Lion’s Roar: 84000 Buddhist translation initiative launches “Save Wisdom Now” video campaign. “84000, a non-profit global initiative to translate the words of the Buddha into modern languages, has marked their tenth anniversary with a new video campaign titled ‘Save Wisdom Now’ that tells the story of the project. The organization is working to preserve the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, the world’s largest and oldest collections of writings with 230,000 pages ‘locked within the fading Classical Tibetan language.'”
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UCLA: UCLA creates multilingual website for coronavirus information
UCLA: UCLA creates multilingual website for coronavirus information. “It’s abundantly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has not hit all people equally, and part of that disparity is informational. Many communities have an increased vulnerability because of a lack access to official news, public health information and safety recommendations in a language other than English. To help remedy that, faculty from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the Asian American Studies Center quickly came together recently to launch TranslateCovid.org. This new website presents health and safety recommendations and other information in more than 40 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Armenian, Japanese and Vietnamese.”
Search Engine Journal: Google Translate Widget is Free Again for Some Websites to Use
Search Engine Journal: Google Translate Widget is Free Again for Some Websites to Use. “Google is again supporting the Google Translate website translator tool in an effort help people get the information they need amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Google had previously withdrawn support for this plugin, which gave site visitors a way to translate pages into 100+ languages for free.”
BBC: Web sleuths spot British Museum gaffe online
BBC: Web sleuths spot British Museum gaffe online. “The British Museum is updating its online collection after mistaking a copyright notice for the name of a Turkish postcard-printing company. The museum described ‘Her Hakki Mahfuzdur’ as ‘Turkey’s largest producer of postcards’. But a Turkish diplomat on Twitter pointed out the phrase means ‘all rights reserved’ – and is not the name of a stationery company.”
Times of India: Google Translate gets support for five new languages
Times of India: Google Translate gets support for five new languages. “Google translate help users by giving them perfect translations in different languages. The company has rolled out the latest update for the app which will make it useful for more people. Google has announced that it is adding five new languages to the Google translate app. This is the first expansion made by the company in the past few years.”
BBC: Can computer translators ever beat speaking a foreign tongue?
BBC: Can computer translators ever beat speaking a foreign tongue?. “Put crottin de chèvre into Google Translate, and you’ll be told it means goat dung. So if it appeared on a menu, you might pass. Alas, you would be ruling out a delicious cheese made of goat’s milk that is often served as a starter in France. Such misunderstandings are why Google admits that its free tool, used by about 500 million people, is not intended to replace human translators.”
Machine Non-Learning: The Chinese Words That Trip Up Google Translate (The Bejinger)
The Bejinger: Machine Non-Learning: The Chinese Words That Trip Up Google Translate. “Humankind now speaks more than 5,000 languages, which as anyone who has traveled or lived in a foreign country can attest to, makes life more interesting, if not at times several times more complicated. It is fairly common then for us to turn to translation tools for help, and Google Translate is probably one of the most trusted popular among them (despite the hurdles of the GFW). Yet when translating a language like Chinese – one that is radically different from the Latin language family – digital translators may not be savvy enough to provide a nuanced, reliable definition after all.”
The Verge: Google Translate will transcribe translations in real time on Android
The Verge: Google Translate will transcribe translations in real time on Android. “Google plans to add a live transcription feature to its Google Translate app for Android at some point in the future. The feature will allow users to record audio in one language and have it rendered in another in real time. It’s still in the prototype stage, but Google gave a demonstration of the technology during a series of artificial intelligence demos at its San Francisco office on Tuesday.”
Microsoft Translator Blog: Dia daoibh! Tá Gaeilge againn!
Microsoft Translator Blog: Dia daoibh! Tá Gaeilge againn!. “Our ongoing mission to break down language barriers continues with Irish: Today, we have added Irish Gaelic to Microsoft Translator. Irish Gaelic, usually referred to as the Irish Language or just Irish, and commonly known in Irish itself as Gaeilge (pronounced “gwael-guh”), is the latest addition to the Microsoft Translator family of languages. This brings Irish to all scenarios powered by Microsoft Translator, including Custom Translator, which helps customers to build translation systems for domain-specific terminology and style.”
BBC: Facebook blames ‘technical issue’ for offensive Xi Jinping translation
BBC: Facebook blames ‘technical issue’ for offensive Xi Jinping translation. “Facebook has apologised for translating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name from Burmese to English into an obscenity on its platform. The translation gaffe came to light on the second day of Mr Xi’s state visit to Myanmar.”
Passenger Terminal Today: JFKIAT announces Google partnership
Passenger Terminal Today: JFKIAT announces Google partnership. “Terminal 4 at John F Kennedy International Airport has become the first airport terminal in the world to partner with Google to bring the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode real-time translation technology to travelers.”
Google Blog: Google Translate improves offline translation
Google Blog: Google Translate improves offline translation. “When you’re traveling somewhere without access to the internet or don’t want to use your data plan, you can still use the Google Translate app on Android and iOS when your phone is offline. Offline translation is getting better: now, in 59 languages, offline translation is 12 percent more accurate, with improved word choice, grammar and sentence structure. In some languages like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi the quality gain is more than 20 percent.”
Neowin: Google Assistant’s Interpreter Mode is rolling out to phones today
Neowin: Google Assistant’s Interpreter Mode is rolling out to phones today. “Google announced Interpreter Mode earlier this year, rolling it out to Google Home and Assistant-powered Smart Displays some time later. As suggested by the name, Interpreter Mode permits users to communicate back and forth when they’re abroad and do not know the local language. Now the company has announced that it is rolling out this feature today to ‘Assistant-enabled Android and iOS phones worldwide.'”
Western Carolina University: Graduate student working to translate Cherokee language from native newspaper
Western Carolina University: Graduate student working to translate Cherokee language from native newspaper. “Constance Owl’s master’s degree thesis is more than a means to a graduate degree in American history. It’s a portal to understanding, and perhaps saving, a disappearing language. Owl, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who grew up in Cherokee County, is a second-year graduate student at Western Carolina University. She is working with local Cherokee language speakers, Tom Belt and Wiggins Blackfox, to translate portions of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, published from about 1828 to 1834 by Elias Boudinot, a formally educated Cherokee.”
VentureBeat: The Masakhane project wants machine translation and AI to transform Africa
VentureBeat: The Masakhane project wants machine translation and AI to transform Africa. “English, Arabic, and French dialects can be found on parts of the African continent and are used across tribes, ethnic groups, and national borders, but none is native to Africa. Some estimates put the number of living languages on the continent at 2,000 or more. This can stand in the way of communication as well as commerce, and earlier this year such concerns led to the creation of the Masakhane open source project, an effort being undertaken by African technologists to translate African languages using neural machine translation.”
