Category Archives: Translation technology

Imperfections in machine translation (MT) have long motivated systems for improving translations post-hoc with automatic post-editing (APE). (1) In contrast, up to now, little attention had been devoted to the problem of automatically correcting human-generated translations. A study introducing for the first time ever an automatic human translation correction model (TEC) was presented by language …

“After automated post-editing, APE, the next new hot topic is automated (human) translation error correction, or TEC”

by Adrien Mathot, Translation Technologist @cApStAn First of all what is a standard? According to the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) standards “provide people and organizations with a basis for mutual understanding, and are used as tools to facilitate communication, measurement, commerce and manufacturing.” What happens when things are not standardised Or are not …

“A Brief Introduction to Translation Technology Standards, Tools & Best Practices”

cApStAn organises its language services into 22 modules, or building blocks. Depending on the client’s requirements, on time and resources available, and on the purpose and life cycle of the document, cApStAn will combine different modules to assemble a coherent project with the most suitable workflow. You will ultimately decide on which modules to keep. …

“Preparation of Translation Process: Legacy Content Transfer & Management”

Psychometric assessments have become a crucial component of the recruitment and development process at scale. To hire the right candidate, one needs to ensure that the tests are fair, valid, reliable and defensible in all the languages that are available to the test takers. Different types of assessments present different challenges, and we shall show …

“Live Webinar: Pitfalls to Avoid while Translating Psychometric Assessments”

Computer-assisted translation tools (CAT tools) have been around for 30 years, and they are designed as productivity tools for professional translators. Using CAT tools effectively increases quality, consistency and productivity at scale. Term bases, style guides and translation memories form a powerful combination that (still) give the human translator a competitive edge in terms of quality/price …

“On-Demand Webinar | How to leverage CAT tools to achieve more savings than MT”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Language really matters when it comes to scientific communication and education. How can you have conversations about science when the scientific terms you wish to talk about do not exist in your own language? Sibusiso Biyela is a science communicator and journalist from South Africa, …

“In South Africa a new AI-based project offers the opportunity for a large corpus of scientific terms to be translated into six indigenous languages”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Webinar hosted by CITLoB with Steve Dept and Sandeep Nulkar, 7.1.2021 “Quality is the most used word in our industry but it is one thing to say you provide quality translation, it’s another to say you can actually measure it”. These opening words by Sandeep …

“Using linguistic quality evaluation to drive revenue”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Google launched “Fabricius”, a web based AI tool to let users interact with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, on July 16, 2020, to coincide with the anniversary of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta stone was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text (Egyptian/Ancient Greek) to be recovered in …

““Fabricius”, Google’s new AI tool, unravels the symbols of Ancient Egypt”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Beyond the AI hype and controversial reports about automatic translation achieving parity with human translation, neural machine translation (NMT) has undoubtedly made spectacular progress in the last three years. Should professional translators resist or should they use it? Machine translation software has been around for a long time. In the …

“Should professional translators shun machine translation?”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village People across China have been very creative in past weeks in finding ways to get around the ban on an article that was critical of how the government handled the coronavirus epidemic. The article, written by Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at a hospital …

“Skirting online censorship in China by “translating” a banned article into Morse, hexadecimal code, emoji and elvish language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Prof. Antonio Toral, from the University of Groningen, has recently published a study comparing unaided human translation (HT) to post-edited machine translation, (PEMT). (1) Whilst acknowledging that PE is very useful in terms of productivity, Toral flags a potential issue. His findings indicate that PEMT …

“Could post-edited machine translation lead to an impoverishment of the target language?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Content translation tools on Wikipedia allow editors to generate a preview of a new article based on an automated translation from another edition. Used correctly, these tools can save valuable time for editors, in particular those building out understaffed language editions – but when it …

“Should Wikipedia consider banning machine translations on its platform if there is no human supervision?”