TechGist05

This is a guest post by Jörg Porsiel, who manages MT at VW, that provides some perspective on the value of MT in the context of a large global enterprise's communication and information distribution needs. VW , like many other truly global enterprises, needs a large variet y of business cont ent and product information to flow easily, and quickly, to enable rapid response to emerging and ongoing business situations and needs. We can see from this viewpoint that the global enterprise has a very pragmatic and dispassionate view of this technology, which is simply seen as a tool to enable and improve information flow, in environments that are truly multilingual, and that require large amounts of content to flow instantly where needed to enable forward bus iness momentum. We also see that this is a use-case scenario where the need for on-premise installation is critical and necessary for deployment for both security and performance reasons. Some may also be surprised that this MT a...

This is a guest post by Luigi Muzii on the importance and value of metadata. Many of us in the MT field are often astonished at how valuable language data resources are left in states of disuse, disrepair and complete lack of organization, thus often rendering these valuable resources useless or at best cumbersome to work with. With many translation agencies and even large enterprises, core language data assets lie in what many of us consider to be in ruins. As we now enter the AI driven phase of so many industrial processes, the value of metadata increases by the day, and enables much of the work of posterity to be useful for future projects and work. Data matters and clean organized data can become a foundation for competitive advantage, especially in the world of business translation where the value of work is still counted by the word. This post urges that all of us in the language industry start thinking about and implementing metadata strategies. Though there are elements of this...

This is a ranking of the most popular posts of 2016 on this blog according to Blogger, based on traffic and/or reader comment activity. Popular does not necessarily mean the best, and I have seen in the past that some posts that may not initially resonate, have real staying power and continue to be read actively years after the original publishing date, even though they are not initially popular. We can see from these rankings, that Neural MT certainly was an attention grabber for 2016, (even though I think for the business translation industry, Adaptive MT is a bigger game changer ) and I look forward to seeing how NMT becomes more fitted to translation industry needs over the coming year . I know with some certainty that the posts by Juan Rowda and Silvio Picinini will be read actively through the coming year and on, because they are not just current news that fades quickly like the Google NMT critique, but rather they are carefully gathered best practice knowledge that is useful as...