Category Archives: Translation technology

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 debate on this topic between Green …

“Is machine translation taking over from English as the global communication language?”

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 a robust boiler plate in multiple …

“Offline AI and boiler plate approach in multilingual testing”

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 lively debates in the linguistic ecosystem …

“Recent research looks at the debate on man vs machine translation parity from a new angle”

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 as Turkish and Finnish, male pronouns …

“Do the footprints of stereotyping and gender bias follow us in online environments?”

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 live in an “increasingly data-driven …

“Only a few more days for EU’s data privacy legislation to come into force”

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 of new forms of computerised …

“Automatic Item Generation in testing”

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 output with human output. Microsoft …

“Has Microsoft’s neural machine translation (NMT) really reached parity with human translation?”

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 providers of neural network-based translation …

“The neural network-based translation technology “Amazon Translate” now generally available”

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, personal reflections, interviews, stories and …

“Translation matters by Jost Zetzsche”

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 the printing press by Gutenberg …

“Translation quality: entertaining anecdotes don’t give you the big picture”