Localization Today

Every day, we listen to music, enjoy our favorite shows, watch the news, listen to audiobooks and podcasts while driving or going to work — but these forms of media are not accessible for everyone.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually reserved for introductory college linguistics courses — but the debate surrounding it is an undeniably fascinating conversation for language professionals as well. 

Though some might describe machine translation as magic, academic translator and entrepreneur Christopher Reid pushes back on this notion.

Have you ever wondered how humans would communicate with extraterrestrial beings in an encounter between the two?

In conversation with  MultiLingual  editor-in-chief Cameron Rasmusson, CEO of Acolad Olivier Marcheteau talks a bit about what’s been keeping him and the company busy over the last few years.

If you’re a marketer who is tasked with building international marketing programs in many languages and finding it difficult, you’re definitely not alone. 

Bruno Hermann prefers to refer to localization as “global language operations,” a tendency that he says raises some eyebrows when he discusses it with other folks in the language service industry. 

Since returning home from this season's conferences, I have had time to reflect, and this article contains several common themes I noticed of how language entrepreneurs are solving the challenges presenting themselves in sales today.

While widely used  speech recognition tools  like Siri or Otter generally analyze audio alone, researchers have also made progress in developing visual speech recognition (VSR) models, which rely on visual input to identify what a speaker is saying.

On Nov. 22, the US Department of Health and Human Services  announced a $350 million initiative  to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates in underserved communities. That includes efforts to expand on translation and interpretation services to make the vaccines more accessible to individuals with limited English proficiency. 

Refugee crises across the globe this year — from the European Union to  Martha’s Vineyard  — have highlighted the importance of maintaining a large, diverse workforce of human translators and interpreters.

When officers arrived at the scene of a violent confrontation and questioned a bystander, they relied on a free machine translation tool to communicate with him. MultiLingual spoke with Utrilla last week to learn more about the case and how his testimony on speech technology and MT factored into the bystander’s eventual acquittal.

Evans Chebet, a long-distance runner who hails from Kenya, received a lot of attention not just for his impressive finish time at the NYC Marathon, but also because he spoke to the media in Kiswahili with the aid of a volunteer interpreter and his coach, rather than using English.

The government of Canada is currently investigating the conditions that led to a particularly bad case of acoustic shock in an interpreter working on Parliament Hill last month.

Zoom announced earlier this month that it’s added a new feature to make its video communication platform more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing users: a specialized view for sign language interpreting.

To promote language revitalization efforts among Native American communities and better understand the role children can play in such projects, the University of New Mexico (UNM) announced Tuesday that it’s launched the Indigenous Child Language Research Center.

You wouldn’t use Google Translate to churn out an English-language (or any language, for that matter) version of a novel like Gabriel García Márquez’s  Cien años de soledad  — or would you?

Have you ever considered the value of localizing for the  Listenbourg  market? According to Twitter, it’s a  beautiful , upwardly mobile region of western Europe that should be attractive for any brand seeking aggressive expansion.

Boeing announced Thursday that it has formed a partnership with Tarjimly — an app that allows refugees to access free language services — to help the app expand its reach.

Demand for dual-language immersion programs has been steadily increasing in the United States. The state of California just made a $10 million investment toward meeting that demand.

Straker Translations reported on Friday that it has earned $33 million NZD (19.37 million USD) in revenue during the first half of Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) — a 42% increase from the same period just one year before.

This post, originally posted by Claudio Fantinuoli of KUDO, was w ritten entirely by the GPT-3 AI without any editing.

Bolingo is back with three more installments in its African Country Guide series, in an effort to help localization professionals learn a bit more about how to best adapt content for Senegal, Tanzania, and Togo. While the guides won’t leave you an expert on these countries,  MultiLingual Magazine  staff writer Andrew Warner argues that they may still serve as a useful launching point to kickstart...

While 1-StopAsia’s book  Asian Language Translation  is a friendly and approachable work that provides an interesting and straightforward introduction to Asian languages for localization projects,  MultiLingual Magazine  reviewer William Dan worries that it veers into the territory of Orientalism and oversimplification. Still, he argues that it does have some merit for localizers who don’t have an...

In their book  The Language Game , linguists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater propose a series of novel concepts about the nature of language and how it’s developed. In his review of the book for  MultiLingual Magazine , Stefan Huyghe wholeheartedly recommends the book to language lovers looking to learn a bit more about how we acquire our first languages.