believe we are facing overproduction. The Spanish market has distinctive traits that explain a substantial portion of the roughly 65,000 new releases published each year. Educational textbooks alone, published across Spain's four official languages, account for more than 20,000 titles. On top of that, essential new editions and technical revisions are continually required in fields such as law, medicine, and engineering.

Not all of these publications are new works chasing the same readership. They cater to very different realities and structural demands. Rather than overproduction, I would describe it as cultural breadth.

Manuel González, president of Liber, notes that the book has not disappeared, but continuously adapted. © Fira Barcelona
— That industry breadth also finds a shared platform at Liber. What role does the fair play for the Spanish publishing sector?

— Liber has evolved enormously over the past four decades. In its early days, the event served primarily to show the wider world that Spain possessed a sophisticated publishing ecosystem capable of producing high-quality books and competing internationally. Today, we have nothing left to prove on that front: Spain’s publishing industry is firmly consolidated, and Liber has established itself as an indispensable international benchmark for Spanish-language publishing and global partnerships. Every year it draws an increasing volume of companies, visitors, and trade buyers from distant markets, including foreign librarians looking to acquire Spanish-language collections.

Related content
Liber turns Barcelona into a global focal point for the Spanish publishing industry
by Ainara Valadez Medina

— How does Liber reflect the wide range of scales and profiles among publishers?

— It is evident in the broad spectrum of publishers and catalogues taking part. Spain counts roughly 3,000 publishing houses, but the approximately 900 imprints belonging to the Spanish Federation of Publishers' Guilds account for over 90% of total industry revenue. What is more, the six largest publishing groups generate around 48% of the €3.1 billion the market turned over last year, while some 800 houses are small independent presses, frequently posting revenues below €200,000 a year and operating with fewer than six staff.

Liber brings together publishers of vastly different sizes and profiles, particularly those for whom scoping out new markets, trading rights, or building professional networks is a commercial priority.

Liber will bring together nearly 250 exhibitors and 9,000 professionals. © Fira Barcelona
— Liber continues to adapt, and this edition brings a feature to Barcelona that debuted at last year's event in Madrid: the Rights Centre. What prompted this new space?

— When we speak of selling rights, we mean an international publisher acquiring the licence to publish a Spanish title in their domestic market, or securing translation rights for another language. Years ago, the Spanish publishing industry was far more accustomed to buying rights than selling them, but the dynamic has shifted: our authors and titles have earned significant international standing.

We have writers commanding wide global appeal, such as Javier Cercas, more than 48 Spanish publishers running subsidiaries across Latin America and North America, and an ever-expanding appetite for the Spanish language worldwide: New Delhi alone counts around 20,000 students learning Spanish through the Instituto Cervantes, while in China that figure is approaching one million. All of this makes rights sales an increasingly vital revenue stream, both economically and culturally.

Liber The 44th edition of Liber will run from 29 September to 1 October at Fira de Barcelona.
— Beyond international publishing rights, what other growth opportunities does Liber see on the horizon?

— The screen and audiovisual sector is one of the clearest. Streaming platforms, television networks, and cinema producers are ravenous for original narratives, and books remain a primary fountainhead for compelling characters, premises, and plots. As a result, more and more authors are licensing adaptation rights for film, television, or even video games. I firmly believe rights licensing for screen adaptations will prove to be one of the industry's greatest growth avenues in the coming years – a trend Liber is actively working to support.

"Artificial intelligence can assist us and streamline workflows, but it can never replace the creator"

— The sector also faces major headwinds: how is artificial intelligence affecting publishing, and what concerns publishers most?

— Artificial intelligence can serve as a highly effective tool for accelerating workflows and cross-referencing vast bodies of information. The problem arises when it ingests content created by human authors without attribution, remuneration, or respect for copyright.

That is why ensuring traceability is vital: we must know where training data originates, and clearly disclose when a work or a book cover has been generated by artificial intelligence. AI can support and streamline processes, but it cannot stand in for the creator. A machine may function as an instrument to generate material, but it cannot hold intellectual property rights. Copyright belongs exclusively to human creators; our responsibility is to guarantee that technology respects and does not displace the authorship of human beings.

— Intellectual property belongs, therefore, to an intellect.

— Exactly: to a human intellect, complete with ideas and emotions – qualities a machine cannot readily replicate.

Ainara Valadez Medina
Writer at The New Barcelona Post

Manuel González

Ainara Valadez Medina

(Writer at The New Barcelona Post)

september 23, 2026 - 01:30

https://www.thenewbarcelonapost.com/en/manuel-gonzalez-liber-interview-future-book-not-in-danger/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Fine on the company responsible for the translation in the trial of 4 national police officers

"The Justice Department of the Generalitat has initiated a sanctioning file with the aim of imposing a fine on the company responsible for the translation in the trial of 4 national police officers for the mutilation of an eye of Roger Español during the 1-O, a hearing that took place last week.

During the course of the oral hearing, the renunciation of the use of Catalan occurred due to the lack of competence of the assigned translators. In a statement released this Wednesday, the department details that it has received the information requested from the company in charge of the interpretation services "within the established deadline," as 'Nació Digital' has reported.

After examining this documentation, the Justice Department has requested complementary data and, simultaneously, has decided to "initiate a file to impose the economic penalties provided for in the contract specifications."

The same sources indicate that the company committed to implementing internal organizational measures in order to optimize the assignment of professional profiles to the services required.

Alternatives provided in the regulations
On the other hand, the Justice Department reminds the Governing Chamber of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia that, according to article 231.5 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, in extraordinary situations, any person knowledgeable of the language used can be authorized as an interpreter, beyond the translators and interpreters on staff that the Department has in certain judicial venues.

The Department also emphasizes that it is the judge's authority to assign the translation to any person present in the courtroom.
https://www.democrata.es/en/courts/the-government-of-catalonia-will-sanction-the-translation-company-of-the-trial-for-the-damages-to-roger-espanol/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

The country’s biggest braille transcription center is inside this Texas prison
Many braille textbooks are transcribed in prisons. For the last 25 years, the Billman Braille Center in Gatesville has prepared women for careers on the outside.

"Trichele Allen, braille translator, translates a college course anatomy book at Patrick O’Daniel unit, a women’s prison, in Gatesville, Texas on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. Allen has worked at the Billman Braille center for 11 years. The center teaches inmates to read and write braille to translate textbooks for Texas students.

Tucked in the back of a women’s prison in Gatesville, 40 miles west of Waco, the Billman Braille Center is a hub of activity.

Women in white jumpsuits transcribe textbooks on computers, while others practice their skills on Perkins Braillers —  typewriter-like machines that punch dots into the page.

Trichele Allen has been at the braille center for 11 years. She is transcribing the graphics in a college-level anatomy book.

“We make the picture as big as we can for the page and then we do a key page,” she said. “Like this would be a texture. This texture here will tell them that those are the ribs.”

Patricia Lim / Texas Standard

Sheets of braille are loaded into a machine used by the women at the Billman Braille Center.

The center has been here for over 25 years and has ballooned into quite the operation, employing around 90 prisoners who fulfill transcription contracts in Texas and beyond.

Like most prison jobs in Texas, the transcribers aren’t paid. But program manager Delores Billman, for whom the center is named, said the goal is to offer mission-driven work behind bars.

“I wanted to give the female population a job and a career that would be meaningful to them also,” Billman said.

The center’s work creates access to braille that is essential for those who need it.

“For those of us who read braille, braille is literacy,” said Robert Englebretson, the chair of the Department of Linguistics at Rice University. “Braille allows us to read in our own voice and at our own pace. Braille allows us to see how sentences are structured and how punctuation works and how things are formatted on the page.”

The Billman Braille Center teaches inmates to read and write braille to translate textbooks for students.

Englebretson has been a braille reader since kindergarten. And despite the rise in other technologies that assist blind and low vision people, he said transcription services are still necessary.

“The automated braille transcription systems often get things very wrong,” he said. “If you want textbooks for kids, you want to make sure that the braille is accurate. And so human-based braille transcription is still essential.”

Billman started as a correctional officer. She started the program to provide workforce training to female inmates at a time when most programs focused on men’s prisons.

“I wanted the ones that were going to be released to have a job that they could do and make money and support themselves,” she said.

Marilyn Wilkes, braille translator in training, does braille drills at the Billman Braille Center. Wilkes has been working at the Billman Braille Center for two months.

This remains a primary goal of the center. The U.S. added over 160,000 jobs in August, but many seeking employment report that it feels difficult to find work. People with criminal records are among those hit hardest when the job market is tough — often experiencing an unemployment rate around 30%.

Billman and her original cohort taught themselves braille until they were proficient enough to earn the Library of Congress’ transcription certification. She said the hardest part in those early days was finding contracts.

“We could study as long as we wanted to, but it wasn’t going to get us anywhere until we actually started production,” she said. “And we had to find clients to work for.”

The Billman Braille Center is the biggest of the 45 prison braille programs across the U.S., and the only one in Texas.

Prisoners play a big role in producing braille textbooks. Jayma Hawkins is the leader of the National Prison Braille Network at the American Printing House for the Blind.

“In the fiscal year 2025, 70% of all textbooks orders for American Printing House for the Blind were transcribed by prison braille programs in the United States,” Hawkins said.

The National Federation of the Blind said incarcerated people make up the majority of those certified in literary braille transcription by the Library of Congress each year.

Christina Harris said knowing she’s helping blind people go to school has kept her working in the Billman Braille Center for the last eight years.

“It was a natural fit for me. I truly love my job. I have a background in education. A long time ago I was a teacher. I taught fourth and fifth grade,” Harris said. “This is how I’m able to use my degree and still make a difference.”"
By Sarah Asch
September 22, 2026
https://texasstandard.org/stories/braille-transcription-billman-center-texas-prison-gatesville/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus