IQwest IT Steps Up Its Machine Translation Marketing
February 3, 2017
Machine translation means that a computer converts one language into another. The idea is that the translation is accurate; that is, presents the speaker’s or writer’s message payload without distortion, odd ball syntax, and unintended humor. What’s a “nus”? The name of a nuclear consulting company or a social mistake? Machine translation, as an idea, has been around since that French whiz Descartes allegedly cooked up the idea in the 17th century.
I read two almost identical articles, which triggered by content marketing radar. The first write up appeared in KV Empty Pages as “Finding the Needle in the Digital Multilingual Haystack.” The second article appeared in the Medium online publication as “Finding the Needle in the Digital Multilingual Haystack.”
Notice the similarity. Intrigued I ran a query for IQwest. I noted that the domain name IQwest.com refers to a bum domain name. I did a bit of poking around and learned that there are companies using IQwest for engineering services, education, and legal technologies. The IQwest.com domain is owned by Qwest Communications in Denver.
The machine translation write up belongs to the IQwestIT.com group. No big deal, of course, but knowing which company’s name overlaps with other companies’ usage is interesting.
Now what’s the message in these two identical essays beyond content marketing? For me, the main point is that a law firm can use software translation to eliminate documents irrelevant to the legal matter at hand. For documents not in the lawyer’s native language, machine translation can churn out a good enough translation. The value of machine translation is that it is cheaper than a human translator and a heck of a lot less expensive.
Okay, I understand, but I have understood the value of machine translation since I had access to a Systran based system years ago. Furthermore, machine translation systems have been an area of interest in some of the government agencies with which I am familiar for decades.
The write up states:
building a model and process that takes advantage of benefits of various technologies, while minimizing the disadvantages of them would be crucial. In order to enhance any and all of these solution’s capabilities, it is important to understand that machines and machine learning by itself cannot be the only mechanism we build our processes on. This is where human translations come into the picture. If there was some way to utilize the natural ability of human translators to analyze content and build out a foundation for our solutions, would we be able improve on the resulting translations? The answer is a resounding yes!
Another, okay from me. The solution, which I anticipated, is a rah rah for the IQwest machine translation system. What’s notable is that the number of buzzwords used to explain the system caught my attention; for instance:
- Classification
- Clustering
- N grams
- Summarization
These standard indexing functions are part of the IQwest machine translation system. That system, the write up notes, can be supplemented with humans who ride herd on the outputs and who interact with the system to make sure that entities (people, places, things, events, etc.) are identified and translated. This is a slippery fish because some persons of interest have different names, handles, nicknames, code words, and legends. Informed humans might be able to spot these entities because no system with which I am familiar is able to knit together some well crafted aliases. Remember those $5,000 teddy bears on eBay. What did they represent?
The write up seems to be aimed at attorneys. I suppose that group of professionals may not be aware of the machine translation systems available online and for on premises installation. For the non attorney reader, the write up tills some familiar ground.
I understand the need to whip up sales leads, but the systems available from Google and Microsoft, to name just two work reasonably well. When those systems are not suitable, one can turn to SDL or Systran, to name two vendors with workable systems.
Net net: My thought is that two identical versions of the same article directed at a legal audience represents a bit of marketing wonkiness. The write up’s shotgun approach to reaching attorneys is interesting. I noticed the duplication of content, and my hunch is that Google’s duplicate detection system did as well.
Perhaps placing the write up in an online publication reaching lawyers would be a helpful use of the information? What’s clear is that IQwest represents an opportunity for some motivated marketing expert to offer his or her services to the company.
My take is that IQwest offers a business process for reducing costs for litigation related document processing. The translation emphasis is okay, but the idea of making a phone call and getting the job done is what differentiates IQwest from, for example, the GOOG. I remember Rocket Docket. A winner. When I looked at that “package,” the attorneys with whom I spoke did not care about what was under the hood. The hook was speed, reduced cost, and more time to do less dog work.
But the lawyers may need to hurry. “Lawyers Are Being Replaced by Machines That Read.” Dragging one’s feet technologically and demanding high salaries despite a glut of legal eagles may change the game and quickly.
Plus, keep in mind FreeTranslations.org. You can get voice translations as well as text translations. The increasingly frugal Google has trimmed its online translation service. Sigh. The days of pasting lengthy text into a box is gone like a Loon balloon drifting away from Sri Lanka.
There are options, gentle reader.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2017
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