Major disruption ahead in the language industry!

The Q2 issue of GALAxy, the quarterly newsletter of our partner association GALA, is guest edited by LT-Innovate Chairman Jochen Hummel (@JochenHummel) with a thought provoking piece on how Language Technology will leverage Big Data and transform the industry.

Several other articles are contributed and/or co-authored by LT-Innovate members and partners:

• Big Data and the Translation Industry: Three Technology Challenges by Andrew Joscelyne, LT Innovate
• Finding New Business Segments Through Big Data by Michael Wetzel, Coreon GmbH & Matthias Heyn, SDL plc
• How to Improve Your Relationship with Machine Translation co-authored by Heidi Depraetere, CrossLang
• Unlocking Language Resource Assets by Christian Galinski, Infoterm
• Riga Summit Forges a Unified Vision for Multilingual Europe by Rihards Kalniņš, Tilde

taraXŰ: The first end-to-end machine translation environment project status as of October 2012

The rising demand for machine translation (MT) and the resulting implementations have shown that workflows and system architectures can become very complex. Particularly, the setup of combination or hybrid systems making use of different MT engines running in parallel has kept many language service providers from introducing MT technology.

To address this issue, euroscript teamed up in 2010 with a strong project consortium in the highly ambitious R&D project taraXŰ. The project has by now resulted in the first advanced machine translation environment that deploys amongst other things:

• Corpus and translation management (running different rule or template based and statistical machine translation engines in parallel)
• Automated source- and target-language quality assessment
• Automatic selection of the best translation through innovative methods
• A web-interface allowing human translators to correct machine translation output and assess its quality by ranking, post-editing, error-analysis, etc.

"The taraXŰ project gives us an unprecedented opportunity to perform applied research in a human-centric setting. The early inclusion of human translators in the development process is definitely a winning strategy to further improve machine translation quality" says Hans Uszkoreit, Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Head of DFKI Language Technology Lab.

The taraXŰ project consortium relies upon expertise in translation services, machine translation and evaluation, language checking, language technology, and related fields. Project partners are Acrolinx (member of the LT-Innovate Network), the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), euroscript Deutschland and yocoy (member of the LT-Innovate Network and winner of LT-Innovate Award 2012).

Press Release on euroscript

MemSource: 3 questions on Machine Translation use

At the Webinar “Making Machine Translation Part of Your Everyday Workflow“ MemSource ran three polling questions and the results are very interesting. To experience the way MemSource Cloud integrates machine translation into the everyday translation workflow, take a free trial. Or read about our post-editing analysis that provides insight into machine translation quality and usage at a segment level.

Question 1: We use Machine Translation for:

0% of our projects: 52%

10% of our projects: 28%

30% of our projects: 16%

50% of our projects: 0%

100% of our projects: 4%

Question 2: Do your translators sometimes use MT without you knowing about it?

No, but I have no way to check: 44%

No, and I have a way to check: 12%

Yes, but I don't mind: 12%

Yes, and it is a concern for us: 32%

Question 3: When you use MT for a project, are you able to measure MT quality?

No: 43%

Yes, to some extent: 45%

Yes, we always measure it: 12%

More information about the technology developed by MEM Source

MEM Source profile on LT-Innovate