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NHS interpreting service problems contributed to patient deaths
The BBC has found interpreting issues were a contributing factor in at least 80 babies dying or suffering serious brain injuries in England between 2018 and 2022.
BritishMuseum agrees to pay translator whose work it used without permission
By Jessie Yeung, CNN
Published 3:07 AM EDT, Wed August 9, 2023
A translator whose work was used by the British Museum without her permission won a victory this week after reaching a settlement with the institution, following two months of negotiations and online campaigning — with a little help from the fans of K-pop superstars BTS.
Now in 2023, CSA Research is running a survey that will be used to publish a follow up to that initial study. The survey takes between 10 and 20 minutes to complete. Please consider adding your input. The resulting report will be made publicly available, just as the first one was.
Foreign Influence Part 2: How the world had a say in Hong Kong’s ‘English’ street names
Most local English-language street names are transliterations of the Cantonese, while some commemorate governors or other colonial empire-builders. But data analysis shows that around a tenth of the non-Cantonese names originate from languages and cultures outside the UK.
Renato Beninatto: “For the world at large, after a thorough explanation of LangOps, their reaction might just be the classic: “Oh, you are talking about translation!””
Hanya satu kata: Terjemahan. Mau pelokalan, internasionalisasi atau “LangOps” atau apa pun itu. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Semua tergantung pada gantungannya. Mau itu anggaran, lingkungan, atau kepemipinan, ketiganya dinamis.
Foreign influence Part 1: Lost in translation, Hong Kong’s weird and wonderful street names
Hong Kong’s Rednaxela Terrace – originally intended to be Alexander Terrace – is just one example of the city’s bizarre transliterations. Our data analysis examines how the city’s place names came to be.”
As previously reported, “Machine translation (MT) and adjacent language technologies are driving industry-wide demand for natural language processing (NLP) engineers and machine learning researchers.”
However, as the same article pointed out, more traditional roles at various companies also need to be filled. So what skills are perceived to be the most important for these language-related positions?
Paquet began his subtitle translation career by proofreading English translations and also sometimes co-translating with a Korean friend. “It was about ten years ago that I felt my Korean was at a level where I could do first drafts,” he said. “And even today I have a lot of people review my work.”
Translating subtitles is unlike any other kind of translation, says Pacquet. “The audience can hear the actors speaking, they can get a lot of emotion from the screen. The translation has to compliment that. I watch the performances really closely as I’m translating. It often feels like I’m translating a performance rather than text. You also have to be aware of issues like timing.”
Paquet is the author of New Korean cinema : breaking the waves, which covers the industry from the 1980s to 2000s. He wrote the book in 2009 and notes that one of the obvious ways the industry has changed since then is the increasing level of international interest.
But the biggest change might be the growing number of independent films now being produced in Korea. To celebrate those indie films Paquet founded the Wildflower Film Awards, an independent film festival.
“The independent sector is very dynamic,” he said. “Producing at least 100 features a year with some incredible acting performances. Exciting new talent comes out every year, but inevitably they get somewhat overlooked. This is a time each year when we can celebrate the achievements of these filmmakers.”
“Living in Korea I got to know a lot of directors,” he said. “Both through subtitle work but also as a journalist and at film festivals. Eventually, I came across a director who needed a foreign actor quite urgently, so I stepped into the part. So, when other directors saw that, they said, oh, Darcy. Whenever anyone needs an undemanding not-too-expensive foreign actor, they give me a call.”
Building an AI speech translation system for Hokkien was no easy task. These tools are usually trained on large quantities of text. But for Hokkien, there is no widely known standard writing system. Furthermore, Hokkien is what’s known as an underresourced language, which means there isn’t much paired speech data available in comparison with, say, Spanish or English. Also, with few human English-to-Hokkien translators, it was difficult to collect and annotate data to train the model.
To get around these problems, Meta researchers used text written in Mandarin, which is similar to Hokkien. The team also worked closely with Hokkien speakers to ensure that the translations were correct. “Our team first translated English or Hokkien speech to Mandarin text, and then translated it to Hokkien or English — both with human annotators and automatically,” said Meta researcher Juan Pino. “They then added the paired sentences to the data used to train the AI model.”
The researchers will make their model, code, and benchmark data freely available to allow others to build on their work. While the model is still a work in progress and can currently translate only one full sentence at a time, it’s a step toward a future where simultaneous translation between many languages is possible.
On October 11, 2022 at Google Cloud Next ’22, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced the launch of Translation Hub, the company’s enterprise-scale document translation service.
Pichai described Translation Hub as “Google Cloud’s AI agent that helps companies translate content in over 135 languages.” He added, “It takes full documents including images and translates them while preserving layouts and formatting.”
Among those targeted by the service, according to the Google CEO, are researchers who want to share their findings with a global audience, product and service providers that want to reach underserved markets, and governments.
While the company recognizes prominent industry studies from the recent past, which clearly document major gaps and inefficiencies in the linguistic supply chain, it sought to answer the following question: what strategies could change the status quo and solve these inefficiencies for everyone, including clients, agencies, and translators alike?
“The debate over quality still lingers, as does how clients can optimize their existing budgets and localization workflows to gain efficiencies that would allow them to either increase translation volumes, translation quality or both in parallel,” said Ivan Smolnikov, Founder & CEO of Smartcat.
Voice-recognition AI software has the potential to be the rare smartphone app that encourages face-to-face interactions. Its early results suggest the technology could be a game-changer for a healthcare industry in desperate need of one, boosting morale in the short-term while potentially saving money down the road.
On August 4, 2022, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a proposed rule in the Federal Register related to Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Enacted in 2010, the ACA expanded healthcare access eligibility to people previously without health insurance in the US. Section 1557 prohibits discrimination on the basis of several protected classes.
SubComm is launching a series of informal chats on questions related to subtitling. The topic of the first Subtitle Chat is ‘Phone a Subtitler Friend’.
“The site is intended to improve and promote accessibility, encourage learning and resource sharing across cinemas, film festivals and the wider film exhibition sector. Around twelve million people (one in 5) in the UK are deaf or living with a hearing loss (RNID, 2022) with over 80% saying they would attend cinema regularly if a nearby cinema had captioned shows at convenient times (Inclusive Cinema, 2022). The project is supported by BFI Film Audience Network (BFI FAN), awarding funds from the National Lottery.”
The EU border agency Frontex has been accused of exploiting staff by using a contractor who it is claimed offers interpreters an effective wage of less than €2.50 (£2.11) an hour.
“Respeaking” is a lesser known way to produce on-screen text within a short turnaround. In this practice, a person repeats live audio content into ASR software, including punctuation and other conventions.
A number of variables lend additional complexity to subtitling via respeaking. Some of these are the technology employed, the types of content presented, the purpose of the subtitles, the expected level of quality, and even environmental factors like background noise.
Inuk activist and politician Tagak Curley and assistant professor Lydia Schoeppner are working to translate a series of letters written in an older form of Inuktitut syllabics. In the letters, elders share what needs to be done to help Inuit language, identity and culture survive.
In celebration of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the Global Coalition for Language Rights, 7000 Languages and The Lingua-Cultura Experience are partnering to highlight indigenous peoples and communities throughout the month of August on our multiple social media channels and websites.
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