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Blog - Show report: Translation Summit

Show report: Translation Summit

posted 2007-03-15 02:44:56
by Clove Lynch

On Monday, March 12 we exhibited at and attended the fast-paced Translation Summit in Salt Lake City, organized by the BYU Center for Language Studies under the meticulous supervision of industry veteran Dr. Alan Melby.

The conference got underway before sunrise, and boasted over 170 attendees from government, academia and industry. An impressive lineup of speakers delivered insightful presentations on localization education/training, technology and standards.

The keynote by Alfred Mockett of Motive, Inc. outlined the benefits of foreign language training and education, citing as a step in the right direction the Committee for Economic Development's report entitled "Lost in Translation: A Review of the Federal Government’s Efforts to Develop a Foreign Language Strategy" (PDF), which recommends additional federal funding of same. Head of UN Translation Services, Stephen Sekel's stats-laced response was a case study in the shortage of qualified language professionals at the UN, where some 887 T & I professionals translate a staggering 185 million words annually and complete 79,000 interpreting assignments. Impressive, but Sekel said that to guarantee adequate capacity in light of the shortage of professionals, the UN had to outsource 20% of its translation work.

ATA president Marian Greenfield underscored the importance of identifying the right professional profile when selecting a linguist. They must have good training, but also must be fundamentally good writers and researchers. Buying cheap is bad – and you definitely get what you pay for. She appealed to the attendees to be aware of this and to educate customers, etc.

Addressing the supply of qualified professionals from the trainer's perspective, Dr. Geoff Koby of the Kent State Institute for Applied Linguistics connected the dots, stating that industry funding of training programs pays dividends in the form of better language professionals.

Excellent presentations on standards were delivered by ISO TC 37 representative (and KSU IAL faculty member) Sue Ellen Wright, as well as Maria Brau, who represented the ILR on behalf of the FBI. A problem of some magnitude for the industry is the current plethora of competing standards for translation service delivery and quality. This was repeated by several speakers, including Jennifer DeCamp of MITRE, who also pointed to the need for tools that measure the quality of other tools.

The place of machine translation (MT) in localization was raised in numerous sessions, and clearly remains both a central and controversial technology issue for many buyers and suppliers. Bernhard Kohlmeier of Microsoft stressed the "something is better than nothing" approach when looking at delivering product offerings to hundreds of different language markets, many of which include languages of limited diffusion. Don DePalma of Common Sense Advisory expressed much the same sentiment, stating that "humans can't do it alone" according to CSA survey data. Both Mr. Kohlmeier of Microsoft and Teresa Marshall of Google outlined the process of deciding when to use MT, boiling it down to the fact that revenue-generating products are given professional quality service, while MT is used for a lot of the rest. This segued nicely into Jaap Van der Meer's overview of Fully Automatic Useful Translation (FAUT), where MT has come into its own and users accept its imperfections in the spirit of translating the volume of information that simply can't be translated by humans.

But of all the high-powered personalities and speakers, it was NVTC director Everette Jordan who stole the show with a quadra-lingual speech (English, German, Spanish and Russian), simultaneously interpreted from a booth in the back of the room and delivered through headphones provided to participants at each table. Nice. Jordan echoed the earlier speakers by stressing the US intelligence community's need for more and more competent linguists, also citing the same CED report as a call for much needed investment in preparation and education. He discussed how many translators and interpreters in the military are asked to perform tasks for which there simply is no adequate training currently.

The conference adjourned with a call for volunteers to tackle a list of action items inspired by the conference.

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