Slator - Language Industry News

On February 5, 2025, a team of researchers from Grenoble Alpes University and   Lingua Custodia , a France-based company specializing in   AI   and   natural language processing   (NLP) for the finance sector,   introduced   DOLFIN, a new test set designed to evaluate document-level   machine translation   (MT) in the   financial domain . The researchers say that the financial domain presents unique challenges for  MT  due to its reliance on precise terminology and strict formatting rules. They describe it as “an interesting use-case for MT” since key terms often shift meaning depending on context. For example, the French word couverture means blanket in a general setting but hedge in financial texts. Such nuances are difficult to capture without larger translation units. Despite strong research interest in document-level MT, specialized test sets remain scarce, the researchers note. Most datasets focus on general topics rather...

How do US actor Sylvester Stallone, France’s minister for gender equality Aurore Bergé, and a multilingual/multibillion voice AI company collide in a tense drama? Since early January 2024, multiple online media sources have highlighted a clash that began with   news   that “Armor,” a film starring Stallone, would feature AI dubbing. For 50 years, Alain Dorval was the familiar voice of Stallone in French-dubbed films, but he passed away in February 2024. Minister Bergé happens to be Dorval’s daughter. Enter  ElevenLabs , which in January 2024  reached a USD 3bn valuation , and found itself at the center of a weeks-long controversy over the cloning of Dorval’s voice. Bergé  publicly opposed  (article in French) the use of her father’s digitally recreated voice, despite acknowledging a prior agreement to a test. “It was just a trial run, with an agreement strictly guaranteeing that my mother and I would have final approval before any use or publication. And th...