The article was co-written by Elia Yuste, Manuel Herranz and Alexandre Helle as leader of the nipponization module at Pangeanic and by Hirokazu Suzuki from the Corporate Research & Development Center of Toshiba Corporation.

It describes the efforts and progress made with the statistical machine translation open-source platform Moses and Toshiba’s rule-based system to obtain better outputs.

You can download a copy of the article here.

The DIY SMT solution has been revolutionizing the localization industry by providing a service for data cleaning tools, data preparation, engine creation and the freedom to retrain and update engines at will.

TMS Inspiration Days is an international conference focusing on the business and technology aspects of the translation industry. This 3rd edition of the event will be held from 19th to 20th April 2012 in Krakow (Poland) under the banner of “Technology for business”. The conference agenda already includes other two presentations: “Keynote: Overview of translation technology” by CSA’s Ben Sargent and “Selling in America” by Renato Beninato.

The conference will begin with the “Keynote: Overview of translation technology” lecture to be held by Ben Sargent from Common Sense Advisory. Ben has been involved in the translation industry since 1989. At CSA, he focuses on technology-related areas, particularly dealing with CMS and TMS tools. The lecture will focus on the major technological trends and solutions available on the translation market and their impact on the functioning of an enterprise.

Manuel will be presenting at JTF on Tuesday 29th about the application of machine translation technologies in EU languages for localization and also our new development for EN –> JP. This is geared for LSPs and corporations which need to deal with sensitive data and create and maintain their own MT technologies in-house. With more and more security breaches, having the ability to offer not only TM but also machine translation pre-translation in-house and a post-editing environment is incresingly becoming a must for many companies which deal with sensitive data.

The exhibition will take place in 4-2-25, Kudan-Kita, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.

Machine translation has been applied very successfully for many EU languages at Pangeanic and within specific fields. We build engines for particular domains like automotive, bio/medicine and of course electronics. Basically any field which has a “controlled input”  is ideal for automation.  What is more, our latest offering the famous “DIY SMT” provides the ability to re-train engines and create new domains in-house, with no data transfer. This gives full ownership and control to LSPs and corporations alike.

This year’s presentation follows Pangeanic’s first introduction of SMT techniques for LSPs in 2010 (pictures below)

Iwanaga-san explaining the benefits of SMT for the localization industry

Manuel at BIJ - Pangeanic's booth

Pangeanic's Manuel and BIJ's Christina at the booth

BIJ's Iwanaga-san at JTF

As different research teams are facing the same problems worldwide, some similar, other new and imaginative approaches are beginning to emerge, for example:

Alon Lavie and Manuel Herranz exchanging views on hybridation.

• Lemmatisation, annotation for morphologically-rich languages, for example Czech and Basque and even lesser resources in the case of the 2nd one.
• Syntax-based approaches and word re-ordering for very unrelated languages (such as Asian or Semitic languages into and out of European languages)
• Web-based annotation tools
• Hybridisation of techniques, starting from analysis at a morphological layer, then analytical layers, tectogrammatical layers, and then transfer, and on to synthesis to t-layers, a-layer and m-layer.
• Word disambiguation
• Mixture of rule-based and statistical approaches to improve predictability.
• Post-editing effort estimation for MT systems and with systems including no linguistic features or having some. Linguistic features are relevant for direct useful error detections and for automatic post-editing. But for sentence-level CE there are issues with sparsity and with representation.
• New metrics like VERTa, using linguistic knowledge organised in different levels (lexical, morphological, syntactic information and sentence semantics)

Following its sponsorship of Médicins sans Frontières during late 2010, Pangeanic, as a leading provider of machine-translation technologies and multilingual communication services worldwide, announced its committed financial support via its silver sponsorship. The announcement became public in Localization World Barcelona in spring 2011 and was re-affirmed with Pangeanic’s assistance at Translators without Borders’ booth at Localization World in Santa Clara. TWB translates approximately 2 million words a year. All work is carried out on a volunteer basis.

The support of donors and sponsors like Pangeanic helps the NGO to provide more servicces, and it is planning to hire a program coordinator to lead the initiative to assist more NGOs in more languages before the end of the year.

Manuel Herranz, Pangeanic’s CEO, stated: “Translators without Borders is filling a very important vaccuum in our industry, often seen as a low-profile, quick turn-around service industry. It can provide a crucial service by helping to eliminate language barriers in times of crisis so NGOs and aid groups can help as many people as possible. We at Pangeanic are thrilled and honored to be a Silver Sponsor and support its expansion and look forward to offer our help with our machine-translation technologies and as a language service provider.”

Translators without Borders Co-founder Lori Thicke added: “We are very excited having Pangeanic onboard as a corporate silver sponsor. In a crisis, aid groups often rely on translators in life-or-death situations and at times of dire need refugees from political or natural disasters end up living in a vacuum due to the lack of appropriate translators. Every effort commercial language providers can make to give back to society by providing something beyond their commercial services is a real help to communities at risk all over the world.”

About Translators without Borders: The mission of Translators without Borders (initially founded in France as Traducteurs sans Frontières in 2003) is to translate knowledge for humanity. Translators without Borders, a non-profit organization, has met that mission through quality humanitarian translations provided by a community of trained translators to vetted NGOs who focus on health, nutrition and education. On average, Translators without Borders volunteers translate millions of words per year, focusing on three types of humanitarian translations: crisis translations needed urgently to inform people in crisis, translations that support an NGO’s operations, and educational translations that directly support people in need. The non-profit organization’s vision is to expand its open digital platform to help make knowledge more accessible worldwide through humanitarian translations. The initial goal is to assist humanitarian organizations with two million dollars worth of free translations per year.

For more information, please visit http://translatorswithoutborders.com.

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The announcement that Pangeanic’s PangeaMT package will provide a customized API for users to its different engines became a hot topic after the news that Google will deprecate its free version and that “The courtesy limit for existing Translate API v2 projects created prior to August 24, 2011 will be reduced to zero on December 1, 2011.”

At TAUS, heated discussions focused on interoperability.  It is becoming the the buzz word for the future if you are dealing with software, translation and more even if you are producing translation software (machine translation software in our case). You can view the presentation about User Empowerment “Provide the tools to those who need them” here.

Pangeanic moves away from the license philosophy to provide access to its technology to machine-translation practitioners. Where this is not possible, the traditional SaaS model will always available, with in-house or cloud training.

In a nutshell:
- It costs money even though most vendors and clients can’t quantify it.
- Some are calling for organizations or leaders.
- Leveraging of TM losses 20% when switching vendors because of different tools being used.
- Some translators simply refuse using one tool or another. Some tools also make translators not-so-productive, thus pushing rates up.
- The current mix of free, cloud-based, licensed, SaaS and LSP-hosted tools is too much of an offering as they do not talk to each other. Perhaps new models are required. Human translator’s life should be made easier rather than focusing on formatting handling.

Several industry players (Iris Orriss, from Microsoft, Karen Combe from PTC, Minette Normal from Autodesk and Eric Blassin from Lionbridge) stated that there are interoperability issues between software and documentation and that it costs money, that CMS doesn’t work well with TMS even with own same supplier. Suppliers can’t find ways to keep up and solve interoperability problems. Ideally, we should use UI with documentation but it is very difficult and there is no budget for it even though inconsistencies do occur. LSP’s are charged with the burden of costs and reduced potential of innovation and efficiency. You are at the mercy of the tools and sometimes it is trial and error to find the best solution. Lack of interoperability is frustrating.

At TAUS, Smith Yewell, CEO Welocalize commented that lack of interoperability is causing productivity to be impaired and profitability to be undermined. We calculated it costs us 3M $ passing formats up and down and manual work. Because formatting affects transfer of data from our repositories (TMS or databases in MySQL, Oracle) to translation environment (Trados), quality issues happen as the wrong translator can be matched to the wrong job. Personally, I would agree that is the case with most LSPs facing conversion problems from different publishing, web and other formats, from Indesign to flash, html and even doc/rtf. Having a single, across-the-industry format would level the playground and increase efficiency.

Interesting presentations came from the EU, which is the largest buyer of translation services. They are embracing the Moses platform to solve part of their problems in over more than 400 language combinations. The task the face is massive, as they have to work with any kind of combination from straight-forward Romance languages and English to morphology-rich Eastern European languages, agglutinating Finnish and Hungarian… Daunting task, but there are also many EU-sponsored R&D programs which can feed back eventually and help the solution. Spyrodon Pilos (EU’s DGT) stated that in 05/2010 Commission Task force was confirmed so that the need for MT is addressed. On 12/2010 ECMT service suspended (rule-based system, Systran), so the EU is looking at Open-source software. The new name is MT@EC and it has to be built on trust, confidentiality and continuity. The EU is building a data-driven system using all its internal TMs, cleaning and preparing them, filtering it and processing them for MT. Benchmarks are established internally with basic Moses releases, then they will set up SMT engines and develop user interfaces and tools for capturing feedback in order to improve them. They are also using and checking Apertium for certain language pairs.

We append the conference programme below. Please contact us if you need further details or would like to receive a copy of Manuel’s presentation later.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Directorate-General for Translation

Directorate R – Resources, R.3 – Informatics

TRANSLATORS AND MACHINE TRANSLATION

DGT CONFERENCE, 6 APRIL 2011, G-12 3/21– JMO M6

Programme

14.15 Welcome and introduction

by Mr Piet Verleysen, Director for Resources, DGT

14.30 Machine translation technology – introduction

by Dr Andreas Eisele, Machine Translation Project Manager, Informatics unit, DGT

15.10 Machine Translation and translators: evidence from research

by Dr Sharon O’Brien, Lecturer in Translation Studies, School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland

15.50 Machine translation: the perspective of the language industry

by Mr Manuel Herranz, owner & senior strategy officer of the “Pangeanic” translation company, Spain

16.30 Using machine translation in DGT: the experience and the perspective of a language department

by Mr Hilário Leal Fontes, translator, Portuguese Language Department, DGT

17.00 Discussion

17.30 Closing

by Mr Josep Bonet, Head of the Informatics Unit, DGT

This Workshop is linked to the EU-funded Multilingual Web project geared at establishing best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually.

Manuel’s talk is entitled Open Standards in Machine Translation. The abstract is as follows:

The web is an open space and the standards by which it is “governed” must be open. However, one barrier clearly remains to make the web even more transnational and truly global. This has been called “the language barrier”. Language Service Providers translation business model is clearly antiquated and it is increasingly being questioned when we face real translation needs by web users. Here, immediacy is paramount. This talk is about open standards in machine translation technologies and workflows, supporting a truly multilingual web.

More information about the rest of speakers’ contributions and the event can be found here.

If you could not make it to Pisa, you can still follow the Workshop bymeans of the video streaming option or through Twitter.

gual Web

The award number is IMEXPA/2010/71. Please refer to this piece of news about related funding.

The award number is IMIDTA/2010/1016.  For Pangeanic this is extremely useful as it enables the company to keep on innovating and improving in the MT arena.

The award corroborates the company’s long-term drive to implement, develop and offer customized translation automation solutions that accelerate and cut down multilingual translation costs.