Perplexity AI, Your Translation Research, Terminology and Review Assistant

I’ve just added to the “Other Presentations” page of this blog the presentation I recently gave on Perplexity AI at the AI in Translation Summit. 

What is Perplexity AI, and how can it help us?

A Perplexity query

Perplexity AI is an innovative search tool combining web searching with language models for concise, contextual answers.

Unlike traditional search engines, it gives conversational answers with citations, and, unlike AI tools like ChatGPT, it offers real-time web searching, with several advantages for translators, such as access to current information on specialized topics, helping us understand the context of our projects. It also helps in terminology research for domain-specific terms.

Perplexity can verify short translated segments by cross-referencing our translations against its search results, to identify potential errors, and the paid version has enhanced privacy features, allowing secure upload of confidential documents.

Perplexity helps gather contextual information and find references for our translations.
 
It provides us with detailed overviews of complex topics.
 
For example, if we are translating a legal document about international child custody laws, we can ask Perplexity for a summary with a query like "Summarize the differences between child custody laws in Italy and the US", and the system compiles a concise summary from various sources. 

Perplexity incorporates contextual information in its responses; this means that we can ask follow-up questions to dig deeper without repeating the background. For example, we might inquire what weight is given to children's wishes in custody decisions.
 
Perplexity provides citations, which allow us to verify the sources it finds for us; but remember that we should always cross-check crucial information. The best use for this system is as a starting point to guide our research, not as the sole source of information.
 
By leveraging Perplexity's real-time search and summarization functions, we can find better information on complex subjects, speeding up our background research. 

While Perplexity is a powerful tool, it's important to remember that, like all AI models, it may occasionally produce errors and hallucinations: it’s a helpful assistant, not a replacement for our expertise.

Los Angeles Review of Books and Yefe Nof Translation Residency

The Los Angeles Review of Books and Yefe Nof present the third year of their joint translation residency. Applications are open to emerging translators who have not yet published a book-length project.

 For more details, see the original announcement.

Italian and English installable or online dictionaries

I first wrote about the Italian bilingual and monolingual dictionaries available online some eighteen years ago. Since, however, such links are liable to change, with old sites disappearing and new ones taking their place, below is an up-to-date list of sites that offer English-Italian, Italian monolingual, and other Italian bilingual dictionaries.

• Picchi’s English-Italian dictionary (published by Hoepli) is available for free from La Repubblica website: Dizionari - La Repubblica. The same site also offers the Grande Dizionario di Italiano Hoepli and Hoepli’s Dizionario dei sinonimi.
• The current incarnation of the excellent Sansoni English-Italian dictionary (published by Rizzoli) is available online at the Corriere della Sera website: Dizionari e Traduttori - Corriere della Sera. The same web page also offers several other Italian monolingual dictionaries, like the Dizionario dei modi di dire and a Dizionario di citazioni, and Italian-Spanish, Italian-French and Italian-German and Latin-Italian bilingual dictionaries.
• The venerable Hazon English-Italian dictionary is available from the Garzanti website: Garzanti Linguistica, where you can also find Garzanti’s Italian monolingual dictionary and an Italian-French bilingual dictionary.
• The English-Italian bilingual dictionary I’m currently using most often is Ragazzini’s. You can subscribe to it on Zanichelli’s site (Dizionari online Zanichelli). From the same site you can subscribe to several other dictionaries, including Zingarelli (Italian monolingual), several specialized English-Italian bilingual dictionaries, and other bilingual dictionaries including Italian-Spanish, Italian-French, Italian-German, Italian-Russian, Italian-Arabic, Italian-Modern Greek, Italian-Chinese and Italian Japanese.
• Oxford-Paravia Concise English-Italian dictionary is available as a (paid) subscription from the MobySystems website.
• WordReference.com offers free access to a useful English-Italian dictionary, as well as several other online dictionaries.
• The eLexico.com website offers a wide range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, either via online subscriptions (generally more expensive than those available from Zanichelli), downloadable installable dictionaries, or both things combined. Among the dictionaries downloadable from eLexico.com are Picchi, Sansoni, and many others; unfortunately, the excellent Italian monolingual Devoto-Oli is no longer available for individual subscription, though it is offered for multi-user subscriptions.
• While the bilingual dictionaries offered by eLexico include Marolli’s Grande Dizionario Tecnico Inglese, it is cheaper to buy it as a Windows app from this link.
• Lexicool.com lets the user search many dictionaries. You can find Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as many other linguistical resources. 
• The Treccani website offers access to the Enciclopedia italiana online, to the Italian language Vocabolario, and to a good Italian synonyms dictionary. 
• Il Nuovo De Mauro is a very useful Italian monolingual dictionary and can be consulted for free online.
• Francesco Urzì’s indispensable Dizionario delle Combinazioni Lessicali is available as a (paid) online resource. 
• Finally, for those of us who try to resist the tide of useless, redundant (and often misleading and incorrect) anglicisms in Italian, Antonio Zoppetti offers il dizionario delle Alternative agli Anglicismi, significati e sinonimi in italiano.

How to access Microsoft terminology now that Microsoft shut down its Language Portal

On June 30, Microsoft closed the Microsoft Language Portal. For at least a few weeks before that, a message appeared on the Portal, with links from which the users could download Microsoft Terminology and Style Guides.

Those links disappeared with the Portal, but it is still possible to download the style guides and access both terminology and the UI strings: 

See below:

• An article that explains how to access various Microsoft language resources
• Links to download style guides in many languages 
• Search the terminology
• Search the UI strings 

The interface provided to search the terminology and UI strings is Microsoft Power BI, a “unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI)”. 

Whether the access to terminology and UI strings through Power BI is temporary or permanent is unknown.

Subscribers to MSDN platforms used to be able to download all UI strings and terminology. I don’t know if that is still true.

MTPE of Poor Quality Source Texts: Some Practical Suggestions

To achieve the best MT results, you should first correct the source text, when it is a scanned hard copy or an automatic transcription of recorded speech. Here are a few practical suggestions:

• Choose the correct settings before running OCR. In particular, select the correct source language (you’ll see better suggestions during verification), select the correct graphic resolution for each page and the correct text direction for each piece of text, and de-skew and clean each page that requires it. Verification should be run by someone familiar with both the source language and the subject.
• Correct misspelled or wrongly transcribed words.
• Add “[sic]” after any word that you cannot identify and that you suspect is an artifact of the OCR process. This helps the post-editor focus on problem areas.
• Capitalize proper nouns and acronyms.
• Lower case incorrectly capitalized words.
• Reassemble sentences broken up by periods (hard returns) or new lines (soft returns).
• Feed the source text to the MT engine only after completing such corrections; doing otherwise will yield substandard results and will take longer to post-edit.

When the source text is good, you can skip pre-editing, but, when it is questionable or poor, pre-editing enhances the quality of the resulting machine translation and helps the post-editor achieve the desired quality.