Thoughts on low adoption of MT in the Language Services industry
This was written as an introduction to a guest post by Luigi Muzii, on the eMpTy Pages blog.
He has been a steady and unrelenting critic of many translation industry practices, mostly, I think with the sincere hope of driving evolution and improvement in business practices. To my mind, his criticism always had the underlying hope that business processes and strategies in the translation industry would evolve to look more like other industries where service work is more respected and acknowledged or more closely align to the business mission needs of clients. His acerbic tone and dense writing style have been criticized, but I have always appreciated his keen observation and unabashed willingness to expose bullshit, overused cliches, and platitudes in the industry. There is just too much Barney-love in the translation industry. Even though I don’t always agree with him, it is refreshing to hear a counter opinion that challenges the frequent self-congratulation that we also see in this industry.
When I first came to the translation industry from the mainstream IT industry I noticed that people in the industry were more world-wise, cultured, and even gentler than most I had encountered in the IT industry. However, the feel-good vibe engendered by the multicultural sensitivity also sustains a cottage industry characteristic to processes, technology, and communication style in this industry. People are much more tolerant of inefficiency and sub-optimal technology use. I noticed this especially from the technology viewpoint as I entered the industry as a spokesperson for Language Weaver who was an MT pioneer with data-driven MT technology, the first wave of “machine learning”. I was amazed by the proliferation of shoddy in-house TMS (process and project management for translation projects) systems and the insistence to keep these mostly second-rate systems running. When a group of more professionally developed TMS systems emerged, these TMS vendors struggled to convince key players to adopt the improved technology. It is amazing that even companies that reach hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue still have processes and technology use profiles of late-stage cottage industry players. Even Jochen Hummel the inventor of Trados (TM) has expressed surprise that a technology he developed in the 1980s is still around, and has stated openly that it should properly be replaced by some form of NMT!
The resistance to MT is a perfect example of a missed opportunity. Instead of learning to use it better, in a more integrated, knowledgeable, and value-adding way for clients, it has become another badly used tool whose adoption struggles along, and MT use is most frequently associated with inflicting pain and low compensation on the translators forced to work with these sub-optimal systems.
In an era where trillions of words are being translated by MT daily in public MT portals, the chart above should properly be titled “Clueless with MT”. I would also change it to N=170 LSPs that don’t know how to use MT. Most LSPs who claim to “do MT”, even the really large ones, in fact, do it really badly. The Translated — ModernMT deployment in my opinion is one of the very few exceptions of how to do MT right for the challenging localization use case.
It is also the ONLY LSP user scenario I know where MT is used in 90% or more of all translations work done by the LSP. Why? Because it CONSISTENTLY makes work easier, more efficient, and most importantly translators consistently ask for access to the rapidly learning ModernMT systems. Rather than BLEU scores, a production scenario where translators regularly and fervently ask for MT access is the measure of success. It can only happen with superior engineering that understands and enhances the process. It also means that this LSP can process thousand words projects with the same ease as they can process billions of words a month and scale easily to trillions of words if needed. In my view, this is a big deal and that is what happens when you use technology properly.
It is no surprise that most of the largest MT deployments in the world outside of the major Public MT Portals (eCommerce, OSI, eDiscovery) have little to no LSP involvement. Why would any sophisticated global enterprise be motivated to bring in an LSP that offers nothing but undifferentiated project management, dead-end discussions on quality measurement, and a decade-long track record of incompetent technology use?
Expert MT use is a result of the right data, the right process, and ML algorithms which are now commoditized. In the localization space, the “right” process is particularly important. “Like much of machine intelligence, the real genius [of deep learning] comes from how the system is designed, not from any autonomous intelligence of its own. Clever representations, including clever architecture, make clever machine intelligence,” Roitblat writes. I think it is fair to say that most MT use in the translation industry does not reach the level of “clever machine intelligence”. It follows that most translation industry MT use projects would qualify as sub-optimal machine intelligence.
This, I felt was a fitting introduction to Luigi’s post. I hope he shows up once in a while in the coming future, as I don’t know many others who are as willing to point out “areas of improvement” for the community as willingly as he does.
You can read his post at: https://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2021/06/close-call-observations-on-productivity.html
