Translation
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Zoom to acquire German startup to bring real-time translation to meetings
As companies expand worldwide and meet online in tools like Zoom, the language barrier can be a real impediment to getting work done. Zoom announced that it intends to acquire German startup Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions or Kites for short, to bring real-time machine-learning-based translation to the platform.
The companies did not share the terms of the deal, but with Kites, the company gets a team of top researchers, who can help enhance the machine-learning translation knowledge at the company. “Kites’ talented team of 12 research scientists will help Zoom’s engineering team advance the field of [machine translation] to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multilanguage translation capabilities for Zoom users,” the company said in a statement.
The deal appears to be an acqui-hire as the company adds those 12 researchers to the Zoom engineering group. It intends to leave the team in place in Germany with plans to build a machine-learning translation R&D center with additional hires over time as the company puts more resources into this area.
While the Kites website reveals little about it other than an address, the company’s About page on LinkedIn indicates that the startup was founded in 2015 by two researchers who taught at Carnegie Mellon and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with the goal of building machine-learning translation tooling.
“The Kites mission is to break down language barriers and make seamless cross-language interaction a reality of everyday life,” the LinkedIn overview stated. It claims to be among a handful of companies, including Google and Microsoft, to have developed “leading speech recognition and translation technologies,” which would suggest that Zoom has acquired some key technologies.
It does not appear the company had a commercial product, but the site does indicate that there is a machine-learning translation platform that is in use in academia and government. Regardless, the fruits of the company’s research will now belong to Zoom.
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Lokalise raises $6 million to make it easier to localize your product
Meet Lokalise, a Latvian startup that focuses on translation and localization of apps, websites, games and more. The company provides a software-as-a-service product that helps you improve your workflow and processes when you need to update text in different languages in your product.
The company just raised a $6 million funding round led by Mike Chalfen, with capital300, Andrey Khusid, Nicolas Dessaigne, Des Traynor, Matt Robinson and others also participating.
When it’s time to ship an update, many companies waste time at the last minute as they still need to translate new buttons and new text in other languages. It’s often a manual process that involves sending and incorporating files with long lists of text strings in different languages.
“As a matter of fact, the most popular tools used in localisation processes are still Excel and Google Sheets. Next come internally-built scripts and tools,” co-founder and CEO Nick Ustinov told me.
Lokalise is all about speeding up that process. You can either manually upload your language files or integrate directly with GitHub or GitLab so that it automatically fetches changes.
You can then browse each sentence in different languages from the service. Your team of translators can edit text in the Lokalise interface. As a web-based service, everybody remains on the same page.
Image Credits: Lokalise
Some productivity features let you collaborate with other team members. You can comment and mention other people. You can assign tasks and trigger events based on completed tasks. For instance, Lokalise can notify a reviewer when a translation is done.
When everything is completed, you can use Lokalise to dynamically deliver language files to your mobile apps using SDKs and an API, or you can simply upload to an object storage bucket so that your app can fetch the latest language file from a server.
If you’re a small company and don’t have a team of translators, Lokalise lets you use Google Translate or a marketplace of professional translators. It works with Gengo or Lokalise’s own marketplace. There are some built-in spelling and grammar features to help you spot the most obvious errors.
“Most customers work with internal or external individual translators or language service providers (LSPs) directly,” Ustinov said. “The SaaS product generates 90% of our revenue — the revenue breakdown between the SaaS product and the marketplace of translation services is 90%/10%.”
The startup now has 1,500 customers, such as Revolut, Yelp, Virgin Mobile and Notion. It currently generates $4 million in annual recurring revenue.
Overall, Lokalise solves a very specific need. It is probably overkill for many companies. But if you ship often and you have customers all around the world, it could speed up the process a little bit.
Image Credits: Lokalise
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Apple’s new Translate app works offline with 11 languages
Translation is an everyday smartphone task for millions of people, but outside a few minor features, Apple has generally ceded the capability to its rivals. That changes today with a new first-party iOS app called, naturally, Translate, which works with 11 languages, no internet connection required.
The app is intended for use with speech or short written sentences, not to translate whole web pages or documents. The interface is simple, with a language selector, text field and record button as well as a few extra widgets like favorites and a dictionary.
At launch Translate will support English, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese and Russian, with others to come. You simply select a pair of languages and paste or record a snippet of text or audio. The translation should show up immediately.
There’s also a landscape mode that further simplifies the interface:
Image Credits: Apple
The best part is that unlike many translation apps out there, Apple’s is entirely offline, meaning you can use it whether you have a good or bad signal, if you’re out in the middle of nowhere in a country where you don’t get service or if you’re just trying to save data.
There were no specific release details, so the app will probably appear when you upgrade to iOS 14.
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FB Messenger auto-translation chips at US/Mexico language wall
Facebook’s been criticized for tearing America apart, but now it will try to help us forge bonds with our neighbors to the south. Facebook Messenger will now offer optional auto-translation of English to Spanish and vice-versa for all users in the United States and Mexico. It’s a timely launch given the family separation troubles at the nation’s border.
The feature could facilitate cross-border and cross-language friendships, business and discussion that might show people in the two countries that deep down we’re all just human. It could be especially powerful for U.S. companies looking to use Messenger for conversational commerce without having to self-translate everything.
Facebook tells me “we were pleased with the results” following a test using AI to translate the language pair in Messenger for U.S. Facebook Marketplace users in April.
Now when users receive a message that is different from their default language, Messenger’s AI assistant M will ask if they want it translated. All future messages in that thread will be auto-translated unless a user turns it off. Facebook plans to bring the feature to more language pairs and countries soon.
A Facebook spokesperson tells me, “The goal with this launch is really to enable people to communicate with people they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, in a way that is natural and seamless.”
Starting in 2011, Facebook began offering translation technology for News Feed posts and comments. For years it relied on Microsoft Bing’s translation technology, but Facebook switched to its own stack in mid-2016. By then it was translating 2 billion pieces of text a day for 800 million users.
Conversational translation is a lot tougher than social media posts, though. When we chat with friends, it’s more colloquial and full of slang. We’re also usually typing in more of a hurry and can be less accurate. But if Facebook can reliably figure out what we’re saying, Messenger could become the modern-day Babel Fish. At 2016’s F8, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw shade on Donald Trump saying, “instead of building walls, we can build bridges.” Trump still doesn’t have that wall, and now Zuck is building a bridge with technology.
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Google brings offline neural machine translations for 59 languages to its Translate app
Currently, when the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android has access to the internet, its translations are far superior to those it produces when it’s offline. That’s because the offline translations are phrase-based, meaning they use an older machine translation technique than the machine learning-powered systems in the cloud that the app has access to when it’s online. But that’s changing today. Google is now rolling out offline Neural Machine Translation (NMT) support for 59 languages in the Translate apps.
Today, only a small number of users will see the updated offline translations, but it will roll out to all users within the next few weeks.
The list of supported languages consists of a wide range of languages. Because I don’t want to play favorites, here is the full list: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian, Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh.
In the past, running these deep learning models on a mobile device wasn’t really an option since mobile phones didn’t have the right hardware to efficiently run them. Now, thanks to both advances in hardware and software, that’s less of an issue and Google, Microsoft and others have also found ways to compress these models to a manageable size. In Google’s case, that’s about 30 to 40 megabytes per language.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft also announced a similar feature for its Translator app earlier this year. It uses a very similar technique, but for the time being, it only supports about a dozen languages.
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SignAll is slowly but surely building a sign language translation platform
Translating is difficult work, the more so the further two languages are from one another. French-Spanish? Not a problem. Ancient Greek-Esperanto? Hard. But sign language is uniquely difficult because it is fundamentally different from spoken and written languages. All the same, companies like SignAll are working hard to make accurate, real-time machine translation of ASL a reality. Read More
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Bilingual? Tarjimly lets you help a refugee or aid worker right now
All over the world, language barriers are limiting the ability of refugees and immigrants to seek help, and aid workers to provide it. Tarjimly is a new service that connects people who speak one language but need to speak in another, with a person who speaks both — in just a couple minutes. They’re part of Y Combinator’s latest batch and are gearing up for a proper launch. Read More
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Timekettle’s WT2 real-time translation earpieces enable ordinary conversation across language barriers
At TechCrunch’s event in Shenzhen last month, we had a chance to test out the WT2, a clever and ambitious device from startup TimeKettle. It’s a pair of wireless earpieces; each person in a multilingual conversation wears one, and they translate what’s said into the language spoken by each participant. Essentially it’s a Babel fish, though admittedly a rough draft of one. Read More
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Microsoft’s Presentation Translator translates presentations in real time
A lot of what Microsoft is showing at its Build conference this week is squarely aimed at developers. But in the barrage of news about Azure, Visual Studio and .NET, the company also showed off a preview of a new add-in for PowerPoint that is aimed at everyday users. The Presentation Translator can automatically provide real-time translated subtitles or translate the text of their actual… Read More
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Quizlet launches a redesign with an eye towards international expansion
Quizlet, the popular app that lets students create interactive study sets and prepare for tests in any subject, is unveiling a redesign today, including a new website, logo and redesigned mobile apps soon to come. The new Quizlet was created with an eye on international expansion. The San Francisco edtech startup now offers translated and localized versions of its study tools in German,… Read More
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