TechGist05

“I have given the record of what one man thought as he pursued research and pressed his hands against the confining walls of scientific method in his time. But men see differently. I can at best report only from my own wilderness.”                    --- - Loren Eiseley This is a slightly expanded version of a presentation, given together with Tony O'Dowd of Kantan, who focused more on Kantan's accomplishments in 2016 earlier this month. The Kantan webinar can be accessed in this video, though be warned the first few minutes of my presentation has some annoying scratchy audio disturbance. Tony speaks for the first 23 minutes and then I do, followed by some questions after that. 2016 was actually a really good year for machine translation technology, as MT had a lot more buzz than it has had in the past 10 years and some breakthrough advances in the basic technology . It was also the year I left Asia Online, and got to engage with the vibrant and much more exciting and rapidl

Recently, I had the opportunity and kind invitation to attend the SYSTRAN community day event where many members of their product development, marketing, and management team gathered with major customers and partners. The objective was to share information about the continuing evolution of their new Pure Neural MT (PNMT) technology,  share detailed PNMT output quality evaluation results, and provide initial customer user experience data with the new technology. Also, naturally such an event creates a more active and intense dialogue between company employees and customers and partners.  This, I think has substantial value for a company that seeks to align product offerings with its customer's actual needs. Ongoing Enhancements of the PNMT Product Offering The event made it clear that SYSTRAN is well down the NMT path, possibly years ahead of other MT vendors, and provided a review of the current status of their rapidly evolving PNMT technology. Some highlights from my perspective:

Lionbridge has recently been in the news as the story of their “agreement” to be acquired by H.I.G. Capital spread. I thought it would be useful to examine more closely what Private Equity is, and what they do since I found much of the commentary on the Lionbridge deal unclear, unsatisfying and quite unlikely to be accurate as they seem to overlook why PE gets involved at all.  I thought that while I am at it, let me also add Luigi’s opinion which is also not a translation industry mainstream opinion, to provide alternate perspectives to the ones we have been hearing. From my early business career when I worked close to Wall St. and institutional investment, private equity meant firms like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, The Blackstone Group, and Apollo Global Management. They were often called corporate raiders, and, in fact, they made a movie about a PE raider, called Wall Street , where Hollywood made PE rock stars like Gordon Gekko, look bad, and suggested he/they lived by an ethos tha

Many observers new to the business of translation are often surprised how little "work process automation" exists in the professional translation business. Many may have noticed the email deluge that many in the translation industry are guilty of in ALL their general business communication -- they use it almost like chat or mobile phone text messaging, and thus it is easy for details to get lost and fall through the cracks.  I noticed this lack of email communication discipline when I first entered the industry many years ago.  Apart from the problems introduced by this communication style we also see that since no real work process automation tools exist, there is an urgent need for a project management role.  There still appears to be a critical need for a project manager (whose role is described here in some detail) to ensure that client projects are properly broken into and assigned in pieces (work packages) to the right personnel and then re-assembled by project managem

This is a guest post by David Snider, Globalization Architect at LinkedIn - Reprinted here with permission. I thought the article was interesting because it points out that MT quality is now quite adequate for several types of Enterprise applications, even though MT might very well be a force that influences and causes the "crapification" (a word I wish I had invented) of  overall language quality. While this might seem like horror to some, for a lot of business content that has a very short shelf life, and value only if the information is current, this MT quality is sufficient for most of the people who have in interest in the specific content. While David thinks that the language quality will improve, I doubt very much if much of this MT content will improve much beyond what is possible by the raw technology itself. Business content that has value for a short time and then is forgotten simply cannot justify the effort to raise it the level of "proper" written mat