With a good sense of history, the TAUS Executive Forum was held in the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel in Washington DC with a clear view of Georgetown University on the other side of the Potomac river, where just over fifty years ago the first MT experiment was performed on an IBM mainframe computer. The almost perfect translation of a Russian text into English convinced one of the project leaders that ‘all of the Soviet Union could easily be translated in a couple of hours’ and that ‘human translators would no longer be needed in a period of five years’. We opened the Forum meeting with a video of this news report from 1954, which Steve Richardson from Microsoft had kindly made available to us.
From the discussions of 11 user cases and 3 technology roadmaps during this two-day forum, it became clear that the predictions of that enthusiast back in the 1950s were far off the mark. But at the same time we concluded that MT technology has a very clear role to play in business these days. New applications have emerged, and in the mainstream publishing model, MT is being integrated with existing translation tools and workflows to generate productivity increases of 18% to 50%.
In the breakout sessions the 33 delegates from large user companies and smaller practitioner agencies discussed ways to streamline the integration and deployment of MT. High on the agenda are industry collaboration, sharing and learning from user cases, and validating ROI. This is exactly what TAUS likes to deliver to its members.
Still a great report and resource help to assess progress and remaining issues for improved automated translation in 2010.
