MAGAZINE

#193 – January/February

AI and Making Localization Tech Work for You

This issue focuses on tech, and specifically, how to make it work for you. Because what good is the future if it’s not friendly?

Read on!

POSTEDITING

I

think we can all agree that 2020 was a wild ride, and we all have high hopes for 2021. We’re doing our part by re-launching our print edition of the magazine — if you’ve missed a fully tangible, bendable MultiLingual, this is already a return to normalcy.

As far as the content goes, we’re taking our cue from what we hope for the future: the best of what has been, updated and re-imagined for the realities to come. This issue focuses on tech, and specifically, how to make it work for you. Because what good is the future if it’s not friendly?

Throughout 2021, MultiLingual is committed to nurturing our traditions of goodwill and neutral reporting, and trying out new things. As always, we welcome feedback and engagement.

Happy new year, and to all our readers, writers, sponsors, friends, and colleagues, may it be the best one yet.

Katie Botkin signature

FEATURED READER

Olga Deputatova, Tortuga Social Ltd.

Would you introduce yourself?

Olga Deputatova. I’m a localization manager at Tortuga Social Ltd., a mobile game developer based in Russia.

Where do you live?

I live in Penza, a small town located not far from Moscow — 700 km (about 400 miles) is really not far compared with Vladivostok, for example, which is 9,000 km (5,600 miles) away from the capital.

FOCUS

On GPT-3. What is GPT-3 and will it shake the language industry?

By Carol Jin

By now you should have heard the big news — San Francisco-based AI company OpenAI announced their new-generation language model GPT-3. You may wonder why it is a big deal. Well, read this: “I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a ‘feeling brain.’ But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!”

Why data labeling may be the new industry gig

By Carol Jin

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in recent years. It’s no stranger in the language industry either — most of us are very familiar with the term machine translation (MT). We take MT as the primary link between localization and AI.

The Future of the Localization Industry

By Kajetan Malinowski and Jaime Punishill

What is the future of the localization industry? To understand where we’re headed, it is helpful to consider how we got here. When I started working in localization 14 years ago, things were a lot different. We worked on multi-month, behemoth projects.

How langtech companies are applying AI on a smaller scale

By Donald A. DePalma

In the megabucks world of high tech, software and hardware vendors vie to capture the attention and spending of business buyers and consumers. Over the last few years their battleground has been artificial intelligence, with frequent announcements from mega-tech platform suppliers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft about the smartest algorithm or the fastest AI computer.

Where Tech Meets Human-Centric Clients

By Olivera Rosulnik

Growth and investment are assets that usually go hand in hand with good practices and successful businesses. While we invest in people, workflows, workspace, and technology, the translation industry seems to march on a relentless pace.

The Ever-Evolving Technology of MT

By Arturs Vasilevskis

Machine translation (MT) has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the post-war era to becoming an integral part of the 21st century business environment. So what are the current and future trends as we head into 2021? And how is dynamic learning — adaptive neural machine translation— transforming the way professional translators work?

How JIRA Can Help Localization Teams

By Donato Giuliano

JIRA is a proprietary project management and issue tracking tool developed by Atlassian. This software was originally designed to be a bug tracking tool, but in the last two decades, it has evolved into a family of products that can help manage the work of all kinds of teams.

SPECIAL REVIEW

Congree Authoring Server

by Nicole Keller

Сongree Language Technology GmbH is a software manufacturer based in the south of Germany. They specialize in the field of computer linguistics, and support companies of any size in the process of content optimization. They mainly concentrate on the work of technical writers and corporate authors who generate source content.

Since they integrate the Congree Linguistic Engine, which performs a morphological analysis, their Language Check is only available for a small selection of languages (English, German, French, and Spanish). 

COLUMNS

Lobbying for Language

By Terena Bell

Why do you work in localization? For translators, this answer may be more obvious. Translation itself is an often underappreciated job; the general assumption is most people do it for love, not money. Translators themselves tend to be smart enough to have their pick of industries: a legal translator could have easily become a lawyer; marketing localizers are perfectly capable of writing source language blogs and slogans.

State of the Machine Translation Union

By John Tinsley

It’s the start of 2021 — a time to look back and a time to look ahead. This time of year, we all love a good list. Whether it’s a retrospective on things that have happened in the previous 12 months, or predictions about what’s going to happen in the coming year, they are staple of articles far and wide, and this one will be no exception!

Regulations were made to be translated

By Christophe Djaouani

Welcome to this first edition of “Rules of the Trade.” I’m very excited to have the opportunity to share insights into the challenges facing professionals managing multilingual communications in highly regulated industries. In this series I will share with you what I’ve learned in my 21 years working alongside language services and tech customers in the financial, legal, IR, CRO, and pharmaceutical sectors.

WHITE PAPER

Memsource: AI doesn’t have to be showy to be effective

Sponsored Content

In 2017, Memsource established a dedicated AI team, and since then has released several features that have enhanced translation workflows. These include patented non-translatable recognition and most recently Memsource Translate, a dynamic machine translation management solution that selects the optimal engine based on the user’s language pair and domain.

Standards

Localization Standards Reader 5.0

By David Filip

This reader is the fifth installment of MultiLingual’s encyclopedia-in-a-nutshell relating to localization standards. It does not purport to address everything around standards, and was last updated in late 2020. To be informative and of practical use, there must be a focus. This focus is being provided via two limitations.

Nonprofits

Translation Fights Back

By Eric Paquin

A year after its emergence, the world is still trying to find ways to quell the COVID-19 pandemic. Different industries look at the problem from a unique perspective — something that is also true for the translation industry. As the pandemic spread across the globe, the translation industry looked at how language and language technology could address a global crisis of information. Thus, the Translation Initiative for COVID-19 (TICO-19) was born.

BUYER’S GUIDE

BUYER’S GUIDE