July 2020: The State of Machine Translation launch event, Intento & IKEA talk at LocWorld, MT provider news, and product updates.
- 📕 The State of Machine Translation 2020 report launch
- 🎤 LocWorld: Intento and IKEA talk
- 📖 Intento interview to Slator
- 🛠 Updates to Intento plugins
- 📱 News from MT providers
- 📗 Essential MT reading
Hi, network!
As businesses keep adjusting to the post-COVID world, they’re undergoing a significant change. While only 25% of employees said they would like to get back to the office, 68% of companies reported COVID-19 had sped up their digital transformation “a great deal.”
What does this mean for machine translation? As one of the most advanced AI areas, it will see further growth, as companies seek to optimize their global performance while keeping the costs down. To address MT implementation at an enterprise, we’ll be giving a talk alongside one of our global customers — IKEA, at the LocWorld.
On the same day, we’ll be launching the State of Machine Translation 2020 report. Stay tuned!
ANNUAL REPORT LAUNCH
The new report is here! We’ll be launching it on July 30th at 5 CET at the TAUS MT Series webinar — please do join! This time, we cover 14 languages and 17 industry sectors to analyze how contemporary MT engines perform in different domains. A particular focus this year is on COVID-related content.
SPEAKING AT LOCWORLD
LocWorld is calling!
One of the key events in the localization industry, this year LWW42 is happening online.
With plenty of opportunities to network, learn, and share, it’s a great place to be for any localization professional. You can still join!
We’ll be giving two talks, and we’d love to see you there.
First, we’ll have a panel with Xillio and Amplexor on why the API Economy is important for the language industry. It’s not only about Machine Translation!
Later that day, we’re co-presenting with Johan Sporre from INGKA / IKEA Group. We’ll share our journey in achieving continuous improvement for centralized multi-purpose MT solutions, involving both post-edited and real-time scenarios: global IT desk and customer support, communication, knowledge base, and learning management.
Stop by to say hi!
MT INDUSTRY — WHAT LIES AHEAD
Following the closure of the seed round of $3 mln earlier in July, we gave an interview to Slator. And Gregory (my co-founder and the guy on the right) showcased his brand new COVID beard.
“Looking ahead, Savenkov predicts that the current trend of unbundling data, technology, and computing ownership will continue to shape the MT landscape. He added that coupled with domain adaptation, this unbundling enables data owners to both train and monetize their own models.”
PRODUCT UPDATES
All users of Intento Translator for Chrome, you will like the 0.2.5 version.
Here’s what’s new:
- You can select or see what provider was chosen for the translation.
- You can select a part of the page and get it translated
- The extension now remembers the languages you’ve selected
Get your plugin here.
There’re also new versions of the plugins for professional tools. SDL Trados plugin version 2.2.10 and MemoQ private plugin version 2.2.8 both have improved lists of models and glossaries.
MT PROVIDER NEWS
Here’re the most recent changes at MT providers:
Google launches a hieroglyphs translator that uses machine learning to decode ancient Egyptian language. We can’t wait for it to be enabled via the API, should pair well with the Klingon alphabet supported by Microsoft Translator.
Apple presents a Translate app that can automatically translate between 11 languages right on the device. It’s not clear if this technology will be available via a mobile SDK — it would be a great fallback option for other translation apps.
IBM introduced a new language pair, Welsh→English. Besides IBM, it’s supported by Google, Microsoft, and Yandex.
Promt added a direct translation between Spanish and Chinese.
There’re some new MT providers we’ve noticed and added to our catalog: AISA, NICT, iFLYTEK.
ESSENTIAL MT READING
Can you translate politeness?
This curious paper from CMU on text style transfer explores how to automatically change the text politeness, and swap style between factual, romantic, and humorous. Trained on 1.39M emails and some other datasets. Code and data available on Github.
An excellent machine learning course
If you feel like enhancing your ML knowledge, here’s a great online video course by DeepMind and UCL Center for Artificial Intelligence. The 12-video course provides the full scope of the science behind ML.
Deploying language intelligence tech at the enterprise: challenges and solutions
Intento took part in a webinar by LT-Innovate to discuss different facets of deploying language technology (aka linguistic AI) at the enterprise level.
If you’ve missed it, here’s a recap for you.
Happy translating!
Intento Team
