An avid sports fan, Tony KantanMT’s Founder and Chief Architect is very excited about a
ttending the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) conference this year because it takes place at Old Trafford, Manchester United Football Club’s world famous stadium (24-25 September 2015). However, between all the events, talks, meeting with the innovative industry leaders and attending award ceremonies, Tony might have very little time for a stadium tour. So it’s a good thing that he loves MT and the language industry more, and won’t miss the tour too much!
Tony has his plate full in the conference, which spreads over two days. He will be presenting a Master Class and a paper during the plenary session of the conference, and will also attend the evening award ceremony where he has been nominated in two categories – Project Manager of the Year category and for Outstanding Contribution to the Language Industry. If you are attending the conference, please say hello to Tony or simply cheer him on – he would love that!
Read about the nominations from ATC here. Below are the details of Tony’s talks in the conference and a teaser of a new stand-alone product that he is going to announce during the event!
Day 1: Masterclass, 09.00 – 11.00AM: How to use Machine Translation to Improve Translation Productivity
A commercially available and highly customisable Machine Translation (MT) workflow will undoubtedly increase translation productivity. However, the actual implementation of this sophisticated technology can sometimes seem challenging for Language Service Providers (LSPs) – Tony shows that 
optimising MT for your workflow does not have to be challenging at all. In fact, he demonstrates how MT can actually simplify the translation cycle and reduce effort.
After educating participants on the best way to implement MT in the translation workflow, Tony will introduce the audience to a tool that can improve MT engines with the help of professional translators. This collaborative project management tool can be accessed and deployed on a secure online platform, benefiting from the flexibility, power and immense security of the cloud.
It allows Project Managers to streamline the language quality review (LQR) process across locations and time zones by efficiently allocating reviewers to a project, and gaining real-time visibility into the progress of each reviewer as well as monitoring the quality and accuracy of the translated content. The transparent progress report accessed through this tool helps Project Managers create precise project effort-estimations and timelines, collate translator feedback and improve the MT engine quality.
To know more about when you can plug this new tool into your MT workflow, drop us a mail at demo@kantanmt.com or simply mail us at info@kantanmt.com and make an appointment with Tony for a coffee and a chat.
Day 2: Plenary Talk, 11.45 – 12.10 PM: Achieving Translation Scalability in an Era of Continuous Content Co-Creation
Session chair: Ruth Partington, R P Translate
In today’s fast-pace world of the Internet, ‘content-boom’ and ‘content-explosions’ are not merely buzzwords, but a business reality that enterprises face every day. With this organically growing content online, the need for translating this content for the consumption of global customers has become inevitable.
While this has opened up endless possibilities for those creating and consuming content, it has also created new challenges for the Language Service Providers (LSPs) responsible for translating and localizing all that content. Scaling translation workflows to meet the multilingual consumption demands, coupled with tight deadlines has led to many LSPs embracing and integrating MT solutions into their workflow.
Automated translation stands out as an efficient, reliable solution and ensures that LSPs can produce more translation, without losing out on the quality that defines their brand. New innovations in machine translation technology mean that MT can be used both as a tool to facilitate professional translators, but also provides a stand-alone tool capable of translating large volumes of content quickly – especially when the usefulness of the translated documents is more important than the accuracy of the content.
Tim Walters in his Forrester blog about MT succulently sums up the need for MT in the language industry:
The internet makes machine translation inevitable… raw output from machine translations is playing a larger role on web sites… MT plus post-editing reduces the cost of human-quality translations… MT drives global business and global business drives MT
Tony, in this presentation will demonstrate through client use cases how LSPs have carried out successful translation projects by using the dynamically scalable powers of MT engines. The final aim of this presentation is to demonstrate once again that integrating MT in translation workflows will not only increase productivity and allow project managers to deliver projects on time, but is also the only way forward when it comes to projects with a high velocity of industry-specific worlds.
To know more about KantanMT, or to arrange a meeting with Tony for a coffee and a chat at the conference, send an email to info@kantanmt.com. message on twitter @KantanMT.
About Tony O’Dowd
Tony O’Dowd is the Founder and Chief Architect of the Irish-owned KantanMT.com, a cloud-based statistical machine translation platform. He was the founder and CEO of Alchemy Software Development, the creators of Alchemy CATALYST. Tony has over 25 years of experience in the localization industry. He has a BSc in computer science from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Fellowship from the University of Limerick. Previously a Chairman of LISA and member of the governance board of the CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content at Dublin City University, Tony’s new research focus is on Statistical Machine Translation systems and how they can improve translation productivity.