Technology News
Hazel Mae Pan
Researcher, writer, content marketer, freelancer open to projects
Philippines
Dedicated lifelong learner, wide reader, and voracious online course consumer with transhumanist dreams
Philippines
Dedicated lifelong learner, wide reader, and voracious online course consumer with transhumanist dreams
Technology News
A study published on August 16, 2016 claims that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) outperforms phrase-based MT (PBMT) and provides better translations in the "particularly hard" to translate English-German language pair. In the past, the researchers say, NMT was considered "too computationally costly and resource demanding" to compete with PBMT.
The CEO of Korea's largest Internet company Naver, Kim Sang-hun, was forced to issue a very public apology on July 8, 2016, after translation crowdsourcing platform Flitto accused the company of ripping off its technology. "We have decided to stop our translation services as of this month after receiving complaints that they appear to be a rip-off of Flitto," Kim told the Korean Herald.
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented Google Translate's progress after going neural, he boasted that translation accuracy improved from 3.694 (phrase-based) to 4.263 (neural). Pichai was quoted as saying that "human quality is only a step away at 4.636." Measuring translation quality down to the third decimal place?
Natural language processing (NLP) is red hot. Hardly a week goes by without a big shot tech CEO NLP to be a core technology or a mainstream publication providing coverage. Beyond the buzz, how are companies doing that have managed to productize NLP?
On July 11, 2016, the Greek bribes-for-contracts trial involving German engineering conglomerate Siemens was postponed indefinitely pending the translation of a couple of bibles' worth of case-related material. According to a news report, "the court accepted the objections of the defendants who claimed that the charge sheet had not been translated into French and German, which renders it invalid."
Financial News
Wisconsin-based Sajan, a publicly traded language service provider (LSP) with a market capitalization of around USD 18m, announced its financial results for the third quarter 2016 on November 3, 2016. The company, which due to its listed status is required to disclose detailed information every quarter, is to some extent, a helpful proxy for the many small- to medium-sized LSPs.
A consumer watchdog urged the agency it once successfully lobbied the US Congress to create to help provide homeowners with mortgage and other documents in their preferred language. The Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a (liberal) coalition of 200 special interest groups, has urged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to require financial institutions to provide homeowners with sufficient translation and interpretation services.
Not that California has not already spent a significant amount on court interpretation. The previous budget stood at USD 95m per annum. The 9.5% increase now pushes the Golden State's interpretation spend past the line. (Other put the figure at USD 101.5m).
On September 23, 2016, Slator covered how the Los Angeles County Superior Court agreed to provide free language services to limited English proficiency litigants. It was the result of an administrative complaint filed by the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) on behalf of two Korean litigants, who failed to get access to court interpreters.
On June 14, 2016, London-based language service provider (LSP) translate plus filed its KPMG audited annual report for the year ended August 31, 2015 with the UK government. Total revenues came in at GBP 6.625m* (USD 8.799m), up 2.5 percent from the previous financial year's GBP 6.464m.
Press Releases
Managing a project, regardless of scope and scale, can already be a challenge on its own. Having to learn and then train others to use complicated tools, maneuver through complex software intricacies to optimize team performance, connect and collaborate - all while scrambling to beat the project's delivery deadline - is perhaps asking for too much from an ordinary project manager who simply wants to get the job done.
Early adopters are important for a software startup to move forward, particularly in the beta stage, a reality all too familiar for Victor Teslenko and Nick Nikolaev, the men behind Casual PM, a visual, mind-map-like project management software designed for non-professional or casual project managers.
Content Marketing
Viral content creation means breaking through scores of exhaustive online content so you become top-of-mind with your target audience. There is something about the power of the "pulse" or the "consciousness" of the masses, and it pays to create and distribute irresistibly shareable content.
When your work involves tons of research, writing, fact-checking, cross-referencing, and collaboration, you can get stuck on information overload. What you don't want to happen is to end up wasting precious time sifting through multiple categories of data to piece together a coherent picture out of it all.
Launching a startup can be a daunting endeavor. Keeping one in good running condition can be expensive, too. From project management to accounting, CRM, marketing, and more, allow this list to give you a rundown of the free business software that can help you manage your business while keeping yourself safe on the budgeting side of things.
Business & Management
Like most modern websites, this site utilizes javascript. Please enable javascript in your browser in order to view properly. There's a reason why TED, the popular conference series, has an 18-minute rule. Most people can pay attention to one thing for about 10 to 18 minutes before tuning out.
"He gets too involved and becomes the bottleneck." Imagine reading this feedback from your boss and subordinates come employee review time. This is the exact review that "Steve" (not his real name), an executive featured in a Harvard Business Review micromanagement article by Muriel Maignan Wilkins, received from his own colleagues.