Slator - Language Industry News

Joining SlatorPod this week is   Steven Piantadosi , Associate Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley. Steven also runs   the computation and language lab   (colala) at UC Berkeley, which studies the basic computational processes involved in human language and cognition. Steven talks about the emergence of  large language models  ( LLMs ) and how it has reshaped our understanding of language processing and language acquisition. Steven breaks down his March 2023 paper, “ Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language ”. He argues that LLMs demonstrate a wide range of powerful language abilities and disprove foundational assumptions underpinning Noam Chomsky’s theories and, as a consequence, negate parts of modern. Steven shares how he prompted  ChatGPT  to generate coherent and sensible responses that go beyond its training data, showcasing its ability to produce creative outputs. While critics argue that it is merely an endless sequence o...

  Large language models  (LLMs) have demonstrated   impressive machine translation (MT) capabilities , but new research shows they can generate different types of hallucinations compared to traditional models when deployed in real-world settings.  The findings, published in a  paper  on March 28, 2023, included evidence that the hallucinations were more prevalent when translating into low-resource languages and out of English and that they can introduce  toxic  text. Hallucinations present a critical challenge in MT, as they may damage user trust and pose serious safety concerns, according to a  2022 research paper , though studies to improve the detection and mitigation of hallucinations in MT have been limited to small models trained on a single English-centric language pair. This has left “a gap in our understanding of hallucinations […] across diverse translation scenarios,” explained Nuno M. Guerreiro and Duarte M. Alves from the  U...

  Since  OpenAI  launched  ChatGPT  in November 2022, headlines have asked whether workers in a range of fields should worry about being replaced by the advanced AI chatbot. Now, a January 2023 paper from a Chinese tech company,  Tencent , asks the  question on behalf of the language industry : Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? The Tencent team goes about answering the question by reviewing, shall we say, a limited set of data. The team said “obtaining the translation results from ChatGPT is time-consuming since it can only be interacted with manually and can not respond to large batches. Thus, we randomly sample 50 sentences from each set for evaluation.” So, let’s see what insights the team gathered by evaluating those 50 sentences. According to the  paper , ChatGPT performs “competitively” with commercial machine translation (MT) products, such as  Google Translate ,  DeepL , and Tencent’s own system, on high-resource European langua...

  In response to soaring content localization needs, online streaming giant Netflix launched a recruitment drive to attract fresh translation talent in March 2017. The program, named  Hermes, was billed as “the first online subtitling and translation test and indexing system  by a major content creator,” and was advertising the fact that “​Netflix is Looking for the Best Translators Around the Globe.” At that time, Netflix movies were being translated into more than 20 languages, and the scale of the localization was on overdrive following the launch of the service globally just a year earlier in January 2016. By March 2018, one year after the Hermes launch, Netflix had issued a  statement on its website  to announce that the program was being closed. The notification read: “we have reached our capacity for each one of the language tests due to the rapid popularity and response from applicants all over the world. Therefore we are closing the platform to future t...

  In a tough year for global stock and bond markets against a backdrop of rising interest rates, only a couple language service providers (LSPs) were able to buck the downtrend. Zoo Digital  tops the list again in 2022. The multimedia localization company started the year with a 5% stock price increase and was up by 14% as January ended. Stocks continued their steady climb past the end of Q2, ending with a share price of USD 178 (+33%). The company boldly announced in September that it expects a revenue increase of 89% from the same period in 2023. In a year that saw global markets tumble across the board, it is no surprise that LSPs except Zoo Digital and, notably,  Honyaku Center , shed value in 2022. Japan’s largest LSP came in at a second place, rising a mere 8% over the year. 2022 Performance of Listed LSPs Game localizer  Keywords Studios  had a good year, with five new acquisitions (59 to date) and a revenue increase of 36.7%. The company’s Globalize divi...