Android Police: Google Translate gets offline translation for 33 more languages. “Google has just expanded the offline translation functionality to a whopping 33 new languages, as announced by the company in a blog post.” From Basque to Zulu, full list in the post.
MakeUseOf: What Language Is This? 5 Tools to Identify Unknown Languages. “If you’ve come across a language you can’t identify, it might drive you crazy until you figure out what it is. Even if you don’t speak multiple languages, it’s useful to know what a language is just by looking at it. Let’s look at some language finder services to help you identify which language you’re looking at in an image or text.”
MakeUseOf: 4 Ways to Have Alexa Translate Languages. “Through the power of AI, Amazon Alexa has evolved to become the voice assistant that seems like it can do everything. And it’s not just limited to telling you the latest weather updates and turning your lights off. Alexa can also be used as an effective translation tool. We’ll show you a number of ways that Alexa can translate words, phrases, and even whole conversations.”
Firefox Add-Ons Blog: Translate The Web Easily With A Browser Extension. “Online translation services provide a hugely valuable function, but for those of us who do a lot of translating on the web, the process is time-consuming and cumbersome. With the right browser extension, however, web translations become a whole lot easier and faster. Here are some fantastic translation extensions for folks with differing needs.”
Mozilla Blog: Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot. “In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private.”
Washington Examiner: Meet the publisher bringing JRR Tolkien and military manuals to Ukraine’s readers. “[Oleh] Feschowetz did not enter the book industry to promote military expertise. He left a senior post in the philosophy department at the nearby Ivan Franko National University more than two decades ago on a ‘mission to return Ukraine to the Western civilization’ — a goal reflected in the selection of poetry, philosophy, and literature available in his catalog. And yet, the martial texts only sharpened the edge of the publisher’s broader efforts. ‘Because Russia always interpret[s] the culture just like a weapon,’ he said in another conversation. ‘We must do the same. Culture is a weapon.’”
The Intercept: Google Ordered Russian Translators Not To Call War In Ukraine A War. “IN EARLY MARCH, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effective immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients.”
STAT News: Doctors often turn to Google Translate to talk to patients. They want a better option. “‘I do think it is the future,’ said Breena Taira, a clinical emergency medicine researcher at UCLA Health whose recent study evaluated Google-translated discharge instructions in seven languages. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which have invested heavily in voice recognition software, have expressed interest in exploring medical translation. ‘We just have to be really aware of what the limitations are,’ Taira said, including significantly lower accuracy rates for languages that aren’t widely spoken.”
CZ Expats: Czech TV to begin nightly news broadcast in Ukrainian. “As of Saturday evening, Czech Television will broadcast its nightly evening news program Události (Events) with simultaneous Ukrainian translation, Czech Television spokesperson Karolína Blinková has announced…. The live broadcast will take place at 7:00 p.m. nightly, along with the translated version. After the broadcasts begin, Czech Television will also create an online database containing an archive of previous news broadcasts in Ukrainian.”
9to5 Google: ‘Aloud’ from Area 120 wants to make dubbing YouTube videos just a minutes-long process . “The latest project from Area 120, Google’s house incubator, is called ‘Aloud,’ and it lets YouTube creators ‘quickly and easily dub their videos into multiple languages.’…Aloud leverages Google’s audio separation, machine translation, and speech synthesis capabilities to create a dubbed voice track.”
Search Engine Journal: Google Updates Some Searches With Translated Results. “Google added documentation for what appears to be a new feature called Translated Results. Translated Results is a feature that will automatically translate and rank web pages that are in a different language than the language of the user and then publish the title and snippet in the translated language. This change does not affect all languages and is currently rolled out in only six languages.”
Microsoft Research Blog: Microsoft Translator: Now translating 100 languages and counting!. “Today, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft Translator has added 12 new languages and dialects to the growing repertoire of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, bringing us to a total of 103 languages! The new languages, which are natively spoken by 84.6 million people, are Bashkir, Dhivehi, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian (Cyrillic), Mongolian (Traditional), Tatar, Tibetan, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek (Latin).”
Engadget: Google Meet is testing live translated captions. “Google Meet’s latest beta feature could help make video conferences with foreign clients, partners, students and employees go more smoothly. The tech giant has started testing live translated captions for the program, which is a step up from Meet’s standard live captions. It will initially support meetings conducted in English that it can translate into Spanish, French, Portuguese and German.”
BetaNews: Startpage launches its privacy-centric Google Translate alternative, Private Language Translator . “Private Language Translator serves as a direct competitor to Google Translate, making it easy to translate between over one hundred languages. Whether you’re looking to translate a single word, or an entire sentence, the translation tool can automatically detect 109 languages, but it is also possible to manually select one if you prefer.” Note that the tool only translates text strings – it does not yet translate entire pages.
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Ubergizmo: YouTube Testing Out Instant Translation For Comments
Ubergizmo: YouTube Testing Out Instant Translation For Comments. “…according to a report from Android Police, it seems that YouTube is testing out a new instant translation feature for the comments section. Unfortunately, this seems to be a feature that might only be available to YouTube Premium subscribers as the test is only for those who are subscribed to the service.” I was given the opportunity to look at this as a YouTube Premium subscriber. However, the feature was for phone apps only and I was desktopping it.