It’s a common theme. In [5, 10, 20] years, machine translation (MT) will be so good that there will be no human translators left. And, indeed, there are some trends that make this idea look tempting. The move towards statistical machine translation has allowed machines to learn from the texts they are given, allowing them […]
Category: Machine Translation
Putting a Smile on The Public Face of Languages
If you are a translator, interpreter, sociolinguist, anthropological linguist or any other kind of linguist, there is a lot to get annoyed about. Courses are closing, rates are (in places) dropping, respect is on the wane and hardly a day goes by without some newspaper publishing a story about some new gadget that will entirely […]
Crowdsourcing and the Shrinking Middle
So, with the creation of new tech firm VerbalizeIT, the world has another company that says they can reduce the cost of translation and interpreting. It’s not as if the idea itself is that new. Regular LifeinLINCS readers, will remember our posts on NTT Docomo (among others), who offered a similar service. The difference this […]
The Importance of Messy Interpreting
It’s a sad fact that interpreting is still not seen as a particularly difficult and useful skill by many members of the public. After all, it’s just like having a walking dictionary, isn’t it? Interpreters hear words in one language and find their equivalents in another. Surely a computer could do the job. Professionals might […]
The Interpreters of the Future
… will either be mobile aps or underpaid, under qualified temps. That’s the impression people could easily get from the last month’s worth of news headlines. We already covered the attempt by NTT Docomo to create an interpreting ap and now, wonder of wonders, Microsoft are at it too. Sure, the results are “comical” in […]
Is it all over for Interpreting?
If you believe the hype, the interpreting profession is on its last legs. NTT Docomo, the biggest mobile phone network has at last managed to provide a service that allows anyone with a smartphone to instantly have their words interpreted. According to this article from the BBC, other companies are working on the same technology. […]
How could research help you?
If you could ask translation and interpreting researchers to look into one thing, what would it be? Here is a simple poll to get you started. Please do leave extended answers in the comments. Please note, the question below should read: If you could ask translation and interpreting researchers to look into one thing, what […]
Best of Frenemies? Machine and Human Translation
It was all so simple in theory. With enough computing power, a handful of smart linguistics boffins, a few computer scientists and enough time, human translators would be as obsolete as punch card programming. No matter the text, no matter the subject, Machine Translation (MT) would give you a word perfect version every time in […]