Author: paige laevy

A language model was learning to think in two languages simultaneously somewhere in a research lab attached to the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer. failing to translate between them. pondering. Hi-NOLIN, a 9-billion-parameter English-Hindi bilingual model developed by the small Indian startup Nolano, relies heavily on this distinction.AI—one of the more covertly ambitious open-source AI initiatives in recent years. Over 600 million people speak Hindi. It is associated with a vast living culture, a sophisticated grammar, and centuries of literary tradition. However, no open-source large language model had made a serious effort to assist Hindi speakers at a level that English…

The way London’s literary community handles its translators is both ridiculous and illuminating. They are both everywhere and nowhere; they are named in small print on spines, thanked at prize ceremonies on occasion, and seldom given any serious consideration. Michael Hofmann is more familiar with this than most, having translated almost eighty books from German into English. Additionally, he is aware that he has been fortunate compared to others, which typically makes him feel bad. Born in Freiburg in 1957, Hofmann and his family relocated to England when he was four years old. He doesn’t recall ever learning English. German…

When a Latino professional reaches a certain point in American life, something peculiar occurs. The degrees are framed. The title is well-deserved. The pay exceeds six figures. Additionally, the Spanish becomes quieter at some point. Not completely gone, but muted—spoken only at family get-togethers, whispered into a grandmother’s phone, and completely avoided in meetings where it might raise an eyebrow or, worse, an assumption. Hispanic lawyers, doctors, and executives who developed their careers by becoming so proficient in English that their Spanish began to feel like a liability may have the most painful understanding of this paradox of any group.…

Recently, Monica Sanchez, a 911 dispatcher in Marfa, Texas, a small desert town where the closest trauma center is more than an hour away and the air smells like creosote, received a call from a frantic Spanish-speaking resident who described a stomach ailment. The caller used a regional term that Sanchez had never heard before; it was derived from a dialect that was older and thicker than the border Spanish she had grown up speaking in New Mexico. That would have required calling a third-party translation line, entering a passcode, waiting on hold, and hoping the caller didn’t hang up…

Late last year, something strange occurred on YouTube. A few English-language podcasters with small fan bases—perhaps a few hundred thousand subscribers—began to notice an increase in comments in Portuguese and Spanish. Not spam. Real listeners, real engagement, responding to episodes they shouldn’t have been able to comprehend. It turned out that automated dubbing was the cause. A tech review show that was recorded in an Austin bedroom was suddenly being listened to in São Paulo thanks to YouTube’s covert rollout of AI-driven multilingual audio tracks across hundreds of thousands of channels. It’s simple to write this off as a novelty,…

The soundscape is the first thing you notice when you walk through any primary school in Brent or Tower Hamlets on a Wednesday morning. Bengali phrases tangled with English instructions, Polish nursery rhymes humming beneath corridor chatter, Somali siblings switching registers mid-sentence without missing a step. By all accounts, London is among the world’s most linguistically diverse cities. For years, a reassuring story about bilingual kids’ superior cognitive abilities followed that density around like a faithful dog. more acute. faster. Even smarter. As it happens, that tale might have been made up. In a series of publications, including one in…

The man behind the counter drops his final s’s as if they weren’t even a part of the alphabet at a coffee shop on Calle Ocho where the cortadito is served in a small plastic cup. A Mexican taquería two blocks north is playing norteño music, and the owner rolls his Rs with such accuracy that a professor from Castile would cry. Additionally, a Puerto Rican barber in the Brickell area asks a customer about the guagua, which means a bus, while his Cuban neighbor either doesn’t use the word at all or uses it to mean something completely different.…

Communities that were told their languages didn’t belong in American classrooms experience a certain kind of frustration that develops gradually over decades. One could argue that it began when California’s Proposition 227 was passed in 1998, destroying bilingual education for almost twenty years. In Arizona, Massachusetts, and other places, it simmered during a period of English-only mandates. And now that frustration has evolved into something more structured, more intentional, and more difficult to ignore in school board meetings and state capitol hallways from Texas to Rhode Island. Every state in the nation is being pushed to implement mandatory bilingual education…

A group of engineers recently witnessed a medical language model perform a seemingly straightforward task in a research lab at MBZUAI, the first university in the world devoted solely to artificial intelligence. A specialist’s report written in complex clinical English was fed into the model, which translated it into conversational Arabic that a patient might actually understand rather than formal Arabic. The result wasn’t flawless. However, it was surprisingly close, and the researchers understood what that meant: even though it was still frustratingly wide, the gap between English-dominant AI and everything else was closing. One of the most costly and…

One afternoon, an 82-year-old woman in Toledo, Ohio, answered her phone and heard her grandson pleading for assistance. He informed her that he had been arrested, that he needed eight thousand dollars to be released on bond, and that she shouldn’t tell his parents. She almost grabbed her handbag. It turned out that the grandson had been eating lunch in his mother’s kitchen the entire time, completely oblivious to the fact that a machine had used his voice to call his grandmother in a fictitious emergency. When she said she didn’t have the money, the phone clicked dead. Somehow, the…