Jaap van der MeerChief Executive OfficerTAUS

Jaap van der Meer was the founder and CEO of some of thelargest global translation and localization servicecompanies in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2005 he founded theTranslation Automation User Society (TAUS). TAUS is aninnovation think tank and platform for industry-sharedservices for the global translation and localization sector.Many of the largest IT companies, government translationbodies and their suppliers of translation and localizationservices and technologies are members of TAUS. TAUSoffers a platform for translation quality evaluation andbenchmarking and a platform for pooling and sharing oftranslation memory data. Jaap has written many articlesover the years about the translation industry. .

AI, MT and Language Processing Symposium

Jaap van der MeerChief Executive OfficerTAUS

The neural technology wave is taking us much quicker intoa future now than seemed impossible for a long time. Jaapvan der Meer will present Nunc Est Tempus: the mostrecent strategic research report from TAUS.

This is not a pie-in-the-sky visionary talk, but rather apractical guide on how to design a Modern TranslationPipeline, how we address the dilemma of open algorithmsand closed data, where to find new jobs and businessopportunities, how as an industry we need to worktogether, agree on metrics and resolve diverging issues inorder to scale and grow our business.

Nunc Est Tempus: Now Is the Time to Redesign Your Translation Business

AI, MT and Language Processing Symposium

Nunc Est Tempus

Jaap van der Meer, TAUSAmsterdam, The Netherlands

Headlines 2017

Nearly Indistinguishable From Human Translation — Google Claims Breakthrough(September 26, 2016)

Linguee’s Founder Launches DeepL in Attempt to Challenge Google Translate (August 30, 2017)

How SDL’s Secure Neural Machine Translation Helps Enterprises Reduce Risk (August 14, 2017)

A Convolutional Encoder Model for Neural Machine Translation - @ Facebook (July 25, 2017)

Systran Goes Neural, Lets You Try It (October 18, 2016)

Baidu Sells Human Translations at Rock-Bottom Rates to Gain Edge in AI (March 16, 2017)

Sogou Invests USD 6-7m in Shanghai-Based UTH in Scramble for Translation Data (August 22, 2017)

Amazon Pits Neural Machine Translation Framework Against Google, Facebook, Others(December 20, 2017)

Microsoft Neural Machine Translation reaches historic milestone: human parity for Chinese to English translations (March 14, 2018)

1954: Electric Brain“In five years we will translate all of the

Soviet Union into the Queen’s English in

just one week.”

2017: Neural MT“The time has come..”

The S-Curve “is stronger than all of us…”

Law of Accelerating Returns

Evolution of the Translation Technology Landscape

The Neural Wave

Neural MT

➢ Five years of NMT = twenty years of SMT

➢ 5,000 lines of code – 200,000 lines of code

➢ Zero shot translation

➢ Thousand(s) decisions taken by machines

➢ Every week we see improvements in quality

➢ Enables ambient intelligence

“The progress in what we can call the consumer translation

tech industry is of much larger relevance than the classic

corporate, outbound targeted, translation business.”Chris Wendt: Going Vocal with Ambient Translation, Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Democratization of Algorithms

Open source algorithms

➢ From SPSS and SAS Institute to TensorFlow, Open NMT,

MXNet, Nematus, ConvNet

➢ 4 million R and Python users vs. 600 million Excel users

➢ The democratization of AI has only just begun

“Once you have found your best service, you are less likely to switch. That’s

how the circle of open algorithms and customer lock-in gets closed.”Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Follow the Data

“We are moving from a people-

driven to a data-driven industry.”Adolfo Hernandez, Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

“Cross-language big data inspires our future.”Eric Yu, CEO of GTCOM, Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

“Our language data travel freely across all borders to

economies driven by free enterprises and long-term big

data strategies.”Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Not Business as Usual

Parallels to advertising, travel and banking industries:

➢ Standardization and automation lead to mass market adoption

➢ Ubiquitous, always-on translation triggers new business and

pricing models

➢ The ease and omnipresence of translation will be the

foundation for a plethora of new business opportunities.

➢ Razor-sharp localization

“Fifty percent of the services we produce today, we were not

doing five years ago, and they are not translation.”Smith Yewell: In the Business of Global Talent Search, Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Going Vocal

Ambient intelligence

➢ Our environment automatically adjusts to the language and

best means of communication.

➢ Spoken translation in wearable technology, robots, smart home

devices

➢ Confluence of technologies, business models and markets

“Machine Translation will become more acceptable not

because it miraculously becomes perfect, but because it can act

as a utility for people with reasonable expectations.”Chris Wendt: Going Vocal with Ambient Translation, Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Going Vocal

Going Vertical

Bringing relevance to verticalization

➢ Companies that specialize in the nuts and bolts: managing

infrastructure

➢ Service companies that fan out into many verticals and

cannibalize sturdy domestic industries

➢ Alternatives to translations that nobody needs

“70% of what we do will be the same from one industry to

another. But 30% of the work will be industry-specific and this is

where we need to be fully relevant.”Christophe Djaouani: Bringing Relevance to Verticalization. Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

The Long Tail of Languages

Geolinguistic shifts

➢ We are in a semi-state of globalization: 30% international trade

➢ China One-Belt One-Road Initiative (OBORI)

➢ China Next Generation AI Development Plan

➢ Zero shot translations adds MT for more languages

➢ Stimulates interest in new cultures and languages

Chinese Government Going All in to Back Language Industry(Slator, January 10, 2018)

“The web, in the mentality of the Chinese, has always been a

key tool to discover the world outside.”Eric Liu: Translation World Shifting from English-Centric to Chinese-Centric, Nunc Est Tempus,

December, 2017

Quality Matters

Boutique style translations:

➢ Don’t be blinded by technology

➢ ‘Dumb translations’ are not enough

➢ Stories need to be told and imagination needs to be triggered

Reading the Charts

Dashboards become commonplace:

➢ Can’t manage, if you can’t measure

➢ ROI on a per segment basis

➢ Data help to decide where to invest

“Localization on the whole has been more of a scattergun approach until

now for most companies.”Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

“Using our dashboards we will be able to switch to a razor-sharp

approach to localization.”Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Making Translation Invisible

“In the past, the keyword was first cost, then quality, then

efficiency. Today it’s agility.”Aiman Copty: Making Translation Invisible. Nunc Est Tempus, December, 2017

Towards Self-Driving Autonomous Workflows:

➢ Automate dozens of human touchpoints in a multi-layer multi-

company supply chain

➢ Microservices and SOA have helped solve the challenges of

interoperability

➢ Resolve diverging issues in localization: quality levels,

nomenclature, metrics, how we measure

Content

Content

Content

Content

Content

Algorithmic management

Content

profiling

Matching

resources

Quantum Leap Datafication Dashboards

FAUT: Fully Automatic

Useful Translation

Good Enough: Review

High Quality: Transcreation

MT Training: Data loopback

Machine Learning: Data loopback

Confidence

scores

UTS scoring

MT

TM

CT

DQF

The Modern Translation Pipeline

The Modern Translation Pipeline …

Data-DrivenInvisible

AutonomousSelf-Learning

1. made great progress in interoperability

2. is adopting DQF as a quality standard

… and where are the Jobs?!

The Engineers

The Reviewers

The Transcreators

The Data Analysts

A search for global multilingual

talents to undertake a plethora

of new value-added services:

Brand Validation

Multilingual Digital

Marketing

eDiscovery

Usability Testing

Campaign Management

Content Curation

Community Development

Quality Management Becomes So Vital

1. Jobs of post-editor/translator,

quality evaluator, editor and

reviewer are blurring

2. They feed the data that train the

translation pipeline, to fork

content in three levels:

• FAUT

• Good enough

• High Quality

3. Their annotation and corrections

train the machine translation

engines.

Key Messages of Nunc Est Tempus:

1. The consumer is driving the change

2. Democratization of algorithms has only just begun

3. Follow the data

4. Not business as usual

5. Going vocal

6. Going vertical

7. Geolinguistic shifts

8. Quality DOES matter

9. Reading the charts

10. Making translation invisible

➢ And now is the time!

Key Take-Aways1. Change – jobs, processes, technology

2. Control – measure, dashboard

3. Analyze – use your data

1954 2017 2022

TAUS Member Experience Journey

IMPROV

E

We guide adoption of technologies and data-driven processes, normalized quality metrics and future-proof business models.

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