Small and Medium Enterprises

KantanMT – 2013 Year in Review

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KantanMT 2013 year in ReviewKantanMT had an exciting year as it transitioned from a publicly funded business idea into a commercial enterprise that was officially launched in June 2013. The KantanMT team are delighted to have surpassed expectations, by developing and refining cutting edge technologies that make Machine Translation easier to understand and use.

Here are some of the highlights for 2013, as KantanMT looks back on an exceptional year.

Strong Customer Focus…

The year started on a high note, with the opening of a second office in Galway, Ireland, and KantanMT kept the forward momentum going as the year progressed. The Galway office is focused on customer service, product education and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and is home to Aidan Collins, User Engagement Manager, Kevin McCoy, Customer Relationship Manager and MT Success Coach, and Gina Lawlor, Customer Relationship co-ordinator.

KantanMT officially launched the KantanMT Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) platform as a commercial entity in June 2013. The platform was tested pre-launch by both industry and academic professionals, and was presented at the European OPTIMALE (Optimizing Professional Translator Training in a Multilingual Europe) workshop in Brussels. OPTIMALE is an academic network of 70 partners from 32 European countries, and the organization aims to promote professional translator training as the translation industry merges with the internet and translation automation.

The KantanMT Community…

The KantanMT member’s community now includes top tier Language Service Providers (LSPs), multinationals and smaller organizations. In 2013, the community has grown from 400 members in January to 3400 registered members in December, and in response to this growth, KantanMT introduced two partner programs, with the objective of improving the Machine Translation ecosystem.

The Developer Partner Program, which supports organizations interested in developing integrated technology solutions, and the Preferred Supplier of MT Program, dedicated to strengthening the use of MT technology in the global translation supply chain. KantanMT’s Preferred Suppliers of MT are:

KantanMT’s Progress…

To date, the most popular target languages on the KantanMT platform are; French, Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese. Members have uploaded more than 67 billion training words and built approx. 7,000 customized KantanMT engines that translated more than 500 million words.

As usage of the platform increased, KantanMT focused on developing new technologies to improve the translation process, including a mobile application for iOS and Android that allows users to get access to their KantanMT engines on the go.

KantanMT’s Core Technologies from 2013…

KantanMT have been kept busy continuously developing and releasing new technologies to help clients build robust business models to integrate Machine Translation into existing workflows.

  • KantanAnalytics™ – segment level Quality Estimation (QE) analysis as a percentage ‘fuzzy match’ score on KantanMT translations, provides a straightforward method for costing and scheduling translation projects.
  • BuildAnalytics™ – QE feature designed to measure the suitability of the uploaded training data. The technology generates a segment level percentage score on a sample of the uploaded training data.
  • KantanWatch™ – makes monitoring the performance of KantanMT engines more transparent.
  • TotalRecall™ – combines TM and MT technology, TM matches with a ‘fuzzy match’ score of less than 85% are automatically put through the customized MT engine, giving the users the benefits of both technologies.
  • KantanISR™ Instant Segment Retraining technology that allows members near instantaneous correction and retraining of their KantanMT engines.
  • PEX Rule Editor – an advanced pattern matching technology that allows members to correct repetitive errors, making a smoother post-editing process by reducing post-editing effort, cost and times.
  • Kantan API – critical for the development of software connectors and smooth integration of KantanMT into existing translation workflows. The success of the MemoQ connector, led to the development of subsequent connectors for MemSource and XTM.

KantanMT sourced and cleaned a range of bi-directional domain specific stock engines that consist of approx. six million words across legal, medical and financial domains and made them available to its members. KantanMT also developed support for Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Croatian Languages during 2013.

Recognition as Business Innovators…

KantanMT received awards for business innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the year. Founder and Chief Architect, Tony O’Dowd was presented with the ICT Commercialization award in September.

In October, KantanMT was shortlisted for the PITCH start-up competition and participated in the ALPHA Program for start-ups at Dublin’s Web Summit, the largest tech conference in Europe. Earlier in the year KantanMT was also shortlisted for the Vodafone Start-up of the Year awards.

KantanMT were silver sponsors at the annual 2013 ASLIB Conference ‘Adopting the theme Translating and the Computer’ that took place in London, in November, and in October, Tony O’Dowd, presented at the TAUS Machine Translation Showcase at Localization World in Silicon Valley.

KantanMT have recently published a white paper introducing its cornerstone Quality Estimation technology, KantanAnalytics, and how this technology provides solutions to the biggest industry challenges facing widespread adoption of Machine Translation.

KantanAnalytics WhitePaper December 2013

For more information on how to introduce Machine Translation into your translation workflow contact Niamh Lacy (niamhl@kantanmt.com).

Motivate Post-Editors

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KantanMT motivate post-editorsPost-editing is a necessary step in the Machine Translation workflow, but the role is still largely misunderstood. Language Service Providers (LSPs) are now experimenting more with the best practices for post-editing in the workflow. The lack of consistent training and reluctance within the industry to accept importance of the role are linked to the post-editors motivation. KantanMT looks at some of the more conventional attitudes towards motivation and their application to post-editing.

What is motivation and what studies have been done so far?

Understanding the concept of motivation has been a hot topic in many areas of organisation theory. Studies in the area really began to kick off with their application in the workplace, opening doors for pioneers to understand how employees could be motivated to do more work, and do better work.

Motivation Pioneers

  • Abraham Maslow and his well-known ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ indicates a person’s motivations are based on their position in the hierarchy pyramid.
  • Frederick Herzberg’s ‘two Factor Theory’ or Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory suggests professional activities like; professional acknowledgement, achievements and work responsibility, or job satisfiers have a positive effect on motivation.
  • Douglas McGregor used a black and white approach to motivation in his ‘Theory X and Theory Y’. He grouped employees into two categories; those who will only do the minimum and those who will push themselves.

As development of theories continued…

  • John Adair came up with the ‘fifty-fifty theory’ . According to the fifty-fifty theory, motivation is fifty percent the responsibility of the employee and fifty percent outside the employee’s control.

Even more recently, in 2010

  • Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer carried out a study on the motivation levels of employees in a variety of settings. Their findings, suggest ‘Progress’ as the top performance motivator identified from an analysis of approx. 12,000 diary entries, daily ratings of motivation and emotions from hundreds of study participants.

To understand post-editor motivation we can combine the top performance motivator; progress with fifty-fifty theory.

Progress is a healthy motivator in the post-editing profession, it can help Localization Project Managers understand and encourage post-editor satisfaction and motivation. But while progress can be deemed an external factor, if we apply Adair’s ‘fifty-fifty’ rule, post-editors are also at least fifty percent responsible for their own motivation.

Post-editing as a profession is still only finding its feet, TAUS carried out a study in 2010 on the post editing practices of global LSPs. The study showed that, while post-editing is becoming a standard activity in the translation workflow it only accounts for a minor share of LSP business volume. This indicates that post-editors see their role as one of lesser importance because the industry views it as a role of lesser importance.

This attitude in the industry is highlighted by the lack of industry standards for post-editing best practices. Without evaluation practices to train post-editors and improve the post-editing process, post-editors are not making progress. This quite naturally is demotivating for the post-editor.

How to motivate post-editors

The first step in motivating post-editors is to recognise their role as autonomous to the role of a translator. The best post-editors are those, who are at least bilingual with some form of linguistic training, like a translator. Linguistic training is a major asset for editing the Machine Translated output.

TAUS offer a comparison of the translation process versus the post-editing process, highlighting the differences in the post-editing and translation processes.

KantanMT, Translator process Taus 2010
Translation process of a Translator (TAUS 2010)
KantanMT, Motivating Post-editors,
Translation process of a Post-editor (TAUS 2010)

One process is not more complicated that the other, only different. Translators, translate internally, while post-editors make “snap editing decisions” based on client requirements. As LSPs recognise these differences, they can successfully motivate their post-editors by providing them with the most suitable support, and work environment.

Progress as a Motivator

Translators make good post-editors, they have the linguistic ability to understand both the source and target texts, and if they enjoy editing or proof-reading, then the post-editing role will suit them. The right training is also important, if post-editors are trained properly they will become more aware of potential improvements to the workflow.

These improvements or ideas can be a great boost to post-editor motivation, if implemented the post-editor can take on more responsibility, which helps improve the translation workflow. A case where this could be applied is; if the post-editor is made responsible for updating the language assets used to retrain a Machine Translation system, they can take ownership and become responsible for the output quality rather than just post-editing Machine Translation output in isolation.

Fixing repetitive errors, can be frustrating for anyone, not just post-editors. But if they are responsible for the output quality, understand the system and can control the rules used to reduce these repetitive errors, they will experience motivation through progress.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on what motivates post-editors, each post-editor is different and how they feel about the role, whether it is just ‘another job’ or a major step in their career all play a part. The key is to provide proper training, foster an environment where post-editors can make progress by positively contributing to the role.

Translators often take pride and ownership of their translations, post-editors should also have the opportunity to take pride in their work, as it is their skills and experience that make it ‘publishable’ or even ‘fit for purpose’ quality.

Repetitive errors like diacritic marks or capitalisation can be easily fixed using KantanMT’s Post-Editing Automation (PEX) rules. PEX rules allow repetitive errors in a Machine Translation engine to be easily fixed using a ‘find and replace’ tool. These rules can be checked on a sample of the text by using the PEX Rule Editor.

The post-editor can correct repetitive errors during post-editing process, so the same errors don’t appear in future MT output, giving them responsibility over the Machine Translation engines quality.

Automatic Post-Editing

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KantanMT - PEX Post EditorPost-Editing Machine Translation (PEMT) is an important and necessary step in the Machine Translation process. KantanMT is releasing a new, simple and easy to use PEX rule editor, which will make the post-editing process more efficient, saving both time, costs and the post-editors sanity.

As we have discussed in earlier posts, PEMT is the process of reviewing and editing raw MT output to improve quality. The PEX rule editor is a tool that can help to save time and cut costs. It helps post-editors, since they no longer have to manually correct the same repetitive mistakes in a translated text.

Post-editing can be divided into roughly two categories; light and full post-editing.  ‘Light’ post-editing, also called ‘gist’, ‘rapid’ or ‘fast’ post-editing focuses on transferring the most correct meaning without spending time correcting grammatical and stylistic errors. Correcting textual standards, like word order and coherence are less important in a light post-edit, compared to a more thorough ‘full’ or ‘conventional’ post-edit. Full post-edits need the correct meaning to be conveyed, correct grammar, accurate punctuation, and the correct transfer of any formatting such as tags or place holders.

The Client often dictates the type of post-editing required, whether it’s a full post-edit to get it up to ‘publishable quality’ similar to a human translation standard, or a light post-edit, which usually means ‘fit for purpose’. The engine’s quality also plays a part in the post-editing effort; using a high volume of in-domain training data during the build produce higher quality engines, which helps to cut post-editing efforts. Other factors such as language combination, domain and text type all contribute to post-editing effort.

Examples of repetitive errors

Some users may experience the following errors in their MT output.

  • Capitalization
  • Punctuation mistakes, hyphenation, diacritic marks etc.
  • Words added/omitted
  • Formatting – trailing spaces

SMT engines use a process of pattern matching to identify different regular expressions. Regular expressions or ‘regex’ are special text strings that describe patterns, these patterns need no linguistic analysis so they can be implemented easily across different language pairs. Regular expressions are also important components in developing PEX rules. KantanMT have a list of regular expressions used for both GENTRY Rule files (*.rul) and PEX post-edit files (*.pex).

Post-Editing Automation (PEX)

Repetitive errors can be fixed automatically by uploading PEX rule files. These rule files allow post-editors to spend less time correcting the same repetitive errors by automatically applying PEX constructs to translations generated from a KantanMT engine.

PEX works by incorporating “find and replace” rules. The rules are uploaded as a PEX file and applied while a translation job is being run.

PEX Rule Editor

KantanMT have designed a simple way to create, test and upload post-editing rules to a client profile.

KantanMT Pex Rule Editor

The PEX Rule editor, located in the ‘MykantanMT’ menu, has an easy to use interface. Users can copy a sample of the translated text into the upper text box ‘Test Content’ then input the rules to be applied in the ‘PEX Search Rules’ and their corrections to the ‘PEX Replacement Rules’ box. The user can test the new rules by clicking ‘test rules’ and instantly identify any incorrect rules, before they are uploaded to the profile.

The introduction of tools to assist in the post-editing process helps remove some of the more repetitive corrections for post-editors. The new PEX Editor feature helps improve the PEMT workflow by ensuring all uploaded rule files are correct leading to a more effective method for fixing repetitive errors.

Conference and Event Guide – December 2013

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KantanMT eventsThings are winding down as we are getting closer to the end of the year, but there are still some great events and webinars coming up during the month of December that we can look forward to.

Here are some recommendations from KantanMT to keep you busy in the lead up to the festive season.

Listings

Dec 02 – Dec 05, 2013
Event: IEEE CloudCom 2013, Bristol, United Kingdom

Held in association with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (HP Labs), the conference is open to researchers, developers, users, students and practitioners from the fields of big data, systems architecture, services research, virtualization, security and high performance computing.

Dec 04, 2013
Event: LANGUAGES & BUSINESS Forum – Hotel InterContinental Berlin

The forum highlights key issues in language education, particularly in the workplace and the new technologies that are becoming a key part of the process. The event, will promote international networking and has four main themes; Corporate Training, Pre-Experience Learners, Intercultural Communication and Online Learning.

Dec 05, 2013
Webinar: Effective Post-Editing in Human and Machine Translation Workflows

Stephen Doherty and Federico Gaspari, CNGL (Centre for Next Generation Localisation) will give an overview of post-editing and different post-editing scenarios from ‘gist’ to ‘full’ post-edits. They will also give advice on different post-editing strategies and how they differ for Machine Translation systems.

Dec 07 – Dec 09, 2013
Event: 6th Language and Technology Conference, Poznan, Poland

The conference will address the challenges of Human Language Technologies (HLT) in computer science and linguistics. The event covers a wide range of topics including; electronic language resources and tools, formalisation of natural languages, parsing and other forms of NL processing.

Dec 09 – Dec 13, 2013
Event: IEEE GLOBECOM 2013 – Power of Global Communications, Atlanta, Georgia USA

The conference, which is the second largest of the 38 IEEE technical societies will focus on the latest advancements in broadband, wireless, multimedia, internet, image and voice communications. Some of the topics presented referring to localization occur on the 10th December and include; Localization Schemes, Localization and Link Layer Issues, and Detection, Estimation and Localization.

Dec 10 – Dec 11, 2013
Event: Game QA & Localization 2013, San Francisco, California USA

This event brings together QA and Localisation Managers, Directors and VPs from game developers around the world to discuss key game localization industry challenges. The event in London, June 2013 was a huge success, as more than 120 senior QA and localization professionals from developers, publishers and 3rd party suppliers of all sizes and platforms came to learn, benchmark and network.

Dec 11 – Dec 15, 2013
Event: International Conference on Language and Translation, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia

The Association of Asian Translation Industry (AATI) is holding an International Conference on Language and Translation or “Translator Day” in three countries; Thailand on December 11, 2013, Vietnam on December 13, 2013, and Cambodia on December 15, 2013. The events provide translators, interpreters, translation agencies, foreign language centres, NGO’s, FDI financed enterprises and other translation purchasers with opportunities to meet.

Dec 12, 2013
Webinar: LSP Partnerships & Reseller Programs 16:00 GMT (11:00 EST/17:00 CET)

This webinar, which is hosted by GALA and presented by Terena Bell covers how to open up new revenue streams by introducing reseller programs to current business models. The webinar is aimed at world trade associations, language schools, and other non-translation companies wishing to offer their clients translation, interpreting, or localization services.

Dec 13 – Dec 14 2013
Event: The Twelfth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT12), Sofia (Bulgaria)

The workshops, hosted by BulTreeBank Group­­­­­­­ serve to promote new and ongoing high-quality work related to syntactically-annotated corpora such as treebanks. Treebanks are important resources for Natural Language processing applications including Machine Translation and information extraction. The workshops will focus on different aspects of treebanking; descriptive, theoretical, formal and computational.

Are you planning to go to any events during December? KantanMT would like to hear about your thoughts on what makes a good event in the localization industry.

Crowdsourcing vs. Machine Translation

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KantanMT CrowdsourcingCrowdsourcing is becoming more popular with both organizations and companies since the concept’s introduction in 2006, and has been adopted by companies who are using this new production model to improve their production capacity while keeping costs low. The web-based business model, uses an open call format to reach a wide network of people willing to volunteer their services for free or for a limited reward, for any activity including translation. The application of translation crowdsourcing models has opened the door for increased demand of multilingual content.

Jeff Howe, Wired magazine defined crowdsourcing as:

“…the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call”.

Crowdsourcing costs equate to approx. 20% of a professional translation. Language Service Providers (LSPs) like Gengo and Moravia have realised the potential of crowdsourcing as part of a viable production model, which they are combining with professional translators and Machine Translation.

The crowdsourcing model is an effective method for translating the surge in User Generate Content (UGC). Erratic fluctuations in demand need a dynamic, flexible and scalable model. Crowdsourcing is definitely a feasible production model for translation services, but it still faces some considerable challenges.

Crowdsourcing Challenges

  • No specialist knowledge – crowdsourcing is difficult for technical texts that require specialised knowledge. It often involves breaking down a text to be translated into smaller sections to be sent to each volunteer. A volunteer may not be qualified in the domain area of expertise and so they end up translating small sections text, out of context, with limited subject knowledge which leads to lower quality or mistranslations.
  • Quality – translation quality is difficult to manage, and is dependent on the type of translation. There have been some innovative suggestions for measuring quality, including evaluation metrics such as BLEU and Meteor, but these are costly and time consuming to implement and need a reference translation or ‘gold standard’ to benchmark against.
  • Security – crowd management can be a difficult task and the moderator must be able to vet participants and make sure that they follow the privacy rules associated with the platform. Sensitive information that requires translation should not be released to volunteers.
  • Emotional attachment – humans can become emotionally attached to their translations.
  • Terminology and writing style inconsistency – when the project is divided amongst a number of volunteers, the final version’s style needs to be edited and checked for inconsistencies.
  • Motivation – decisions on how to motivate volunteers and keep them motivated can be an ongoing challenge for moderators.

Improvements in the quality of Machine Translation have had an influence on crowdsourcing popularity and the majority of MT post-editing and proofreading tasks fit into crowdsourcing models nicely. Content can be classified into ‘find-fix-verify’ phases and distributed easily among volunteers.

There are some advantages to be gained when pairing MT technology and collaborative crowdsourcing.

Combined MT/Crowdsourcing

Machine Translation will have a pivotal role to play within new translation models, which focus on translating large volumes of data in cost-effective and powerful production models. Merging both Machine Translation and crowdsourcing tasks will create not only fit-for-purpose, but also high quality translations.

  • Quality – as the overall quality of Machine Translation output improves, it is easier for crowdsourcing volunteers with less experience to generate better quality translations. This will in turn increase the demand for crowdsourcing models to be used within LSPs and organizations. MT quality metrics will also make post-editing tasks more straightforward and easier to delegate among volunteers based on their experience.
  • Training data – word alignment and engine evaluations can be done through crowd computing, and parallel corpora created by volunteers can be used to train and/or retrain existing SMT engines.
  • Security – customized Machine Translation engines are more secure when dealing with sensitive product or client information. General or publicly available information is more suited to crowdsourcing.
  • Terminology and writing style consistency – writing style and terminology can be controlled and updated through a straightforward process when using MT. This avoids the idiosyncrasies of volunteer writing styles. There is no risk of translator bias when using Machine Translation.
  • Speed – Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) engines can process translations quickly and efficiently. When there is a need for a high volume of content to be translated within a short period of time it is better to use Machine Translation. Output is guaranteed within a designated time and crowdsourcing post-editing tasks speeds up the production process before final checks are carried out by experienced translators or post-editors.
crowdsource and Machine Translation model
Use of crowdsourcing for software localization. Source: V. Muntes-Mulero and P. Paladini, CA Technologies and M. Solé and J. Manzoor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

Last chance for a FREE TRIAL for KantanAnalytics™ for all members until November 30th 2013. KantanAnalytics will be available on the Enterprise Plan.

tcworld special

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The tcworld Conference & tekom Fair starts tomorrow, November 6th in Wiesbaden, Germany. Aidan Collins, KantanMT’s User Engagement Manager will be visiting the conference on Thursday and is looking forward to seeing you all there. To help keep you organised, KantanMT put together a list of professional and expert presentations and workshops relevant for localization professionals. Expert speakers will cover topics on content strategy and design, terminology management, translation, localization, and quality assurance.
Rhein-Main-Hallen convention centre Wiesbaden, Germany, KantanMT
Source: GCB German Convention Bureau e. V, 2011.

The fair opens at 9am on Wednesday and finishes at 4pm on Friday in the Rhein-Main-Hallen, Wiesbaden’s biggest convention centre. The centre has more than 20,000m² of conference space, seven exhibition halls and a number of conference and congress rooms. The largest congress hall has the capacity to seat 3,000 people. The exhibition’s size and central location, just half a kilometre from the city centre, make it an excellent option for hosting the technical communication event.The line up includes:

Wednesday November 6th 9:00 – 18:00

Content Strategy 08:45 – 09:30: ‘Strategic Video Storytelling’. The Content Wrangler’s Scott Abel, will give the opening keynote speech, a presentation on Content Strategies and the importance of using stories in video production.

International Management 08:45 – 10:30: ‘A Business Model Generation Session’. Diego Bartolome will host a design thinking workshop on technology and languages.

Content Strategy 11:15 – 12:00: ‘The Need for Speed: Preparing for New Requirements’. Content Strategy Consultant, Sarah O’Keefe, will present on the importance of developing content initiatives to improve technical communication workflows.

Language Technology 11:15 – 12:00: ‘Real-time Selection of Best Assets Based on Productivity Analysis’. Anton Voronov, Innovations Director for ABBYY Language Services will discuss the use of productivity metrics and translator preferences in developing a pricing structure and best practices for Machine Translation deployment.

Language Technology 14:45 – 15:30: ‘Developing “Ideal” Software for Language Industry’. Julia Makoushina and Eugenia Tashkun will co-present on developing the “ideal” Language technology. They will discuss the software possibilities from both the user and developer’s perspective, and how to identify and meet user needs.

Language Technology 16:15 – 17:00: ‘Extracting Translation Relations for Human-readable Dictionaries from Bilingual Text’. Kurt Eberle, Managing Director and Co-founder of Lingenio GmbH, talks about “cross-lingual expression” through the identification and extraction of dictionary entries from source and target texts.

Content Strategy 17:15 – 18:00: ‘The Convergence Era: Translation Becomes a Utility’. TAUS Founder and Director, Jaap van der Meer, will discuss the evolution of the translation industry and what this will mean for content creators.

Thursday November 7th 9:00 – 18:00

Localization 08:30 – 08:45: ‘Welcome Session’. Don De Palma, Founder Common Sense Advisory will give a welcome session in Room 12B.

Localization 08:45 – 09:30: ‘Is Your Content Ready to Go Global?’ Localization and Content Strategy Consultant, Kit Brown-Hoekstra will discuss how localized quality content can be leveraged as a competitive advantage.

Localization 09:45 – 10:30: ‘Rules of Engagement: Successful Partnerships with Translation/Localization Companies’. Aki Ito, Localization Professional, will co-present with Robin Franke, a Technical Product Communication Specialist, on the client-vendor partnership and the role each partner plays when working together.

Language Technology 11:15 – 12:00: ‘Welcome to the Cloud! Terminology as a Service’. Dr. Andrejs Vasiljevs will introduce a cloud based terminology platform and solutions for using multilingual terminological data. The talk will target both language workers and Machine Translation users.

Localization 12:15 – 13:00: ‘Machine Translation in the Mainstream: New Tools, New Gains, New Headaches’. Daniel Grasmick from Lucy Software and Services GmbH, will discuss how Machine Translation can be built into the localization lifecycle.

Language Technology 16:00 – 16:45: ‘Terminology in the cloud with MemoQ and TaaS’. CEO of Kilgray Translation Technologies, Istvan Lengyel and Kilgray’s Founder, Gabor Ugray will present on TaaS CAT tool solutions and their integration with memoQ.

Localization 17:15 – 18:00: ‘Closing Session: Summaries and Lessons Learned’. Don De Palma will cover the sessions highlights and future localization “trends” and “innovations”.

Friday November 8th 9:00 – 16:00

Localization 08:45 – 09:30: ‘Simplified English and MT: Best Practices for Localization Content Optimization and Simplification’. Alberto Ferreira, Avira Operations will discuss Machine Translation and automated post editing integration into the localization workflow.

Localization 09:45 – 10:30: ‘A Unified Model for Document and Translation Quality Assurance’. Dr. Aljoscha Burchardt and Dr. Arle Lommel will address Translation quality assurance (QA) with QTLaunchPad, an open source software project funded by the European commission.

Localization 14:30 – 15:15: ‘UX and Localization: Optimal Design Practices for World-Ready Applications’. Alberto Ferreira will talk about user interface (UI) and web design localization trends based on “platform-independent design principles”.  Ferreira will cover topics such as; usability testing, visual text layout, cultural adaptation, internationalisation concerns, cost reduction and the time-to-market development cycle.

Localization 15:30 – 16:15: ‘The “International Persona” – Usability and Localization Communication consultant, Henrietta Hartl will discuss the use of an “international persona” in localization usability evaluation.

It will be a busy couple of days with informative presentations and workshops from industry experts and market leaders. KantanMT hopes you all enjoy the conference!

Would you like to learn how Machine Translation can increase your business opportunities? Contact Kevin McCoy, KantanMT’s Machine Translation Success Coach: kevinmcc@kantanmt.com.

Conference and Event Guide – November 2013

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KantanMT eventsThere are some great events and webinars coming up over the next month and KantanMT put together a list of some noteworthy dates to add to the calendar.

KantanMT’s Aidan Collins, User Engagement Manager, will be attending tcworld on Thursday 7th November in Wiesbaden, Germany. Then towards the end of the month, Aidan will head to London, and present at the 35th ASLIB Translating and the Computer Conference. KantanMT are also a silver sponsor for this year’s ASLIB conference.

Listings

Nov 04 – 05, 2013
Workshop:  Translation Project Management, Wiesbaden, Germany.
Angelika Zerfaß and Martin Beuster will be presenting a Translation Project Management (PM) and Localization PM workshop. This is geared towards current and future Project Managers in the localization and translation industry.

Nov 06 – 08, 2013
Event: tcworld 2013 – tekom trade fair, Rhein-Main-Hallen, Wiesbaden, Germany.
This is the largest global event for technical communication. Participating companies offer industrial, software and services for technical communication with a regional focus on Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The conference will cover topics on localization, internationalization, and globalization, management of technical communication, mobile documentation and content strategies.Contact: tekom, info@tekom.de

To set up a meeting with Aidan Collins, User Engagement Manager, email him directly at aidanc@kantanmt.com or call him on +353 86 823 1767.

Nov 06 – 09, 2013
Event: 54th ATA Conference, San Antonio, Texas USA.
This is a great networking event for translators, project managers and industry professionals. The aim of the conference is to promote the professional development of translators and interpreters. There will be approx. 175 educational sessions in varying languages, specializations and levels. Contact: American Translators Association, ata@atanet.org

Nov 11, 2013
Webinar: MemoQ – Getting Started guide, online.
An introductory webinar for translators who want to use MemoQ. Participants will learn how to create projects, translate using MemoQ Editor and Translation Memory management.

Nov 13, 2013
Webinar: Editing for Localization, online.
Katherine (Kit) Brown-Hoekstra is targeting Senior Technical Communicators and Content Managers with a webinar on editing for Localization.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Nov 15 – 16, 2013 (Expolingua International Fair, Nov 15 – 17)
Event:: InDialog: Mapping the Field of Community Interpreting, Expolingua International Fair Berlin, Germany
This conference is focusing on interpreting services aimed towards government representatives, policy makers, service providers and anyone involved in the interpreting service workflow. InDialog is taking place in conjunction with 26th EXPOLINGUA International Fair for languages and Cultures. Contact: ICWE GmbH, info@indialog-conference.com

Nov 20, 2013
Webinar: The Convergence Era: Translation As A Utility

Jaap van der Meer (TAUS) talks with Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) about the future of translation and the evolution of the translation industry. They will look at the opportunities and challenges for content publishers about the need for real-time translation.

Nov 22, 2013
Event: think! India, The Metropolitan Hotel & Spa, Delhi
think! India is a one day event with a regional focus on how to succeed in the expanding localization industry in India. The event is coordinated by GALA, the Globalization and Localization Association, and is part of a series of regional events, which bring language service providers (LSPs) together.

Nov 28 – 29, 2013
Event: 35th Translating and the Computer Conference, Paddington, London
This event covers technology and its influence on the localization and translation industry. It aims to bring translators, researchers and students in the translation and localization field together. It is also a great event for catching up on the latest computer aided translation (CAT) tools. KantanMT are sponsoring this event. Niamh Lacy and Aidan Collins will both be there to answer any questions about KantanMT’s technology.

To set up a meeting with Aidan or Niamh, email Niamhl@kantanmt.com or call her directly on +353 877526320