It’s hard to believe January has already flown by. With such a whirlwind start to the new year there’s a lot to share and look forward to. Keep reading for our comprehensive updates!
📞 Voice2Voice Translation
🗣️ Tone-of-Voice control
🗓️ Intento’s Event Calendar
🌏 GlobalSaké Partnership for Global Growth
🔦 Attention on Spotlight
🚀 Konstantin Savenkov elected to AMTA Board of Directors
🗞 Latest news from the AI/MT landscape
📚 Recommended reading and listening
Voice2Voice Translation
Voice-to-voice translation may seem like a Holy Grail when pictured as The Babel fish from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. However, many of the practical industrial needs and applications may well be solved using existing technology.
Voice format tends to be less forgiving to transition mistakes, as there is no ability to re-read the translation. Custom terminology, brand speak, tone of voice, profanity control — all that becomes a must for such solutions.
This past week, our CEO Konstantin Savenkov participated as a Process Innovation Challenge finalist at LocWorldWide43. Konstantin used the PIC stage to discuss Augmented MT: Language and Provider-Agnostic Fine-Tuning of MT Output. We have demonstrated how Voice-to-Voice translation may be solved using the Intento platform for sequential voice translation in the Customer Service scenario. Check out our AI for Service Desk demo to see voice-to-voice in action.
Focus on Tone-of-Voice Control
We are continuing to focus on tone-of-voice control in an effort to control involuntary bias when using MT. This involves taking practical steps towards dodging these biases, piloting a tone of voice control that works independently of the MT providers.
Here is an example of how tone-of-voice control works with Amazon English to German translation (this technology is useful for conversational scenarios in languages where tone matters, like German or French). Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to learn more about tone-of-voice control and its various applications!
Upcoming Calendar Highlights
We’re looking forward to a few other events coming up this quarter:
Calling all gamers and globalizers
From March 2nd-3rd, Intento will be attending the Game Global Digital Summit, an event dedicated to the video game globalization industry. Game Global offers the unique experience for those specializing in text and audio translation and localization, functional QA to learn from fellow industry experts and share inspiration.
Konstantin Savenkov will be presenting with Playrix: “Rooting for Better Machine Translation of In-game Content”, and attendees will hear the results of unique internal research. We look forward to seeing you there!
GALA Connected: How is digital acceleration impacting the global language industry?
Join us March 23rd-25th, as Intento presents at the GALA Connected conference. This year, GALA is adapting to the new ways of working and socializing with an online format that allows for wider engagement with more industry players in an interactive and inclusive setting. Stay tuned for a full program coming soon!
Intento and Global Saké: Partnership for Global Growth
Intento is proud to be a 2021 Platinum Sponsor of GlobalSake. Join us for an annual seat in The ParlamINT–GlobalSake’s 2021 program (12 monthly events) designed for global-first and geo-fit solutions with a global community of thought leaders driving new markets’ expansion. Full program here. See you there on February 4th for the first event! Hear from industry experts leading exciting brands going global on how they’ve approached their international expansion strategies, goals, gaps, solutions, KPIs, and so much more.
Industry Attention on Spotlight
You might have seen Nimdzi’s recent coverage of MT customization evaluation in Spotlight. Spotlight is an Intento MT evaluation tool, used by global companies to ensure the highest quality and ROI while on-boarding best-fit MT.
Nimdzi notes, “Spotlight can definitely save evaluators time and money. It also enables the linguistic teams to have a quick and sufficient understanding of the customization results before rolling out the particular MT engine in production”
Spotlight Updates
There are also a few additions and improvements to Intento Spotlight you should have on your radar:
- We have new corpus score metrics available for users: BLUE and TER
- There is a new segment-level metric: BERTScore. BERTScore leverages the pre-trained contextual embeddings from BERT and matches words in candidate and reference sentences by cosine similarity. It has been shown to correlate with human judgement on sentence-level and system-level evaluation (QingXiu et al., 2021).
- Spotlight Issue Types allow you to asses key elements behind the corpus level metrics. This issue summary will now also be included in the exported report.
Product News — Updates and Upgrades
Intento for Windows Translator
Here’s what’s new in the latest version of Intento Windows Translator
- Domain specific routings
- Configurable shortcuts
- Added license to installation
- Improved UI
- Fixed multiple bugs and removed unnecessary dependencies
Intento MT Hub for Trados
We have updated the MT Hub for Trados, now available with multiple bug-fixes and upgrades, including more accurate mapping of certain languages and dialects
Chrome Extention version 1.0.0
We’re happy to announce that version 1.0.0 of our Chrome extension is now officially available in the Chrome Web Store! This marks the first release that has been extensively tested with our QA team, and includes the following changes:
- Improved UI/UX
- Improved support for right-to-left languages
- Added experimental limited support for LinkedIn chats and Asana website
- Whole page translation of Confluence documents now excludes content editors by default, as it might lead to unwanted results (to translate editable content users can select it first)
- Minor bug fixes
Intento CEO Elected to AMTA Board
We are proud to announce that our CEO, Konstantin Savenkov, has been officially elected to the AMTA Board of Directors! AMTA was founded in 1991 as the North American component of the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT). We are looking forward to seeing the valuable input he will bring to the board!
Gartner Covers AI-Enabled Translation Services
Gartner Research recently created a new coverage market — AI Enabled Translation Services. Gartner notes, “Advances in AI are offering enterprises new opportunities to reduce costs and improve the availability of translation services”. Their guidance will be extremely helpful as global businesses begin to explore our emerging class of AI-enabled translation services.
MT Provider News
Alibaba Language Pairs
Our AI monitoring algorithms have detected that Alibaba Translate significantly improved its language support — to 109 languages in total! You can even translate between these languages, not only to and from English.
Today, you can try all the new Alibaba models via online demo on our website.
Welcoming Prompsit
We always welcome new MT vendors to the landscape, and this month we say hello to Spain-based Prompsit — High Tech NLP and AI Solutions!
Additional New Language Pairs Added by MT Providers
Several providers have expanded their offerings of language pairs. Here are some to look out for:
ProMT:
- ar↔︎es, ar↔︎hi, ar↔︎ja, ar↔︎pt, ar↔︎tr, ar↔︎zh
- en↔︎da, en↔︎no, en↔︎sv
- ru↔︎da, ru↔︎no, ru↔︎sv
- fr↔︎bg
Systran PNMT:
- en↔︎so (Somali)
Microsoft v2/v3:
In partnership with the Government of Nunavut, Department of Culture and Heritage, Microsoft has released the first MT for Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ) [language code iu]
As usual, you can try all those new models in the free online demo at the Intento website.
Recommended Reading and Listening
Here are some of the articles and podcasts that have grabbed our attention this past month. Follow these links to find out more about what’s happening in the AI/MT landscape! As always, there’s a lot to learn.
- Google trained a trillion-parameter AI language model
- Why enterprises fail to integrate AI and what to do about it
- Globally Speaking: Choosing and implementing a translation management system
- How to prepare a software string for internationalization
- Can a machine really write for the New Yorker?
- Will 2021 be the year that AI finally scales?
