I see that DCU have announced a 5-year research program to develop the next generation of “automatic language translation”.

The project involves “UCD (that’s University College Dublin, not UC Davis), UL (University of Limerick) and TCD (Trinity College Dublin), and with renowned global technology leaders, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Dai Nippon Printing, and Idiom Technologies as well as key Irish SMEs, Alchemy, VistaTech, SpeechStorm and Traslan.” We’re told it aims to address three critical problems for L10n:

“Volume: The amount of content to be translated and localized to the destination culture and environment is growing rapidly and massively outstrips the supply of human translators.

Access: Powerful, small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs require novel technologies integrating speech and text to support “on the move” delivery of, and access to multilingual information.

Personalization : A new demand has rapidly emerged for the adaptation of a huge amount of multilingual content now available on the web, for individual needs . It needs “instant” localization and personalization to meet the demands of the users.”

This is great news indeed, and a tribute to academic-industry collaboration.