Four years ago today, my personal journey in the practical implementation of Machine Interpreting started with a simple application -written in a rainy weekend just for fun- which is still available online for free at www.machine-interpreting.com. Try it out if you are curious! Now, commercial speech translation systems are completely different from that first naive…
Category: AI
The Clash of Interpretations
In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington introduced the world to the concept of “The Clash of Civilizations” (article available here) positing that future conflicts would be driven by cultural and religious differences. Fast forward three decades, and we are witnessing the surge of a similar kind of cultural clash—not as important as the one described by…
Enhance Interpreting Training with YouTube
Interpreting training relies on teachers providing students with suitable speeches to practice. Many times, trainers offer background information for preparation and transcripts of the originals for checking the quality of the rendition. The importance of training materials is demonstrated by the so-called repositories of speech curated by international organizations such as the European Union, with…
Challenges for machine interpreting in high-risk scenarios
Discussions on the impact of translation and interpreting technologies in the field of multilingual communication are more important today than ever. Technology is improving rapidly and will continue to do so in the years to come. Consequently, its use in a multitude of contexts is bound to increase. While in most cases the use of…
Leadership in Machine Interpreting
Machine interpreting is quickly becoming a part of our reality. It is expected to see broader adoption in the years ahead, driven by significant improvements in translation quality and other factors such as economic and societal changes. In this new era, it’s important to come to terms with a new state of affairs: spoken multilingual…
The ethical challenges of Machine Interpreting
Machine interpreting (MI), like any emerging technology, presents a range of ethical challenges that require careful consideration and governance. As a tool designed to enhance communication and understanding across language barriers, it has the potential to significantly and positively impact various areas of human life, contributing to easy and affordable accessibility and inclusiveness. However, its…
Defining Machine Interpreting
Automated spoken language translation is advancing quickly. This technology has various applications and use cases, each with subtle differences that can overwhelm many people. Despite this, understanding these nuances is crucial. That’s why I spent a significant part of my recent workshop “The State of Machine Interpretation” at GALA defining what Machine Interpreting is. In…
Having a professor at your fingertips? Is it possible?
I couldn’t resist the temptation and created a digital clone of myself, or more precisely, of the knowledge from my publications on #interpreting and #technology. Now, people can engage in natural language conversations with this virtual counterpart, asking questions about the few topics where I possess some expertise. From what I can discern, as the…
Machine Interpreting and Translation Universals
Today, we’ve made generally available the integration of a Large Language Model (LLM) into KUDO AI Simultaneous Speech Translator. To the best of my knowledge, this marks the first instance of Generative AI being incorporated into a real-life speech translation system. When I began experimenting with LLMs in speech translation, I was immediately struck by…
Situational Awareness in Machine Interpreting
Machine Interpreting, a subset of spoken language translation, is undergoing rapid advancements. The recent strides in this domain are particularly evident in the development of robust end-to-end systems. These systems utilize a singular language model to directly translate spoken content from one language to another. As impressive as this technology is, it currently finds its…