Open source machine translation: a new deal?

Who has not at least once used Google Translate? Statistical machine translation services like Google Translate make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. But because the translations are generated by machines, the translations are far from perfect. Still, Google Translate has made people expect ‘usable’ translations to be produced in no time by these machine translation engines – with no human translators involved. In addition to raised expectations of quality and lead time, people are getting used to paying nothing or at least to paying less for translation services. But is open source machine translation truly a threat to human translators and language service providers?

Implementing machine translation in the translation process

Integration of machine translation systems in the translation process can actually improve both translation quality and turnaround times. As far back as 1993, Xplanation started developing rule-based machine translation engines. A couple of years ago, Xplanation started analysing the available open source statistical machine translation engines and comparing their quality. At the Expertise in Translation and Post-editing workshop, Jurgen Goens, Technology & Operations Manager of the Xplanation group, will give an insight into how Xplanation has successfully implemented machine translation systems in their translation workflow called Tstream®.

About the workshop

Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) and Machine Translation (MT) technology are transforming the translation profession. However, it is still unclear how translation technologies can help translators in the best way to produce high quality translations faster. The Expertise in Translation and Post-editing workshop aims to explore how to design advanced editing platforms to deploy translation technology in better ways than merely by post-editing machine generated texts, and how to assess and compare the human expert behaviour during translation and (post-) editing activities.

The workshop seeks to bring together all interested parties from the translation industry, from the translation process research community as well as translation system designers to contribute to this session on Expertise in Translation and Post-editing.

When and where
17-18 August, 2012 at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

Find out more
http://www.cbs.dk/Forskning/Konferencer/ETP