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We stand on the brink of a new era, fueled by the rapid advancement and integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today, the manufacturing industry is poised to undergo a transformation unlike any it has seen before.
While the transition from manual labor to automated processes marked a significant leap, and the digital revolution of enterprise resource management systems brought about considerable efficiencies, the advent of AI promises to redefine the landscape of manufacturing with even greater impact.
Central to this transformation are Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI technologies. These tools are significantly lowering the barrier to entry for subject matter experts and field engineers who traditionally have not been involved in coding or “speaking AI.” The impact of this should not be underestimated. Up to 40% of working hours across industries could be influenced by the adoption of LLMs, a significant shift in workforce dynamics.
AI, and particularly LLMs, will have a profound impact on the manufacturing sector. The opportunities are vast — but there are potential challenges, too.
AI-native language translation application DeepL Translate is launching into Australia and Singapore following regional forays into Japan and South Korea. Founder and CEO Jarek Kutylowski said it is targeting APAC businesses that require more natural language translations.
Tech employees in APAC know working in the region can involve struggles with language. While most cross-border business is conducted in English, there can still be difficulties communicating, which can lead workers to turn to offerings like Google Translate or ChatGPT for help.
Jarek Kutylowski, founder and chief executive officer of DeepL.
The same goes for enterprises looking to win business in the languages of the region. Jarek Kutylowski, founder and chief executive officer of DeepL, said the firm’s natural language processing AI model offers natural language translations in 32 languages, thanks to years of development and fine-tuning since launching in Europe in 2017.
With additional APAC languages on its roadmap for 2024, DeepL is expanding its footprint into Australia and Singapore, with key business use cases including translation for cross-border business growth. Its Pro subscription (starting at US$8.74 per user per month, rising to US$57.49 for an Ultimate package) and API Pro (beginning at $5.49 per month) allow businesses to translate documents at scale or integrate translations within their workflows.
Climate Cardinals is a youth-led nonprofit that’s accomplished quite a bit with almost no funding: translating 2 million words in four years to make scientific literature more accessible to non-English speakers.
Earth Day 2024 marks a turning point for the group, leaders say, with $400,000 in backing from the philanthropic arm of Google.
The nonprofit plans to use the funding to expand its translation capacity from 500,000 words per year to a least 1 million and as many as 3 million words per year, says Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, Climate Cardinals’ vice president and deputy executive director.
“This is our anchor funding, though we have several grants from L’Oréal and National Geographic, among others,” says Hayakawa, also a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts.
“We began with a $500 budget and have largely functioned with a near-zero budget with volunteers spending their time on Climate Cardinals between work, sleep and study.”
Translation has consistently been a central focus at London Book Fairs. Translators’ and scouts’ perspectives shape publishing decisions for translations. Nonetheless, their impact on the UK publishing market is limited to 3-6% of the market, which mostly belongs to anglophone writers. Over the last two years, Japanese manga made it clear: the foreign literature segment is poised for growth.
In 2023, the UK witnessed a surge in popularity for manga and cozy novels, with Japanese writers leading the market for translated titles. Seventeen of the top 30 translated authors in Britain hailed from Japan, contributing to nine out of the 20 bestsellers being originally written in Japanese. Kentaro Miura, the manga creator who tragically passed away in 2021 at the age of 54, led the pack of translators. An overwhelming 95% of manga sales came from titles originally published in Japan. Among the top 10 authors in translation who generated over £1 million in sales last year, seven were Japanese, with five of them being manga creators. The only non-Japanese names in the top 10 were Thomas Erikson (3rd) and Andrzej Sapkowski (10th).
The top 20 lists featured familiar names such as Elena Ferrante, Jo Nesbo, Paulo Coelho, and Haruki Murakami. Additionally, new faces emerged in the charts, including Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov.
While AI tools have been used by some translators to support their work, three-quarters of those surveyed believe the emerging technology will negatively impact their future income
More than a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI, a survey by the Society of Authors (SoA) has found. More than four in 10 translators said that their income has decreased because of generative AI, while more than three-quarters believe the emerging technology will negatively affect their future income.
The SoA, the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, ran the survey in January. It found that 37% of translators had used generative AI to support their work, and 8% used it because they were asked by their publisher or commissioning organisation.
Thomas Bunstead, whose translations from Spanish include The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo, said it is important to draw a distinction between literary translators and “commercial” translators. “Though a third of translators have responded to the SoA survey saying they think they’ve lost work to AI already, literary translation remains in the hands of humans,” he said. “The work that has presumably been handed over to AI will be the kind of uncomplicated bread-and-butter stuff which doesn’t require so much nuance,” such as instruction manuals.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the body in charge of developing and publishing international standards, has published a new standard on evaluation of translation output.
ISO 5060 is the result of four years of work conducted by the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 technical committee for translation, interpreting and related technology, and the 18th document of this kind published by the unit (with a further seven being currently under development). Numerous experts on translation and quality evaluation formed part of the working group, with participants from more than 30 countries contributing to the creation of this new standard.
ISO certification brings an array of benefits for companies deciding to pursue it: increased sales and revenue, heightened efficiency, and improved quality of operations are usually expected as a result of certifying against a selected standard. Language service providers (LSPs) and others recognize compliance with ISO norms as a competitive advantage, allowing them to position themselves among top players in the industry.
How would you translate these phrases into another language? “There are those who know how to fill a dishwasher, and those who don’t care” and “¡El chat GPT me ha hecho una paella!”
Bursting with translation anticipation, a quirky UN contest has had translators, interpreters, students, and lovers of a good multilingual idiom challenge submitting entries from around the world to the 2023 St. Jerome Translation Contest.
On hiatus for three years, the contest is back and participants from across the world were limbering up for a new bout of linguistic gymnastics.
AI beware
A panel of expert judges have combed through entries for each language, looking for accuracy in conveying not only the meaning of a frustrating household task, artificial intelligence (AI), and a traditional Spanish dish, but also the nuances of the source text, as well as style, submitted by students to seasoned translators.
The goal as always is to make sure nothing is lost in translation.
“In spite of the rise of Google and AI, which are threatening the very existence of our profession, there is continuing interest in translation,” said one of the judges, a senior text revisor in the Russian section of the UN Office at Vienna.
“We were very pleased with the liveliness of the language of many translations; it seemed like most of the contestants had had the same kind of problem loading dishwashers, and some of them seem to have PTSD when recalling those feats,” he told the audience in Vienna at the official award ceremony on Wednesday.
The forthcoming language translation component won’t even require a drawn circle. Google says people will just have to long press the home button or the navigation bar and look for the translate icon. It’ll do the rest. The company showed the tech quickly translating an entire menu with one long press. Google Translate can already do this, though in a slightly different way, but this update means users won’t have to pop out of one app and into another just to check on something.
Samsung continues to break down language barriers and innovate communication for more users through Galaxy AI
Samsung Electronics today announced the upcoming expansion of three new languages for Galaxy AI: Arabic, Indonesian and Russian, as well as three new dialects: Australian English, Cantonese and Canadian French. In addition to the 13 languages1 already available, Samsung empowers even more Galaxy users around the world to harness the power of mobile AI. In addition to these new languages and dialects, Samsung plans to add four more languages later this year, including Romanian, Turkish, Dutch and Swedish, as well as the traditional Chinese and European Portuguese.
“Committed to democratizing mobile AI for all, Galaxy AI’s language expansion this year will allow even more Galaxy users to communicate beyond language barriers on a scale that is completely unique to Samsung,” said TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to innovate our technology and pioneer premium mobile AI experiences so that even more users are equipped with the right tools to unleash their unlimited potential.”
As San Francisco-based OpenAI just unveiled on Friday its Voice Engine tool, which can replicate people’s voices, in small commodity hub Yiwu, East China’s Zhejiang Province, people adopted a similar domestic artificial intelligence (AI) application to help engage with foreign traders in 36 different languages as early as in October 2023.
Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices, uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles that of the original speaker, said the company in a statement released on Friday.
Translation algorithms have greatly improved in recent years, but can they work on literature? Human practitioners of the art are not convinced
‘Translators are stage horses of enlightenment,” the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in the margin of one of his manuscripts. Two centuries later, the political scientist Steven Weber similarly compared translation to transportation: not of people and goods but of ideas and knowledge. Just as the world swapped horses for mechanical means of transport, multilingual communication has accelerated too – and now, with the use of AI tools, translation can happen faster than ever.
But faster doesn’t always mean better – the use of AI comes with various risks. This week the European parliament adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first comprehensive piece of AI legislation. It requires developers to be transparent about the data used to train their models, and to comply with EU copyright law.
The Ethical and Quality Concerns Raised by Improper Data Acquisition
In a digital world teeming with data, the art of language learning and its integration into the fabric of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands as an eclectic fusion of human insight and technical precision. As giants of the AI arena seek to harness the power of linguistic diversity, one mammoth challenge rears its head – the flood of web-scraped, machine-translated data that inundates the datasets of large language models (LLMs).
These data sources can potentially impact the sanctity of language learning, calling education technologists, AI data analysts, and business leaders to rally against the detrimental effects of opaque data origins in our AI future..
Sunnyvale residents who don’t speak English have a new way to engage and participate in city meetings.
The city is piloting an artificial intelligence-based translation service upon request for public meetings through Wordly. The technology offers live translation in more than 50 languages. Using AI is more cost effective and efficient than human translators, according to city officials.
“We have such diversity from cultures as well as language that trying to make sure we can overcome those barriers … is a great step forward in showing what cities can do to include residents who in the past have been left out,” Mayor Larry Klein told San José Spotlight.
On its website, Wordly advertises its work with a handful of other cities, such as Gilroy. Residents attending a Gilroy government meeting in person can scan a QR code to access Wordly translations in more than 30 languages.
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.”
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.
The translation news daily digest is my daily 'signal' to stop work and find out what's going on in the world of translation before heading back into the world at large! It provides a great overview that I could never get on my own.
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United States
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