On March 22-24 the DTT Symposion (short DTT) took place again in Mannheim. It is the bi-annual meeting of the German Terminology Association (Deutscher Terminologietag). We were exhibiting and I enjoyed talking to many Coreon customers there. It was a truly exciting event this year and according to the organizers the most busy ever. 200+ participants meant house full!

"Ausgebucht - no further seats left!"

After a half day of pre-event workshops, the event kicked off Friday morning with a presentation from Martin Volk (University Zürich) on parallel corpora, terminology extraction, and MT. Martin challenged the hype around Neural Machine Translation and pinpointed some weaknesses: “NMT operates with a fixed vocabulary. But real world translation has to deal with new words constantly … how can we ensure terminology-consistent translation?”. His research confirms what we've outlined in an earlier blog post: Why Machine Learning still Needs Humans for Language.

“Concept Maps Everywhere”
Back to the event ... as one participant tweeted, concept maps were the dominating topic throughout the days. First a workshop by Annette Weilandt (eccenca) on taxonomy, thesauri, and ontologies, followed by a presentation by Petra Drewer (University Karlsruhe). Petra unveiled a plethora of benefits:

• insight into the domain
• systematic presentation
• clear distinction between concepts
• identification of gaps
• equivalence checks across languages
• new opportunities in AI contexts

No surprise, my event highlight was the Coreon customer presentation from Liebherr on the benefits of multilingual knowledge systems. In this very entertaining presentation Lukas Auer (Liebherr MCCtec) and Johannes Widmann (Liebherr Holding) outlined how pragmatic and effective the work with concept systems turns out. They concluded: “If we all think in networks, why should our termbase then be designed as an alphabetic list of terms??” Instead, the concept system driven approach has many advantages such as training of new staff, context knowledge for technical authors and translators, terminological elaboration of specific domains, insight into the degree of how far a domain is already covered, avoiding doublettes etc. Download a case study from the Coreon web site.

DTT 2018 Award for a Master Thesis on Coreon
And then the “i-Tüpfelchen” (cherry on the cake) on Friday afternoon: David Reininghaus received this year’s DTT award on his master thesis: “Applying concept maps onto terminology collections: implementation of WIPO terminology with Coreon”. David analyzed in his work how a real graph driven technology outperforms simple hyperlink based approaches: no redundancies, more efficient, less error-prone. David further developed an XSL-based method how to transform the MultiTerm / TBX hyperlink based workarounds into a real graph, visualized in Coreon.

Deutsche Bahn: Terminology-Driven AI Applications
Tom Winter (Deutsche Bahn and President of the DTT) illustrated in his session how terminology boosts AI applications. Through already simple synonym expansion the intranet search engines are now more meaningful (a search for the unofficial Schaffner, now finds even documents where only the approved Zugbegleiter was used). Other applications are automatic pre-processing of incoming requests in a customer query-answering system or even improving Alexa driven speech interaction at ticket vending machines … who says terminology is still a niche application?

From Language to Knowledge
I am excited about the evolution of the DTT in recent years. How many more participants will we see in spring 2020? I am convinced the more the DTT community continues to leave the pure documentation niche and the more the focus moves onto areas that our customer Liebherr or Tom Winter have illustrated, the relevance and awareness level of the community will continue to grow. So that the organisers can again proudly announce:   Ausgebucht - no more seats left!

Focus Semantic Interoperability

Controlled Vocabulary and Ontologies

IoT Knowledge Systems made Easy

By Rachel Wheeler, Morningside Translations

Language localization services have been big business, and estimates indicate that the market will grow at an annual rate of about 7%. Companies that focus solely on translations services will continue to find demand for several years to come. The global marketplace, however, also presents new opportunities for language service providers (LSPs) to elevate their services and expand their businesses beyond translation alone.

Other LSPs Are Not The Only Competition

Some of the key benefits that professional translation agencies provide are quality translation and local expertise. To date, machine language translation software has had it limitations: poor quality, faulty grammar and syntax, and lack of contextual understanding. LSPs have benefited from these flaws by being able to provide a superior alternative.

However, in 2017, Google introduced Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT). What GNMT promises to provide is a new machine approach that will directly compete with human translators. Machine learning translation software has relied on an algorithmic approach to translation that was an almost a word-for-word dictionary approach. Therein lies its major flaw: it can only learn through predictive behavior analysis.

Neural networks like GNMT, however, incorporate a more complex structure that mimics the way the human brain processes information. This approach replicates the idea of intuition in many ways, not simply hard definitions. In its first published iteration, Google is already claiming a 60% reduction in errors.

For LSPs, these neural networks mean more–and cheaper–competition in the future. The nature of work for translation agencies will need to change in order to remain relevant.

Marketing Remains the Realm of People

By far, the main edge LSPs will have over machine translation is experience and local culture understanding. For global businesses, marketing their goods and services is not just a matter of translating words. Successful marketing understands the emotional impact of how information is presented.

Subtle differences in words–“discover” versus “find”, for example–have a different impact in sales and marketing than they do in more formal written content. Factoring in the additional layer of translation word choices, and the tone or intent of words can change dramatically beyond the original purpose.

Marketing content does not automatically translate from one language to another. Even visual imagery can fall in the purview of the cross-cultural marketer. Lingerie, for instance, is promote differently in conservative countries than in the West. LSPs are in the perfect position to expand their services into marketing, either as outside consultants or even agency-level providers.

Essentially, their ability to localize is a human translator’s greatest differentiator. Whether that’s leveraged for eLearning localization or creating images for a website specifically geared towards a regional audience, this is where an LSP can still shine.

Data Mining Works In Any Language

With today’s enormous output of information, data mining has become big business of its own. Data miners often refer to their work as “discovering insights.” As they review the clicks of a website, the comments on social media, and results of customer surveys, they inherently build a consumer profile with cultural bias built in.

LSPs with experts in particular languages and cultures offer the opportunity to sift through these insights in the original language that a non-native speaker can miss in translation.

Plan Ahead for Competitive Advantage

The technology world makes no secret of its innovations. LSPs should keep on eye on the changes and trends and plan for the future. By anticipating the coming shift in global demand for translation service, language service providers can be ahead of their competitors instead of playing catch-up.

What a great follow up to Coreon's last newsletter we welcome contributions from partner companies and industry experts.
This guest post is written by Rachel Wheeler from Morningside Translations.