Slator - Language Industry News

New SAG-AFTRA Game Localization Contract Restricts AI Usage in Dubbing On November 14, 2024, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)  announced  an updated version of a previous agreement that covers the localization of  video game  projects produced in a non-English language. With approximately 160,000 members, SAG-AFTRA calls itself the “world’s largest union representing performers and broadcasters.” The union also represents voiceover artists, including those who provide dubbing.  As comics and gaming website Bleeding Cool  reported , the new Independent Interactive Localization Agreement is essentially an updated version of the base terms from the union’s Tiered Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement, plus  AI  protections. The new agreement is signed on a project-by-project basis by employers whose project was originally scripted in a language other than English, and whose intellectual ...

Google Says There’s a Better Way to Create High-Quality Training Data for AI Translation In an October 14, 2024  paper , Google researchers highlighted the potential of AI translations refined by humans or human translations refined by  large language models  (LLMs) as alternatives to traditional human-only references. Talking to Slator, Zhongtao Liu, a Software Engineer at Google, explained that their study addresses a growing challenge in the translation industry: scaling the collection of high-quality data needed for fine-tuning and testing  machine translation  (MT) systems.  With translation demand expanding across multiple languages, domains, and use cases, traditional methods that rely solely on human translators have become increasingly expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale. To address this challenge, the researchers explored more efficient approaches to collect high-quality translation data. They compared 11 different approaches — including ...