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I have just had a scrumptious breakfast with my team workers to celebrate Saint Jerome’s Day. For those who find such ecumenical celebration weird, do know that this Saint was born in Dalmatia around 347. With a name that means “he who has a sacred name,” Jerome dedicated his life to the study of the Holy Scriptures and is considered one of the best, if not the best, in the translation work.

He was actually the first translator in History and was assigned the translation of the Holy Bible into Latin. However, since there were not CAT tools and machine translation at the time, this process too him some 15 years to complete. The so-called Vulgata (meaning it was made for the people) was the official Bible for the Catholic Church for over 15 centuries. See now what an expert he was?

Saint Jerome translating the Bible.
The one on the bottom corner is his project manager… =)

This day reminds me that I started my university years in 1995. I studied Liberal Arts, right after having started working as a typist for a translation company. The young lady who until then wanted to be a journalist was contaminated by the passion of her colleagues and the opportunity that opened up. The conversion of a foreign language text into Portuguese, the power of enabling a non-speaker of a foreign language to understand what the author intended to convey was far too good. I could not resist and abandoned my former dreams of becoming a journalist and became a translator.

Yet life has its own ways and it led me through a different path. Maybe because I was unable to transmit these ideas with the excellence I noticed in some colleagues, I ended up finding my way in project management. I must confess that I am happier now and found my true talent, even though I still greatly admire the translators with whom I work or worked in the past.

For this reason, I leave here my most sincere wishes of better rates, deadlines and customers. May you as a translator encounter even more clients who understand that, for one to produce a work of art, time is of essence. I know that 15 years can be a bit too long, but a couple of additional days (or hours) could be our every day gift.

Happy Translator’s Day!

A few days ago, I read an article that had a very important message. I very much liked the way the author showed how we can prevent many of our problems based on attitude alone. We can live in a much less stressful way in this city, where violence and chaos are so commonplace. We need so little to enjoy a happier and more peaceful life, yet many times we don’t even realize this. I suggest that you take a few minutes to learn this lesson.

We know how demanding we are when it comes to life: we want everything to work out nicely and sometimes the littlest things can leave us upset for an entire day. Take this trivial example: two cars parked next to each other, so close that it would be impossible for the driver to open his or her side. That’s it! It’s enough to make you upset, ruin your day, have you want to fight with everyone you see, when the solution is so simple: you could just get in the car using the other door. Uncomfortable? Well yes, but it could solve the problem without getting so upset and irritated.

This is a good example that can help make the lives of some people better. While the life of others can get worse. These are the people who have a life that is very similar to that of their friends, but they don’t understand why their friends seem so much happier. Could it be that things don’t go wrong for them? Of course they do; lots of things! The difference is that, for these friends using the other door every once in a while makes no difference.

There are enough inidividuals in this world who think they are the most important person alive. You would not dare argue with them! They are the ones who have never heard of emergency exits: they plant their feet, pick a fight and never back down easy. Have you ever heard of the persecution complex? It’s precisely that: The world versus these stubborn types. I often use the other door and sometimes I get out through that side too. It is certainly not comfortable, with that handbrake in the middle and all, but it is a problem that can be easily solved.

And most of our problems can be solved like this: simple and fast. It only takes a phone call, an e-mail message, an apology, a gentle acceptance. And lately, I have been giving these out for free… To be honest, 24 hours is not enough for everything I have to do, so I don’t plan on wasting any time being in a bad mood.

If we look for them, we will certainly find hundreds of irritating situations (and people too). Dozens of people will put me behind schedule every day. So I use the “other door” so I can focus on what is really important. This is the key to the mystery, the formula for happiness, the elixir for good spirits, the reason for which so little in the lives of others seem to go wrong.

When problems start to threaten your good mood, don’t let them ruin your day. Use the other door and keep your balance. Yet remember: mood is something contagious – for better or for worse. Smile then, and contaminate all those around you with your joy.

Here at Ccaps machine translation has become a reality.

To date, we have completed several post-editing machine translation projects and established a fruitful partnership with Asia Online to provide our clients with this most exciting and profitable possibility. Some (more conservative) industry players have demonstrated their concerns with it, but we have no doubt that MT is here to stay and have fully embraced it.

The folks at Wired Magazine published in 2000 the history of MT and gave their humorous views on its future.

1629 René Descartes proposes a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol.

1933 Russian Petr Smirnov-Troyanskii patents a device for transforming word-root sequences into their other-language equivalents.

1939 Bell Labs demonstrates the first electronic speech-synthesizing device at the New York World’s Fair.

1949 Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences division, drafts a memorandum for peer review outlining the prospects of machine translation.

1952 Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, MIT’s first full-time MT researcher, organizes the maiden MT conference.

1954 First public demo of computer translation at Georgetown University: 49 Russian sentences are translated into English using a 250-word vocabulary and 6 grammar rules.

1960 Bar-Hillel publishes his report arguing that fully automatic and accurate translation systems are, in principle, impossible.

1964 The National Academy of Sciences creates the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to study MT’s feasibility.

1966 ALPAC publishes a report on MT concluding that years of research have not produced useful results. The outcome is a halt in federal funding for machine translation R&D.

1967 L. E. Baum and colleagues at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in Princeton, New Jersey, develop hidden Markov models, the mathematical backbone of continuous-speech recognition.

1968 Peter Toma, a former Georgetown University linguist, starts one of the first MT companies, Language Automated Translation System and Electronic Communications (LATSEC).

1969 In Middletown, New York, Charles Byrne and Bernard Scott found Logos to develop MT systems.

1978 The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Network Speech Compression (NSC) project transmits the first spoken words over the Internet.

1982 Janet and Jim Baker found Newton, Massachusetts-based Dragon Systems.

1983 The Automated Language Processing System (ALPS) is the first MT software for a microcomputer.

1985 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launches its speech recognition program.

1986 Japan launches the ATR Interpreting Telecommunication Research Laboratories (ATR-ITL) to study multilingual speech translation.

1987 In Belgium, Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie found Lernout & Hauspie.

1988 Researchers at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center revive statistical MT methods that equate parallel texts, then calculate the probabilities that words in one version will correspond to words in another.

1990 Dragon Systems releases its 30,000-word-strong DragonDictate, the first retailed speech-to-text system for general-purpose dictation on PCs.

DARPA launches its Spoken Language Systems (SLS) program to develop apps for voice-activated human-machine interaction.

1991 The first translator-dedicated workstations appear, including STAR’s Transit, IBM’s TranslationManager, Canadian Translation Services’ PTT and Eurolang’s Optimizer.

1992 ATR-ITL founds the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR), which gives the first public demo of phone translation between English, German and Japanese.

1993 The German-funded Verbmobil project gets under way. Researchers focus on portable systems for face-to-face English-language business negotiations in German and Japanese.

BBN Technologies demonstrates the first off-the-shelf MT workstation for real-time, large-vocabulary (20,000 words), speaker-independent, continuous-speech-recognition software.

1994 Free Systran machine translation is available in select CompuServe chat forums.

1997 AltaVista’s Babel Fish offers real-time Systran translation on the Web.

Dragon Systems’ NaturallySpeaking and IBM’s ViaVoice are the first large-vocabulary continuous-speech-recognition products for PCs.

Parlance Corporation, a BBN Technologies spin-off, releases Name Connector, the first large-vocabulary internal switchboard that routes phone calls by hearing a spoken name.

1999 A televised newscast is automatically transcribed with 85 percent accuracy.

Logos releases e.Sense Enterprise Translation, the first Web-enabled multiple translator operating from a single server.

IBM releases ViaVoice for the Macintosh, the first continuous-speech-recognition Mac software.

Kevin Knight, of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), leads a multi-university team that develops Egypt, a software toolkit for building statistical MT systems. Egypt examines bilingual texts for statistical relationships, analyzes those patterns and applies what it has “learned” to its translation functions.

2000 At MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Young-Suk Lee and Clifford Weinstein demonstrate an advanced Korean-English speech-to-speech translation-system prototype.

USC’s ISI performs backward machine-transliterations of proper nouns, which are replaced with phonetic approximations. Southern California translates to “Janoub Kalyfornya” in Arabic.

2001 Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI), led by Jaime Carbonell, constructs speech-to-speech translation for “small” languages like Croatian or Mapudungun, spoken by Mapuches in Chile.

USC biomedical engineers Theodore Berger and Jim-Shih Liaw create a new Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speech Recognition System (SRS) that understands spoken languages better than humans do. Ford says the technology will be incorporated into its cars to facilitate communication at fast-food drive-thrus.

2002 NowHear offers an agent-based newsreader device that translates articles from thousands of publications worldwide, delivering them as MP3 audio files.

2003 Text of Joyce’s Ulysses is run through Cliff’s Notemaker, a new omnidirectional literary interpreter and summarizer. Program: “Your professor didn’t read it either. Don’t worry about what your essay says; just include the words Dublin, pub and fuck.

2004 Dragon Systems’ NaturallyCursing software is added to wristwatches to ease communication at multilingual construction sites.

2005 Employee at Allstate Insurance files suit against the company, citing emotional distress from the collective chatter of coworkers using speech recognition input devices.

GeoCities pulls down 350,000 homepages for failing to use GeoCities Controlled English, a 1,000-word e-dictionary designed to interface with its language translation software.

2006 It’s that .001 percent part that got us,” moans NASA director Rafu Sanjali, after the fourth disastrous attempt to land a robot-controlled vehicle on Mars was foiled by the use of “99.999 percent accurate” MT technology.

2007 Microsoft pulls its “What do you want to think today?” campaign after reviewers unanimously trounce the company’s much-anticipated Thought Recognition Interface (TRI).

2008 L&H’s Travel Sunglasses offer real-time translation of road signs, marquees and menus into a wearer’s native language.

2009 CorconText introduces FinalCopy, a Japanese-to-English documentation translation program that uses AI-based semantic networks to reduce the need for human editing of output.

2012 Saruzuno embeds its Lexical Disambiguation System (LDS) into smartcards equipped with membrane microphones so travelers can converse with store clerks in dozens of languages.

2017 The Russian-made Durok II language tutor is used to train customs-and-immigrations bots (DNA-based servant-devices) employed at US points of entry.

2020 “Teaching a child reading and writing is a waste of time,” declares Yeo Kiah Wei, Singapore’s minister of education, who cancels the subjects in schools. “Children needn’t be burdened with such an onerous task as deciphering tiny markings on a page or screen. Leave it to the machines.”

2021 PigLatin Furby reveals parents’ plans for divorce. Dozens of toddlers are traumatized.

2043 Tower of Babel is completed in Iraq (formerly Babylonia) after a 4,000-year delay, thanks to NEC Technologies’ Neutral Language.

2045 Telepathy system developed by Europeans. Users wear adhesive patches containing thought recognition and MT technology, plus a high-speed wireless transceiver.

2058 The Reformed Rifkin Institute (RRI) is awarded a patent for its invention of a symbio-parasite that feeds on the electrical impulses in the speech center of the human brain, and then excretes a translated signal that can be understood by anyone who inserts the creature in their ear. The estate of Douglas Adams files suit, claiming prior art.

2108 Procter & Gamble researchers use their newly developed Distributed Tachyon Swarm System (DTSS) to learn that diphtheria bacteria band together as a hive mind capable of communication.

2264 “Humans are dumber than bags of hair,” declares Entity 296. “Only the most naive scientist would try to develop a technology to understand those smelly lumps of protoplasm,” it states. “The noises they emit from the holes in their heads are ultimately less enlightening than cosmic static.”

Who has never caught themselves recently saying (or thinking), “My gosh, it is already June, July, August… Unbelievable… it’s nearly Christmas again!”

The impression we have is that time is really going by quickly. But could it be that it is really time, or is it we who are moving at a faster pace? Could it be that things fly so quickly by our eyes that we are no longer able to assimilate them? Or could it be that there is so much information that we can no longer manage it?

I used to get a roll of film, take 12, 24 or 36 photos over a period of a few weeks, wait two or three days to develop them and only then could I see the pictures. Today, the photo has hardly been taken before half a dozen curious hands are taking the camera from me to see what the shot looks like in the display. It is all very automatic and disposable. Didn’t turn out so good? Delete it and take another one!

Of course, these advances in technology are wonderful, but they also mean that we are losing the sweet agony of the wait. Waiting for a letter that takes time to arrive by mail, waiting for a film on a video tape to come out two years after it was released in theaters, downloading at the speed of 2 Kb/s…

I remember my days as an intern at LMI, more than 11 years ago now… We proofed humungous manuals on paper, marking everything in red and only then implemented the changes. We had enough time for this! There were so many hard copy documents to translate… But who works with paper today? Our deadlines are increasingly tighter, Trados no longer has a dongle, machine translation is knocking at our door, and Renato Beninatto left us all with mouths gaping when he revealed at the ABRATES Conference that the translator’s productivity will eventually reach 30,000 words per day!

I want to make it clear that I love modernity. I just woke up a little nostalgic for times past…

The dongles formerly used by Trados and Transit, straight from the Ccaps Localization Museum

As an American gringa here in Brazil, I have had a lot of trouble converting to metric. But thanks to this handy dandy metric guide, my troubles are over.