TechGist05

I had the honor of participating in the 7th ABRATES International Translation and Interpreting Conference in Rio de Janeiro last week. An event that had over 500 attendees, based on my casual observation. A large portion of the attendees were translators, but there were also some LSPs and Enterprise representatives. As much of the information was presented in Portuguese I had direct experience with simultaneous translation via a headset which was also kind of cool, and it was fun to switch around when I was less interested in the actual subject matter. The formidable, emotion packed sign language interpretation by Paloma Bueno, intensely focused simultaneous interpreter volunteers in the booth, and the abounding loveliness of Rio. I found the conference surprisingly refreshing for several reasons including: The high level of understanding that many translators had about MT, Post-Editing practice and their general attitude that i...

I recently attended the GDC conference and were impressed to see how advanced the tools and thinking on translation and localization was amongst the game developer community. This is a new frontier for the professional translation industry and it is amazing to see how quickly games developers are learning about localization issues and developing tools and methodologies to rapidly make their products viable in international markets. It is commonplace to see development tools that are truly both multi-platform capable and multilingual capable in active use throughout the community. Their comfort level with multimedia (video, voice) data, multi-platform development (mobile, desktop and TV) issues and willingness to consider technology was quite refreshing, and we think it is quite possible that this community will drive translation and localization technology advances much more rapidly than the traditional software and documentation community where things change much more slowly. While ...

This is a guest post by Huiping Iler who I had the pleasure to meet in New Orleans last month who made a very interesting presentation on how to increase the intrisnic value of an LSP firm. She runs a language services firm that is one of the growing fold of LSPs who have direct experience with post-editing MT output, and see an increasing role for MT in the future of her business.   I should add that while her own feedback on my presentation here is quite flattering, there were also others who commented through the regular feedback process that my slides were too dense and information filled, and one who even felt that my presentation was a “thinly disguised sales pitch ”. ( I assure you Sir, it was not.) It is difficult to find a balance that makes sense to everybody and all feedback is valuable . The pictures below come from the wonderful photographic eye of Rina Ne’eman taken during her visit to New Orleans. -------------------------------------------------- It was a real de...

This is an (opinionated) summary of interesting findings from a flurry of conferences that I attended earlier this month. The conferences were the TAUS User Conference, Localization World and tekom. Even though it is tiring to have so many so close together, it is interesting to see what sticks out a few weeks later. For me TAUS and tekom were clearly worthwhile, and Localization World was not, and I believe that #LWSV is an event that is losing it’s mojo in spite of big attendance numbers. Some of the big themes that stand out (mostly from TAUS) were: Detailed case studies that provide clear and specific evidence that customized MT enhances and improves the productivity of traditional (TEP) translation processes The Instant on-demand Moses MT engine parade Initial attempts at defining post-editing effort and difficulty from MemoQ and Memosource A future session on the multilingual web from speakers who actually are involved with big perspective, global web-wide changes and requirem...

I have noticed of late that every conference has a session or two that focuses on the future. Probably because many sense that change is in the air. Some of you may also have noticed that the protest from some quarters has grown more strident or even outright rude, to some of the ideas presented at these future outlook sessions. The most vocal protests seem to be directed at predictions about the increasing use of machine translation, anything about “good enough” quality and the process and production process changes necessary to deal with the increasing translation volume. (There are still some who think that the data deluge is a myth).  Some feel personally threatened by those who speak on these subjects and rush to kill or at least stab the messenger. I think they miss the point that what is happening in translation, is just part of a larger upheaval in the way global enterprises are interacting with customers. The forces causing change in translation are also creating upheava...