TechGist05

This is a guest post by Luigi Muzii that focuses mostly on the various questions that surround Language Data, which by most “big data” definitions and volumes is really not what most in the community would consider big data. As the world hurtles into the brave new world that is being created by a growling volume of machine learning and AI applications, the question of getting the data right is often brushed aside. Most think the data is a solved problem or presume that data is easily available. However, those of us who have been working at MT seriously over the last decade understand this is far from a solved problem. Machines learn from data and smart engineers can find ways to leverage the patterns in data in innumerable ways. Properly used it can make knowledge work easier, or more efficient e.g. machine translation, recommendation, and personalization. The value and quality of this pattern learning can only be as good as the data used, and however exciting all this technology seem...

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 slightly updated post that has been already published on the SDL site . The holiday season around the world today is often characterized by special holiday shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These special promotional events generate peak shopping activity and are now increasingly becoming global events. They are also increasingly becoming a digital and online commerce phenomenon. This is especially true in the B2C markets but is also now often true in the B2B markets. The numbers are in, and the most recent data is quite telling. The biggest U.S. retail shopping holiday of the year – from Thanksgiving Day to Black Friday to Cyber Monday, plus Small Business Saturday and Super Sunday – generated $24.2 billion in online revenues . And that figure is far below Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, which in 2018 reached $30.8 billion – in just 24 hours. When we look at the penetration of eCommerce in the U.S. retail market, we see that, as disruptive as i...

This is a post that was originally published on the SDL website in two parts which are combined here in a single long post. This post also reflects the expertise of my colleague Matthias Heyn, VP of Life Sciences Solutions at SDL. ===== This first post in an ongoing series takes a closer look at the emerging use and acceptance of machine translation (MT) in the Life Sciences industry. We take a look at the expanding role MT is likely to have in the industry over the coming years and explore some key use cases and applications. The Life Sciences industry, like every other industry today, feels the impact of the explosion of content and of the driving forces that compel the industry to use MT and machine learning (ML). The growth is caused by: The volume of multilingual research impacting drug development The increasing volume of multilingual external consumer data now available (or needed), which influence drug discovery, disease identification, global clinical research, and globa...

This is a guest post by Luigi on his further thoughts on blockchain in the localization industry. He asks some fundamental questions that should provide readers a good reality check on blockchain stuff you might see at a conference or read in an industry journal. He also points to almost new technology that might really matter for this industry NOW, i.e. interactive virtual assistants (IVAs). The momentum on this is building as we speak, and for the most part, the industry is being swept aside from any relevance with it, as so few are even barely aware of it. This is a new and better way to serve digital customers, a way to improve the overall digital experience, a way to more efficiently serve the right content to the right customer at the right time. This is where CX meets DX and where competitive advantage can be built for digital transformation strategies. But everywhere I turn, I see naysayers. Localization people tend to look for volume and efficiency, and very few look for value...