EuroMatrixPlus

Europe faces a growing economic and societal challenge due to its vast diversity of languages, and machine translation technology holds promise as a means to address this challenge. The goals of EuroMatrixPlus are:

Firstly, the project will continue the rapid advance of machine translation technology, creating example systems for every official EU language, and providing other machine translation developers with our infrastructure for building statistical translation models.

Secondly, the project will continue and broaden the controlled systematic investigation of different approaches and techniques to accelerate the scientific evolution of novel methods, including both selection and cross-fertilization. The aim is to arrive at scientifically well understood novel combinations of methods that are proven superior to the state of the art.

Thirdly, the project will focus on bringing machine translation to the users, in addition to focusing on scientific advances. Because our statistical models are derived from example translations, we believe that there is potential for a synergistic relationship in which users suggest improvements to the system by post-editing its output, and the system improves itself by learning from user feedback.

Fourthly, the project will contribute to the growth and competitiveness of the European MT research scene and infrastructure through its open international competitive shared tasks and living community supported surveys of resources, tools, systems and their respective capabilities.

In bringing MT to the users, EuroMatrixPlus focuses on two different types of users: (a) professional translators and translation agencies working for private corporations, administrations, and other organisations, and (b) lay users who create content on a volunteer basis by translating foreign materials into their own languages. The project will investigate how these users can benefit from state of the art machine translation, and conversely, how machine translation can benefit from user corrections. 

EuroMatrixPlus will create an openly accessible sample application that enables users to automatically translate news stories and web pages from any European language into any other, and whose corrections will be exploited as data for improving translation technology.

Funded by:	European Union
Project Manager:	Hans Uszkoreit (Hans.Uszkoreit@dfki.de)
Contact:	Andreas Eisele (Andreas.Eisele@dfki.de)
Duration:	01.03.2009 - 29.02.2012
URL:	http://www.euromatrixplus.eu
Partners:	DFKI (coordinator), University of Edinburgh, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Johns Hopkins University, FBK: Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Université Le Mans , Dublin City University, Lucy Software and Services GmbH, CEET s.r.o.

Source: Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz

Brave New World of Translation

No one disputes the fact that the translation industry is undergoing fundamental changes, which are affecting what we translate, the way do it, and the compensation we receive for our work.

The basic (interrelated) factors in these changes are

1. Technology,

2. Globalization, and

3. Concentration of the Industry.

Technology —computers, CAT tools, and the Internet— has dramatically increased our productivity in the past decades, and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In a recent conference I attended in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Renato Beninatto, CEO of the consulting firm milengo, predicted that, while the income of translators will remain unchanged or will slightly increase in the coming years, the compensation per translated word will drop substantially. He foresees translators' productivity to rise to 30,000 - 40,000 words a day thanks to CAT tools, which will be free of charge.

Beninatto also foresees that the traditional model of translator-reviser will be replaced by machine translations edited by often monolingual experts.

Since the technologies needed for advanced machine translation can only be afforded by large multinational companies, individual translators and mom-and-pop translation companies will be increasingly marginalized and left with the crumbs of the market and with highly specialized translations such as literature and advertising, which are not susceptible to machine translation. While no one expects Shakespeare to be machine-translated into Quechua in our lifetime, most technical documents (which includes almost all non-literary texts) can already be successfully "gisted" by corpus-based machine translation. In many cases such "gisting" is adequate for the purpose; this is why quality will continue to be trumped by price for all but the most specialized translations where both accuracy and style are critical or where cultural adaptation, rather than straightforward translation, is required.

Do you agree with these predictions? How do you see our industry's future in the next few years and decades? How do you see your own role in this "brave new world of translation"?

Fuente: Translation Journal Blog