A group of Translationz staff members recently attended the TAUS Asia Conference and Exhibits event, which was held in Singapore from 16-18 October 2019. TAUS is a language data network who describe themselves as “an independent and neutral industry organization” seeking to develop communities by sharing knowledge, metrics and data during events and in online user groups. They’ve organised 25 events in Asia since 2005, but this was the first time they’d staged one in Singapore.
It was the largest event ever organised by TAUS, drawing in over 210 individuals in the translation and interpreting industry from 22 countries around the globe. Attendees at the event were encouraged to learn how to redesign new translation processes, deepen their knowledge of emerging technologies, and meet new customers and vendors in the language field.
One of the primary goals for Translationz in attending conference events like TAUS is to meet and engage with industry experts and learn more about the latest developments in relevant technologies. We also aim to develop our understanding of current best practices in order to best serve our clients in the continuously-evolving and rapidly-advancing translation and interpreting industry.
Topics at the event were fascinating and varied. Some of the most prominent discussions around global content included (among others): ensuring translation quality and how to deal with emerging markets; how companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon tackle language industry issues and solve customer challenges; the state of neural machine translation (NMT); the knowledge, operation, and data gaps in the industry; solving localization challenges with the modern translation pipeline; and Artificial Intelligence to automate subtitle creation and translation (this was one of the most interesting presentations in the whole conference).
No language industry conference would be complete without numerous presentations on artificial intelligence and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and the TAUS conference in Singapore was no exception! Translationz uses NMT for some of our client translation needs, and going to conferences like those organised by TAUS reinforces our understanding of the global businesses' wide-spread use of NMT today.
The accuracy of machine translation has improved immensely in the past three years. The chart below is quite amazing and indicative of the speed in which companies are using Translationz to work with them for their machine translation requirements. They are trusting the output of NMT for more and more of their translation requirements and expanding their scope of languages and volume of text to translate.
Recently a client moved from offering their readers translation from 5 languages to over 90 languages because they could use NMT to translate the text and post edit with humans. If you are a government department or a business that is seeking to do the same, Translationz can be your partner in this process.
For specific client needs Translationz uses NMT and Artificial Intelligence technologies. It’s important to be aware of the latest developments in that area of the industry. Presenters discussed the benefits of having robust NMT systems that produce context-appropriate translations and limit human involvement. Machine translation is improving every day and new developments are constantly rolled out, so it’s imperative that we stay on top of the latest trends and innovations. Particularly for many our clients that are not aware of the uses of these technologies. Attending conferences like TAUS that feature leading minds in the field are fantastic opportunities for us as a company to learn even more about the latest developments in the industry.
By attending the TAUS conference, we were able to further increase our knowledge on the importance of data, domain-sourcing, and methods of evaluation for MT quality. MT systems developers test daily to see if new data and algorithms lead to improvements in output quality. Due to the sheer number of tests, human evaluation simply isn’t feasible, so developers use automated metrics instead. The most commonly used metric is BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy). We will draw upon this knowledge to better serve our clients who regularly request this service.
One of the highlights of the TAUS conference every year is a contest in which participants present their game-changing innovations. Ten companies took part in the 2019 competition, including NICT, ModernMT, Transn and Xillio, with innovations in language processing and linguistic quality management among the ideas featured. This year’s winner was Adam Hodgson, founder and CEO of Interpreter.io. It was a pleasant surprise to see Adam win as his software is used by Translationz to manage interpreters, and on-demand and scheduled phone (OPI) and video calls (VRI). The game-changing technology presented was the use of Artificial Intelligence to assist interpreters (termed AI AI). Interperter.io technology provides automatic interpretation in real-time and is used to help interpreters with their interpretation as they refer to the real-time translation.
We’re excited to use the AI-assisted interpreter innovation presented at the conference and are more than happy for our clients and interpreters to reap the benefits of it.
We highly recommend attending a TAUS Conference, whether one pops up in your city or whether you travel to attend. The information presented is well-worth the time and investment. Here is more information on the next TAUS Conference.