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.