The translation industry has undergone a paradigm shift every decade since 1980, but none was as big as the one we are facing now. We are entering the Convergence era: automatic translation will be a utility embedded in every app, device, sign board and screen. Businesses will prosper by finding new customers in new markets. Governments and citizens will connect and communicate easily. Consumers will become world-wise, talking to everyone everywhere as if language barriers never existed. It will not be perfect, but it will open doors and break down barriers. And it will give a boost to the translation industry, which will be chartered to constantly improve the technology and fill the gaps in global communications. In this interactive opening session Jaap van der Meer will zoom in on the choices we are facing and the decision factors that help us make planning for an uncertain future opportunistic and profitable.

3. Planning for an Uncertain Future
TAUS Round Table, Moscow, May 22, 2014
www.taus.net

4. Agenda
Agenda
 Translation Technology Landscape Report
 What it means for enterprises, LSPs and governments: dilemmas and strategies
 Questions and answers

5. Translation Technology Landscape Report
Table of Contents
 Evolution of translation industry
 Types, Categories and Models of Technologies
 Trends
 Opportunities & Challenges
 Machine Translation
What we’ll talk about now
 Evolution
 Trends
 Opportunities & Challenges

6. The Evolution till Now
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7. Evolution to Come
From theTAUSTranslationTechnology Landscape Report (January, 2013)

20. Open or Closed Translation Future
?
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21. Drivers and Inhibitors
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25. Content Disruption
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34. Human Language Project
Collaboration between business,
government and academia worldwide
Think of:
 the Human Genome Project: a $3.8
Billion investment in sharing data
about the human genome drove $796
Billion in economic impact, and
spurred growth in the life sciences
industry.

35. Translation is
Becoming a Utility

36. MT as the New
Lingua Franca

38. Ingredients of Human Language Project
The Human Language Project consists of (at least):
1. Fearless sharing of language and translation data (speech and text) in all languages and language
pairs, not hindered by outdated copyright law. European legislators must modernize copyright regulations
on translation data. (See TAUS article published in January 2013)
2. A library of translation,language and reordering models covering all languages and a wide scope of
domains to help fast-track and fine-tune the development and customization of machine translation
engines.
3. A translation quality evaluation platform to help assess, benchmark and predict the right translation
quality for different content types and different purposes of communication.
4. A library of language tools – such as parsers, chunkers, lemmatizers, taggers – to assist service and
technology providers to improve and customize their solutions.
5. Common translation web services API’s to ensure that all services and technologies work seamlessly
together.

40. This slide may not be used or copied without permission from TAUS