GTS Blog

In this post I am going to describe the process that we use at GTS for post-editing machine translation (MT). To run this process you will need to have licenses for Systran Desktop 6 and SDL Trados Workbench. This process yields human translation quality for various kinds of texts and is well-suited for high volume projects that need to be delivered quickly. We have been successfully using this process for translation of technical translation projects such as tenders and technical manuals.

BACKGROUND

MT has long been considered a tool which is good for ‘gisting’ but that is not good enough for translations that require high quality and accuracy. Several things have happened in the last two years which are changing the way that the translation industry and clients perceive MT: continue reading…

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Speech-to-speech translation is gaining momentum. Now Microsoft has jumped into the fray and demonstrated German-English translation of a live conversation between two Microsoft employees. The demo was published by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.

Google was the first company to announce that it was working on speech-to-speech translation for mobile phones. A previous GTS blog post suggested that IBM and Apple may also be working on this exciting new technology.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft shows its muscle and in my opinion the demo you will see is most impressive. The conversation of the German speaker appears to be unrehearsed and it is translated into English, converted to speech and played back with a very reasonable delay. Seeing this demo, the concept of real-time translation of bilingual conversations appears to be very real and imminent. Implementation on cellular phones may be more challenging and therefore distant, but it is easy to imagine this new Microsoft technology working with Skype and other similar VoIP systems. And it will probably happen sooner than you think.

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Microsoft Translator official team blog announced the addition of seven new languages to its online Bing Translator. The new languages are Romanian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Lithuanian and Turkish. That brings the total number of languages to 30 which narrows the gap with Google; but Google still has a commanding lead with over 50 languages.

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At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 2.16.10 Google CEO Eric Schmidt demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the integration of Google’s machine translation and image recognition technologies. Mr. Schmidt demoed the ‘new’ concept by taking a picture of a German menu with a cellphone and instantly translating the text into English. Check out the video on the Google Translate Blog.

There is just one little problem. The ‘new’ feature Mr. Schmidt presented was introduced one year ago at the Mobile World Congress 2009 by Spanish company tauyou.com. I wrote a blog post about this which you can read by clicking here. You can check out this feature on their website.

Google is a great company and they have great products. But is everything they do the world’s greatest breakthrough? Are all of their ideas original? Evidently not.

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One of last week’s biggest news items in the tech world was Google’s plan to work on speech-to-speech translation for Android. This item was covered by hundreds of newspapers as well as by all the major blogs. The story was retweeted thousands of times on Twitter.

Apple’s reaction to this news? Silence. Which is a bit strange since Apple could lose its leadership in the cellphone market with such a technological breakthrough by Google. Could Apple be hiding something up its sleeve? Could Apple roll out a speech-to-speech translator for iPhone sooner than Google, who projected that the product will be ready in two years? The answer is YES, if IBM helps them get there.

In fact, the more you think about it the more this makes sense. IBM can provide Apple with the technology to power its smartphone with speech-to-speech translation. Will Apple and IBM collaborate? Why not. Here are some facts that lend credence to this possibility. continue reading…

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