Ecosystem translate: How to build, run and own your machine translation

Pangeanic will exhibit its Pangea machine translation technology at LocWorld London 2013 inside ELIA's booth. Over the 3-day event, you will have a chance to meet our representatives and see for yourself how PangeaMT works and how easy it is to create translation engines, manage them and update engines, clean and segregate training material and of course obtain translation in portable and open formats (from TMX and XLIFF to xml-compliant docx, odt, html and ttx).

Manuel Herranz is also a guest speaker at the pre-conference day, where he will speak as an experienced implementor of machine translation (MT) technologies at LSP and for large organizations with big publishing needs. Pangeanic was a founding member of TAUS, the industry think-tank and its spin-off the Data Association. Advancements in machine translation led Pangeanic to become the first language service provider to successfully apply Moses as recorded by the EU research program Euromatrixplus. The release of its ground-breaking DIY features in 2011 were "ahead of the times" and now part of many MT offerings.

Manuel will focus his talk on how machine translation is not only being adopted by technical departments, but also by translators themselves, who see the opportunity of customizing engines as another helping tool in their jobs. This is an abstract of the presentation:

I used to be a translator, now I run MT

Gone to the days when machine translation meant a desktop application, an off-the-shelf product or a post-editing job imposed by a translation agency.
Or aren't they? If you work for/own/outsource translation work from an LSP, machine translation may still sound like something exotic, something only "the big boys" do, something terribly complicated based on unintelligible algorithms.

Fear not. Since 2011, small agencies, translation departments and even freelance translators can create their own engines at will. Increasingly, the translator with a taylor's complex is giving way to a data handler who can mix&match pre-built engines, add new material at will and service pre-translations for fast post-editing.

We do not need to wait for technology to evolve from electrons to photons for fast MT customization. It is already here. Some people used to be translators, now they have MT Customization Specialist on the name cards.