Stimulus funding for translation?

While Washington, DC works on an economic stimulus bill for the entire United States, lawmakers in Vermont are drafting one of their own. And, according to local CBS affiliate WCAX, it may include additional funding for more translation.

SDL adds features

SDL has added content insight, expanded options for adaptation, and automated quality assessment to the localization provider’s existing machine translation (MT) tech.

Slator LSP index released

Slator has released its 2021 index listing language services providers (LSPs) by last year’s annual revenue. The report came out the same day as the Nimdzi 100, a similar report from MultiLingual‘s parent company. While both use income to determine an LSP’s rank, they do not have the same results. Some companies on Nimdzi’s list do not appear at all on Slator’s and vice-a-versa.

NCIHC survey on covid-19 & interpreters

The National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) is asking US-based medical interpreters to complete this survey on how covid-19 has impacted language access and the profession.

Complaint about interpreter pay “ridiculous,” MLB player says

The Seattle Mariners pays its Japanese interpreter $75K a year, a fact we shared in February 26th’s Weekly Shorts. This figure was made public after the Major League baseball team’s chief executive officer complained about the cost to newspaper The Seattle Times. Anthony Rizzo, first baseman for competing team Chicago Cubs, has since called the comment “kind of ridiculous”: “A lot of guys, when you put the mic and camera in front of their face, that aren’t used to talking a lot and not used to the English language need that help,” Rizzo told NBC Sports, “and it’s no knock on them, a lot of guys speak really good English. But if they need the help, they need to help.”

Sprechen Sie covid?

Linguistic research group Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache has compiled a list of the many words covid-19 and its resulting lockdowns have added to the German language.

Cat translation?

A March 1st article on information site Make Use Of (MUD) took a deep dive into the technology behind cat translation apps that claim to translate “cat speak” into human English. Surprisingly, the science follows the same natural language processing (NLP) base as many machine translation (MT) tools today: Speech — or “meow” — recognition.