Slator - Language Industry News

  Since  OpenAI  launched  ChatGPT  in November 2022, headlines have asked whether workers in a range of fields should worry about being replaced by the advanced AI chatbot. Now, a January 2023 paper from a Chinese tech company,  Tencent , asks the  question on behalf of the language industry : Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? The Tencent team goes about answering the question by reviewing, shall we say, a limited set of data. The team said “obtaining the translation results from ChatGPT is time-consuming since it can only be interacted with manually and can not respond to large batches. Thus, we randomly sample 50 sentences from each set for evaluation.” So, let’s see what insights the team gathered by evaluating those 50 sentences. According to the  paper , ChatGPT performs “competitively” with commercial machine translation (MT) products, such as  Google Translate ,  DeepL , and Tencent’s own system, on high-resource European langua...

  In response to soaring content localization needs, online streaming giant Netflix launched a recruitment drive to attract fresh translation talent in March 2017. The program, named  Hermes, was billed as “the first online subtitling and translation test and indexing system  by a major content creator,” and was advertising the fact that “​Netflix is Looking for the Best Translators Around the Globe.” At that time, Netflix movies were being translated into more than 20 languages, and the scale of the localization was on overdrive following the launch of the service globally just a year earlier in January 2016. By March 2018, one year after the Hermes launch, Netflix had issued a  statement on its website  to announce that the program was being closed. The notification read: “we have reached our capacity for each one of the language tests due to the rapid popularity and response from applicants all over the world. Therefore we are closing the platform to future t...

  In a tough year for global stock and bond markets against a backdrop of rising interest rates, only a couple language service providers (LSPs) were able to buck the downtrend. Zoo Digital  tops the list again in 2022. The multimedia localization company started the year with a 5% stock price increase and was up by 14% as January ended. Stocks continued their steady climb past the end of Q2, ending with a share price of USD 178 (+33%). The company boldly announced in September that it expects a revenue increase of 89% from the same period in 2023. In a year that saw global markets tumble across the board, it is no surprise that LSPs except Zoo Digital and, notably,  Honyaku Center , shed value in 2022. Japan’s largest LSP came in at a second place, rising a mere 8% over the year. 2022 Performance of Listed LSPs Game localizer  Keywords Studios  had a good year, with five new acquisitions (59 to date) and a revenue increase of 36.7%. The company’s Globalize divi...

  In this week’s SlatorPod,   Happy Scribe   CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling. André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of  transcription  and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina. The CEO shares how their product development has evolved, from initially deploying the Google Speech-to-Text API to connecting to various off-the-shelf systems to, now, building their own custom models. He talks about how being a bootstrapped company forces them to focus on producing results with limited resources. André touches on the different customized features that allow users to create a vocabulary list, build their own dictionary, and adjust the number of characters per line for subtitling projects. He gives his take on what’s driving the popularity of subtitles in short-form content and how sub...

  Natural Language Processing Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It is an interdisciplinary field that involves linguistics, computer science, and information engineering. NLP techniques are used to analyze and understand large volumes of unstructured language data and to help computers communicate with humans in a more natural way.  Some Common Applications of NLP: Language Translation:  Language translation is the process of converting text from one language to another. This can be done using a variety of methods, including machine translation , which uses algorithms and statistical models to automatically translate text, or human translation, which is done by a person who is fluent in both languages. There are also hybrid approaches that use a combination of both machine and human translation. Machine translation can be done in real-time, whi...