14 May 2012

The LTi News Roundup - 13th th May 2012 (part 2)



Weekly news round-up prepared by the Editorial Staff of LangTechNews for LT-Innovate, the Forum for Europe’s Language Technology Industry.

What's happening in the Language Technology industry, from LT-Innovate




Source-language engineering : 

The Berlin-based information quality company Acrolinx helps contentcentric organisations write documents that are easier to understand, translate and search. Gartner has now added their name to its Cool Vendors A-list. Making text ‘translatable’ used to be most relevant to exporters with mission-critical products that simply could not afford to get Lost in Translation. Today, all website content is a potential export product, and intelligent writing – i.e. writing for reading/translating/SEO – should head the list of everyone’s content strategy agenda. A nice example this week came from the Czech localisation company Moravia’s blog on reworking English words into a Japanese order to ready text for machine translation. This sounds complicated because it requires lots of upstream editorial work. But it is likely that rewriting (or pre-editing) source text could be (semi-)automated, as was predicted over 50 years ago at the very first MT conference. Nobody likes the term ‘controlled language’ any longer, even though tweeting is a form of it. Think of source engineering as a long-term investment: if you want to machine-translate language pairs that include German or Japanese (two languages that computers find particularly hard to translate into), building up corpora of quality parallel texts by introducing a source-fixer today will pay off a thousand-fold tomorrow.

xHealth :

The healthcare sector is growing prefixes – mHealth, eHealth – making it an increasingly interesting target for language technology applications. Indeed “intelligent healthcare” – iHealth – is a major theme in LT-Innovate activities. IDC believes we are entering a second wave of mobile healthcare.
Laptops are the dominant mobile device today (84% of installed base), but smartphones and tablets will eventually dominate the market and spending on mobile point-of-care solutions in Western Europe will nearly double by 2015. In Europe, big healthcare data is fragmented across countries and languages, making it hard for applications to gain critical mass, as the Publicis Healthcare Communication Group has shown. But as the recent eHealth Week in Copenhagen demonstrated, individual countries are successfully transforming health data into digital intelligence. Transcription of audio recordings, speech interfaces, language interpretation for patients, ontologies and text analytics are all playing a critical role in enabling medicine to evolve into iHealth.

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