TechGist05

Happy New Year This is yet another post on Blockchain, a guest post by Robert Etches who presents his vision of what Blockchain might be able to be in the translation industry. A vision, by definition, implies a series of possibilities, and in this case, quite revolutionary possibilities, but does not necessarily provide all the details of how and what. Of course, the way ahead is full of challenges and obstacles which are much more visible to us than the promised land, but I think it is wise to keep an open mind and watch the evolution even if we are not fully engaged or committed or in agreement. Sometimes it is simply better to wait and see than to come to any final conclusions. It is much easier to be dismissive and skeptical of upstart claims of fundamental change than to allow for a slim but real possibility that some new phenomenon could indeed be revolutionary. I wrote previously about CEO shortsightedness and what I called Roryisms. Here is a classic one from IBM that shows h...

This is a  modified version of a post that was originally published on  Caroline Alberoni's blog. ------------------------------- Machine translation (MT) today is as pervasive and ubiquitous as mobile phone technology. While some translators still feel threatened by the technology or feel the need to disparage it for it’s less than perfect translation, it is useful to understand why it is so widely used. At their annual developer conference in April 2016, Google announced that they are translating over 140 billion words a day across 100 languages. Baidu Translate can translate 27 languages and is growing, and processes around 100 million requests every day. Most of this use is from casual internet users who may be interested in translating a news story or some simple phrases. However, there is a growing impact on the professional translation business as well. If you add the translation volume of Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex and other MT providers, we can certainly expect that mo...

This is a summary of what I think are some interesting recent articles on the web on subjects relating to MT. The Big Wave , an Italian initiative that focuses on the changes happening in language technology released details and proceeding papers from their conference held in Rome in the summer of 2011. There are many interesting papers related to MT, controlled language and collaborative translation related issues. These papers provide a balance of practitioner, academic and user perspectives on these subjects and are worth a close examination. Some highlights include: Linguistic resources and MT trends for the Italian language by Isabella Chiari discusses the implications of various kinds of data and their value for building data-driven MT systems and provides some specifics for EN <> IT MT systems. The paper is a great overview on the kinds of data that can be used and also provides insight on what data to use and where to use it with summary implications. It also makes a gre...