by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Here is an interesting take on "automation anxiety" among translators. The author's approach was to "crawl" content from forum postings and translator blogs in order to compile "a corpus of professional discourses". He says that, despite the wealth of ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Globalization and innovative web technologies have removed geographic boundaries and opened new opportunities for awarding bodies, technology certification programs and credentialing organizations. However, with these opportunities come new challenges: How do you localize items and assessments so they will ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent TAUS webinar on "geo-linguistic shifts" two leading experts in the field, Lane Green and Nicholas Ostler (see bios below), discussed whether machine translation could one day replace English as the world's "lingua franca". The first TAUS ... Read more >
by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner Will AI allow test development, item banking, item localization, validation and multilingual test delivery to all happen in one integrated environment? The AI behind adaptive translation is not the same as the AI behind item generation, but they can work together to build ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tech companies driving the progress in neural machine translation (NMT) tend to fall into the trap of comparing NMT output with human output. Earlier this year Microsoft announced that its NMT had reached parity with human translation, which prompted ... Read more >
by Emel Ince - Project manager @ cApStAn Online translation platforms such as Google Translation and Microsoft Translator have fuelled lively discussions. Recently, one such topic on social media has been the alleged gender bias of these platforms: Some users reported that, when translating phrases from gender-neutral languages such ... Read more >
There is a lot of hype around the coming into force on May 25 of the GDPR – the new European regulation to protect personal data. This regulation amends a previous 1995 Directive on data privacy to take into account the fact that, as we all well realize, we now ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari - cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Automatic item generation (AIG) is one of the innovations in testing discussed at the recent Association of Test Publishers' (ATP) annual conference in San Antonio, Texas. Multiple choice questions have been the traditional way of testing for generations; the advent ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari - cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village While at cApStAn we investigate how neural machine translation (NMT) can be used to improve a human translator's output rate while increasing consistency, blue chip companies driving the progress in NMT still fall into the trap of comparing the NMT ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari - cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village On April 4, Amazon Translate, which was in "preview" mode since 2017, was made available to anyone in the US and EU (with an Amazon Web Services account). In doing so, Amazon positions itself as one of the 20+ existing ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari - cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Anything produced by Jost Zetzsche is premium material and his new book “Translation Matters” is no exception. The collection of articles, reviews, posts and other writings spans over 15 years, with a nice combination of historical details, real life experience, ... Read more >
Our history class on the Middle Ages was a revelation (I remain indebted to Herman Van Bostraeten at Sint-Barbaracollege): instead of just being taught the starting point and the end point of the Dark Ages, e.g. from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 till the invention of ... Read more >