Where’s Phil? – II

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Episode 2: TAUS Content Summit

For this second episode of Where’s Phil?, Vistatec Chief Technology Officer Phil Ritchie takes us deep into a content discussion hosted by one of the world’s leading technology organizations, Microsoft.

The TAUS Global Content Summit was hosted by Microsoft at their new headquarters located in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 2019.

Alongside Vistatec Director of Sales, Teresa Lawless, TAUS Programme Committee member Phil enjoyed a day full of networking opportunities and talks by various speakers.

Some of the numerous companies represented included Microsoft, Oracle, Google. The European Commission Directorate-General for Translation was also represented on the day.

The bi-yearly event, having last taken place in Amsterdam in March 2019, is described by its organizers as a summit aiming to “promote the ideas around automation and innovation in global intelligent content delivery,” and “educate professionals and practitioners active in the localization and global marketing sectors”.

With buyers, service providers and technology providers attending the summit, for Phil, these types of events represent a unique opportunity to interact with individuals who are “strategically trying to drive a lot of change in their business or are at the coalface of actually implementing those changes”.

TAUS founder Jaap van der Meer was keen for the event to showcase how the localization hub of the eighties and nineties is lifting itself into the age of the Modern Translation Pipeline. The event included a full day of discussions around the changes in the translation ecosystem as a result of breakthroughs in technology.

One of the most interesting presentations was given by Microsoft themselves, explaining the reasoning behind a decision to have integrated quality estimation into their software translation workflow.

It was a very interesting presentation not only because quality estimation is at the forefront of topics at the moment in the industry, but also from the perspective that they had to do this without disturbing their live production,” said Ritchie.

Quality estimation is a machine learning task and the idea is that– particularly in workflows where you are using machine translation — want to try and estimate whether the translation that the machine translation system has come up with is a very good one or a bad one because then if you can estimate that quality, you can obviously then decide whether you need to have a human post edit or quality review the translation or you can just it directly and obviously that has a huge impact on kind of productivity and cost as well.’’

About Vistatec

We have been helping some of the world’s most iconic brands to optimize their global commercial potential since 1997. Vistatec is one of the world’s leading global content solutions providers. HQ in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in Mountain View, California, USA. To learn more about Vistatec, please visit: https://www.vistatec.com