On February 2nd, Google released another seven languages on its Translate service, including Hungarian. Does this spell bad news for small companies such as MorphoLogic, Hungary's major language technology developer and operator of the Webfordítás web translation service? CEO Gábor Prószéky and László Tihanyi, Director of the Translation Business Unit, explain the strategies available to "independent" MT providers at a time when money is scarce.
In mid January, the European Commission (represented by Language Technology maestro Roberto Cencioni) brought together 250 of Europe's brightest and best translation players - academic researchers, technology providers, and LSPs - in Luxembourg to offer them some badly needed innovation funding. There was not a lot in the pot - €40 million to collaborate on new ways of making better systems - but for the first time in several years, the machine translation agenda was specifically targeted for development. Why now?
For Hans Uszkoreit, the doyen of MT researchers in Europe, one answer lies in the Gartner Hype Cycle that tracks technology visibility along a complex curve. Professor Uszkoreit is the current coordinator of the EuroMatrix project that is attempting to weave extensive collaboration around building statistical MT engines for all "official" EU languages (506 pairs), and gave a stimulating keynote at the Luxembourg meeting.
The Danish Languagelens System is a statistical MT engine that began as an academic project two years ago and now drives millions of words of English to Danish patent translation at the Copenhagen based LSP Lingtech. Theoretical linguist Daniel Hardt now supervises development at Language Lens.
Language technology consultant Tom Hoar has recently made his corpus processing software available at Sourceforge. Hopefully this is the first of many new offerings in the statistical space to bring down SMT overheads.
Google's imminent launch of its free-for-all Translation Centre raises some questions. Why is Google doing this? How can it be free? Should I start using it? What are the alternatives? What's next? This article brings some answers and serves as a springboard for a discussion.
At TAUS we're forward-thinking. Which means we try to know our history. So explore with us the story of translation automation in the digital age. See timeline
Researchers debate on future translation technologies
Researchers focus on a myriad of nuances in search of improvements. Major research groups and leading global researchers help to ground us in reality and help shed light on what we can expect in the near future.
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