TAUS - Enabling better translation

PROGRAM

Monday April 23

13:30 /TAUS Open Source Machine Translation Showcase
Rahzeb Choudhury (TAUS), Professor Chengqing Zong (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yu Gong (Adobe), Jie Jiang (Applied Language Solutions), Grant Straker (Straker Translations)

Tuesday April 24

Part 1: Vision & Market Overview

9:00 /Welcome
Huang Changqi, Assistant to President (Translators Association of China), Jaap van der Meer, Director (TAUS) 

9:10 /Agenda overview & introductions
 Jaap van der Meer (TAUS)

9:20 /Translation in China
Huang Changqi (Translators Association of China)

Overview of the current development of the language service industry in China, the opportunities and challenges.

9:40 /Who Gets Paid for Translation in 2020
Jaap van der Meer (TAUS)

Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo! are either getting paid or getting ready to be paid for translation through advertising revenue. Giving access to multilingual information increases their user base and raises cash. They are setting an example that many others would like to emulate. Anyone who fails to see the fundamental shift in the demand for translation from the traditional buyer to the billions of citizens, patients, tax payers and consumers, is just scratching the surface of the vast potential for the global language industries. The European Commission tells us that each EU citizen is paying on average €2 per year to fund the one Billion Euro translation budget of the Directorate General of Translation, by far the largest in the world. We can rightfully say that translation is already being paid for in different ways than the word-price model.

Data-driven machine translation is still in its infancy and the language industry is only just starting to work with this technology on a material scale. We are only at the beginning of an innovation journey that will include game changing shifts for both buyers and providers of translation as they seek to adapt their models to the 21st century. In his opening presentation Jaap van der Meer will give an overview of “Eight Things to Change”.

10:00 /Development of MT in China
Cathy Yan (TransN)

10:20 / Changing our MT Perspective
Daniel Marcu (SDL) 

In 2002, statistical machine translation was commercialized to bring a new translation solution to enterprise and government organizations. While this was a great advance for global communication, it has also stirred a decade long debate over which systems are the best. First it was Rule Based MT vs. SMT, then RbMT vs. Hybrid vs. SMT. Today, the conversation continues about which individual advances or improvements generate the best translations. It is time to change our perspective.

In this presentation, Daniel Marcu, Chief Technology Officer for SDL Language Technologies will share his vision for automated translation. He will talk about what is required to transition MT from a component into an ecosystem - one where MT is touched by numerous products and platforms and becomes an integral part of each and every communication. In this type of environment, improvements to systems drive significant productivity gains across the board, give users control over the MT systems for their particular communication needs and create opportunities for both the enterprise and translation vendors. The outlook is bright, but it starts with changing the conversations we are driving as a community. 

10:50 /Refreshment break

11:20 /IOL Mode: an Open 4th-party Service Platform
Henry He (TransN)

This speech presents the mode of the internet of languages (IOL) and discusses the social and economic value it brings to the language service industrial chain. The IOL mode represents a new-generation global open 4th-party language service platform which makes use of SNS, language, and cloud computing technologies to achieve highly elastic throughput and to meet the worldwide fluctuating and expanding demand for language services by means of organic integration of language service resources and markets. The development of this mode will fundamentally break the barrier to the business expansion of a translation company, creating a vast business space while offering better client experience by making translation services easily available like water, power and other utilities.

11:40 /Readability and accuracy - two aspects of MT
Xiao Jian (CCID)

Currently, the functions of machine translation (MT) mainly include the following two aspects based on its features. One is for information browsing, for which the readability of articles translated through MT is required. The other one is serving as the tool of a translation platform, for which the accuracy of translation is required. Given the above two vastly different user requirements, demands for MT are also entirely different. 

12:00 /Discussion & Questions

12:30 /Lunch

Part 2: Challenges and Opportunities of Translation Automation

14:00 /Challenges and Opportunities of Translation Automation

Six 5-minutes presentations followed by a panel discussion and questions and answers with the audience between three buyers and three providers of language services. The topics they will cover:

• Quality. Impacts of MT on translation quality. How to protect quality. How to measure quality.
• Efficiency. Impacts of MT on translation efficiency. Productivity of post-editing. How to price MT-based services.
• Business impacts. Is MT disruptive? Does it change the business model radically? Or is it just an evolutionary step?

Presenters and panelists are: Victor Wang (Huawei Technologies), James Wei (EC Innovations), Rain Lau (Google), Pablo Vazquez (EMC), Steven Yu Zhang (Beijing Micromice Translation), Arthur Lin (hiSoft).

15:20 /Refreshment break

Part 3: MT is Entering the Human-Based Translation Process

15:50 /Business Strategies for Building Strategic Advantage and Revenue from Machine Translation
Dion Wiggins (Asia Online) 

Translators and LSPs have been curious about Machine Translation (MT), but have yet to fully understand how they are able to build strategic advantage and increase revenues. Recent advances in MT have changed the landscape from being able to get the meaning (gist) of text in another language using MT to being able to publish the output with very few human edits. Industrial-strength customized MT now offers near-human quality and greatly improved translation throughput. With this increased productivity come new market opportunities for LSPs.

16:10 /SmartMATE in Practice: Use-Case Scenarios
Jie Jiang (Applied Language Solutions)

SmartMATE is the online self-serve translation platform developed in Applied Language Solutions. It incorporates translation memory, customized and self-serve machine translation, glossary management and an online editing environment, which together comprises a one-stop machine-assisted translation service to a wide range of users in the translation industry. 

16:40 /Moses works for Adobe. A use case of Open-Source MT

17:10 /Discussions & Questions

18:30 /Networking dinner, offered by CCID, at the restaurant in the Park Plaza Beijing West Hotel
(Confirmation required)

Wednesday April 25

Part 3: Web-based Automatic Translation

9:00 /Introduction of the day
Jaap van der Meer (TAUS)

9:10 /The Online Language Translation Service in Youdao
Jin Huang (NetEase Youdao Information Technology, Beijing, Co., Ltd.)

Youdao is the larges indigenous free online translation engine, and it provides a full range of services including online dictionary, online translation, desktop and mobile application, and open data interface. Hereafter is intended to introduce the attempts that Youdao has made in online translation, as well as the products and features that Youdao has developed based on user behavior characteristics of Chinese. In addition, some prospects for future work.

9:35 /Online Machine Translation
Hua Wu (Baidu)

Besides search-related service, Baidu also provides online translation service (http:/translate.baidu.com or http://fanyi.baidu.com), now supporting Chinese-English and Chinese-Japanese bidirectional translation service, and planning to extend to more language pairs. In this talk, Hua Wu, will analyze the characteristics of web-based machine translation and propose the core translation technology to meet the users' need.

10:00 /Collaborative Machine Translation: Your Community and Microsoft's Knowledge working together
Chris Wendt (Microsoft)

The implementation of collaborative translation, in conjunction with personalized traning of the translation engine, provides companies and interested groups a unique and elegant option of using their own data, and the feedback of internal and external crowds, to tune and improve a translation engine for specific uses - or for new languages. Big data from Microsoft's Bing Search engine provides generic language knowledge, while the translations and target language material provided by your community provides the specific domain knowledge: trained and optimized together gives you the best of both worlds, and significantly improves the utility of machine translation in your field, above a generic engine. We will look at the technology involved, and a few practical examples of the collaboration and custom training working together, lifting the quality of automatic translation. 

10:25 /Refreshment break

Part 4: Innovation Perspectives and Use Cases

10:55 /How we do localization at Google
Rain Lau (Google)

The traditional localization process is designed to scale and it is largely limited by the project triangle of time, cost and quality. gCommunity is Google localization's attempt to enable better quality, speed, cost, and communication. 

11:15 /Translations by the hour - a race to the top for translation industry
Grant Straker (Straker Software)

This presentation will look at the "race to the top" for the translation industry. Who can translate the fastest, with the best quality and at the best price. Straker has developed a world leading "translations by the hour" system which changes the way in which translation projects are managed and charged. Find out why this new model is a game changer for the translation industry.

11:35 /Use Case Fuji Xerox

12:00 /The Convergence of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and MT (Machine Translation)
Anthony Wong, CCID

The automated language profiling technologies proposed in this presentation expand traditional corpus-based approach to include the NLP-oriented research and application. The speaker will put forward the building of 3-tuple comparable corpora to exploit the native language models, so as to achieve improvement on natural language processing applications such as MT and cross-language information retrieval. There will be illustrations on the effort to reduce 'Translationese' in the language profiling aspect, as well as explanation on why 'comparable corpus' is preferred over 'parallel corpus' in this approach.

12:25 /Discussion & Questions

12:40 /Lunch

14:00 /An Internet Based English Learning Engine
Dinglong Huang (Microsoft) 

Using data mined from the Web, Microsoft aims to provide an online Chinese-English dictionary and language translation service, a technique that could one day be used in similar tools for anyone learning any language. Microsoft launched Engkoo service in China 2 years ago, and now millions of Chinese users are using it to learn English. Engkoo won the Asian Innovation Award from the Wall Street Journal. This technology is also used to help the Chinese government correct the 'Chinglish' on the street during the Shanghai Expo 2010. We introduce the technology, insights, designing concept, use cases, and interesting stories behind this product during this talk.

14:30 /Google Translator Toolkit
Rain Lau (Google)

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google Translator Toolkit is the product that promotes universal access through translation. This session will include demonstrations of the latest features of Translator Toolkit, as well as a question-and-answer session.

15:10 /TAUS Data 2020
Jaap van der Meer (TAUS)

TAUS Data Association is an industry-driven platform for the sharing of language data. Members and non-members can upload and download translation data for the training of MT engines and for advanced leveraging. Translators use TDA to search terms and phrases.

15:30 /  Refreshment break

16:00 /Tools in the Cloud - TA and TermWiki
Robert Derbyshire (CSOFT International)

Have you ever wondered about the potential combining machine translation, translation memory and multilingual terminology for the highest quality automated content? Or wanted to improve consistency by managing terminology, but not had the resources to do so?

During this presentation, the multi-award winning localization provider CSOFT International will discuss its experiences in developing cloud-based tools for the translation industry. Designed for collaboration, cloud-based tools deliver where traditional tools fail. The presentation will introduce Tà, a revolutionary new system developed by CSOFT to automate many aspects of the translation process, allowing maximum productivity.

It will also introduce TermWiki, a social website designed around the crowdsourcing of terminology, as well as the more secure development of glossaries for organizations. Through the presentation, attendees will gain exciting insights into the future of the localization industry, driven by technical innovation.

16:20 /Using CAT for Translation
Gabriel Su (ASUS)

16:40 /TAUS Dynamic Quality Framework
Rahzeb Choudhury (TAUS)

Quality is when the buyer or customer is satisfied. Yet, quality measurement in the translation industry is not always linked to customer satisfaction, but rather is managed by quality gatekeepers on the supply and demand side who have specific evaluation models, the majority of which are based on counting errors, applying penalties and maintaining thresholds with little, if any, interaction from customers. Quality evaluation (QE) in the translation industry is problematic.

Despite very detailed and strict error-based evaluation models, it seems that satisfaction levels with both translation quality and the evaluation process itself are low. QE models are static, that is, there is a 'one size fit all' approach. Little consideration is given to multiple variables such as content type, communicative function, end user requirements, context, perishability, or mode of translation generation (whether the translation is created by a qualified human translator, unqualified volunteer, machine translation system or a combination of these).

Together with a group of twenty of the enterprise members, TAUS is introducing the Dynamic Quality Framework, a knowledge base for general industry use, which will be followed by a Dynamic Quality Dashboard for QE benchmarking.

17:00 /Closure 

Next TAUS Asia Translation Summit: April  16-17, 2013

VENUE

The TAUS Asia Translation Summit will be held in the Park Plaza Beijing West Hotel. TAUS has reserved a block of rooms at the hotel for a special rate of 550 RMB per night. This fee includes a 15% surcharge and daily breakfast buffet. To book your room, please email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Or call the hotel at (86-10) 6813 0088. Please make sure to mention 'TAUS Meeting' in your booking to benefit from the discounted rate. We advise you to book your room as soon as possible as a limited number of rooms is available.

Address of the hotel
No. 17 Xicui Road
Haidan District
Beijing 100036
China
Telephone: +86 10 6813 0088
Fax: +86 10 6813 3399 

REGISTRATION FEES

Registration fees for the TAUS Asia Translation Summit are:

• €500 for members of TAUS (4,500 CNY)
• €1,000 for non-members of TAUS (9,000 CNY)

DISCOUNTS

TAUS offers a 50% discount on the annual membership fees for new organizations registering for the Asia Translation Summit and joining TAUS. This offer is limited to companies headquartered in Asia. Members of TAC will benefits from an additional 20% discount on the TAUS annual membership fees.