Anna Schlegel from Acclaro gave a talk on “Emerging Localization Technologies: Crowdsourcing and Machine Translation” at IMUG tonite.
Anna Schlegel is currently Director, Localization at Acclaro and previously was Director of Globalization at VMware, VeriSign, and managed localization and web globalization teams at Xerox and Cisco.
She’s a Catalan originally from Spain.
Her talk focused on the issues and tradeoffs with machine translation and crowdsourcing of translation.
These technologies are of interest to product managers who want to save time and money and perhaps gain more independence from vendors. Traditional human translators can do 2,000 to 3,000 words per day, while MT post-editors can finish around 10,000 words per day.
Also, some clients have simply too much text to translate for a reasonable budget or timeframe, so automation looks increasingly useful. Examples would be search engine result pages, for example.
Anna gave a demo of the translation management interface that Facebook has provided for users. It allows multiple volunteer translators to discuss efforts, divides the remaining work into daily portions, and has a Top score table for biggest contributors.
She also talked about istockphoto.com and a tshirt web site as examples of businesses that rely and flourish on the basis of crowdsourced creativity.
There was a great turnout – we almost ran out of chairs.
Thanks again to Apple for hosting IMUG each month.
