The Future of Machine Translation

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It’s an exciting time for translators indeed, with December 2017 seeing the launch of two AI systems able to teach themselves any language. According to Global Market Insights, the translation industry will have a $1.5 billion net worth by 2024, with “the ability to translate different languages according to customer preferences and the lack of existing translator for several specialized fields and language combinations providing tremendous growth opportunities for the industry.” This is good news both for individual translators and translator tech developers. Both will be called upon to deliver increasingly specialized translation solutions to fulfil an ever-growing global demand. Technology does not Aim to Replace Translators Before delving into the machine translation systems that will be dominating the industry, it is important to understand that these systems are not meant to replace human translators. For example, Korea has one of the highest robot populations in the world and hardly 0 unemployment. Higher automation creates […]

Disintermediation – The Uber of Translation and iADAATPA open source multi-MT platform

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by Manuel Herranz Speaking at two conferences in two very different scenarios and to two very different audiences gives you the precious opportunity to get a taste of what the market thinks, the fears and the wishes. By market I mean people that represent business, companies or represent themselves but they have an influence on what others think in their profession. In my case, this is happened in Athens at the Elia Together conference and at Gala Boston recently. Although the presentations were targeted at two very different groups, they shared some common ground. Both audiences contained professional translators and linguists and representatives of translation companies. The presentation in Athens dealt more with the future of translation as a profession, some marketing development tips and a short summary of our iADAATPA open source multi-MT platform project which inevitably led to the question of “How does neural machine translation work”?. The presentation […]

Towards a multilingual world: the future of the English language in the 21st Century

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by Carolina Herranz-Carr  Carolina is an Account Executive at East Creative Agency, a voice-over artist in English and Spanish and a graduate from Brunel University. Her passion for languages comes from her bilingual background. To share a common language and a cultural aptitude are well-known determinants of trade, a belief long held by successful businesses in their international marketing campaigns and trade negotiations. With the far-reaching postcolonial spread of the English language and US dominance in the Western hemisphere, international trade, global politics and cultural interactions soon adopted English as the common ‘lingua franca’, whilst Russian dominated Eastern Europe and French most of Western Africa. This phenomenon accelerated the globalised world of today and created several cultural spheres of influence where none existed before and strengthening older links in some cases. However, in the face of an unsettled post-Brexit anxiety, a perceived void in US global leadership, and China’s entering in the big league […]

Our Nordic Translation Industry Forum Blog diary!

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by Garth Hedenskog From Wednesday, the 22nd until Friday the 24th of November, Pangeanic traveled north to Helsinki to attend our first Nordic Translation Industry Forum! And what an amazing event it was. Let’s start off by saying that Helsinki is a stunning location for business or pleasure. The team was greeted by light snow and a high of 1ºC for most of the 4 day stay! Garth Hedenskog (our sales director) and Alex Helle (our chief research and developer) were lucky enough to go this year. This was naturally a very popular event/destination to attend with a lot of staff at Pangeanic very eager to go! Here is Garth and Alex trying to look busy with at the interpreting challenge, they didn’t fool anyone! Garth and Alex of course didn’t just go for the beautiful scenery, adventure and crisp fresh Nordic air, they went to showcase Pangeanic’s technology, see […]

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How can a global brand be more local? 3 tips to reach more customers

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If you have been working hard to develop and set up an eCommerce site, you know that is the first step in a long journey. Now you need clients to find your site. Adjusting your eCommerce site to the feel and look of local markets is essential because it reassures customers that you have paid enough time and consideration for your brand to be more local to them. You are considering their language, their local customs and traditions. Three things to think about: 1) Not all images convey the same message The majority of eCommerce sites are all about the visual and the price. Planning a little bit about images that will not fit the palate of some audiences is paramount. Think about the right kind of images for your eCommerce website. For example: high-quality images for your products are neutral and will often come for the product manufacturers themselves. However, if you are […]

The Pangeanic neural translation project

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The last few months have been extraordinarily busy at Pangeanic, with a focus on the application neural networks for machine translation (neural machine translation) with tests into 7 languages (Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish), the completion of a national R&D project (Cor technology as a platform for translation companies offering an integrated way of analyzing and managing website translation and document analysis), the integration of CAT-agnostic translation memory system ActivaTM into Cor and our neural engines, and the award by the European Union’s CEF (Connecting Europe Facility) of the largest digital infrastructure project to build secure connectors to commercial MT vendors and the EU’s own machine translation service (MT@EC) for public administrations across Europe. Leading machine translation developers such as KantanMT, Prompsit, Tilde and our PangeaMT join forces with consulting company Everis to build IADAATPA, a system that will intelligently work on domain adaptation and the selection of […]

TAUS Tokyo Summit: improvements in neural machine translation in Japanese are real

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Not that business plans are written in stone any longer, but efforts to provide an insight by experts are always welcome. TAUS Tokyo Summit provided a much awaited for set of good news about perceived human translation improvements in neural machine translation in Japanese. English-Japanese was a well-known difficult language pair for rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation provided a really awful experience for many Japanese audiences. It has historically been one of the hardest language combinations to automate. It seems that neural machine translation may be the answer. Day 1 – Where is the translation industry heading? Jaap began by summarizing the latest meeting of thought leaders in Amsterdam who met in Amsterdam in order to brainstorm a potential landscape and priorities for the language industry in the five years. If machine translation hype was at its peak five years ago with statistical machine translation and all sort […]

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A web of problems: Why Google Translate and website translation can’t marry

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It is not news that machine translated websites are penalized by search engines. Google has developed its technologies on the back of reliable bilingual website crawling and freely available public data. After ditching rule-based engines (Systran) back in 2006, it embarked on a mission to use statistical machine translation (SMT) as a byproduct of its own data analysis. Websites that use machine translation to inform users are crawled and aligned, but those alignments provide data that adds dirt (read: uncertainty) which worsens the probabilities and hence the output (read: the translation). That is why Google Translate and website translation can’t marry. A machine translated website will be penalized by Google, for it is dirty. It is also a proof of laziness on the part of those responsible. The search giant wants to analyze natural, human data. We recently bumped into an article on Slator.com that got our feathers all aflutter. […]

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Agile Localization and Continuous Localization – The evolution

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Our people here at Pangeanic have been around the block when it comes to translating and localizing products for international markets, from website translations to software. These are the guys you would call “an expert in the field.”  However, in order to keep their guru status, they have to keep up with the new ways content is produced and, obviously, the new ways it has to be delivered. Translations are not “given” to users any longer. They are expected in various shapes and many formats and, many a time, they are expected immediately. Sometimes, they need to be produced for intermediate versions and releases. We have heard the terms Agile Localization and Continuous Localization, but do we know what they truly mean? Let us talk to Garth Hedenskog, Director of Sales at Pangeanic and Manuel Herranz, Pangeanic’s CEO. Garth faces many clients every day and he is aware of the […]

Deep learning – The day language technologies became a Christmas present

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It is said the third Monday every January is the saddest day in the year. It does not take deep learning to feel so. A long vacation period has ended. No sight of another one until several months away. Overspent, overstuffed, with no more presents to exchange, with winter settling in the Northern hemisphere and missing the drinks and chocolates that made our sugar levels go sky high, many start booking holidays in the sun. Let’s turn the clocks back to Christmas and we will remember the last few weeks as the Christmas when language technologies made it to the top of the list. Millions of people, literally, have opened boxes whose content was an electronic assistant with a rapidly improving ability to use human language. There are two main products: Amazon’s Echo, featuring the Alexa digital assistant, which sold more than 5m units. In essence, Echo is a desktop […]