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Video Jan 23, 2025

The Future of Translation

Hi, and welcome to three questions with MotionPoint. I'm your host, Dominic Deltzerbajde, and I have the pleasure today to meet with Verdi Coburn, MotionPoint's adaptive translation product manager. Verdi, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well, Don. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very pleased to be here in the iconic pink chairs. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm glad to be here on the iconic pink chairs once again with you. Today, actually, we're talking about a very fun subject. What's the future of the translation and localization industry? So let's just get right through it. Verdi, what do you think the future is?

So I think that we're actually at a really exciting time at the moment in the translation industry. Industry. There are a lot of advancements that are happening in the field of neural sheet translation.

And I think in parallel, the world is really learning about the power of AI, you know, with chat GPT.

Everyone's playing with it. Everyone's seeing, like, the power of that to create human like text. And so I think that people's perceptions will change for machine translation as well due to that. I think that, you know, in the past, there's been a perception that machine translation translations, it produces silly translations. And now we're really moving away from that. We're really moving towards the human quality translation stuff that's happening very fast. I think people have to keep their eye on that with real machine translation.

I think that's very interesting. You just hit it on the head there. The future of the industry is kind of like accepting that human translation costs are too high and making it so that there's an easier way, cheaper, most cost effective way of doing a competition.

Right. Right. While still maintaining quality as well.

Absolutely. While still maintaining the same level of human translation quality. So I mean, I would ask you then question number two, how can companies and technologies help reduce translation costs and kind of keep pace with where our industry is going?

So I think there's a lot of smart ways that companies can leverage the different translation technologies that are out there as well as the new technologies as well. So we have, first of all, translation memory, and, you know, that's been around for many years. Anyone who's been involved in localization has a translation memory. But there are also, other smart ways that MotionPoint is working on that we can leverage translation memory more smartly with smart algorithms that leverage it for repetitive content. And then, like I was mentioning, highly trained, domain specific neural machine translation as well, using that to, really add that on the top and then keep the human element as well, for human review and for strategic areas of your content. We can still keep humans involved as well.

Yeah. It’s almost like translation memory two point o is what the feature is. Right? It’s like, okay, you have a translation memory now.

How can you use that to get more leverage, you know?

Right.

What are similar repetitive patterns that you might need to pick up on the fly and make sure that that part of translation isn't something that's getting, a cost going back to the to the customer, but instead still getting leverage from that translation memory with algorithmic translation and then, of course, neural machine translation to get that that type of leverage. Right?

Absolutely. And that's a difference that we're making at MotionPoint because some translation companies, you know, they'll, trans they'll be focused on translating words for you. So even for the repetitive content, they will charge you less. Mhmm. But we at MotionPoint are really focused on reducing an emotion wise that you translate overall.

Yeah.

And and keeping that quality and leveraging the memory that you have. So, it's really a a good way forward in the industry.

Yeah. I mean, it's almost like most of our, you know, peers in this industry are incentivized to translate more words and to make it more expensive because that's how they make their money. Right? But what we're doing here, what the future of the industry beckons is that we need to reduce the cost. We need to reduce the actual number of words that we need for human translation quality. So that that's very interesting.

Well, and for companies that don’t quite have all of that yet, like, what should localization companies like that be focused on to, you know, reduce costs whether or not they’re going to go?

So I think the key is to look at your content. You know, what types of content are you translating?

Is it web? Is it, omnichannel? Is it documents? And do you have a translation memory?

And keeping that translation memory consistent. Mhmm. And then, you know, leveraging that translation memory as smartly as you can. And then, you know, keep an eye on the industry and see how you can leverage, you know, the the neural machine translation that's out there and, you know, try to combine.

I think the key is combining different different technologies and different ways of leveraging memory, to to to, you know, reduce those costs and and keep the quality of the system.

Wonderful. I mean, couldn't have said it any any other way. I'm not gonna rephrase it or repackage it that you have it. That doesn't vary. Thank you so much for taking the time. And to our audience, I'll see you next time. You have three questions with motion point.