#SmartReads 3-2018 on the Translation Industry.
The March issue of this newsletter contained a sneak preview about the Translation Technology Summer 2018. Here comes another announcement.
Build the Foundation Meeting
The Luxembourg-based translation technology provider WordBee is organizing a user meeting in Brussels on May 30, 2018. They have a great program with two tracks, one centered around the numerous functionalities of the WordBee platform and one with presentations by various experts.
The WordBee team has kindly invited me to join a panel discussion on the 21st century translation technology trends. There are other interesting talks planned for the day (for example on algorithms in the content industry, multi-channel multi-lingual content, NMT for the fintech industry etc.). Also, it’s a great chance to see up-close what the WordBee platform can deliver.
Let’s get on with the #SmartReads now.
Two New Articles
I wrote two articles for the WordBee blog:
- GDPR: What’s the Commotion All About? – On May 25, 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect. What does this mean for the translation industry?
- How to Survive Technological Hypes – Neural networks, neural machine translation, speech-to-speech technology, blockchain, translator implants in our brains, automated interpreting, mind reading computers, digital twins, ambient intelligence. In one word: artificial intelligence. Are all these technologies hypes that will deflate in time? Or will they become relevant to our business?
On the topics of translation technology, you might also want to browse:
- A History of Machine Translation from the Cold War to Deep Learning.
- The State of Machine Translation by Konstantin Savenkov, CEO at Intento. This is an evaluation of 14 major cloud machine translation engines (Google, Microsoft, IBM, IBM NMT, SAP, Amazon, Yandex, SDL, Systran, Systran PNMT, Baidu, GTCom, PROMT, DeepL) for 48 language pairs, based on performance, quality, language coverage, API update frequency.
- A list of translation APIs, courtesy of ProgrammableWeb.
Translation Magazines for Your Ears
A couple of years ago I wrote a short blog post on translation podcasts I like best. Well, it seems that this type of content is still going strong. Time to plan an update of the list.
- Translation City Radio, the podcast by Zingword, has – finally – a new episode with Natalie Toledo, a Chilean translator specialized in marketing, SEO, transcreation and more.
- A new podcast is Lingthusiasm, hosted by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Some episodes are available for free and others are paid content. Topics range from swearing to linguistics book reviews, from hypercorrection to conlangs. Very entertaining and very detailed.
Language links
- A Brief Opinion on Office Jargon by Lisa Hupe, Communications Manager at FinchFactor. Read how people outside the language industry feel about jargon.
- The history of “Dagnabbit”, a word we say when we don’t want to say the word.
- The Nationalist Roots of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.