Why are you being so defensive? Seems like you’re attacking Kirti for simply expressing an opinion.

What wasn’t clear from reading the article was the answer to the question, “Is there a future for translation businesses in a world of Google Translation?” (at least not imo).

You are entitled to your opinions. My grandmother told me, “Never complain, never explain.” You did both.
What would grandma think? I don’t do PR. I don’t do much. At age 65, I am lucky to write blog posts and respond to the sharp wit and telling comments. I leave PR to the 20 somethings, the azure chip consultants, and the pre Wal*Mart greeters.

Stephen Arnold, January 7, 2010

Again, I apologize for suggesting that your post was anything but a summary of your own thoughts.

I think that you and your readers may find some of the following links interesting as a way to expand on the great start that you have given them in your initial summary. I agree that the technology has great promise (not $67B worth) but clearly great promise and potential.

The market for “highly customized” MT systems is just beginning and Language Weaver is not a leader. I hope that Asia Online builds a leadership position here and I humbly request that you keep your eye on us.

http://www.languagestudio.com is where much of the information updates will happen related to the Asia Online platform.

Also perhaps interesting are some video presentations involving MT from a recent conference that talk about the promise of highly interactive man-machine collaborations. Enterprise quality will require much more man-machine collaboration than Google allows and we believe that really compelling translation quality can only come from much more intensive, structured and managed human feedback. This will allow global enterprises to expand the global dialogue and share information across language on a scale not seen before.

Implementing large scale Machine Translation in Patent Information by Andrew Ruffner CTO Lexis Nexis on comparison of Japanese Patent MT systems http://dotsub.com/view/159ce97c-dbd4-4d6a-90c2-427a3a3e755f

The On-going Evolution of the Localization Business by Renato Beninatto CEO Milengo
http://dotsub.com/view/7da1f3a0-4df2-45a4-b62d-99434c2cf75f

Beyond Machine Translation: Collaboration, Integration, Quality, Change and Jobs – CEO Dion Wiggins on Asia Online Vision
http://dotsub.com/view/727cdacf-9653-40ef-b6f3-6145ca107db0

I am sure that Diego and others could add more information to show that the whole segment of producing “high quality customized and tuned MT “is growing and that the market is doing well possibly even because of the visibility that Google and Microsoft are giving to MT.

Again, I apologize for suggesting that your post was anything but a summary of your own thoughts.

I think that you and your readers may find some of the following links as a way to expand on the great start that you have given them in your initial summary. I agree that the technology has great promise (not $67B worth) but clearly great promise and potential.

The market for “highly customized” MT systems is just beginning and Language Weaver is not a leader. I hope that Asia Online builds a leadership position here and I humbly request that you keep your eye on us.

http://www.languagestudio.com is where much of the information updates will happen related to the Asia Online platform.

Also perhaps interesting are some video presentations involving MT from a recent conference that talk about the promise of highly interactive man-machine collaborations. Enterprise quality will require much more man-machine collaboration than Google allows and we believe that really compelling translation quality can only come from much more intensive, structured and managed human feedback. This will allow global enterprises to expand the global dialogue and share information across language on a scale not seen before.

Implementing large scale Machine Translation in Patent Information by Andrew Ruffner CTO Lexis Nexis on comparison of Japanese Patent MT systems http://dotsub.com/view/159ce97c-dbd4-4d6a-90c2-427a3a3e755f

The On-going Evolution of the Localization Business by Renato Beninatto CEO Milengo
http://dotsub.com/view/7da1f3a0-4df2-45a4-b62d-99434c2cf75f

Beyond Machine Translation: Collaboration, Integration, Quality, Change and Jobs – CEO Dion Wiggins on Asia Online Vision
http://dotsub.com/view/727cdacf-9653-40ef-b6f3-6145ca107db0

I am sure that Diego and others could add more information to show that the whole segment of producing “high quality customized and tuned MT “is growing and that the market is doing well possibly even because of the visibility that Google and Microsoft are giving to MT.

Ah, public relations. I wish I could agree that my write was PR, but I crank out these articles based on references I find in other documents. You may get a better sense of what I am doing if you read the About section of the blog. PR people get paid. You may notice the disclaimers at the foot of each article which make clear that I labor without compensation. If this eludes you, may I suggest you stop reading the Web log?

Stephen E Arnold
January 7, 2010

Our approach is unique because we build completely customized solutions for our clients, in any language and with limited data. We are specialists in hybrid (statistical + rule-based) machine translation technology, offering confidentiality and complete control of the data that feeds the system of any client (a valuable point with respect to Google), among other key features.

With as little as 1 million translated words from the client, we have developed
+70% accuracy solutions, but this depends on the domain and the quality of the data, among others.

For a bit of history, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation

Google itself has been working on similar research with good results:

http://research.google.com/pubs/och.html

I think you may not be aware that SMT technology is available in open source (search for Moses and SMT) and you may not be aware that now there are many new companies that appear to have much more compelling or at least more cost-effective offerings than Language Weaver. Thus, your hunch that people will pay for non-Google solutions is quite right, there are at least 5 such companies with SMT technology.

I am a former VP of Sales & Marketing of Language Weaver who has moved on to a new and exciting company called Asia Online that provides a much more comprehensive “platform” that enables many more people to build and constantly tune SMT engines in a way that has never been possible before to quality levels that have never been seen before.

Here is a link that describes this emerging translation platform http://is.gd/5MjDe written by a leading industry analyst. This is a platform that is designed to be used by both language industry professionals and can be embedded into CRM and global customer facing applications to facilitate global communications.

Google may be an excellent option for a casual user who wants an occasional web page or email translated but it is far from ready as an enterprise ready application. Also, there is no possibility of using Google if you have any concern about data privacy and they are not likely to tune it for individual corporate customers for very specific customer needs. Google is a one-size-fits-all approach but I think it is likely that they already produce the best baselines. You can easily see this by comparing Google translations to most others available for free on the web.

Also given that the current ACTUAL market size for machine translation software is around $50 Million in 2008 – the estimate of $67Billion is somewhat silly. There is an extensive discussion of this in a Linked In MT discussion group that you can find here: http://bit.ly/MTmktSize and here http://bit.ly/MTFuture

Thank you for making people aware of the possibilities of MT in Enterprise Use. I suspect that it would be more useful if you provided a more complete picture and I would suggest that you might find the information in the Linked In Automated Language Translation Group ( http://is.gd/5Peuf) quite useful as multiple vendors are present and all speaking and sharing information in a much more comprehensive and complete way to add you to your initial summary.

Thanks