TechGist05

While many people may consider that all post-editing is the same, there are definitely variations that are worth a closer look. This is a guest post by Mats Dannewitz Linder that digs into three very specific PEMT scenarios that a translator might view quite differently. Mats has a more translator-specific perspective and as the author of the Trados Studio manual, I think provides a greater sensitivity to the issues that do matter to translators.  From my perspective as a technology guy, this post is quite enlightening as it provides real substance and insight on why there have been communication difficulties between MT developers and translator editors. PEMT can be quite a range of different editor experiences as Mats describes here, and if we now factor in the change that Adaptive MT can have, we now have even more variations on the final PEMT user experience.   I think a case can be made for both major cases of PEMT that I see from my vantage post, the batch chunk mode...

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 ...

Together with all the news of catastrophic hurricane activity in the US, that we are being bombarded with recently, we also are seeing stories of serious data security breaches of privileged information, even in the world of business translation. As always, the security and privacy of the data can only be as good as the data security practices and the sophistication of the technological implementations, and thus the knee-jerk response of pointing to “bad” MT technology per se, and assigning blame at MT use practices is not quite fair. It is indeed possible to make MT services available for public and/or corporate community uses safe and secure if you know what you are doing and are careful. It may seem obvious to some, but effective use of any technology requires both competence and skill, and we see too many cases of inept implementations that result in sub-optimal outcomes.   Generally, even professional translation work done entirely by humans requires source conte...

This is a guest post by Gábor Ugray on NMT model building challenges and issues. Don't let the playful tone and general sense of frolic in the post fool you. If you look more closely, you will see that it very clearly defines an accurate list of challenges that one might come upon when one ventures into building a Neural MT engine. This list of problems is probably the exact list that the big boys (Microsoft, FaceBook, Google, and others) have faced some time ago. I  have previously discussed how SYSTRAN and SDL are solving these problems. While this post describes an experimental system very much from a do-it-yourself perspective, production NMT engines might differ only by the way in which they handle these various challenges.  This post also points out a basic issue about NMT - while it is clear that NMT works, often surprisingly well,  it is still very unclear what predictive patterns are learned, which makes it hard to control and steer. Most (if not all) of the SM...