Many businesses want to adopt MT, but face a seamingly impenetrable set of barriers when confronted with the cost of MT licenses, knowing which engines are available, understanding ease of customization, and working out how to measure ROI. The recent TAUS Executive Forum in Copenhagen helped shed light on how to breakthrough.
The great linguistic distance of Japanese from other major commercial languages has stimulated a great deal of MT-related activity in Japan but also continues to present challenges for translation quality. One could sense at the TAUS meeting a strong interest in Japan in the emerging new generation of MT technologies and that perhaps the impetus to experiment with and implement new solutions is starting to overtake the longstanding cautious skepticism towards MT that has prevailed in Japanese companies.
The TAUS Executive Forum in Edinburgh (March 25-27) was another milestone event. "One of the best conferences I have attended in my 15 years in business..," commented one of the attendees. The two days of meetings were attended by 50 decision makers representing the buy and the sell side of the market in equal proportions. On the agenda was the design of the localization future. The program was carefully prepared by a committee with representatives from some of the leading IT companies. They had called for proposals for truly Open Translation Platforms. Out of 15 companies submitting proposals 8 were invited to present in Edinburgh. What made this TAUS Executive Forum so special was the genuine openness to change. "Innovation in the localization industry started right here in Edinburgh."
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
