TAUS Review #6 - January 2016 by TAUS

TAUS RE VIEW of language business and technology

Reviews of Language Business and Technology in Europe and Africa. Columns by Luigi Muzii and Jost Zetzsche. as well as a special review of the Americas on Speech Translation PLUS an Interview with Steve Richardson

January 2016 - No. VI

Magazine with a Mission How do we communicate in an ever more globalizing world? Will we all learn to speak the same language? A lingua franca, English, Chinese, Spanish? Or will we rely on translators to help us bridge the language divides? Language business and technology are core to the world economy and to the prevailing trend of globalization of business and governance. And yet, the language sector, its actors and innovations do not get much visibility in the media. Since 2005 TAUS has published numerous articles on translation automation and language business innovation on its web site. Now we are bundling them in TAUS Review, an online quarterly magazine. TAUS Review is a magazine with a mission. We believe that a vibrant language and translation industry helps the world communicate better, become more prosperous and more peaceful. Communicating across hundreds – if not thousands – of languages requires adoption of technology. In the age of the Internet of Things and the internet of you, translation – in every language – becomes embedded in every app, on every screen, on every web site, in every thing. In TAUS Review reporters and columnists worldwide monitor how machines and humans work together to help the world communicate better. We tell the stories about the successes and the excitements, but also about the frustrations, the failures and shortcomings of technologies and innovative models. We are conscious of the pressure on the profession, but convinced that language and translation technologies lead to greater opportunities. TAUS Review follows a simple and straightforward structure. In every issue we publish reports from four different continents – Africa, Americas, Asia and Europe – on new technologies, use cases and developments in language business and technology from these regions. In every issue we also publish perspectives from four different ‘personas’ – researcher, journalist, translator and language – by well-known writers from the language sector. This is complemented by features and conversations that are different in each issue. The knowledge we share in TAUS Review is part of the ‘shared commons’ that TAUS develops as a foundation for the global language and translation market to lift itself to a high-tech sector. TAUS is a think tank and resource center for the global translation industry, offering access to best practices, shared translation data, metrics and tools for quality evaluation, training and research.

TAUS Review is a free online magazine, published four times per year. We invite TAUS members and nonmembers to distribute the magazine through their websites and online media. Please write to editor@taus.net for the embed code. TAUS Review currently has about 8,000 readers globally. Publisher & Managing Editor: Jaap van der Meer Editor & Content Manager: Mick Rooney Design, Distribution & Advertisements: Anne-Maj

Disclaimer The views or opinions expressed by the various authors in the TAUS review do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of TAUS. While we try to ensure that the information provided is correct, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the material. If you do notice any mistakes then please let us know.

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Content

Leader

Features

5. Leader by Mick Rooney

34. An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

8. News

Reviews of language business & technologies

42. Directory of Distributors

10. In the Americas by Mark Seligman

45. Events Calendar

15. In Europe by Andrew Joscelyne

19. In Africa by Dina Sayed 24. In Africa by Amlaku Eshetie

Columns 26. The Translatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Perspective by Jost Zetzsche 29. The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

Leader

by Mick Rooney

The TAUS Review begins 2016 features. For this quarter, we

with some new introduce our

industry news segment and an interview with

Steve Richardson Manager, Translation Systems at the LDS Church. We also have our persona columns and the usual reviews from around the globe.

As we begin 2016, we can still hear the echoes and message from the 2015 TAUS Annual Conference... All of us in localization will be confronted with data questions and in 2016, more so than ever before. Data has become the fuel of translation. How much translation memory data you have will determine how good your automated translation will be. And the data has to be clean and well-organized by language, domain and content type. And now there is also the data about translation that require your attention. In 2016 we will see dashboards and business intelligence portals popping up everywhere. The game-changer knows that if you don’t measure you don’t know anything. Not so much of a problem perhaps if business is the same every year. But in the world of localization, and in this Convergence Era, everything is changing: the technology, the content, the workflow, the audience and the business model. Where to focus and where to invest: these decisions depend on data. The challenge in 2016 is to break down some walls, to share data and make the translation business transparent and measurable. The game-changer focuses on the user and his or her experience. The game-changer realizes that in some cases a straightforward translation simply does not work, and that local content creation will be the only way to win the hearts of the users in a new market. In other scenarios a good enough translation may be just the right thing to do. The game-changers will build solutions that support dynamic solutions. They realize that “it’s not just about the technology”. They imagine a convergence

of apps, tools, technologies and services that empower the best possible multi-way communications with end-users and all actors in the process. Jaap van der Meer, The Game Changers of 2016 We asked some of our contributors to reflect on their highlights of 2015 and consider what developments and changes we might see during 2016. Our Americas review for this quarter comes from the heart of technology in the United States of America. Dr. Mark Seligman is founder and CEO of Spoken Translation Inc. He is both an established researcher and a Silicon Valley veteran with technical and managerial participation in four high-tech start-ups under his belt. We are delighted he contributed to the TAUS Review for this quarter. Mark moderated the Spoken Translation session at the TAUS Annual Conference during October of 2015 in San Jose, California and he takes the opportunity to reflect back on the debate. The session assessed both the state of the art and the state of the business in automatic speechto-speech translation. It seems likely that recent developments in this area will accelerate movement of the technology into mainstream use, given that Microsoft, Google and Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology made presentations during this session. While Google has been developing its realtime translation capabilities for face-to-face exchanges, Microsoft has been concentrating on speech translation delivered remotely via video chat.

As we begin 2016, we can still hear the echoes and message from the 2015 TAUS Annual Conference.

Leader by Mick Rooney

In our global review from Europe, Andrew Joscelyne examines the three events which marked the translation – and more broadly the language technology – industry in Europe 2015. One of these events inevitably is about money. In May of 2015, an industry coalition met in Riga to launch a call for action from the European Commission (EC) for more funding in language innovation and development as part of the initiative of the Digital Single Market (DSM) program to ensure the DSM would be fully and decisively multilingual.

We asked some of our contributors to reflect on their highlights of 2015 and consider what developments and changes we might see during 2016.

The second event is having adequate data. Joscelyne points out that adequate data might be sufficient to add a powerful innovational dimension to the industry. “Fundamental and even blue skies research is of course vital. But perhaps Europe can do a bit more with what it has already to enable a higher degree of multilingual reach.” And the third event? The dreadful attacks last November in Paris and the role data plays in thwarting and catching ‘the forces of darkness.’ Amlaku Eshetie delivers his 2015 reflection from Africa while Dina Sayed joins TAUS Review for the first time with a fascinating global look at the Arabic language, reminding us that it is one of the most ancient and prominent languages in the world. Arabic is the official language in twenty-six countries with more than 250 million native speakers. Sayed examines how the language has evolved on the web and the technological challenges, opportunities for improvements, and whether 2016 is going to be

the time the industry tackles these requirements for a possible growth market. We have two persona perspectives for our readers this quarter. Technical translator and consultant Josh Zetzsche explains what the ‘unspeakably beautiful’ wandering Oregon dunes have to do with machine translation. From the majestic Oregon coast to productive ways to work with machine translation, Zetzsche guides us through a lesson in unintended consequences. Our second persona perspective, A Reality Check, is written by Luigi Muzii. He has been working in the language industry for more than 30 years as a translator, localizer, technical writer, author, trainer, teacher and consultant. He is probably no better a person to ask to write a piece on predictions, research and innovation in translation. So, clutching tightly to his copy of The Visionary’s Handbook, Luigi Muzii took on the task and, as always, he is the quickest at finding that perfect quote or oneliner. I will leave you with it for this quarter. “The closer your vision gets to a provable truth, the more you are simply describing the present. In the same way, the more certain you are of a future outcome, the more likely you will be wrong.”

Send your comments or questions to review@taus.net

Mick Rooney Mick joined the TAUS team in 2015. He is a content strategist and in charge of TAUS localization projects. Mick’s career has spanned three decades, from working in various roles in the entertainment industry, retail, warehousing and logistics; to journalism and consultancy work in the publishing industry.

y mrofni lliw I An artificial intelligence approach touotranslation oitalsnart otwill hcaorevolutionize rppa ecnegilletn i laicďŹ business. itra nA gnikcehc ret fa your .kcots ruo

To realize a society in which everyone can interact freely across language barriers with the use of machine translation technology, and thereby contribute to invigoration and innovation in businesses. https://miraitranslate.com/en/

News

Amazon Forms Machine Translation R&D Group Amazon.com Inc. is well-versed and prolific in press releases. Take a visit to its media center and you will find more than a dozen press releases. Amazon likes to tell us a lot about what it is doing, but not always everything. Amazon is also very prolific with company acquisitions, but they are not always formally announced. Amazon has acquired Pittsburgh-based developer of automated text translation software, Safaba Translation Systems LLC. Safaba has a notable client base, including PayPal and Dell Inc. Founded in 2009, Safaba develops automated translation solutions for large global enterprises that allow them to migrate and maintain large volumes of content in all the languages of their markets. It also develops advanced solutions to integrate machine translation technology into workflow processes used by Language Service Providers. Amazon has something of a habit of acquiring companies when it is developing current and new projects. Now part of the Amazon Group, Safaba has been renamed Amazon Machine Translation R&D Group. After Safaba was founded, it received financial support from the National Science Foundation and later Newlin Investments initiated a round of equity financing for the company. A third round of funding occurred in December 2014, led by Innovation Works. Amazon will likely use the newly named Amazon Machine Translation R&D Group to continue to develop its offerings from Amazon Web Services and its ever expanding localization program.

IBM Launches Machine Translation Feature for Bluemix IBM launched the beta version of its new machine translation feature for Bluemix last November. Bluemix is IBM’s Platform-asa-Service (PaaS) and the new translation feature will be known as the Globalization Pipeline. Developers will be able to use the Bluemix platform to machine translate web strings from English into nine target languages (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese). According to Lisa McCabe of IBM DeveloperWorks: “Globalization Pipeline accommodates both the enterprise application team that may already be translating but want to adapt their processes to their new Cloud development environment, and app developers new to translation who want to get started without a large investment in understanding translation processes, securing vendors, or implementing new tools.” While the new Bluemix machine translation feature is nothing new to the industry, IBM Chief Globalization Architect Steve Atkin believes it has its strengths and that machine translation has undergone many advances in both speed and quality over recent years. He told Slator news that it allows developers to test and deploy global apps much faster “without having to leave the IBM Bluemix ecosystem.”

News

DARPA Awards Contracts for Low-Resource Languages Program DARPA is the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As part of its Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) program, it recently awarded 13 organisations contracts, with seven of the contracts amounting to $26 million. The 13 contracts were primarily awarded to universities. The goal of the Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) program is to dramatically advance the state of computational linguistics and human language technology to enable rapid, low-cost development of capabilities for low-resource languages. Understanding local languages is essential for effective situational awareness in military operations, and particularly in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts that require immediate and close coordination with local communities. With more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, however, the U.S. military frequently encounters languages for which translators are rare and no automated translation capabilities exist. DARPA’s Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) program aims to change this state of affairs by providing real-time essential information in any language to support emergent missions such as humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, peacekeeping and infectious disease response. The program recently awarded Phase one contracts to 13 organizations. According to Boyan Onyshkevych, DARPA program manager: “The global diversity of languages makes it virtually impossible to ensure that U.S. personnel will be able to understand the situation on the ground when they go into new environments. Through LORELEI, we envision a system that could quickly pick out key information — things such as names, events, sentiment and relationships — from public news and social media sources in any language, based on the system’s understanding of other languages. The goal is to provide immediate, evolving situational awareness that helps decision makers assess and respond as intelligently as possible to dynamic, difficult situations.” SOURCE INFO: DARPA

Review of language business & technologies in the Americas by Mark Seligman

The second – and hopefully not last – TAUS panel on speech translation took place on October 12th, 2015 under the aegis of the TAUS Annual Conference in San Jose. In attendance as panelists were Barack Turovsky, Head of Product, Google Translate; Chris Wendt, Group Program Manager, Machine Translation at Microsoft; and Dr. Prof. Alex Waibel of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Mark Seligman of Spoken Translation, Inc. moderated. The session’s goal was straightforward: to assess both the state of the art and the state of the business in automatic speech-to-speech translation. The premise was that recent developments seem likely to accelerate movement of the technology into mainstream use. The panelists were invited to share their perspectives on probable paths, opportunities, and obstacles. The session kicked off somewhat tonguein-cheek with a demonstration of Simulated Simultaneous Song Translation (SSST). As Mark fought his way through the chorus of Cielito Lindo in Spanish and in the key of C, Gema Ramirez Sanchez of Prompsit ably interpreted into English in real time: to general amazement, “Ay, ay, ay, ay” was instantly, correctly, and melodiously rendered as “Ay, yay, yay, yay,” and so forward. It had been decided that the panelists would make individual presentations before opening the session to questions. Barak Turovsky (Google) Barack was first to present. His responsibility for product management and user experience for Google Translate extends to Google Translate Mobile applications, web properties, integrations with other Google products (such as Search and Chrome), and to the Google Translate Community. He began by explaining why translation is crucial to make the world’s information accessible, noting that 50% of the Internet content is in

English, while only 20% of the world population has some English knowledge. 80% of the web is in ten languages, but of course there are hundreds more worldwide. He introduced Google Translate as a free statistical machine translation service for translation of text, speech, images, or realtime video. It’s available on the web or through mobile interfaces; offers a paid developer API; and currently supports 90 languages at various levels. Daily translation reaches about 100 billion words, and more than half a billion active users are claimed per month, with 95% from outside the US.

50% of the Internet content is in English, while only 20% of the world population has some English knowledge. 80% of the web is in ten languages, but of course there are hundreds more worldwide.

The newest and most exciting feature of Google Translate, in its mobile versions, actually exemplifies translation of text rather than speech. However, in view of its thrilling effect, it does

Review of language business & technologies in the Americas by Mark Seligman

merit a place in our annual survey of real-time translation. Signs and other text are translated in real time in the context of live videos, so that the target text replaces the source text right before your eyes, even when the camera and text are in motion. In one promotional video, the lyrics of La Bamba are translated phrase by phrase on placards held up by team members. (That’s Barak on the End card.) Can SSST be far behind? In a more prosaic example, a Russian sign is translated to reveal “Access to city.”

icance has crept in, almost below the radar: automatic language recognition is now available in face-to-face conversations, so that manual switching between languages becomes unnecessary. Each party simply speaks, and the program translates in the appropriate direction. Since end-of-speech detection is also automatic, the need to manually switch off the mic at the end of each turn is likewise eliminated. In-person speech translation thus takes a big step closer to hands-free conversation, a major ergonomic win.

The accompanying demo of mobile speech translation (French waitress: “Can I help you?” American customer: “Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee.”) may have seemed somewhat less dramatic by comparison, if only because speech translation has been available on mobile devices for several years now. Here too, however, a new feature of considerable signif-

The translation engines behind Google Translate benefit from the input of the Translate Community, launched in July, 2014. Users having some knowledge of both input and output languages can offer corrected translations. (For example, “bed bugs” are now insects in Russian, rather than recumbent programming errors.) To date there have been hundreds of millions of contributions in 44+ languages; some new languages have been launched (including Kazakh); and quality improvements are claimed.

While Google has been developing its real-time translation capabilities for face-to-face exchanges, Microsoft has been concentrating on speech translation delivered remotely via video chat.

There is a noticeable gain in speed as well, also vital for practical use. The user sees speech recognition results being updated as she speaks, and translation and pronunciation follow within a second once speech ceases. Barak’s presentation next touched on the usefulness of mobile translation. Police, we’re told, used the app to help a diabetic driver, and an Indian couple were able to meet and marry across a linguistic divide.

Chris Wendt (Microsoft) Since 2005, Chris Wendt has been leading program management and planning for Microsoft’s Machine Translation development. He’s responsible for Bing Translator and Microsoft Translator services. Previously at Microsoft, he spent a decade on software internationalization for several products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, MSN and Windows Live. While Google has been developing its realtime translation capabilities for face-to-face

Review of language business & technologies in the Americas by Mark Seligman

exchanges, Microsoft has been concentrating on speech translation delivered remotely via video chat. Chris’ presentation accordingly focused on the recent public release of Skype Translator, powered by Microsoft’s speech translation system. In a promotional video, we see two groups of middle school students, one in Seattle, and one in Beijing. In each class, students take turns donning a headset and speaking to a counterpart across the Pacific. As is already standard in telepresence systems, both parties can see and hear each other; but now they can also see a running text transcript of the conversation along the right edge of the screen, including both the source language and the target language; and they can hear synthesized pronunciation of the translations. The students’ conversation in this video is no more profound than “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” – but just as epochal in its own way, and a good deal more heartwarming. We here immortalize most of the conversational fragments in the video Chris showed. (See sidebar.) Naturally enough, most of the exchanges selected for the video are successful ones: close examination of the visible transcript reveals several less fortunate attempts. Still, no doubt in the spirit of disclosure, one obvious error is purposely highlighted when an initial response to the English question “Do you play a musical instrument?” comes through as “Alaska.” But the Chinese speaker could see in the transcript (and probably on her interlocutor’s face) that her speech had been misrecognized, and her next try fared better. Microsoft reports that some Seattle public schools have started to use Skype Translator in the classroom. In addition to uses for human contact and perhaps language learning, as dramatized in the video, uses have also been explored to aid children who are hard of hearing or deaf. Two such male students appear in the clip. The first, Denny, suffered hearing loss due to chemotherapy and has used hearing aids since he was three years old.

Some early student exchanges via Skype Translator English speaker: Hello. Chinese speaker: How are you doing? English: Good. How are you doing? Chinese: Oh, I am also very good. English: Good. What is the weather like in Beijing? … English: Do you like wearing uniforms in school? … English: What are you doing this summer? … English: What’s your favorite food? Mine is pizza. Chinese: I prefer noodles. … English: What time is it in Beijing? Chinese: Eight point four zero. … Chinese: Well, we are now in Beijing. English: Awesome! … English: Hi, ni hao. … English: I love you! [blushing, laughter] … Chinese: You play a musical instrument? English: I do, I play the violin. Do you play a musical instrument? Chinese: Alaska. [puzzlement at this apparent error] Chinese: In fact, I play the flute. English: Oh, that’s very cool, my sister plays the flute also. … English: What kinds of anime do you like to watch? Chinese: I love Miyazaki. June especially likes Spirited Away. [cheers] … English: You guys wanna take a picture with us? English: Say cheese! [smiles all round]

Review of language business & technologies in the Americas by Mark Seligman

Chinese: You are at home or at school Denny: We are all at school right now Denny: Did you know that Starbucks is from Seattle? But Denny is succeeding in a classroom for hearing children – he’s “mainstreaming” – and gives the new technology some of the credit. Denny [to reporter]: I was able to be with all of my friends and talk to someone in China who is speaking a different language than me and I could see what they were saying on the screen so I could perfectly understand what they were telling me. … It’s easier to communicate with my teachers and to get what I have to get in school done, rather than other schools, where it was just so hard for me with my hearing problems and such. A second student was profoundly deaf; but, following a cochlear implant and with a little help from Skype Tr a n s l a t o r, he too is functioning among hearing kids. According to a Microsoft representative, “That often requires an interpreter, whether that’s a sign language interpreter or whether it’s closed captioning. The problem is, it doesn’t scale.”

However, in view of Skype’s global reach, and given certain ergonomic niceties still in the planning stage at HP, the advent of Skype Translator does signal another milestone for worldwide speech translation.

Chinese: You tried Peking duck? Deaf student: That sounds pretty good Chinese: Can you not talk about eating? I was hungry. A teacher adds, “If you think about captions, they were created for someone who can’t hear, yet they are most often used in exercise rooms

and sports bars because it’s too noisy. And in a classroom it actually promotes literacy. It helps students for whom English is a second language. Captioning has been shown to accelerate the rate at which kids learn how to read and write.” Skype Translator is not the first video chat to add speech translation capability. HewlettPackard, for instance, has for more than two years been bundling multilingual speech translation powered by SpeechTrans, Inc. as an optional paid upgrade in its MyRoom facility, included in all of its computers. However, in view of Skype’s global reach, and given certain ergonomic niceties still in the planning stage at HP (automatic start- and end-of-speech detection, obviating the need for manual indications), the advent of Skype Translator does signal another milestone for worldwide speech translation. Alex Waibel Dr. Alexander Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He’s the director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT), with branches at eight international research institutions worldwide. The Center develops multimodal and multilingual human communication technologies aimed to improve human-human and humanmachine communication. Alex reviewed some of the history of the speech translation field – and he has been there every step of the way. He was instrumental in organizing, on behalf of his two home institutions in cooperation with ATR International in Japan, the first major international demo of speechto-speech translation, a trilateral effort in early 1993 demonstrating omnidirectional automatic interpretation among English, German, and Japanese speakers. In the decade that followed, he was active in the C-STAR consortium for speech translation research, with participants from eight or nine countries. He and his colleagues developed the first fully on-device speech translation apps for smart phones un-

Review of language business & technologies in the Americas by Mark Seligman

revenue from speech translation, despite extensive investment in the area. Instead, speech translation services are offered gratis as a way of bringing customers into the respective ecosystems. Paying use cases – for business, healthcare, emergency response, military use, education, intelligence, and many other areas – remain for the future. Likewise – so ran the consensus – for greater use of semantic processing during translation, or for widespread delivery of speech translation via wearable devices. der the Jibbigo label. The technology was sold to Facebook in August, 2013. The centerpiece of Alex’s TAUS 2015 presentation, however, was his work on simultaneous speech translation. An early public demonstration was offered in Honolulu at AMTA in October, 2008. As Alex spoke naturally and at normal speed into his headset in English, transcribed English text and the corresponding Spanish translation scrolled down the neighboring screen, a few seconds behind him. There were, of course, numerous errors; even so, the potential benefit was clear for language-challenged and hearing-challenged listeners. Since that time, the simultaneous technology has gone into regular use to aid classroom comprehension in Karlsruhe, where professors’ words are translated textually in real time and then saved for later study. In his presentation, Alex reported experiments at recent conferences as well. Q&A Question time in San Jose was relatively brief. One matter of particular general interest was the near-term moneymaking potential of spoken language translation. Barak pithily encapsulated the state of affairs: “If you ask about our business model, I can answer you briefly. We don’t have one.” Just so: neither Google nor Microsoft/Skype presently seeks

Overall, however, the panel justified expectations that 2015 would be a pivotal year for the real-time translation field as text translation and superposition over video, automatic language recognition, instant updating of ASR results, speech translation for telepresence (with special application to the hearing-challenged), and simultaneous spoken language translation increasingly come into their own.

Send your comments or questions to americas@taus.net

Mark Seligman Dr. Mark Seligman is founder, president, of

Spoken

established

and

acting

CEO

Translation,

Inc

His

2002.

background is a unique mixture of ivory tower and school of hard knocks. He is both an established researcher (with a PhD in computational linguistics from UC Berkeley, granted in 1991) and a Silicon Valley veteran (with technical and managerial participation in four high-tech startups under his belt).

Review of language business & technologies in Europe by Andrew Joscelyne

Europe: Money, Data, and Paris Three

very different kinds of events marked the

translation technology

– –

and more broadly the language industry in

focused on money, another

Europe 2015. One on data, and the last

on a possible mismatch between resources and actions.

In May, under the auspices of the European Commission (EC) and its drive to kick-start the famous Digital Single Market (DSM), a fairly broad industry coalition came together in Riga (the capital of the EU presidency country at that period) to launch a call for action from the Commission to fund more language innovation and development to ensure that the DSM would be fully and decisively multilingual. Note that we are looking here at a lead time of several years, involving presumably deep, transformative research into digital systems that can process language and speech, drawing on a plethora of multilingual resources that cover at least 24 or so of the continent’s official languages, let alone the fifty or so other tongues spoken in our cities and villages. Ambitious, broad-based, c r o s s e d fingers.

Fundamental and even blue skies research is of course vital. But perhaps Europe can do a bit more with what it has already to enable a higher degree of multilingual reach.

ty that largely depends on the public purse to finance its projects. However, the fact is (as readers of previous chronicles on this topic know well) that the EC’s focus seems to have shifted towards the more encompassing topic of big data, of which multilingual content is but one component. There will still be funding for language technol-

A glance at the news this summer and autumn, as nearly 500,000 migrants from war-torn states in the Middle East, northern Asia and Africa, suggests the kind of eventual span of languages that will need to be addressed by a fully operational DSM tomorrow. The brunt of the effort for this call obviously came from the academic research communi-

Review of language business & technologies in Europe by Andrew Joscelyne

ogy, and the EC is actively soliciting bright ideas from the research community so as to set out a strategic agenda for the field. Yet the one common theme that appears to emerge from discussion interestingly seems indeed to be that of translation data. So let’s look at this a bit more closely, because adequate data might be sufficient to add a powerful innovational dimension to our industry. Fundamental and even blue skies research is of course vital. But perhaps Europe can do a bit more with what it has already to enable a higher degree of multilingual reach. In April this year, did you notice that the European Parliament (EP) and the Joint Research Centre (an EC institution based in Italy) jointly “released” a very large collection of documents and their translations? Most people in the industry are aware of the famous Acquis communautaires (AC - basically the legal documents underlying national membership of the EU) that have been widely used to train MOSESbased statistical machine translation engines for the last eight years, at least. Well, this publication was the same sort of undertaking, but this time based on content from multilingual European Parliament communications and debates.

The EC is in fact funding various small-scale initiatives to dig out available translation data from the forgotten corners of public websites, research repositories, and other sources of potentially valuable translation data.

This Digital Corpus of the European Parliament (DCEP) consists of EP texts produced between

2001 and 2012 with over 1.3 billion words in 24 languages. The content covers press releases, EP reports, questions to the EP and resulting answers, agendas, and more. DCEP was produced by the EP, with the support of the JRC and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As with the Acquis, the real value of this corpus for translation automation specialists is probably in the language span and the precise nature of the text alignments rather than the (possibly somewhat limited) domains covered by the documents. But these are considerable steps forward, if not for standard corporate translation needs, at least for a growing area of European activity – namely public sector translation. The EC is in fact funding various small-scale initiatives to dig out available translation data from the forgotten corners of public websites, research repositories, and other sources of potentially valuable translation data. The LTObserve project, for example, is tasked with collecting and evaluating this information, and another project is coordinating data resources in each country. Depending on what these efforts find, the idea will be to fuel more institutional machine translation as a natural resource for cross-language communication.

Review of language business & technologies in Europe by Andrew Joscelyne

This in turn could have an influence on the research agenda so close to the heart of the academics. Perhaps inventive new ways of optimizing parallel corpora, backed by some of the interesting semantic work being done with open data/semantic web type applications, could give Europe a better purchase on the vast amounts of unused translation data developed over 25 years of research and technology projects. In other words, 2016 is starting to look like a wakeup year for translation data.

As Woody Allen says, we always have Paris. Where I happen to live, a couple of minutes away from the Place de la République that has become the epicenter for mourning and resistance.

This is salutary. But we need to look further into the translation data economy, now that we have a decade of experience of trying to share, and web-scrape and experiment with data that can help accelerate the kind of translation that organizations and people need. It seems quite possible that in the years ahead the focus will shift from data, as such, to the specific forms data takes in translation processes. For example, it could be that packaged machine translation engines will arrive on the market, rather than simply the resources that originally generate them.

effort at sharing the sort of data that can help track villains. I’m sure that like me you wonder how much rapid and accurate translation could contribute to our shared security and safety. It also seems to me we need not just translation data, but data about translation, and analytics on what is translated, by whom and when. One project worth aiming for would be to show how translation interacts more intimately with the world’s practices – not just in the familiar fields of retailing, customer support and corporate communication, but also in policing, security, and the rest. Happy 2016!

Send your comments or questions to europe@taus.net

Andrew Joscelyne Andrew

Joscelyne

has

been

reporting on language technology

A final, more sober note. As Woody Allen says, we always have Paris. Where I happen to live, a couple of minutes away from the Place de la République that has become the epicenter for mourning and resistance. This November’s massacre was particularly brutal, casting a deep shadow on nearly everything we love and believe in.

in Europe for well over 20 years

Once again, it looks as if data is king in the fight against the forces of darkness. Data about individuals, movements, transactions… all the detailed stuff we are now familiar with. But maybe Europe needs to make a greater

a collection of silos – translation, spoken interaction,

now. He also been a market watcher for European Commission support programs devoted to mapping language technology progress and needs. Andrew has been especially interested in the changing translation industry, and began working with TAUS from its beginnings as a part of the communication team. Today he sees language technologies (and languages themselves) as text analytics, semantics, NLP and so on. Tomorrow, these will converge and interpenetrate, releasing new energies and possibilities for human communication.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Dina Sayed

Emerging Arabic Languages Arabic

is one of the most ancient and prominent

languages in the world.

It goes all the way back Twenty-six countries have Arabic as an official language, with more than 250 million Arabic native speakers all over the world. In this article we will go through how the Arabic language is evolving on the web. We to the sixth century.

will shed some light on technological challenges and possible opportunities for improvements. will have more insight about what the

Arabic

language needs are in the market and speculate on whether the industry should tackle these requirements for a new possible growth market.

Introduction Arabic has a common written standard form and shares a cultural/religious legacy. Therefore, most speakers consider all varieties of Arabic as forms of one language. Yet, only those with a formal education are proficient in standard Arabic. Modern conversational Arabic differs extensively from one region to another and exists as a dialect across the Arabic speaking region. One of the popular dialects for Arabic is the Egyptian dialect. It is well understood in many Arabic countries. This is due to the strategic influence of Egypt on the Arab region as well as the impact of the Egyptian media.

Twenty-six countries have Arabic as an official language, with more than 250 million Arabic native speakers all over the world.

Taking a glance at the future, Arabic was ranked as the second most important language for the future in the UK. This is according to a report commissioned by the British council and conducted by Teresa Tinsely and Kathryn Board of Alcantara communications. The report presents a strategic analysis of the UK’s long-term language needs, taking into consideration a variety of

economic, geopolitical, cultural and educational indicators and scoring different languages accordingly. It classified a set of ten languages which will be of critical importance for the UK’s wealth, security and impact in the world for the coming years (Figure 1). The indicators used are: 1. Current UK export trade 2. The language needs of UK businesses 3. UK government trade priorities 4. Emerging high growth markets 5. Diplomatic and security priorities 6. The public’s language interests 7. Outward visitor destinations 8. UK government’s International Education Strategy priorities 9. Levels of English proficiency in other countries 10. The prevalence of different languages on the internet. From the analysis of languages against these indicators, the set of languages identified in ascending order of importance are shown in figure 1 (see next page). Arabic is used as an official language of the United Nations, International Criminal Court, African Union, and Arab League amongst others. Three per cent of Internet usage is conducted in Arabic.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Dina Sayed

Figure 1: Ten most critical languages When it comes to the technology ecosystem, there are more attractions towards Arabic as a language growing in importance. For example, “IBM supercomputer and Jeopardy champion Watson is learning Arabic and setting up shop in the Middle East and North Africa,” IBM said to Fortune magazine. “Right now, IBM is working on teaching Watson Arabic so local residents can better work with the service. And that’s

more than just teaching Watson the Arabic equivalents of English words,” Jonathan Vanian wrote in Fortune magazine. IBM is “actually teaching Watson to understand the grammar, the nuances of the culture, and how the spoken word handles the nuances of meaning,” said Mike Rhodin, the senior vice president of IBM’s Watson group.

Taking a glance at the future, Arabic was ranked as the second most important language for the future in the UK.

This could imply that there is significant interest for researchers to expand their studies for Arabic language in natural language processing and understanding; machine learning; artificial intelligence; building lexicons and more libraries and tools to tackle Arabic language challenges. One of the simplest challenges for example is in use cases where it is mandated to differentiate between the various Arabic dialects. Another challenge is in language detection, because Arabic script is also used in languages such as Farsi, Urdu and Pashto. Another example of the Arabic evolution in technology is in the announcement made by Apple in June 2015: Apple is releasing a more Arabic-friendly user interface in iOS 9. It is bringing full support for a mirroring feature. Mirroring requires flipping the application interface into right-toleft orientation so that it is convenient and intuitive for native Arabic

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Dina Sayed

users. It is also important for other right-to-left languages as Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu…etc. Sara Radi, an Apple software engineer and native Arabic speaker said that “third-party developers who use Apple’s system frameworks to build their apps will get similar functionality largely ‘for free’ in their own apps when they add language support for a right-to-left language, thanks to system user interface elements that automatically mirror themselves. Those app makers with custom functionality will be able to re-work apps for right-to-left localization using a new API that reports which way the interface is flowing.” Blair Hanley Frank (ITWorld).

Arabic is used as an official language of the United Nations, International Criminal Court, African Union, and Arab League amongst others. Three per cent of Internet usage is conducted in Arabic.

Apple had been supporting Arabic fundamental features in iOS 8 by adding Keyboard Dictation and QuickType for Arabic. Moreover in November 2015, Apple had launched iOS 9.2 beta version which contains Arabic support for Siri. Siri is a built-in smart assistant that enables users of the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices to talk in natural language voice commands in order to run the mobile device and its applications. Apple launched flagship retail stores in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in late October 2015 so that this feature could be demonstrated for the customers there, according to Amit Chowdhry, Forbes. Factors for Arabic slow adoption in global websites Benjamin B. Sargent, in his report Waking Up to Opportunity in Arabic, mentions that “not only is the Arabic language under-represented on the websites of the best global brands, it’s

also missed by the great majority of Fortune 500 companies – a paltry 5% of these offer web content in Arabic”. He also adds, “By way of comparison, Dutch sites are more than three times as likely as American sites to include Arabic, and UK sites are almost twice as likely”. In his report, Sargent highlights factors that contribute to lack of Arabic content online: Instability Perception: This is common because emerging events and the continuous fight for democracy leads directly to the instability perception. Moreover, some governments limit Internet access or restrict specific webbased services that would help companies to reach out to end user. Arabic dialects speech: Dialects for Arabic sometimes differ dramatically from one country to another. However, in education, news media, law, politics and any formal media always adopt the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). In Morocco, approximately 30% of the native population speak Berber, with a few Spanish words embedded. In Algeria, about 20% are native Berber speakers, but local language is a mixture of Algerian Arabic dialects and French. Brands’ inability to speak the vernacular: The requirement for local nuance increases with proximity to the home and individual. Common Sense Advisory has shown that lifestyle requires a higher degree of localization in online marketing. This is not achievable using Modern Standard Arabic, which is more formal as mentioned earlier. These lifestyle topics naturally use the vernacular, making it more expensive for global brands to effectively reach local audiences. Cultural differentiation: In some Arabicspeaking cultures, there is also a tendency towards keeping Arabic pure and separate from Western influence. Thus, people may get pleasure from reading about Gucci bags or Apple mini iPads, but they don’t want to do it in Arabic. In this context, Arabic is more preferred for topics of spirit, ethics, law, and so on.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Dina Sayed

Sales and distribution channels: Trade agreements, distribution, and online fulfillment may vary in Arab countries. For example, sometimes companies find it easier to use a local partner to sell their products. In this case, products and services may be distributed through local websites channels rather than on the company’s global corporate sites. Arabic Language for the future So is the usage of Arabic in the computer ecosystem expected to increase more in the future? There is no straight forward answer to this question. However, in the report Waking up to opportunity in Arabic, Sargent mentions that “Global companies miss a big opportunity when they neglect this economically important language”. Here are some other critical points from his report:

Another example of the Arabic evolution in technology is in the announcement made by Apple in June 2015: Apple is releasing a more Arabic-friendly user interface in iOS 9.

• The Arab Spring has re-ignited the outward glance: In 2002, the Arab Human Development Report found that the Arab world was translating only 330 books annually and that the cumulative total since the ninth century was about 100,000, “the amount Spain translates in one year.” Ten years later, efforts have stepped up. As more countries achieve democratic governments, access to products, services, and information has increased. Websites should not lag behind. • Generational shift favors Arabic: In older generations, education in French was common (or English, in the case of Egypt). Online services have found that business visitors from Arabic-speaking countries may opt to use European language inter-

faces. However, younger generations more often prefer Arabic in most contexts, and we expect this generational tide to continue. Early adopters had to use other languages or nothing. Today’s users find Arabic content and services. • Arabic is the fastest-growing critical language: Only ten other languages on the planet pack as much online power as Arabic. Among those ten, Arabic posted the fastest growth in share of world online wallet between 2011 and 2012 – even outpacing Simplified Chinese. • MSA might suffice for some information types: MSA can often be deployed for general business information. When you are addressing Arabic-speaking audiences online, the first step is to determine what level of localization is required for your product category, content type, and information context. If the context is a corporate website, a more formal approach may work even for a consumer brand. If the context is an ad insertion on a local website, further localization may be needed even for businessto-business brands. But MSA is a good place to start. Arabic requires special analysis to consider a broad range of issues, but global brands can no longer afford to ignore this economically vital language.

There is also a tendency towards keeping Arabic pure and separate from Western influence. Thus, people may get pleasure from reading about Gucci bags or Apple mini iPads, but they don’t want to do it in Arabic.

From my technical working experience in the Arabic market for several years now, I have seen how much effort was exerted to empower

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Dina Sayed

the Arabic language. IBM was one of the companies always at the frontier in this regard, and it is not only about supporting its product for Arabic, It goes beyond this by supporting the technology and standards that impact how Arabic language is tackled. For example, IBM is a major contributor for the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. This is the base foundation algorithm for memory presentation in Bidirectional languages. IBM also supports International Components for Unicode (ICU). ICU is a prominent and widely used library in C/C++ and Java that offer

globalization and Unicode support. Many IBM products use ICU like DB2, Lotus, Websphere, Tivoli, Rational, AIX, i/OS and z/OS. Other companies also use ICU like Adobe, Apache, Apple, Google and many more. All this investment promotes the Arabic language and it demonstrates the importance of this language in the technological sector.

Send your comments or questions to africa@taus.net

References http://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/languages-for-the-future-report.pdf http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm http://www.ibtimes.com/arabic-fastest-growing-language-us-immigration-middle-east-northafrica-spikes-2131272 Waking up to opportunity in Arabic by Benjamin B.Sargent, Common Sense Advisory https://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/AbstractView.aspx?ArticleID=2977 http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2002e.pdf http://fortune.com/2015/07/14/ibm-watson-home-middle-east/ http://www.itworld.com/article/2933533/apple-improves-support-for-righttoleft-languageswith-ios-9.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/11/11/ios-9-2-features/ http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/04/entertainment/et-arab4 http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-6.html http://site.icu-project.org/

Dina Sayed Dina Sayed is an expert IT specialist

working

IBM

Egypt. For ten years she has designed

and

implemented

various solutions to leverage Arabic language support. She also contributed in developing different open source projects. She is certified â&#x20AC;&#x153;Master IT Specialistâ&#x20AC;? by the Open Group. She is a member in North Africa Technical Expert Council, an affiliate to IBM academy of technology. Dina has a Bachelors degree in Communication and Electronics Engineering from Cairo University. She also earned her MSc. degree with merit in Natural Language Processing from the University of Nottingham in UK.

Review of language business & technologies in Africa by Amlaku Eshetie

Wrap up of the first year of the Reports from Africa, TAUS Review Over the last year of TAUS Review issues, I have published five articles: Language and Technology in Africa; Translation and localization Practices in Africa: A Closer Look Through the Eyes of a Translation Professional; Translation in Ethiopia – A Long Way to Catch up With the Industry as is Practiced in the Rest of the World; Ethiopian Languages and the Need for Translation Within Languages; Another Critical Challenge for Translation and Localization Agencies to Emerge and Sprout in Ethiopia – Banking System. These contributions dealt with African language translation and technology issues in general and language translation and technology issues within Ethiopia in particular. I am based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and many of the articles focused on and covered the language translation and technology practices and problems of Ethiopia. In October 2015, one year after the launch of TAUS Review, I was able to travel to San Jose, CA, USA to attend the TAUS Annual Conference. The trip was my first long journey and a great experience by and large. More particularly, the conference was such a technology-savvy event. It focused on machine translation, translation technology and cloud storage as well as data management services and disruptive innovations. Over the past year, I’ve starting inviting fellow African contributors so they could give us a different taste of the African language industry. While my attempts have so far not proved fruitful, I will keep trying to find fellow Africans who would be interested in sharing their observations and experiences of the language industry in their locality. This will be one of my main objectives in 2016.

Send your comments or questions to africa@taus.net

Amlaku Eshetie Amlaku earned a BA degree in Foreign Languages & Literature (English & French) in 1997, and an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in 2005, both at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. He had been a teacher of English at various levels until he switched to translation and localisation in 2009. Currently, Amlaku is the founder and manager of KHAABBA International Training and Language Services at which he has been able to create a big base of clients for services, such as localisation, translation, editing & proofreading, interpretation, voiceovers, copy writing.

The Translator’s Perspective by Jost Zetzsche

Oregon dunes, 60 km of the in the US. It’s

live right in the heart of the

a majestic stretch of more than largest coastal sand dunes unspeakably beautiful.

fact, standing in some

areas makes me feel like to

another

Herbert

planet.

The

I’ve

been transposed

late

author

Frank

shared my sentiments about our unique

landscape, inspiring him to start his

Dune saga here. (Readers my age will know what I’m talking about.) There’s an interesting story about our dunes, though. One of unintended consequences. Like many dunes, these are wandering dunes. This makes for interesting, ever-shifting scenery, but it wasn’t deemed helpful when the dunes also wandered over roads and houses and other important structures. So in the early 1900s, local experts decided to plant non-native European beach grass to stabilize the sand. And it worked! Our wandering dunes were finally subdued. What no one had foreseen, though, was that the aggressive grass eventually began to take over the dunes, forming a layer of topsoil thick enough for other plants to grow. Today, vegetation covers more than 80% of the sand dunes. In another 50 years they will most likely be gone completely.

Why do I tell this story? Because it feels personal — not a day goes by when I’m not out on the beach marveling at what’s left of the dunes — and because the unintended consequences remind me of another story. Only this one is about machine translation. Readers of my column know that my interest in machine translation is not primarily in the alltoo-common process of post-editing of machine translation (PEMT). I’m convinced that there are better and more productive ways to work with machine translation, ways that help the translator do what she was trained to do: drive the translation rather than be driven by the translation. I know this sounds outrageous to some in the machine translation community who manage very high-quality, in-domain MT engines whose sugg e s t i o n s typically require very few

I’m convinced that there are better and more productive ways to work with machine translation, ways that help the translator do what she was trained to do: drive the translation rather than be driven by the translation.

The Translator’s Perspective by Jost Zetzsche

edits (depending on language combination and other factors). I understand that. But I also understand that the vast majority of translators do not have the opportunity to use those kinds of engines, nor will they for some time to come.

Transit); identification of TM subsegments with MT matches (Lift); interactive MT suggestions based on what has already been entered (Lilt); automatic formatting or target texts based on machine translation lookups (Lilt); and the list could and will go on and on.

The typical translator has access either to general MT engines or to engines that may be customized but don’t have a particular high level of quality. There is still a lot of value that can be unearthed in those machine translation suggestions, but typically not on a whole-segment level and therefore not easily mendable with post-editing.

This whole area is like a new El Dorado for developers, with essentially no limits to the creativity that can be used to unleash the power of machine translation in many new ways.

Let’s act like other professionals, be they lawyers, plumbers, or accountants, and charge on the basis of time or project.

In the past three or so years, a whole slew of new technologies have aimed at integrating machine translation directly into the translator’s workflow to increase her productivity.

Examples include auto-suggestions of subsegments of partial machine translation segments (Wordfast Classic /Anywhere, Trados Studio, Déjà Vu, CafeTran), some even from more than one translation engine; repair of fuzzy translation memory matches (Déjà Vu); validation of MT suggestions with the help of TM matches (Star

Here is where I see the unintended consequences coming into play (and, don’t worry, unlike my beloved dunes, these aren’t negative). If there’s been one common factor in the world of translation for a very long time, it’s been the word count on which we’ve based so much of our billing. And it’s that bedrock of stability that really doesn’t work anymore. There are just too many variables in play at this point to allow for quotes and invoices based on word counts. With translation memories it was easy. We essentially just had to negotiate what the full word price was and then determine certain percentages for fuzzy matches, repetitions, etc. But with the flurry of new MTbased technologies, we can no longer measure which materials aid in the translation of a word (or any text) and how, so it’s unreasonable to measure price on the basis of volume of text. So, what to do? Let’s throw word (or line or character) counts out and be all the better for it. Let’s act like

The Translator’s Perspective by Jost Zetzsche

other professionals, be they lawyers, plumbers, or accountants, and charge on the basis of time or project. We can do this ethically (unlike the shady way we tried to slip the use of translation memory technology past our clients when the technology first came into use) and convincingly (our clients will eventually thank us for not charging in percentages of pennies anymore). And — once we step away from the tyranny of the word — we might just discover that we needed our blindfolds removed so we could see the projects we sell in a different way, allowing us to perceive additional services we have to offer. Unintended consequences come in strange packages. I imagine the machine translation community didn’t anticipate machine translation being just one of several tools translators would simultaneously access to help them work more productively. Or that this would eventually break down long-established pricing paradigms in exchange for greater professionalization. But that’s exactly what seems to be happening. Maybe that’s what Frank Herbert meant when he wrote in Dune that “the highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.” Let’s take a lesson from the dunes.

Jost Zetzsche Jost

Zetzsche

English-to-German translator,

Send your comments or questions to translator@taus.net

technology

certified technical

translation

consultant,

and

a widely published author on various aspects of translation. Originally from Hamburg, Germany, he earned a Ph.D. in the field of Chinese translation history and linguistics. His computer guide for translators, A Translator’s Tool Box for the 21st Century, is now in its eleventh edition and his technical newsletter for translators goes out to more than 10,000 translation professionals. In 2012, Penguin published his co-authored Found in Translation, a book about translation and interpretation for the general public. His Twitter handle is @jeromobot.

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

A Reality Check A

few years ago, a friend of mine came to me

with a book,

The Visionary’s Handbook, which contained an interesting statement: “The closer your vision gets to a provable truth, the more you are simply describing the present. In the same way, the more certain you are of a future outcome, the more likely you will be wrong.”

It should not be surprising that accurate or incorrect predictions in Back to the Future were due to existing or inadequate technologies. Predictions are tricky and chancy, except, maybe, for futurist Ray Kurzweil. Therefore, when Jaap van der Meer invited me to write a column on research and innovation in translation for this journal, I knew it would be tough. New questions Over time, I have come to realize how research, innovation and translation are strange bedfellows. Innovations come from answering new questions, but the overwhelming — and increasing — store of human knowledge, although just a click away, is seemingly inhibiting. Also, the translation community has been struggling with the same old issues for centuries. I myself have been wondering whether translation is really important.

In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell wrote, “One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Judging how frantically and feebly translators and translation scholars underline the importance of translation, the whole community must be suffering from a dreadful nervous breakdown. All analysis seems to identify the origin of this disease with the academics.

While linguists develop theories about how language works, technologists focus on producing useful insights.

Translation is what allows global businesses to thrive on localized versions of increasingly complex products by enabling worldwide users to operate and enjoy them. Translation does matter, then, but, paraphrasing French statesman Georges Clemenceau, many think that c’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des linguistes. While linguists develop theories about how language works, technologists focus on producing useful insights. Linguists view their job as

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

scientific discovery, while it appears dogmatic to scientists. NLP researchers do not care about how true linguistic theories might be, but how well these theories enable their systems to function. And, in this respect, even wrong theories can prove useful.

Will such conferences improve the opinion society holds of translation? Will they help bridge the gap between truth and usefulness?

This could explain why more and more nonlinguists get involved in translation, or why speech recognition pioneer Fred Jelinek said, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.” I have been collecting my own statistics from daily alerts and news: 97% relates to translation at large, i.e. to book translation, and a noteworthy tenth of it relates to Bible translation. Translation studies could even prove useful, but as long as they are confined to literature, translation will be perceived as an art, and, as such, ephemeral, if not pointless.

Companies are increasingly aware that cultural sensitivity is essential for a global presence, but conveying the same message consistently across many cultures could become a nightmare when this translates into hundreds of distinct websites and applications. And yet, this issue is not addressed by any academic conference.

A communication problem? Maybe. The organizers of the conference Meaning in translation: illusion of precision admit that “someday computers will be able to translate better than human translators”, although this is an extreme point of view. Maybe they have never heard of Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of machines reaching human levels of translation quality by the year 2029.

According to research by the Modern Language Association, the number of American students who learned a language other than English decreased by about 100,000 between 2009 and 2013. At the same time, according to research from the British Council, around three-quarters of British people do not speak another language well enough to have a basic conversation, while a recent report from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) found that the UK is recording £48bn a year in lost exports as a direct result of its lack of language skills.

The number of American students who learned a language other than English decreased by about 100,000 between 2009 and 2013.

Not surprisingly, the language service market has been growing steadily for the last two decades, with a recent slowdown due to a decrease in revenues, despite the increasing volumes. Projections call for a further 23% growth in revenues by 2018, roughly corresponding to a yearly 7% over the last three years. The growth in volumes and the decrease in revenues have possibly the same origin.

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

The market for translation technologies is expected to reach 14% of the language service market by 2019. The fear that robots will destroy jobs and leave people unemployed is as old as automation. Anyway, the booming of translation technologies will not endanger translation jobs any time soon, more than the lack of skillful professionals. True, intellectual jobs are at risk. Even scientists are not safe. Adam, the scientist-robot from Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities, can perform experiments, interpret results, plan further experiments, and make discoveries all on its own. But, to paraphrase Pablo Picasso, it is miserable, it can only provide answers; it cannot ask questions. Yet. Outliers and game-changers Can we expect any substantial news in the translation industry, then? Not straightaway. Game-changers never play the game, so any disruption will come from outliers who enter the game and unsettle it. As usual.

The winning formula for the next future seems to be the sharing economy.

Game players produce sustaining innovation by meeting the needs of customers in existing markets, without affecting them. Game-changers introduce disruptive innovations and create new markets that are unknowable at the time of conception. Speech technology and machine translation are the next frontline in media, telecommunications, medicine, etc., but they are all sustaining innovations now. The winning formula for the next future seems to be the sharing economy, and any gamechangers could come from this arena. In any case, any disruption will come again through low prices and hyper-efficient services. Disruptive innovation could backfire too, as we

learnt from a recent decision by the California Labor Commission to award $4000 compensation to a San Franciscan driver when it was ruled that he should be recognized as an Uber employee. Also, those who disrupt may in turn be disrupted. This explains why disruptors often turn into fierce conservatives. Non-predictions Any innovation in the translation industry will be a sustaining innovation. Maybe 2016 will be the year for a financial innovation. People increasingly arrange things by themselves. Banking institutions have been exploiting this trend, and new payment service providers could emerge allowing businesses to make and accept payments from every country in the world, in every currency, rapidly, efficiently, and at very low or no cost at all. This will boost disintermediation and, in turn, lead to a further decrease in translation pricing and in compensation for translation jobs. A new wave of mergers and acquisitions will then sweep through the translation industry. The bigger players will eat up the smaller ones, all with the same goal, the intangibles (clients, data, workforce.) Seldom will technology be the driving force. Also, since translation industry players are dwarfs to their customers in terms of revenues, assets, and resources, the translation industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immediate future is about being either super-specialized or supersized, with no room for anything in between.

The Research Perspective by Luigi Muzii

And the academic community? It will watch, keep arguing about difficult to understand quality models and the same old stuff, and, granted, produce some new useless standards.

Luigi Muzii Send your comments or questions to research@taus.net

Luigi

Muzii

has

been working in the language for

industry than

years as a translator, localizer, technical writer, author, trainer, university localization,

teacher and

terminology

consultant.

and has

authored books on technical writing and translation quality systems, and is a regular speaker at conferences.

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An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

The TAUS Review Interview is a the magazine that you’ll see each

new feature in quarter.

We are delighted to have snatched Steve Richardson, manager of Translation Systems at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS Church, as our first interviewee. Steve was a bit humbled by our request, but as we sat down (or rather connected via a web meeting) it turned out he had a lot of great things to share. Let’s start with a quick introduction. Steve has been at the Church for 4,5 years. His role is to oversee all the systems and software that are used by their translators around the world. The Church has over 1,000 translators working for them, of which 200-300 are full-time translators and supervisors. They translate regularly into over 90 languages. Some languages they translate much more into and other languages less, depending on the language and the needs. Steve oversees systems such as SDL WorldServer of which they have a very large installation. Almost all their translators now work with SDL Trados Studio, so they have several hundreds of licenses. They also use the Microsoft Translator Hub to provide machine translation to translators in dozens of languages. Steve doesn’t work in any languages in particular, although he’s fluent in Portuguese, having lived in Brazil for over three years. But he oversees all languages and is in constant contact with people all over the world; Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific islands and all their languages. Can you tell us a bit about your past experiences in this industry? My introduction into this field was in 1975 at Brigham Young University in Utah, where I was an undergraduate student. I joined a machine translation project, which I worked on for five years. When that project came to an end, I ended up going to IBM. After a few years of being a systems programmer at IBM, I went to

IBM Research and started working in Natural Language Processing (NLP). I was involved in some machine translation work there as well, but a lot more in NLP and grammar checking. In 1991 I moved to Microsoft as one of the first three researchers at Microsoft Research, also working in NLP. We worked in multiple languages and created the initial versions of the Word “grammar-checker”. Then in 1999 I started working in machine translation at Microsoft Research. I was responsible for managing the group that created the Bing Translator, which later became the basis of the Microsoft Translator Hub.

Machine translation is what started me in this industry and because of its use, I became very involved also in how it’s been used in the localization industry.

So in 2008, after 17 years, I left Microsoft. Machine translation is what started me in this industry and because of its use, I became very involved also in how it’s been used in the localization industry. Before coming here to the Church, I was actually in Brazil working for my church as a missionary for a few years. What specifically attracted you to the industry? Can I assume that is the MT project you did at BYU? Yes, that’s exactly right. I came into this industry through machine translation - into the research and development side of it. Then, at Microsoft, I became more involved, because we actually created a real system and people

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

started using it. So of course I had to interact with a lot of people in localization and translation, getting feedback from translators that used the system. And today I’m involved in both sides of it. I still like to be involved in machine translation and research, but now I am much more tied to the user’s side of it, since I’m trying to help an organization to use that technology rather than to create the technology. So, I’m not sure how applicable my next question “Tell us a little bit more about the company and how it serves the industry” is to the LDS Church. Right, it’s a church. Yes, so how does the Church serve the industry? Well, I don’t know about serving the industry. We certainly serve the world. The focus of the Church is to strengthen and help individuals and families and to reach out to people who are in need, whether physically or spiritually. Through sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, we try to supply messages of peace and comfort to a world, that is, as we all know, in a lot of turmoil, especially recently. We do a lot of work in areas around the world that are not so economically advanced, whereas many of the players in this industry are focused on the economic aspects. So in one sense I suppose we serve the industry by creating unique MT systems. We have machine translation systems in languages that nobody else has. For example, we have systems in Tongan, Samoan, Mongolian, Fijian and Haitian. Rare languages… Yes, some languages that others don’t have. We’re trying to be proactive. As a church our whole focus is to help others, to lift others up. And I think communication, as we all know, is absolutely essential. If you want to help the world, you need to help people communicate. So I’m happy to participate both in TAUS and

in other organizations like that. I’m also on the board for the AMTA. My involvement in all these is to help move forward this technology, which I think is essential for helping the world communicate better and making it a better place. Whether it’s between consumers or amongst translators, I think we can all benefit. I was really impressed by the way — I’m going to digress for a second here — at the MT Summit which took place two weeks after the TAUS Annual Conference. We had Spyridon Pilos from the European Commission give a keynote address and I was really impressed with the effort the EC has made in Europe on automatic translation and helping all of Europe communicate amongst themselves. For economic reasons, I think, mainly.

We do a lot of work in areas around the world that are not so economically advanced, whereas many of the players in this industry are focused on the economic aspects.

I see that as a very similar role to the Church’s role. Not necessarily from an economic perspective, although we know that helping people economically is tremendously important for their well-being, but also from an individual perspective, from a stability perspective, and from a world peace perspective. So there you go, how’s that for an answer to that question?! It’s wonderful! So perhaps you can tell us about the challenges you face working towards these goals and the rewards you get from this work? Right, yes, I think some of our greatest challenges are the number of languages that we translate into. It’s one thing to translate into the world’s more economically advanced languages, but it’s another thing to try to get out

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

to languages in Africa, the Pacific Islands, and some places in Asia. Those languages provide a lot of challenges, in terms of the script or fonts they use and the structure of the languages. We are trying to use the same technologies, whether it’s Wo r l d S e r v e r, Trados, or machine translation for many languages where those technologies are not commonly used. We deal in some very low-resource languages and we are producing data we’d like to share at some point actually. I know Jaap (van der Meer) has asked me about that :-)

When I think of the fact that what I do makes a difference in the lives of individuals, not just their ability to communicate, but the messages being communicated are messages that help them.

And because of these low-resource languages, we also have a wide variety of users: from very high-tech users to very low-tech users. That’s another challenge. We go out to some of these places where they’ll have to start a generator to power their computer just to be able to do anything. We even have a couple of places where people are doing their translations on paper. Not very much though, but still. And of course, the majority of our translators around the world do have high-speed internet. But I’m sure there are also some great rewards? Yes, certainly. Almost 3 years ago we started an effort to upgrade all the technology that was being used for our translations. It’s been a slow process, but one of the great rewards I think is to see these 1,000 translators now using industry standard tools, like Trados Studio, and seeing their technological sophistication

raised up and the results of the productivity increases that come from that. We have created MT systems using the Microsoft Hub for English to and from 39 languages. Some languages never had machine translation, like Tongan, but now our translators use it constantly. It is very rewarding and satisfying to be able to create these MT systems in languages nobody ever had, but now all of a sudden they have it, and not only do they have it, but it works well. They use it and benefit from it. It is indeed rewarding to enable that kind of communication between all these people who speak different languages. Apart from the technological side, the main thrust of our work is, of course, getting messages out that inspire and uplift people and help people in their lives. When I think of the fact that what I do makes a difference in the lives of individuals, not just their ability to communicate, but the messages being communicated are messages that help them. That of course is rewarding in itself.

Let’s talk about innovation. It’s been a big theme at our conference in October and I’m sure at other industry events recently as well. Where do you think the industry needs to innovate or change? What are the challenges? You might have seen Jaap’s recent blog about the Game Changers of 2016 where he stated a few take-aways we noticed: we need to be data-driven, mission-driven and it’s all about the user. What are your personal key take-aways from the recent conferences? A big theme that is ongoing, and I’m happy to be participating in it, is the whole area DQF addresses. This is really important and essential to improve the quality of our systems and to improve productivity, extending the reach of our translation systems and processes. The whole effort around trying to measure and control quality and to get data on what is actually happening amongst our translators: How

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

they work, and how they can work more effectively? Where should our training be focused? How much do we pay for the work that’s done and in particular for MT post-editing? The other area I think we need to innovate in is integration of systems. When I go to these conferences I talk to people from other organizations and from some of the user groups I’m involved in, and the areas they’re really concerned about is the rapidly changing publishing industry. What we see there is that we have these publishing systems and content management systems that, to be honest, I don’t think integrate really well with the existing translation management systems. There’s a lot of work being done already and there’s a lot of focus on it. We ourselves are involved in a significant effort now to integrate our publishing systems with our translation systems. It has to be a seamless integration, though. When I talk to other people in the industry I hear that they are struggling with exactly the same problems: How do I create content and publish it to print, to the web, to mobile, all at the same time and in 50 languages simultaneously? The publishing systems are doing much better now than they were, but they still lack a lot of things.

When I talk to other people in the industry I hear that they are struggling with exactly the same problems: How do I create content and publish it to print, to the web, to mobile, all at the same time and in 50 languages simultaneously?

Just a very simple example of a need for better integration: even though you may have a nice publishing system that sends things to be translated, you want to be able to see the re-

sulting translation in context on a web page or mobile device and be able to make changes there according to the context. A lot of the publishing systems that allow this don’t allow you then to make changes and capture the changes back into the translation memory in your translation tools. We all know that changes are made, but if we don’t get them into our translation memories, it doesn’t do any good because if the same content is ever used in the future, it’s not the right version of it.

This year we also had a few talks at the MT Summit on how speech translation really is going to open doors that have never been opened before, in terms of worldwide communication.

More innovation is needed to dynamically adapt our MT systems to improve them when translators make changes during post-editing. This is an area that people have been doing a lot of work in. There are initial efforts in this area and some industry MT providers claim to have solved it. I think they have a version 1, to be honest, and it works ok. But there’s a lot of work to do in this area. As people will begin to use this technology, they’ll find that not every change a translator makes should be put back into the MT system. You only want those that are reviewed and accurate. There’s a lot of tuning that needs to be done in this area. But it’s very important to teach our MT systems to be more adaptive so they’ll be able to produce better translations in a variety of domains. Certain companies are coming up with publishing solutions that incorporate translation processes and are a one-stop-shop for publishing in multiple languages. That’s great, but one of the problems is that you have companies with already existing systems and processes.

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

It’s good to talk about these issues and challenges with other people. TAUS strongly encourages our attendees to do this and always has a lot of room for break-out discussions and Q&A. Hopefully through these discussions we’ll be able to solve some of the issues and challenges. It is of course our mantra, “Together we know more”. Which brings me to my next question: Do you have a personal mantra or motto?

So you’ll need to provide a migration path for existing users and companies to get onto these newer systems. That’s a big challenge, especially when you’re looking at very complex publishing processes and systems and you need to update them with the latest technologies. So, not only integration, but also migration is an important aspect. Another big focus, which I was really impressed with, not only at TAUS but also at the MT Summit, was speech translation. We’ve heard a lot about that at TAUS over the past two years and what it’s going to do. But this year we also had a few talks at the MT Summit on how speech translation really is going to open doors that have never been opened before, in terms of worldwide communication. I think the applications there are very exciting and definitely for us at the Church. We’re trying to go out into the world with a missionary force of about 88.000 people. A lot of it is teaching religious principle, but a lot of it is also humanitarian. These missionaries are out in the world trying to communicate, so to actually have a handheld device that enables speech translation would be an amazing benefit.

I don’t know that I have a phrase, but I can describe my “philosophy.” It is that there’s almost always a solution to any problem that you encounter, if you just have the right attitude. It’s interesting to talk to translators and others when they get stuck in a rut, using a particular type of technology or doing things in a certain way. They work really hard but they don’t see that there’s a better way of doing things; a better solution. I’m one who is focused on the better solution. When people tell me “I can’t do this” or “this is how it is”, I say “no that’s not how it is, we can change that!” In fact, this “mantra” is how I came to the Church. As I mentioned earlier, before I came to the Church, I was the leader of 200 missionaries in Brazil for three years. When I got back to Utah, one of the Church leaders talked to me and found out that I had been involved in MT. He told me they really wanted to incorporate MT technology because they wanted to increase the volume of their translations and they didn’t see any other way to do it. So that’s why I was asked to come here. This is a huge change of process and technology, which may seem extremely difficult or impossible, but certainly isn’t. My whole focus here is one of change and upgrading to the best technologies and processes in order to improve the flow of information in all the languages. The final thing I would say about this is that I always try to come up with simple solutions. Simplicity is best!

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

With such a long career in different roles within industry, I’m sure you have experiences — some high and low points. Can you share a best and worst experience with us? My worst experience was when I moved from IBM (I worked there for almost 11 years) and went to Microsoft Research in 1991. My team and I had been working at IBM, creating parsers and grammar checking systems. We actually had developed some MT systems as well. We tried to get these technologies into IBM products, but hit a roadblock when IBM Products were not at a point where they could accept such new technology. At the time Microsoft Office was just coming out and IBM was trying to create a new office offering of their own.

We talked to Microsoft and WordPerfect and they were both interested in buying our technology, but IBM management said they were not going to let us sell it, because they were our competitors.

We had a grammar checker we wanted to incorporate into the IBM’s word processor under development, but we were told that they were too busy working on the word processor itself and there was no time to incorporate the grammar checker. We talked to Microsoft and WordPerfect and they were both interested in buying our technology, but IBM management said they were not going to let us sell it, because they were our competitors. So we had this technology that we created in Research, but we couldn’t use it inside or outside of IBM; we couldn’t do anything with it. We became very frustrated and a member of our group contacted Microsoft to ask if they would be interested in hiring a few people who were involved in NLP. We found out later that

one month earlier, Bill Gates had decided to create Microsoft Research and one of the areas he wanted to do research in was NLP. Three of us from IBM interviewed with Microsoft and were offered the job to become the first three Microsoft researchers. We didn’t know at the time that Microsoft and IBM were already undergoing a “divorce” as it were. So in April 1991, that divorce took place. Microsoft was working on Windows and IBM on OS2, which became a huge and very divisive moment between the two companies. Not a good moment for the three of us to announce that we were going from IBM to Microsoft; it was not received well at all! To say we were treated poorly by IBM at that point would be an understatement. Our departure from IBM was one of the most difficult transitions I’ve ever had from one company to another. In retrospect, if that had not happened, I would never have gone to Microsoft and never been able to work on machine translation there. I don’t know whether someone else would have been there to lead the effort to create the Microsoft Translator or not. So although it was one of the worst experiences of my working life, it also had a silver lining, which is that in the end, Microsoft was able to have natural language and machine translation technology.

To say we were treated poorly by IBM at that point would be an understatement. Our departure from IBM was one of the most difficult transitions I’ve ever had from one company to another.

My best experience is actually related to this as well. In 2007, we launched the Microsoft Translator on the Internet. We had already been using it inside the company for several years to translate support knowledge base articles and such. But when we released

An Interview with Steve Richardson by Anne-Maj van der Meer

it on the internet in the fall of 2007, I was invited to give a keynote talk at a BYU Computer Science Alumni meeting and announced in public for the first time that Microsoft was going to launch the Translator. So there I was, some thirty years later, back at the place where my career began and making this great announcement.

It’s funny because back in the 1970s, we thought we were going to change the world with machine translation and it would be only five years away!

the beginning of the Microsoft Translator. That, to me, was sort of coming full circle. Just as an addendum to that, coming back from my missionary work in Brazil in the fall of 2011, I found out not only that the Translator had been further enhanced, but that the group at Microsoft had created the Translator Hub during my absence and that I could use it to create MT systems here at the Church. It was another moment of realization how amazing it was and how I could now use the very technology I helped create.

It’s funny because back in the 1970s, we thought we were going to change the world with machine translation and it would be only five years away! But it took thirty years until I was able to announce Send your comments or questions to review@taus.net

Steve Richardson Steve Richardson is the manager of Translation Systems in the LDS Church’s Publishing

Services

Department,

where he has worked for the last four years overseeing the Church’s use of translation management systems, translator workbenches, and machine translation systems for over 90 languages and 1000 translators. Previously, he completed a 3-year mission assignment in Brazil with his wife and younger children, and 17 years at Microsoft Research as a Principal Researcher and manager of the Machine Translation Group, which created the Microsoft Translator. Prior to his time at Microsoft, he spent 11 years at IBM working in natural language processing, including

Anne-Maj van der Meer

at the TJ Watson Research Center. He holds Bachelor’s and

Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics from

Anne-Maj has been with TAUS

Brigham Young University and a PhD in Computer Science

since 2007 and transformed

from the City University of New York. During his career, Dr.

from bookkeeper and accounts

Richardson has served on numerous advisory boards and

receivable into manager of

conference program committees in organizations such as

web

the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) and the

member services. She is also the editor of TAUS

Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA).

Review and responsible for its layout. She has

He is the author and/or editor of various books, conference

studied English Language and Literature at the

proceedings, research papers, and numerous patents in NLP

University of Amsterdam and Creative Writing at

and MT.

Harvard University.

content,

events

and

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Events Calendar

Upcoming TAUS Events

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TAUS Roundtable 15 March, 2016 Vienna (Austria)

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Translation Automation Users Call An MT Use Case by Pactera 25 February, 2016, 5 PM CET

TAUS Roundtable 12 May, 2016 Barcelona (Spain) check out the rest of the 2016 agenda!

Industry Events Elia Together 11-12 February, 2016 Barcelona (Spain) LocWorld30 13-15 April, 2016 Tokyo (Japan)

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