Localization Today

The NAD’s Policy Institute recently conducted a study assessing the ASL access practices at each state’s press briefings, ranking them according to the visibility of interpreters and the frequency of their presence — just last month, the institute published its findings.

Easy access to the internet and smart devices have democratized learning. Knowledge is now just a click away because eLearning has harnessed the full power of the latest technologies. And language services have paved the way for exchange of information at a global level.

“Children easily acquire language from quantities of data that are modest by the standards of modern artificial intelligence (AI),” reads a paper published in Nature Communications earlier this week.

A popular application allowing users to access Google Translate directly from their desktop (as opposed to their browser) has turned out to be a “crypto miner malware campaign” that’s affected thousands of users across at least 11 countries.

To help ease the linguistic challenges for refugees from Central America and Mexico seeking asylum in the United States, a team of researchers at the University of Southern California is working on a project to develop machine translation for speakers of K’iche’, an Indigenous languages that’s in high demand within the US immigration courts.

In an analysis of the 50 most widely frequented gaming websites, BLEND found that nearly half offer a multilingual experience, with 48% supporting four or more languages.

Many of the words derived from Spanish entered North American English first, due to the complicated relationship between the United States and the former Spanish territories in Latin America, particularly Mexico. 

With a history in sound production, Andrea Ballista has been developing a groundbreaking voice technology that's attracted funding from the European Commission and subsequent attention from the localization and language technology communities, gaining a first place at the LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge (PIC).

Airgram, a Singapore-based company specializing in voice transcription, announced recently that it has closed its Series A funding round, having raised $10 million, as it prepares to launch in the North American market. 

As we attempted to reach out to Lionbridge regarding their cyber security breach, we got an out-of-office message from Jaime Punishill, Lionbridge’s CMO.