The Process Innovation Challenge (PIC), held June 12 at LocWorld40, changed its model by pitting six competitors against one another, three relating to process and three to technology. Each competitor had four minutes to present an idea, with a couple of minutes afterward free to answer questions from the onstage PIC dragons — and later from the audience itself.

Istvan Lengyel of BeLazy, Aimee Ansari of Translators without Borders and Harsha Mudumby of Image-Translate offered tech innovations; and Giulia Tarditi of Monase, Benedetta Zamagni of Translated and David Benotmane of Glossa Group offered process innovations.

Tarditi compared translation and creating copy from scratch, and asked “what makes the two acts so dramatically different” on a neurological level. She said the difference lay in the source text — rewriting copy from a “brief” engaged a different part of the translator’s brain. She said the process tool she had developed divided “content in type buckets to direct different process flows.”

Zamagni said her company had to recruit 300 linguists in a month, so they developed an AI-augmented selection process to help. She said there was nothing to fear from tech “as long as we give back to humans all the time and money that we save,” so her company invests the saved time in linguist training.

Mudumby showcased what he described as a “design tool for translators” that allowed translators to post-edit machine translation in context; the tool looks at a webpage, for example, and translates the text that appears on a page automatically, allowing the linguist to click into the text and directly post-edit it.

Tarditi and Mudumby won their tracks by audience vote, and then went head-to-head in the final round, fielding audience questions about their products. The final round was won by Tarditi.