Localization Today

In its most recent call for submissions (which opens Monday, Jan. 9), the ICML included a note in its “Ethics” section prohibiting the use of text generated by ChatGPT and other LLMs, unless “presented as part of the paper’s experiential analysis.”

Knowing when to make a change in strategy is possible only when clients or prospects trust their provider enough to give honest feedback. And sometimes providers just try something new because they believe in it, and measure success as they do so. These are the trailblazers, but they do this at a huge risk — reputationally and financially. Marketing and experienced media agencies can help analyze markets, provide special opportunities, and recommend ways to stand out with your marketing.

A recent study published by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute found that Asian Americans with limited English proficiency (LEP) face unique language barriers compared to other groups with high levels of LEP.

Software is often the external face of the company. Many people interact with the company exclusively through the software. But what if your software biases some employees to be more successful than others?

Catalan has often been excluded from some social media platforms on the assumption that Catalan-speaking users would feel comfortable using the Spanish version. Recently, Plataforma per la Llengua (“Platform for the Language”) published the results of a market study conducted in Catalonia that sheds light on the possibility of companies such as LinkedIn and Instagram increasing their market penetration by incorporating Catalan into their platforms.

Organizations are adopting a data-driven culture in order to avoid falling behind their competitors and to see results. According to a Forrester report, data-driven companies “grow at a rate of more than 30% per year.”

After attending GALA 2022 this past April, Riteba McCallum was inspired to conduct a survey to determine just how useful professional translators think machine translation is in conducting their day-to-day tasks. Here, she shares the findings of her survey and what she thinks they might mean for the industry.

In her latest piece for MultiLingual magazine, Nataly Kelly talks to colleague Karolina Bujalska-Exner, senior marketing manager of international SEO at HubSpot, to gain some insights into how companies can develop an SEO strategy as they expand into new markets abroad.

While many business people might see a multilingual team as a challenge to overcome, Sophie Jackson thinks it’s the opposite — to her (and many others in our industry) it’s an asset. Here’s why.

In this piece, Nimdzi Insights co-founder Renato Beninatto dissects the concept of LangOps, identifying a handful of challenges he foresees for the term as it begins to catch on both within and without the language industry.

In this piece, Dr. Miguel Cerna of Verve Translations does a point-by-point analysis of a previous MultiLingual article on LangOps, providing critiques and commentaries on whether or not it’s actually “here to stay” as many others in the magazine have argued.

In the latest installment of his column “The Red List,” Tim Brookes has a candid and fascinating conversation with Gerry Leonidas, a professor in the Department of Typography at the University of Reading. The two discuss font creation and the challenges of localizing a font for a specific locale.

In the last installment of The Lab for the year, columnist Mark Shriner takes a look at the past year and predicts some trends in the field of life sciences for the coming year. Spoiler alert: Things are looking good for localization folks working in life sciences.

The phrase “LangOps” has received quite a bit of buzz lately, but where did it really come from? In this piece, MultiLingual staff writer Andrew Warner takes a look at the phrases’s origins and how it fits into the evolution of the localization industry.

In this column, KUDO co-founder and chief language officer Ewandro Magalhães tells the tale of Enrique — an enslaved person who served as Ferdinand Magellan’s interpreter in his quest to circumnavigate the world.

Sometimes things become reality if you only put the right label on it — in this piece, LT-Innovate board member Arthur Wetzel sets out to determine just what exactly LangOps means, and whether or not “LangOps” is the right label for it.

Each December, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) hosts its NORAD Tracks Santa program, allowing kids to track Santa’s exact location in real time. To spread the holiday cheer even further, NORAD and Interpreters Unlimited have partnered up to offer NORAD Tracks Santa in eight languages, making it more accessible to kids from different linguistic backgrounds.

Across the world, these last couple of weeks in the calendar year are jam-packed with holiday celebrations. As language enthusiasts, it’s fascinating to look at the etymology of the names for these celebrations — here are the origins of names for some common holiday celebrations throughout the world.

Recently, advocates in the US state of New Jersey raised concerns about the state not providing adequate language access services at community meetings on the environment, leading to low engagement levels among individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP).

At the eighth Google for India event earlier this week, Google announced a handful of new language technology developments that it’s rolling out in India.

A recent survey from CNN showed that 90% of adults in the United States believe the country is in the middle of a mental health crisis. This predicament seems particularly pronounced among children and adolescents — and even worse for children and adolescents who are immigrants or have limited English proficiency.

Nigeria is home to more languages than all but two countries on Earth. Still, primary school students in the West African nation have been educated mainly in English for decades, even after the country gained independence from the British Empire in 1960. That may be changing in the near future, though.

In the United States, the number of people who speak a language other than English at home is rising faster than those who mainly speak English.

If you’ve been watching the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, no doubt you can by now quote parts of the Frito Lays commercial featuring Peyton Manning and David Beckham.

The quality of machine translation (MT) is quickly approaching that of human translators, according to research published today by Translated.

As 2022 comes to a close, English-language dictionary publishers are selecting the words that best encapsulate the character and ambiance of the last 365 days.

Researchers at the international tech company NVIDIA recently developed an award-winning automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Telugu.

Duolingo now gives users insights into their language learning habits for the past year, all in the form of a neatly packed Instagram story-like widget. And following up on that personalized data, the company also released information on language learning trends among all of its users earlier this week in its 2022 Duolingo Language Report.

OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence laboratory behind the large language model (LLM) GPT-3 and the image generator DALL-E, launched a new tool on Wednesday: ChatGPT.

A five-day workshop at the University of Kashmir culminated in the completion of a nearly 4,000-word glossary of political science terminology translated into the Kashmiri language.

Almost four months after announcing it acquired the studio behind German-language dubs of Stranger Things and The Crown, Deluxe has announced another acquisition: Post Haste Digital, an audiovisual studio that specializes in English-language dubbing.

Often referred to as the biggest sporting event in the entire world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that broadcasters and organizers of the FIFA World Cup also have to take into account certain linguistic considerations when airing the games on television.

It can be easy to take our writing systems for granted — we don’t often have to think all that critically about the letters we use on a day-to-day basis, in part because they’ve been around for thousands of years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.