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 an interesting guest post by Gábor Ugray on the potential of AI in the translation business.  We hear something about artificial intelligence almost every day now and are continually told that it will change our lives. AI is indeed helping to solve complex problems that even a year ago were virtually unthinkable. Mostly, these are problems where big data and massive computing can come together to produce new kinds of efficiencies and even production solutions. However, there are dangers and risks too, and it is wise to be aware of some of the basic driving forces that underly these problems. As we have seen with self-driving cars, sometimes things don't quite work as you would expect . These mishaps and unintended results can happen when we barely understand what and how the computer "understands". Machine learning is not perfect learning and much of what is learned through deep neural nets, in particular, is kind of mysterious, to put it nicely.  We have seen tha...

Many observers new to the business of translation are often surprised how little "work process automation" exists in the professional translation business. Many may have noticed the email deluge that many in the translation industry are guilty of in ALL their general business communication -- they use it almost like chat or mobile phone text messaging, and thus it is easy for details to get lost and fall through the cracks.  I noticed this lack of email communication discipline when I first entered the industry many years ago.  Apart from the problems introduced by this communication style we also see that since no real work process automation tools exist, there is an urgent need for a project management role.  There still appears to be a critical need for a project manager (whose role is described here in some detail) to ensure that client projects are properly broken into and assigned in pieces (work packages) to the right personnel and then re-assembled by project man...

This is a guest post by "Vova" from SmartCAT . I connected with him on Twitter and learned about the SmartCAT product which I would describe as a TMS + CAT tool with a much more substantial collaboration framework than most translation tools I know of. It is a next-generation translation management tool that enables multi-user collaboration at a large project level, but also allows individual freelancers to use it as a simple CAT tool. It has a new and non-standard approach to pricing which I am still trying to unravel. I have talked to one LSP customer, who was very enthusiastic about his user experience and stressed the QA and productivity benefits especially for large projects. I am still researching the product and company (which has several ex-ABBYY people but they seem eager to develop a separate identity) and will share more as I learn more. But on first glance, this product looks very interesting and even compelling, even though, they, like Lilt, have a hard time des...

I found an interesting series of blog posts by Christelle Maignon that I thought articulated translator perspectives on MT and the increasing use of technology in translation work very well. She herself was driven away from translation work towards coaching because PEMT was just not her cup of tea from what I could gather. Anyway I thought it would be good to highlight her work in case you are not aware of her blog. Some posts that readers of this blog may also find interesting are listed below: Why machine translation creates so much anger and how to deal with it This post references Dr Kübler-Ross study of grief. She describes the five stages of emotions which are experienced by people who are approaching death or dealing with the death of a loved one. Her model was widely accepted and it was found to be valid for other forms of losses, as well as situations relating to change (for instance, the loss of a job or of a familiar way of doing things). Her model has been used as a ...