TechGist05

This is a guest post by Luigi Muzii ( and his unedited post title ). Luigi likes to knock down false idols and speak plainly, sometimes with obscure (to most Americans anyway) Italian literary references. I would characterize this post as an opinion on the lack of honest self-assessment and self-review that pervades the industry (at all levels) and thus slows evolution and progress. Thus, we see that industry groups struggle to promote "the industry", but in fact, the industry is still one that "gets no respect" or is "misunderstood" as we hear at many industry forums.  While change can be uncomfortable, real evolution also results in a higher and better position for some in the internationalization and globalization arena. Efficiency is always valuable, even in the arts. In my view, the companies that solve the most challenging and interesting translation problems today (and thus earn the most money from translation related activity) are all ...

There are some kinds of translation applications where MT just makes sense, and it would be foolish to even attempt these kinds of projects without decent MT technology as a foundation. Usually, this is because these applications have some combination of the following factors: Very large volume of source content that simply could NOT be translated without MT in any useful time frame Rapid turnaround requirement (days, hours or minutes) for the content to have any value to the translation consumers A user tolerance for lower quality translations at least in early stages of information review To enable information and document triage when dealing with large document collections and help to identify highest priority content from a large mass of undifferentiated content. This process also helps to identify the most important and relevant documents to send to higher quality human translation. Translation Cost prohibitions (usually related to volume) One can find this combination of requirem...