TechGist05

I have always found Luigi Muzii's aka Il barbaro (The Barbarian) opinions on the "translation industry" interesting and have often felt that his blog never got the attention it deserved. Possibly because he often wrote with frequent references to Roman historical precedence, in what I have been told is an Italian scholarly style, and perhaps because English is not his preferred language to communicate complex thoughts.    His willingness to state the obvious (to common sense) sometimes makes him unpopular, especially with the MT naysayers e.g. "Moreover, translation data - i.e. project data - has a limited lifespan and, at some point in time, it becomes outdated, possibly inaccurate, and definitely irrelevant." I think that many in the "translation industry" still fail to realize that the bulk of the material that they translate;   i.e. the manuals, documen...

This is an important subject and one that needs ongoing examination and continuing study to get to real insight and find greater process efficiency. I hope that this post by Silvio Picinini will trigger further discussion and I also invite others who have information, and opinions to share on this subject, to step forward. In my observation of MT output over time, I have seen that MT produces a greater number of actual errors, but the types of errors most often generated by MT are easy to spot and clean up. Unlike the incorrect or inconsistent terminology and sometimes misunderstood source errors, that may often be hidden in the clear grammar and flow of a human translation.  These human errors are much harder to find, and not as easy to correct without multiple stages of review by independent reviewers.  ----- It is common to see a focus on the errors that machine translation makes. But maybe there are also strengths in MT that can benefit translators and customer...

The issue of rapidly understanding the MT output quality as precisely as possible BEFORE post-editing begins, is an important one. Juan Rowda from eBay provides an interesting way to make this assessment based on linguistic criteria and provides a model that can be further refined and defined by motivated users. Automated metrics like BLEU used by MT system developers provide very little of value for this PEMT effort assessment. This approach is an example of the kinds of insightful tools that can only be developed by linguists who are engaged with a long-term MT project and want to solve problems that can add real value to the MT development and PEMT process. I think it is interesting that somebody outside of the "translation industry" came up with this kind of practical innovation, that can facilitate and greatly enhance efforts in a project involving translation of several hundred million new w...

This is a third post in a series on expert MT systems developers. Iconic fits my definition of expert much more closely (as does tayou) as they do-it-for-you rather than give you a technology platform to do-it-yourself. (DIY does not work well for those who do not really know what they are doing.) They bring deep expertise to bear on the very specific translation problem that you bring to them, and may create a unique MT solution for each customer. In the case of Iconic, the components used to build an MT solution, may also vary from customer to customer, as they assemble sub-components to address unique customer problems, which can vary by content, language and quality expectation. In general, the interaction with an expert is going to much more consultative and customer specific and less off-the-shelf. As MT is an evolving technology, it is especially useful for an expert developer to have close ties with an academic institution that is engaged in ongoing research in M...