The foundation for TAUS (Translation Automation User Society) was laid in a Round Table meeting on November 18, 2004 at the Localization World Conference in San Francisco. Delegates from fifteen companies - all corporate users of translation services and technologies - joined for a full day brainstorming on issues around translation automation. The day turned into a great success. The open discussions and the sharing of experiences and insights helped the participants in the meeting to be better informed and prepared for their own implementation of authoring, translation and globalization technologies.
Corporate agenda
Until a few years ago the corporate world did not bother much about translation technology. Translation and localization services were outsourced to vendors. It was up to the vendors to invest in translation technology. This has resulted in a translation services industry that is equipped with primarily desk-top translation tools and often incompatible data bases of terminology and translation memories. This also left the customer, the corporate user, handicapped, not able to optimize his process.
The growing importance of international markets has changed this picture in recent years. Many corporate customers of translation and localization services are looking for ways to get more control of the translation process, internalize their translation memories, and sometimes even in-source their translation activities. They need to increase their volumes, lower their costs and shorten their time-to-market. Companies have started making investments in Globalization Management Systems, Machine Translation technology and sometimes they have started internal development and integration of globalization technologies and methodologies. These early adopters have learned that translation automation is not a straightforward process.
MT for customer support
Microsoft participated in the Roundtable meeting and shared their experience in applying MT to the Customer Support Knowledge Base. The process of building this internally developed MT system was tedious but - as it appears now - rewarding. Spanish and Japanese customers can now find information in their native language on the Microsoft support site. Despite the perhaps lower than human translation quality level, the ratings for usefulness and satisfaction are very close to the ratings for the English source. The Microsoft MT system is developed on the basis of the vast collection of Translation Memories that have been accumulated over the years by translation vendors. The result is a hybrid rule-based and data-driven MT system that can be applied to new languages relatively quickly.
IBM and Cisco who also participated in the Round Table meeting apply MT to their customer support databases as well. IBM uses an internally developed system, that is available on the market as IBM Websphere Translation Server. Cisco uses one of the commercial MT systems.