News

Small Languages in the (Machine) Translation World

To mark International Translators' Day on 30 September, a seminar organised by the University of Tartu and the European Commission focused on the upsides and downsides of machine translation, which is having ever more influence on the work of translators.

Machine translation: is it really an easier route?

Along with machine translation's more enticing aspects, an informative presentation by Mai Lehtpuu, Quality Officer of the Estonian Language Department of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation, also highlighted several of the problems that arise in regard to editing of machine translations. One concern is that translators' focus shifts from the content of the original text to that of the automatic translation. As a result, it can happen that the translation no longer corresponds to the original.

Does machine translation reinforce gender stereotypes?

In languages without gender pronouns, perhaps. Elizaveta Yankovskaya, a language technology researcher at the University of Tartu, concluded her presentation with a humorous example of how AI could reinforce gender stereotypes by making predictions based on statistical averages.
Consider a sentence in Estonian that was fed to a machine translation engine, which might be translated as: Anne can't make it to the cinema in the evening, because they work in construction and are very tired in the evenings. Being trained on thousands of other sentences, the engine predicted that Anne was a he, because most people working in construction are men.

Be careful: if AI doesn't know, it will try to guess!

Computer-assisted translation has been around for decades. Machine translation is a newer development and one that can't be ignored. The seminar, which featured experts such as Kristiina Suviste, consultant of the machine translation unit of the European Commission, called for vigilance to keep from succumbing to the pitfalls of machine translation, and emphasised the fact that AI is no substitute for humans in translation work.

Happy International Translation Day!

A&A Lingua has been a translation partner of the European Commission since 2004, the year Estonia joined the European Union. Since 2020, we have been working closely with two other translation agencies with similar experience, Discripta OÜ and Tõlkebroo Pangloss OÜ. For the second time, our consortium won the European Commission's Translation Procurement (TRAD23). The contract will run for the next four years.

Adding special significance to the achievement is the fact that this year is both the 20th anniversary of Estonian accession to the European Union and A&A Lingua's 25th anniversary.

To order a translation or other linguistic service from us, send us an email or use the price query form on our website.

26.06.2020

With economies reeling due to the global pandemic, we’re especially pleased to announce that A&A Lingua and two partners have been awarded a TRAD19 international translation contract from the European Commission.

Because of the volumes of work involved, we joined two other companies specializing in translations of European Union documents to bid on this contract. The consortium is made up of Discripta OÜ (leader), A&A Lingua OÜ and Tõlkebüroo Pangloss OÜ.

The contract start date is 1 July 2020.

A&A Lingua has been a translation partner of the European Commission since 2004

16.01.2019

Many companies are reluctant to hire an outside editor take a look at their ad copy, believing that they know best, but is this always wise?

The answer is no. Typos and awkward phrasing in key ad content could directly mean money lost for a company. Compared to the harm to reputation caused by a gaffe in a website or brochure, the cost of reprinting or rewriting is much lower, and prevention is best of all.

If you’ve spent years building your company’s trustworthiness and public image, you don’t want sloppiness to cause doubt to creep into the minds of your customers.

To make sure your essential content is grammatically correct, easy to read and free of errors, it’s best to let experts proofread or copy edit your company’s messaging.

A&A Lingua offers proofreading for ad copy in Estonian, Finnish, English, German and many other languages. Our editors are all native speakers of their respective languages.

To learn more or ask for an estimate, visit A&A Lingua’s website: https://www.lingua.ee/teenused/toimetamine-ja-korrektuur/

08.10.2018

We recently visited the European Language Resources Coordination (ELRC) to learn about exciting advances in language technology research, solutions and applications.

if you’re interested in languages and technology, the following links are worth a read.

https://keeleressursid.ee/et/eesti-keeleressursside-keskus The Centre of Estonian Language Resources makes digital Estonian language resources and technologies (software, dictionaries, text and speech databases, language databases) available for researchers as well as for anyone else with an interest in the field.

https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keeleressursid/konetootlusvahendid https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keeleressursid/tekstitootlusvahendid

Major strides are finally being made in the field of speech-to-text and text-to-speech in Estonian. Visit http://bark.phon.ioc.ee/ and https://www.eki.ee/heli/

Both speech-to-text and text-to-speech are a great help for the visually and hearing impaired. An example of Estonian-language subtitles converted to speech: https://www.eki.ee/heli/images/koduleht/isa_brown.mp4

A website called the Voice Recording Browser has a selection of transcriptions, such as Vikerraadio’s news program from the day before or Kuku Raadio’s midday talk show http://bark.phon.ioc.ee/tsab/p/index

As translators, we find the Institute of the Estonian Language’s databases of terminology for professional use https://term.eki.ee/termbases/index/ to be a useful resource and it is also fascinating to try out the latest neural net translation capabilities at http://neurotolge.ee/ , https://live.xn--neurotlge-v7a.ee/ and https://www.translate2018.eu/#/text

A few more sophisticated solutions:

https://metashare.ut.ee/ META-SHARE is an open, integrated, secure and interoperable sharing and exchange facility for LRs (datasets and tools) for the Human Language Technologies domain and other applicative domains where language plays a critical role;
https://www.texta.ee/ TEXTA makes your company’s document archive searchable and the information easy to manage.

And just for fun, here are a couple computer-based language games: https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keelemangud

Sources: The respective websites and A&A Lingua participants’ notes from the ELRC seminar, 3 October 2018