TechGist05

This is a post, mostly written by Terence Lewis about his experience with open source NMT, that was just published in the 275th edition of  The Tool Box Journal . Since I have been chatting with Terence off and on over the years, about various MT related issues, I thought his experience might be interesting to some in the primary reader base of this blog.   At the moment, there is a lot of hype driving NMT in the public eye, and while there is no doubt that NMT is definite and real progress in the MT field, it is important to temper the hype with as many actual data points about the reality as possible. There are also a lot of pretty shallow and superficial "Isn't-NMT-cool?" or "My oh my, it looks like human translation!?@!&?$" type stories abounding, so when you see one of substance (like this one by Terence) it is always refreshing, interesting and also illuminating. (For me anyway). I will admit that I am more than slightly skeptical about DIY NMT, as, fr...

This is a guest post by a frequent contributor to eMpTy Pages, Luigi Muzii, on the future of translation, written in what some may say is an irreverent tone. I like to hear his opinions because he has a way cutting through the bullshit and getting to core issues quickly.  Getting to core issues matters, because it helps then to get to the right questions and the right questions can sometimes lead to meaningful and impactful answers. And isn't that what evolution and progress are really all about? For those participants who add very little value in any business production chain, the future is always foreboding and threatening, because there is often a sense that a reckoning is at hand.  It is easier to automate low-value work than it is to automate high-value work. Technology is often seen as a demon, but for those who learn to use it and leverage it, it is also a means to increase their own value addition possibilities in a known process, and increase one's standing in a pro...

For as long as I have been engaged with the professional translation industry, I have seen that there exist great confusion and ambiguity around the concept of  "translation quality". This is a services industry where nobody has been able to coherently define "quality" in a way that makes sense to a new buyer and potential customer of translation services. It also is, unfortunately, the basis of a lot of the differentiation claims made by translation agencies in competitive situations. Thus, is it surprising that many buyers of translation services are mystified and confused about what this really means? To this day it is my sense that the best objective measures of  "translation quality", imperfect and flawed though they may be, come from the machine translation community.  The computational linguistics community have very clear definitions of adequacy and fluency that can be reduced to a number, and have the perfect order that mathematics provide. The t...

Recently I have had reason to look closely at how content flows, user experience and the e-Commerce market are related, and I noticed some things that I thought were worth pointing out and highlighting in a blog post. These connections were triggered by a post I saw on Content Fabric by Anna Schlegel. The demands of the digital landscape and the 21st-century digital audience are challenging and some might say unforgiving for a modern global enterprise. Generally, no internet user is searching the web hoping to find a corporate advertisement and hear about how great your products are in standard corporate and marketing-speak product overviews. Most of the time, the random user on the web is not searching for you or for your company. More than likely, they are searching for an answer to a question . If you can provide a useful answer, they may spend more time and look more closely at your website, social presence, and other content. If  you can help them understand, and educate them...