Metaglossia: The Translation World

Routledge Translation Studies Portal...

Voci(TM) Technologies Inc. announced today that it has been selected by the United States Army to develop a prototype system to perform language identification of six target languages in real time, and in a single pass. The languages include Arabic, English, Farsi, Iraqi Arabic, Pashto, and Urdu. The Voci system will be a pre-processor for automatic translation of the target languages into English. It will accurately identify the language spoken for automated translation systems to be correctly configured to decode the speech. Fast identification and translation of languages is becoming a critical component of the US Army Warfighter program.

Voci will leverage language identification technology in existing Voci products that address call center and text analytics applications, and all other business intelligence applications seeking to extract insights from big data. The benefits envisioned for commercial applications include automatic routing of calls based on the language of the caller and automating the selection of the speech recognition models for speech-to-text conversion based on each caller's language.

In the mid of the 20th century, Jamal Nebez said that ‘Translation is an Art’. Today, however, translation has become an independent scientific discipline after the translation scholar, James Holmes, laid the foundation of the Translation Studies represented in his now classic article ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, and presented in the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen in 1972. Today, translation has a great status in the global media, in introducing cultures and building bridges between different languages and nations. It is again through translation that the United Nations and European Union put forward a great deal of the world politics. In this article, we shall discuss the role and status of translation in the Kurdish media, we specifically aim to answer the following questions:

1. To what extent has the Kurdish media been successful in utilising the role of translation to enhance the media output?

2. How is the quality of translation in the Kurdish media?

3. Does ideology play any role in the translation like other aspects of society?