subject: Machine Translation (mt) [print this page] The language industry is expanding rapidly, but its growth seems out of sync with language technologys ability to provide meaningful support. Will this change over the next five years?
There will definitely be a proliferation of tools and technology into this business, driven by the sheer size of the market and the demand for translation and localization. The current situation is still characterized not by suites of highly integrated tools but by islands of translation that somehow communicate, but dont really work together well.
To give an analogy, we are in a similar situation to that of robotics or manufacturing before computer-integrated manufacturing became the paradigm. There is no highly integrated suite of tools that would support a truly intelligent process. And if you dont have a fully integrated process, you cant really take full advantage of what machine translation (MT) could bring to the party.
The question is how to create an integrated process composed of different tools that today are supplied by individual companies. This implies the need for strategic alliances, and possibly mergers or pooling of interests. In my view, critical mass is still lacking in a lot of cases.
The problem still remains that, as it stands, MT doesnt work. What do customers have to do to change this?
In fact, MT does work, but only within an appropriate process! Therefore, customers have to change the way they perceive their language or translation needs - in other words, how and where they apply MT. You have to pick your application properly: where MT works, for example, is in high-volume applications with structured texts that are well written and possibly preedited. If you have a document that MT cant handle well, you get whats commonly referred to as gisting.
This is what many MT suppliers are now offering for online news.
Yes, and for some applications this may be extremely attractive - especially when the consumer does not have to pay for the service. However, the minute you put a price tag on it, you will see that people will become very sensitive to quality, and you will need a very robust system. Even so, you are still going to get somewhat unpredictable results if you just use MT alone. You probably have to use an integrated system that combines MT with translation memory (TM).
So why isnt MT being pursued more aggressively by clients with suitable applications?
Firstly, the problem might be to recognize a suitable application when you have it. Even then, the technology is inherently complicated: it is not one size fits all. Furthermore, if a company views this application as non-strategic, the decision may be to outsource it, thereby losing control over the decision as to whether or not to use MT. However, maybe over time they will develop a feeling for whether to take a solution in-house, as their volume, timeliness and cost issues dictate. This is why we offer our clients both full service MT and in-house MT solutions. I do not want to force MT onto anybody because in a lot of cases I know the customer isnt ready to bring it in-house.
What does this mean for suppliers?
It means that todays MT developers need to expand their vision to embrace fully integrated solutions. Ideally, this means controlling your own destiny by participating in the entire process from authoring to the finished translation. However, we have obtained significant performance improvements over conventional methods even where documents were not optimized for MT. This was due not only to the machine but also to a robust, integrated process.
You really have to take a top-down view, and one that goes from A to Z. In other words, what we really need is an authoring environment - but one that is sensitive to machine translation, one which knows how the MT system reacts to things I do to my document, while I am writing it. Of course, this is not trivial, and may require alliances with suppliers that specialize in such authoring systems. For pre-existing text you could use what we call a translatability index that essentially tells you ahead of time whether a sentence can be parsed by the system. This creates the opportunity to improve the documents machine translatability. However, the market is so dynamic and document content is so dynamic that nobody really has the time to really focus on this issue. The reality is that document generation and translation are not properly connected.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
