BOLT image courtesy SRI International

"Machine translation technology has made major progress over the past decade," said Jing Zheng, Ph.D., leader of SRI's BOLT initiative and program director in SRI's Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory.

"Now we will work on fundamental breakthroughs to move from memorizing the surface forms of language to understanding the underlying meanings," Zheng continued.

SRI will lead research activities with the goal of developing systems that accurately translate foreign languages and extract information regardless of genre and media. These technologies are intended to facilitate bilingual conversations with instant interpretation and automatic clarification.

SRI has a strong record of delivering breakthrough technologies in artificial intelligence and complex language-processing systems for DARPA.

Decades of SRI research in artificial intelligence, including leadership of the largest known artificial intelligence project in U.S. history (CALO), led to the development of the groundbreaking virtual personal assistant technology called Siri. Siri was acquired from SRI by Apple in 2010.

SRI's speech and translation work includes research under DARPA's Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program to develop computer software that translates and analyzes huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, and under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program to enable two-way communication between U.S. warfighters and speakers of other languages.

To achieve the objectives of the BOLT program, SRI researchers will build upon many of the linguistic resources and technologies developed for the GALE and TRANSTAC programs.

Photo courtesy english.ahram.org.eg

According to the UNESCO Index Translation, Arabic translation has been so low to the extent that, out of top 50 languages it is the 17th language being translated to other languages, and 29th target language (translations to Arabic).

A one-day workshop, organized in cooperation with the EU Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) organization, was held to explore the reasons behind this huge gap. Translators, publishers and supporting organizations discussed the challenges facing the trade and brainstormed solutions to move forward with the translations into and from Arabic.

The main reasons given behind the poor conditions in the field of Arabic translation were the translator’s lack of proficiency in the language, the poor quality of contracts leading to unfair remuneration, and how these discourage many talented young people from making this their life career.

Alexandra Buchler, representing LAF at the workshop, offered the following observation.

"Regarding translation grants, covering costs of translation and sometimes production costs and promotion costs, the rules expected are related to quality, copyright holding, marketing and distribution plan and contracts, plus proof of payment, for the translator."

Workshop panelists further concluded that in order for Arabic to reach a higher stage in translation, much more work and funding is required.

The average publisher or translator cannot be expected to handle this all on their own. Instead more public support is required, starting with increased education and resources, including enhanced business expertise and market knowledge.

Courtesy amazon.com

The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards (BTBA) for fiction and poetry were announced during a ceremony held on May 4 at McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

In fiction, the winning title was Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books. The poetry winner was Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, published by Omnidawn Publishing.

The award event was part of the PEN World Voices Festival, a series of literary events in New York City featuring authors from around the world.

“It’s extremely satisfying to be able to give these authors and translators such a significant cash prize,” said BTBA co-founder Chad W. Post, “and it’s especially pleasing to do so in this environment — at such a great bookstore, during such a great festival.”

The BTBA is organized by Three Percent of the University of Rochester and is the only prize in the United States that recognizes international works of literature in translation. For the second year, the prize is supported by Amazon in the amount of $20,000. The prize money is distributed between the winning authors and translators.

Photo posted on LA Times story

The last few years have seen a growing demand for language interpreting services, driven partly by an increase in immigration to the U.S. over the last few decades, but also because of a recent boom in international business transactions with countries such as China, Japan, India and South Korea. In fact, more than 2,600 translation and interpreting companies now make up what is estimated to be a $3-billion industry, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The L.A. Times reports that the number of U.S. residents who speak a language other than English at home has more than doubled in the last three decades, a pace four times as fast as the nation's population growth, according to a new census report analyzing language data from 1980 to 2007.

During that period, the percentage of speakers of non-English languages grew 140% while the nation's overall population grew 34%.

Moreover, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, from 2000 to 2010, the amount of foreign investments made in the U.S. actually tripled, and more than 5% of the nation's workers are now employed by firms that are majority-owned by foreign entities.

As a result, businesses that offer translating and interpreting services, including ours, Language Translation, Inc., are positioned to meet the exploding demand.

Alex Dupont

Voci™ Technologies Inc. has announced that it has been selected by the United States Army to develop a prototype system to perform language identification of six target languages in real time, and in a single pass. The languages include Arabic, English, Farsi, Iraqi Arabic, Pashto, and Urdu.

The Voci system will be a pre-processor for automatic translation of the target languages into English. It will accurately identify the language spoken for automated translation systems to be correctly configured to decode the speech. Fast identification and translation of languages is becoming a critical component of the US Army Warfighter program.

Voci will leverage language identification technology in existing Voci products that address call center and text analytics applications, and all other business intelligence applications seeking to extract insights from big data.

The benefits envisioned for commercial applications include automatic routing of calls based on the language of the caller and automating the selection of the speech recognition models for speech-to-text conversion based on each caller's language.