Hi folks!

Live translation is showing up everywhere this month — Claude’s voice mode, Threads Live Chats, DeepL in Google Meet, OpenAI’s GPT-Live, and even live commentary at a track and field championship. Sign language joined the mix too, with Google DeepMind’s SL2T landing on Pixel phones.

Our community shared fun projects too. We loved them! One app added High Valyrian. Another lets you read EPUBs with side-by-side translation. A third keeps character names and terms consistent when translating novels into Chinese.

Event season continues. AMTA, AAMT, and MT Marathon are coming up. There's a new Translation AI event at Tech Week in SF in October. And WMT is in November.

Enjoy — and share!

🗞️ News

• The US Congress is debating the Language Access for All Act, which would restore language-access requirements revoked in 2025 and stop AI from replacing human translators.

• Gartner features ModelFront in its 2026 Hype Cycle for Natural Language and Unstructured Content Technologies.

🚀 Launches

• Google DeepMind launches SL2T, a sign-language-to-text model that adds ASL dictation to Pixel 11’s Gboard and Live Transcribe.

• OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a voice model that replaces Advanced Voice Mode, listens and talks at the same time, and demoed live translation.

• Eurovision Sport and CAMB.AI launch AI-translated live commentary at the European Athletics U18 Championships.

• Anthropic launches multilingual support for Claude’s voice mode on Opus and Sonnet models.

• Translated launches Lara 3, adding training based on human feedback plus image, audio, and document translation.

• Instagram and Facebook launch Reels translation in 18 languages, with auto-dubbing and AI lip-sync.

• TAUS launches version 3 of its EPIC quality-estimation model.

• Threads launches translation support for Live Chats.

• Amazon launches Kindle Translate, an AI translation service, in French, Italian, and Portuguese for self-published authors.

• DeepL Voice launches real-time translated captions for Google Meet.

• Pangeanic launches MTQE v2, a quality-estimation model, on Hugging Face.

• Azure Translator API launches LLM choice, adaptive MT, and tone controls.

More launches →

🛠️ Community launches

• Wenyi, an open-source pipeline for consistent terminology and character names in Chinese novel translation.

• GenSRT, a free, open-source Whisper subtitle app for Windows, with translation and burn-in.

• Rhetoriq launches an app for AI rewriting, translation, and dialect conversion, adding High Valyrian for Game of Thrones fans.

• XliffAI, an open-source CLI for translating XLIFF 2.x files with LLMs.

• GianoReader adds side-by-side EPUB translation on phones and tablets.

• Olaverse Lab launches DiacNet-1.1, a specialized model for restoring diacritics in 10 languages, fine-tuned from Google’s ByT5.

• Libyx, a free e-book translator supporting 43 languages, cuts costs with batch mode and prompt caching, and refines quality with a two-model pass.

• FTA, a browser extension that shows an LLM-powered translation in a popup over selected text, using Google AI Studio, OpenRouter, or local models.

• Meeting Interpreter, a real-time speech translation app for Windows.

• DocTranslating, a document translator that lets you pick between DeepL, Google, Azure, and Gemini per job, with OCR support for handwritten text.

• OLVA, a bot-free AI meeting assistant, adds live translation in 87 languages across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.

📚 Research

• Taia Translations shares its experience adding LLM tiers to its product, citing unreliable segment handling and a shift to credit-based pricing.

• WMT26’s quality-evaluation shared task closes for submissions, covering error detection, score prediction, and error-free classification.

• A technical walkthrough of building a Transformer from scratch in PyTorch, for English-to-Tamil translation.

More research →

❔ Questions

• How do you preserve table format when translating English to Spanish files?

• Is a Google Lens translation trick real?

• Which real-time voice translation app works for English and Hungarian?

• Has DeepL gotten worse?

• What AI instructions do people use for translation?

• Can anyone beta-test a Hindi translation on a Lord of the Rings-themed site?

• Can anyone help with a Sanskrit translation for a research project?

• What advice do people have on preprocessing for an MT internship project?

• Which local STT/ASR subtitle tool should I use?

• What workflow do people use for translating long-form books with AI?

• What do you learn building an LLM-based translation setup on a budget?

• Which MT tools can translate medieval Tibetan into English?

• Does machinetranslation.com actually work?

• Why doesn’t WhatsApp use a voice transcriber as accurate as Instagram’s?

More questions →

⏰️ Deadlines

• MT Marathon 2026 call for papers — 5 September

More deadlines →

📆 Events

• AMTA 2026 — 31 August - 2 September — Québec City 🇨🇦

• AAMT 2026 — 13 - 14 September — Online / Nara 🇯🇵

• MT Marathon 2026 — 14 - 18 September — Karlsruhe 🇩🇪

• Translation AI at Tech Week — 8 October — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• WMT 2026 — November — Budapest 🇭🇺

More events →

💻 Jobs

• Head of Global Language Services (LSE) at INTERPOL — Lyon 🇫🇷

• Manager, New Localization Technology at Deluxe — Burbank 🇺🇸

• Machine Learning Manager, Localization Algorithms at Netflix — Los Gatos 🇺🇸

• Program Manager, Localization Testing at Meta — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• Localization Program Manager at Meta — Menlo Park 🇺🇸

More jobs →

Meanwhile, thanks to Claude, the homemade translation tools shared in our community are starting to look more and more polished, but they’re also becoming more similar. Commoditization is happening fast.

Event season is in full swing, and there are plenty of jobs!

Enjoy - and share!

🗞️ News

• AMTA opens registration for its 2026 conference in Québec City.

• TAUS opens registration for its conference in Vancouver.

• LocWorld 56 opens registration for its conference in Vancouver.

• Romhack.ing, a hub for fan-translated retro games, pulls machine-translated versions to protect human ones.

🚀 Launches

• DeepL launches Translation Flow, connecting enterprise apps like Google Drive and SharePoint to its MT, glossaries, style guides, and human review routing.

• RWS launches Trados Studio 2026 with context-aware AI, native Language Weaver Pro, and LLM support.

• Ray-Ban Meta glasses now support real-time Korean translation.

• xAI launches 21 multilingual voices for Grok’s Voice Agent Builder, now supporting 25+ languages.

• TAUS launches a Canadian French quality estimation model.

• Lara Translate launches audio-to-audio translation, mobile image translation, and Microsoft Edge support.

• Gradium launches stt-translate and s2s-translate speech models.

• Gyeonggi Province launches a multilingual AI portal with integrated MT for foreign residents.

• NagaTranslate adds a new domain and voice (TTS and speech recognition).

• DeepManga is a new open-source manga translation tool built on PaddleOCR and Gemini.

More launches →

🛠️ Community launches

• An open-source machine translator for indigenous languages.

• A Chrome extension for translating webpages, PDFs, and DOCX files using your own LLM API.

• A Chrome extension that shows Google Translate output for any selected text.

• An offline, lightweight version of the OPUS-MT/Marian translation engine.

• A tool to mask sensitive data locally before sending it for AI translation.

• Local, real-time subtitles and translation for streamers.

• A translation quality-check tool with MQM-based error annotations, back-translation, and style guide support.

📚 Research

• EAMT publishes its 2026 proceedings.

• NeTTiT publishes the first version of its 2026 proceedings.

• Can AI detectors flag AI translations?

• ModelFront debunks myths about quality estimation and automatic post-editing.

More research →

🎙️ Podcasts and videos

• SlatorPod covers language AI startups, voice AI, and Anthropic.

• GenAI in Localization’s recording is available on demand.

❔ Questions

• “Asymmetric AI Translator” — why Apple and Timekettle get it wrong

• Examples where DeepL fails to translate tone

• Is ModelFront doing QE with a score?

• Does ModernMT still exist?

• Biggest unsolved problems in business-focused MT workflows

• Disclosed AI/MT vs. no translation at all

• Are any translators happy about MTPE?

• Is anyone still fine-tuning models in 2026?

• An 80s electronic English/Spanish translator

• Large-scale multilingual translation on a budget

• Translating your own work from your native language into English

• Biggest pain in your translation/localization workflow

• Why commercial LLM translator tools are so bad

• Best free AI PDF translator for text that isn’t editable

More questions →

📆 Events

• AMTA 2026 — 31 August - 2 September — Québec City 🇨🇦

• AAMT 2026 — 13 - 14 September — Online / Nara 🇯🇵

• MT Marathon 2026 — 14 - 18 September — Karlsruhe 🇩🇪

• Translation AI at Tech Week — 8 October — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• WMT 2026 — November — Budapest 🇭🇺

More events →

💻 Jobs

• Multilingual AI Quality Specialist at Spotify — Stockholm 🇸🇪 or London 🇬🇧

• Software Engineer, Localization at OpenAI — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• Applied Scientist II, GenAI/LLM, Translation Services at Amazon Science — Seattle 🇺🇸

• Applied Scientist II, Alexa International at Amazon — Bellevue 🇺🇸

• Senior and Principal Applied Scientist, Speech and Translation at Microsoft — Redmond 🇺🇸

• Solution Architect, Language/Translation at DeepL — Texas, New York, San Francisco 🇺🇸

• Localization Technical Solution Architect at Blizzard Entertainment — Irvine 🇺🇸

• Senior Software Engineer, Localization Engineering at Autodesk — Vancouver 🇨🇦

• Head of Localisation at Gallup — London 🇬🇧

• AI Enablement Localization Specialist at SAS — Madrid 🇪🇸

• Senior Localization Engineer, Applied AI at Tenable — Dublin 🇮🇪

• Principal AI Researcher at Phrase — Remote (EEA) 🇪🇺

• Machine Learning Engineer, Speech and Translation at myLanguage — Remote 🇺🇸

• Assistant Professor, Language Technologies and AI Governance at University of Warwick — Coventry 🇬🇧

• NLU and MT Intern at DB Cargo Hungária — Frankfurt 🇩🇪

More jobs →

More live translation deployments this month in police departments, construction sites, and phone calls.

Meanwhile, DeepL’s transition to AWS introduces US data jurisdiction into the equation. With the sudden government restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, companies are questioning supply chain risks.

Conference season is here. EAMT started this week in Tilburg, and the calendar is packed through November.

The man who led Google Translate’s transition to neural and Transformers, Macduff Hughes, shared his thoughts in a fireside chat.

Enjoy—and share!

🗞️ News

• Audible reports 50 million minutes of AI-narrated content played.

• Quebec language laws open the door to automated web translation.

💼 Business

• ModelFront announces outcome-based pricing.

• DeepL acquires Mixhalo for low-latency audio in live events.

• DeepL shifts data from EU to US jurisdiction via Amazon partnership.

• TransPerfect replaces Widn.AI with GlobalLinkNow.

• Youdao reports MT growth in Q1 earnings.

• Interpreters Unlimited adds AI interpretation to GSA contract.

More business →

🚀 Launches

• Google launches Gemini 3.5 Live Translate.

• Alibaba launches Qwen3.5-LiveTranslate-Flash, real-time speech translation with voice cloning.

• ElevenLabs releases Dubbing v2 with speaker emotion preservation.

• OneMeta launches real-time interpretation for emergency services in Mexico ahead of FIFA 2026.

• T-Mobile launches beta live translation.

• Daewoo E&C launches AI translator for foreign workers.

• A California police department adds live translation for officers.

• Xiaomi launches clip-on earbuds with AI translation.

More launches →

📚 Research

• WMT 2026 announces a shared task on translation quality evaluation.

• Linguists flag 71% of TranslateGemma-12b subtitle translations.

• Fine-tuning TranslateGemma-4B for English-Welsh translation.

More research →

🎙️ Interviews

• Macduff Hughes, former Google Translate Director of Engineering, on the 2016 neural MT transition and the LLM era.

❔ Questions

• MTQE as a workflow trigger in production

• AI tool for book translation

• Real-time translation on Quest AR

• Subtitle localization QC

• Multilingual WordPress plugins

• Translating a 70MB PDF

• Reliability signals in AI translation

• Omni and OpenNovel for translation

• Translating PDFs with no selectable text

• Japanese MT beyond the “easiest” answer

• AI voice-over for non-English

• Video transcription for non-European languages

• AI tools for technical docs

More questions →

📆 Events

• EAMT 2026 — 15 - 18 June — Tilburg 🇳🇱

• NeTTiT 2026 — 24 - 27 June — Dubrovnik 🇭🇷

• IWSLT 2026 — 3 - 4 July — San Diego 🇺🇸

• AMTA 2026 — 31 August - 2 September — Québec City 🇨🇦

• MT Marathon 2026 — 14 - 18 September — Karlsruhe 🇩🇪

• SF Tech Week Translation AI — 8 October — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• WMT 2026 — November — Budapest 🇭🇺

More events →

💻 Jobs

• Senior Software Engineer, Localization Engineering at Autodesk — Vancouver 🇨🇦

• Research Engineer, Machine Translation at Sanas — Palo Alto 🇺🇸

• Senior Applied Scientist, Translation Services at Amazon — Hyderabad 🇮🇳

• AI Researcher / ML Engineer, ASR and Speech at LILT — Boston 🇺🇸

• Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA — Hamburg 🇩🇪

• AI Technical Program Manager, Localization at Canva — London 🇬🇧

• Software Engineer, Machine Translation at Solerity — Fort Meade 🇺🇸

• Solution Architect, Language/Translation at DeepL — New York 🇺🇸

• AI Research Manager, Translation Quality at DeepL — London 🇬🇧

• Staff Research Scientist, Language AI at DeepL — Munich 🇩🇪

• Software Engineer, Localization at OpenAI — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• Localization Product Strategist at Google — Boulder 🇺🇸

• Senior AI/NLP/ML Expert at Stott and May — Brussels 🇧🇪

• Prompt Engineer, Translation Management at Schmieder Translations — Telangana 🇮🇳

• Member of Technical Staff, Multilingual at Cohere — New York 🇺🇸

• Machine Learning Engineer, Globalization at Netflix — United States 🇺🇸

More jobs →

Modern machine translation (learned from data, not based on hand-coded rules) started exactly 20 years ago, with the original launch of Google Translate.

Now trillions of words are translated every month. (Not hyperbole, that’s the actual number.)

The quality available has improved fantastically, by any measure. (Model evaluation is as unsolved as ever.) Even free, open-source models now translate at quality better than the best APIs a decade ago, between thousands of languages.

Convenient built-in translation features are now standard across top platforms like Reddit, X and Whatsapp. Book fans are hacking together their own tools, now that machine translation can do context across sentences and take prompts.

Progress is even coming to the high-value content, where manually checking the AI is the bottleneck. Enterprise localization teams are using AI to automagically confirm millions of segments, while keeping human quality.

To help us all keep track, we’ve launched new sections at machinetranslate.org, like models and automatic post-editing.

🚀 Launches

Language support

• Google Translate now supports more than 247 languages.

• DeepL now supports 109 languages, after adding more than 70 in November.

• Meta released Omnilingual MT for 1,600 languages in a free, open-source model.

• Machine Translate now lists 615 languages.

Voice and video

• Apple integrated system-wide Live Translation into FaceTime, phone calls and messages via Apple Intelligence.

• Apple launched real-time in-person translation directly through AirPods Pro.

• Google Translate launched real-time speech translation, then speech-to-speech with Gemini.

• DeepL launched voice translation in November 2024, then real-time voice at its Spring 2026 event.

• Microsoft launched a Live Interpreter API, and Microsoft Teams added turn-based translation for multilingual meetings.

• Translated launched Lara for iOS.

• Ray-Ban Meta and Huawei shipped translation in smart glasses and on-device.

• Zoom launched Voice Translator for real-time multilingual meetings.

• YouTube rolled out AI auto-dubbing with “Expressive Speech”.

• Instagram launched AI dubbing for Reels that clones voices and syncs lip movements.

Consumer apps

• WhatsApp added native, on-device message translation in 19+ languages.

• X / Grok now translates and recommends foreign-language posts.

• Amazon launched Kindle Translate, letting self-published authors AI-translate books into multiple languages.

• SafePal launched in-app machine translation.

MT ⇄ LLMs

• Google Translate integrated Gemini capabilities.

• Microsoft brought LLM-powered translation to Azure Translator with a September 2025 preview launch.

• Translated added reasoning model Lara Think and 200-language support to Lara.

• DeepL launched DeepL Agent and Clarify, and updated its API with a new language model and AI writing tools.

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched a translation app page.

• OpenAI launched GPT‑Realtime‑Translate, a live translation model that translates speech while keeping pace with the speaker.

Open models

• Google released TranslateGemma, an open suite of translation models.

• Alibaba released Qwen-MT, a dedicated machine translation model supporting 92 languages.

• Cohere released Command A Translate and the open-weight Tiny Aya for 70+ languages.

• Tencent open-sourced a 440MB translation model that runs fully offline on smartphones, supporting 33 languages.

• Machine Translate now covers models and lists 11 providers.

Quality estimation and automatic post-editing

• ModelFront announced general availability of automatic post-editing.

• Advanced localization teams, like Booking.com, have shifted to using AI to verify AI scaling translation while keeping human-level quality.

• Amazon’s LLM translation playground uses RAG to inject translation memory into prompts, improving BLEU scores without fine-tuning.

• Machine Translate now supports automatic post-editing providers and lists 9 QE integrations and 4 APE integrations across TMS platforms.

More product and feature launches →

📚 Research

• Google Translate released the WMT24++ and SMOL datasets for high- and low-resource languages.

• FUSE, a new MT evaluation metric for indigenous languages.

• Pearmut, a tool for human evaluation of translation.

• WMT 2025 results were released at EMNLP.

More research news →

📈 Business

• Reddit credited machine translation with driving record international user growth.

• DeepL cut 250 jobs amid AI-driven restructuring.

• ElevenLabs grew to $500M ARR and raised more investment.

• Unbabel exited to Transperfect.

• RWS outsourced AI to Cohere.

More business news →

⏰️ Deadlines

• AsLing call for papers and presentations — 30 June

• MT Marathon 2026 call for papers — 5 September

More deadlines →

📆 Events

• EAMT 2026 — 15–18 June — Tilburg 🇳🇱

• IWSLT 2026 — 3–4 July — San Diego 🇺🇸

• AMTA 2026 — 31 August - 2 September — Québec City 🇨🇦

• MT Marathon 2026 — 14-18 September — Karlsruhe 🇩🇪

• SF Tech Week Translation AI — 8 October — San Francisco 🇺🇸

• WMT 2026 — November — Budapest 🇭🇺

More events →

💻 Jobs

• Software Engineer, Machine Translation Automation at Apple — Seattle 🇺🇸

• Applied Research Engineer, Machine Translation at Apple — Munich and Aachen 🇩🇪

• Sr Manager, Translations at McDonald’s — Chicago 🇺🇸

• Senior Applied AI Researcher (Lara) at Translated — Rome 🇮🇹

• Senior Software Engineer at Autodesk — Vancouver 🇨🇦

• Staff Research Scientist, Language AI at DeepL — Munich 🇩🇪

• Senior AI Research Scientist at Transperfect — Lisbon 🇵🇹

• Senior Localization Program Manager, Multilingual AI at Uber — Sunnyvale 🇺🇸

• AI Research Manager, Translation Quality at DeepL — London 🇬🇧

More jobs →