The European Commission (EC) has just announced a new round of language research & technology funding with a strong focus on the translation space. At the same time, a new raft of translation-related projects chosen from last year’s calls are about to get underway.
At a meeting held in Luxembourg on March 22 and 23, funding seekers and providers, project maestros and a number of European language technology stakeholders were given an overview of current research and tech development projects. Around €156 million will be made available between 2009 and 2013 when the current “framework” program for Information and Communication Technologies as a whole come to an end.
(See here for further EC information about language technology programs, funding, calls, and new projects).
Recent and upcoming calls for proposals put the emphasis on pushing the translation technology envelope forward in two ways:
- new more fundamental research on various aspects of MT hybridization, and
- taking existing technology to market by organizing value chains into testable demonstrations of what can work in real world communication environments.
This second stream of EC funding – enhancing the technology for end users – is particularly close to the TAUS vision of LBI or localization/language business innovation. In Luxembourg, where TAUS Data Association gave a presentation, much of the focus was on industry-booster actions such as pooling and sharing existing data, tools and applications in more efficient ways. The plan is to gradually build a robust resources infrastructure to underpin all types of translation - publication, interactive, institutional and social.
However, only a few LSPs and technology providers managed to attend the event. And most projects, even those with an “industry” focus, still tend to be research-driven. As was noted at the meeting, these projects tend to be over-ambitious in scope, and cannot always delivery on their promise. For example, widely flung network projects may start with a comprehensive check-list of action points, even though these have not necessarily been explicitly motivated by upstream market research into what the various translation constituencies actually need at any one stage in their development.
The main problem facing the EC language technology unit channeling this funding is one that has always dogged the global translation industry – how to map an overarching vision of a “language technology infrastructure” onto the extremely fragmented community of players who research, develop, market, provide services to, and use the various components of the “multilingual web”.
This fragmentation reflects the myriad variety of countries, language pairs, organizations, individuals, legislations, and even content types that must somehow interoperate to make the emerging infrastructure work for the benefit of Europe’s end users.
Users themselves are already a vast multiple, covering anything from large enterprises and governments to individuals trying to decipher a foreign language blog. Relevant language pairs theoretically reach into the hundreds for any genuine Europe-wide translation platform. And usable resources need to cover language-based text types ranging from well-structured domains to idiomatic online chat.
Yet without some kind of a market-centric model that explicitly addresses the hierarchy of needs, the funding effort may appear to work like scatter shot, occasionally hitting home with relatively small investments but also missing out on potential winners in the long term.
Few people in the industry can pinpoint any breakthrough translation technology in the last 15 years that has emerged from the many dozens of previous language tech projects, even though a lot of invisible work has surely been carried out. The time might now be ripe to do something innovative.
The downsides are familiar: a certain amount of red tape, extra management loads, human resource availability problems, and business risk. But the EC is simplifying the application process, and seems very keen to fund a showcase of focused, operational technology projects as outcomes, alongside its much larger, looser “network of excellence” type projects that tend to forge more traditional, slower-moving alliances across the research community.
This is why translation industry players such as LSPs and technology providers who need to innovate to grow their businesses should at least investigate the possibility of getting some EC funding. Projects lasting 18 months to 2 years could help them test-drive an innovative solution with one or two of customers, working in small (4-strong) partnerships where sharing and pooling are becoming industry watchwords.
