TRANSLATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Machine translation has arrived for good in the language industry; the influential Global Watchtower blog even called it a tidal wave earlier this year. TAUS’ recent article on Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft ended by promising to look at the issues highlighted by the team’s analysis. Their assessment is that we need shared services and resources in 21st century translation to grow from a $15 billion industry to a $70 billion one. I pick up the baton by proposing companies combine investments to effectively leverage open source SMT for localization.
While research in machine translation has been going on for over 50 years, recently adopted statistical methods make it easier to create customized MT systems for specific language pairs and domains. By leveraging existing translation assets, translation providers and buyers can build well-performing MT systems that, combined with post-editing, are more productive than traditional translation methods alone. This is beginning to lead to wide-spread adoption of statistical MT (SMT) systems throughout the industry.
