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 A computer newsletter for translation professionals


Issue 13-6-223
(the two hundred twenty-third edition)  

Contents

1.Getting There and Beyond (Premium Edition)

2. Last Call!

3. Swiss All the Way

4. The Next Step (Premium Edition)

The Last Word on the Tool Box

You Do the Math

Imagine this: Two competing, relatively sophisticated applications to aid in, say, higher math are developed by two of the largest high-tech companies in the world. Each of these companies promotes its product heavily and proudly, proclaiming, in fact, that it will be one of the cornerstones of its future development plan. Not the development plan for the math application alone, mind you, but for virtually every other product they develop.

There is only one problem: about 8 out of 10 times the programs don't get their calculations right. They usually get pretty close to the actual results in their calculations, but just not quite there. Every once in a while they hit the bull's eye, but for every time that happens another calculation goes completely haywire. In those cases, the calculated result is not even pretty close; instead, it's on the very opposite side of the spectrum.

Well, yes, say the very confident representatives of the companies, the programs are not perfect, but it is so hard to get it right all the time, so it's amazing how well we do.

And, aside from some pretentious math geeks (who always seem to think that they're smarter than everyone anyway -- Gosh!), pretty much everyone agrees. In fact the leading media outlets regularly run  major stories on how wonderfully close many of those calculations come much of the time and marvel at the ingenious developers and the powerful computing processes that make all this possible. Some even speculate that one day -- ONE GLORIOUS  DAY! -- the programs will always get it right.

Well, virtually always.

 

I'm sure you've seen through my thinly veiled analogy. Of course, one could take issue with how closely a math program relates to a machine translation program, but sometimes odd comparisons allow us to view familiar things in a new and helpful context.

In fact, we should be proud to represent the profession that is performing what Google and Microsoft products unabashedly and proudly strive to achieve. It really is hard to get those translations just right, and because everyone knows it, no one dares to laugh about the imperfections of the results.

But aside from the weather forecast, can you think of any other area where this level of inexactitude is permissible? I can't, and we should remind ourselves of that fact when we lose perspective on how relevant our profession is.

It's like the quote that I found last week: Google Translate is "like a dog walking on its hind legs: although it is not done well, you are surprised to find it done at all."

(And before I receive a host of critical messages: no, the semi-free machine translation engines from Google and Microsoft are not the same as customized MT engines with appropriately integrated post-editing services, but that still doesn't make any of the foregoing irrelevant.)

1. Getting There and Beyond  (Premium Edition)

In many ways, memoQ has long since "arrived." It is the clear frontrunner among its competitors against SDL Trados in the TEnT (translation environment tool) market, and it is a known entity in all sectors of the language industry. But I realized only last week how much Kilgray, the maker of memoQ, really has established itself as a company when I talked with its CEO István Lengel. We naturally chatted about the new version of memoQ (more about that in a second), but we also talked about transitions within the company itself. It both took me by surprise and made me marvel at the maturity of the company to learn that much of the current leadership is going to step back to let some "fresher blood" take over. This doesn't mean that current CEO István or CTO Gábor Ugray or head of marketing Sandor Papp will completely resign. They will stay in the background in reduced roles with continued oversight, but the day-to-day business will be led by others (Gábor's shoes, for instance, will be filled by ex-Passolo/SDL developer Florian Sachse).

Not too shabby for guys who have barely reached their mid-thirties, wouldn't you think? I can't wait to see how this transition will work out, but my gut feeling is that it'll turn out well.

Let's talk about the tool.

 

. . . you can find the rest of this long and in-depth article in the premium edition. If you'd like to read more, an annual subscription to the premium edition costs just $25 at www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit. Or you can purchase the new edition of the Translator's Tool Box ebook and receive an annual subscription for free. 

 

2. Last Call!

I've just been told by the University of Maryland that my three-day translation technology workshop still needs a bunch of sign-ups. You can read more about it by following the link above (you'll need to scroll down a little on that page). During those three days we'll be focusing on CAT tools (translation environment tools), complex file formats, data resources, machine translation, and the many smaller tools that are needed for the modern translator.

The dates were originally announced as July 25-27 but they are in fact July 26-28. As I mentioned before, it's going to be very hands-on and practical -- no matter whether you are a beginner or have been translating for a long time. Plus, the ATA has agreed to approve the workshop for 10 Continued Education points for participants.

And really important: the application deadline is July 1!

Hope to see you there.

 

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3. Swiss All the Way

Most of you know that I like to mention where tool vendors come from -- partly to emphasize that we truly are an international bunch of folks, but also because it intrigues me when countries that would typically not be on my mental list of hotbeds of development are among the places where translation technology is being developed, including countries like Uruguay or Ukraine. But only rarely does a vendor whom I interview stress that his company is located in a certain country because of the positive associations with it -- especially for his particular product.

Well, that's what happened when I talked to (the native German) Mirko Plitt of Modulo Language about his Swiss Post-Editing Score product. A quality assurance product from the land of super-accurate watches! Can there be a better match?!

Now, you might ask why "Swiss" is mentioned in the name of the tool at all. It risks misleading potential non-Swiss clients, and it's surely not because "Swiss Post-Editing Score" is an easy-flowing and highly marketable name! Well, listen to what it does and you might agree that the particular Swiss brand of precision goes to the heart of what the tool does.

Consider this actual example (don't worry if your German is a little rusty -- it's OK if you don't really understand):  

Titelverteidiger Rafael Nadal hat erneut das Endspiel der French Open erreicht.

Nun trifft Nadal am Sonntag entweder auf den französischen Lokalmatador Jo-Wilfried Tsonga oder seinen Landsmann David Ferrer. Djokovic konnte sich damit nicht für die letztjährige Niederlage im Endspiel revanchieren. "Das ist ein sehr spezieller Sieg für mich", sagte Nadal nach seinem 20. Sieg im 35. Duell mit seinem Dauerrivalen: "Dieser Platz ist für mich etwas ganz Besonderes. Novak wird in einem anderen Jahr hier gewinnen, er ist ein großer Champion."

And then this:

Defending champion Rafael Nadal has again reached the final hell of the French Open.

Now Nadal meets on Sunday either on the French local hero Jo-Wilfried Tsonga or his compatriot experienced David Ferrer. Djokovic could not reciprocate for last year's defeat in staying the final. "This is a very special win for me," said ago Nadal after his 20th victory in the 35th duel with rival duration: "This place is for me something special. Novak will win in another year here, he's was a great champion."

Without a doubt you will stumble over the unidiomatic English -- that's not surprising since the English text was produced by machine translation. But you should really stumble over the surprising "final hell" of the French Open (unless you were just deeply engrossed in re-reading Dante and thought final hells could be found everywhere).

The "final hell" was inserted by Swiss Post-Editing Score. And it did that for no other reason than to be caught by the post-editor of this machine-translated text. The makers of SPES (sorry about the acronym, but my fingers are tired!) are not trying to evaluate the quality of machine translation; instead, they want to give MT users a way to evaluate post-editors. Companies that use MT will tell you it's hard to find good post-editors (if they find any at all), and there really are only very subjective ways to evaluate their quality. What about combining the well-proven ideas of sampling and error injection and merging them with measures of editing distance (how much a post-editor changes in the machine-translated text) to identify positive or negative outliers? This is what SPES does.

By injecting errors and automatically checking whether those have been corrected, it can come up with reports on the reliability of the individual translators. And if those number are also related to editing distance (and word count), it's possible to see whether the post-editor was just an (unnecessarily) eager beaver and corrected everything and anything anyway, or whether she focused on the "right kind of errors" (and, yes, dear passionate MT foe, I know, I know...).

You can see a sample "dashboard" report right here.

So far this product is in an alpha stage with only two LSPs using it. In fact, how they're using it at this point is less than sophisticated: they have to have the error insertion and the analysis done via intermediate XLIFF files. But when the product is launched in October it will be introduced as an API, allowing it to be directly integrated into any machine translation engine so the process will be automated. The price? It will be charged as a service, and will be approximately at the level of what Google charges for its Google Translate API, says Marko.

I'll let you know how this tool and concept progress.

Oh, Marko brought up something else that was interesting. As I mentioned above, it's very difficult to find qualified MT post-editors. How to eventually solve this? Let the laws of the market sort it out by significantly raising compensation. That's an idea! (And, yes again, dear MT foe, I know that this still does not mean that you'll touch it with a ten-foot pole.)

 

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4. The Next Step (Premium Edition)

The Muscovite company ITI ("International Translation and Informatics") was originally a software development company but quickly morphed into a localization and translation company. But it apparently never quite shook its development roots, because the product that it developed first for its internal use and has now opened up for the rest of us is both sophisticated and well thought-out.

One of the dilemmas that most LSPs face is that while it would be great to have one kind of translation environment technology for all projects (so that resources and expertise can be centralized), in reality they need to be able to work with the clients' requirements (provided they work with clients who have invested in translation technology themselves). This is even more true for single-language vendors (SLVs) who typically work for MLVs who do have some kind of technology in place. So, what to do about the resources that are being assembled in many different technology silos? Yes, there are exchange formats for translation memories, terminology databases, and translation files, but the reality is that the exchange is typically less than straightforward. And especially when it comes to terminology data where the many different TEnTs have such different approaches, ranging all the way from complex concept-based databases to simple glossaries, lots of data is lost in the transfer process. Plus, as our discussion on morphological recognition has shown, there really is a lot to do for any of the existing term databases as far as functionality goes.

This is where MultiQA enters. Even though its name suggests that it's primarily a quality assurance tool (and it does provide quality assurance -- more on that later), it really is a complex web-based terminology management tool with an attached desktop component.

. . . you can find the rest of this article in the premium edition. If you'd like to read more, an annual subscription to the premium edition costs just $25 at www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit. Or you can purchase the new edition of the Translator's Tool Box ebook and receive an annual subscription for free.  

 

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© 2013 International Writers' Group    

 


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