Fredrik Härén spoke in 2007 on Sweden’s knowledge day (kunskapens dag). This engaging speaker stood and explained his views on the value of knowledge in the global economy. Video in Swedish.

He spoke of how the very meaning of the term “developed country” has lead to complacency, and that “developing countries” are taking advantage of new ideas, not existing knowledge, but what he calls nyskap, or “newledge” as it would roughly translate. He defines an idea as the coming together of two previous concepts, ruling out the possibility that any idea could be 100% original.

He exposes typical Western ignorance of Chinese and Indian leaders and top companies (asking what are the prime minister’s names? And what are their top ten companies?) while highlighting the fact that Chinese and Indians workers are quite familiar with both East and West in terms of politics and business, stressing that we risk being left behind.

He states that while building skyscrapers may not be indicative of a more advanced society (saying they could quite easily be described as extensions of a man’s ego, among other things) they still require new kinds of lifts/elevators, water and waste systems developing, pulling innovation along with the new buildings.

Talk is cheap

He showed that knowledge can be bought for $3 an hour, and that students and statepersons that he has spoken to who think they are smart and knowledgeable should bear this in mind. He says we should focus on imagination, ideas and innovation. Which, to cheekily try to coin a second term in this post, amounts to “the three I’s”.

Finally, he spoke of Niklas Zennström of Skype, described as deserving a medal and as a role-model for Sweden. Given the date of the talk, 2007,  the latest re-sale of Skype was not taken into account when he praised Zennström’s ability to earn 10 billion SEK (£100m)  and paid the resulting tax on it in Sweden, all within 18 months. He finished by saying that these are the Swedes we need leaving school, but unfortunately this is not the case.

The talk could be summed up in one line as follows:

To compete, we need permanent use of imagination, ideas and innovation for the continued development of our “newledge”-based economy.

What do you think? Are we standing idly by in the West as China and India seal deal after deal?

As far as I understand it, the “Semantic Web”, heralded by Tim Berners-Lee as the coming of Web 3.0, is about labelling everything. Because apparently the web as it stands is a big mess that somebody needs to clean up. All data on the global network will be tagged in a variety of ways, allowing computers to group relevant data sets in any way it or its operators see fit.

“The semantic web, bringing together AI and OCD.”

So what will this mean for the translation industry?

My initial thoughts are the quite obvious implications, but further discussion and consideration in this field is welcome; your comments and thoughts can be shared below.

Key impact 1 – Term research
This ought to see a massive improvement in efficiency, with relevant information rising to the top of any related search. Glossary, term and dictionary websites would do well to keep an eye on this in order to capitalise on improved data transparency.

Key impact 2 – Machine translation
This may be improved if the concepts are implemented, with full context being given to any multi-lingual text on the network, mistakes should occur less frequently. As a QA measure machines could also validate their own term selection decisions by comparing like for like texts and highlighting words and terms with lower certainties.

Key impact 3 – Buyers buying less
Companies who buy translation services may be able to search for similar templates of existing human translations, leading to a cost reduction for them on that front. Lower barriers to international business then perhaps increase demand for human-presence-required interpreting services. How private would any given translation be? Would we be forced to share our work when the client publishes online, and in so doing losing any chance of translating that kind of text again?

Key impact 4 – More work!
Translation of international tagging terms will need constant updating and indexing. This potentially represents a slew of new work; unless the process is automated, which is not wholly out of the question.

Opportunities may be plentiful in this evolution of the internet, as with the move towards applications and artificial intelligence. The best strategy may be to seek these out as existing translation services are potentially increasingly automated.

What are your thoughts?

To kick things off, who better to start with than French Silicon-Valley rockstar Loïc Le Meur. In just 4 years he has created a personal brand and company presence that doesn’t often come naturally to Europeans in SF. Not a shy guy, by any means, his face is plastered all over the web and largely in part due to his seismically-social networking service, Seesmic. Recently he has voiced his opinion on Twitter to a French techblog. He’s close to Twitter, in regular contact with the team and so his thoughts are particularly on the pulse. They are in French, so I took the liberty of putting some of them into English. Here’s a roundup of what he said:

- Twitter now want no competitors, as some Twitter clients compete with traffic (eyeballs!) and others with ads.

- Doesn’t affect us, and we’re kept in the loop – Ryan Sarver (Twitter Platform Manager) called me before sending the announcement email. Anything that enriches Twitter is welcome, anything competing is bad.

- Seesmic is becoming a tool for brand management – managing feedback over all social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Viadeo – 70 so far…)

- Seesmic has 1 million users, 400k active, with good growth (+10k per day), 1/3rd of whom are businesses – which we’ll now focus on. It’s difficult to pursue a strategy of end users and companies at the same time, so we’ve decided to focus on business. This helps us to not compete with Twitter, and have a clearer position and business model.

- Our free product will always be so, but the new business focused model will allow professionals to pay to get analytics. We’re remaining open with 70 plugins for Seesmic, made by companies themselves. They can be made in 2 weeks.

- Seesmic becomes a pro dashboard for engagement, lead generation. The new partnership with Salesforce helps this. Negative comments can be talked about internally. Companies can manage prospects via social networks.

- 10% of Seesmic users are in Japan. Euro-Director Cédric Giorgi now handles partnerships in Europe. He is someone Loïc admires.

- He also talked about ticket sales for LeWeb11 at 40% sold at present, so now is the time to sign up if you want to attend.

Here’s the original video:

Loic Le Meur, CEO de Seesmic from frenchweb on Vimeo.

A lot of this info is also summed up in this French press article.

Opinion

So what to make of all this? It seems as though Twitter is forcing the market to innovate and to develop its own revenue models rather than just hang from Twitter’s coat tails, parasite-like (in the nicest possible way). This can only be good for consumers, provided they don’t mind having their public thoughts scrutinised for marketing purposes.

The age-old argument of increased efficiency versus decreased privacy rears its ugly head again. Twitter could have perhaps embraced their client community and somehow worked alongside them, but the decision has been made. Time to see what comes of it.

Just what could it all mean? Is it really true that my success is premoderated?

(It’s an error displayed while browsing the Linkedin site…)

The machines are taking over

I could really do with getting up in the search results, but for some bizarre reason Google has placed 4 pages of free machine-translation sites ahead of me, including – for another unfathomable reason – their own Google Translate, which makes a galliant effort to be the best “get-the-gist” translation engine out there.

Revolution, the people rise against Skynet

Again, over-sensational, but we could cross-link to each others’ sites to boost our search engine rankings significantly. That’s what I propose, at least. If you don’t work in French to English, we could benefit from a bit of mutual cross-linking.

Anyone interested?

Myth 1 – Voice recognition makes too many mistakes to be worthwhile
I have used Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 for two years now and find the amount of mistakes made to be minimal. Those mistakes that appear over and over can be trained away. Common mistakes I find with my accent – a non-region-specific blend of Southern/Midlands UK with hints of other influences – would be “we’re” recognised as “were”, “for” (ie. he’d be there fuh three days) being missed by the software or names of people the software hasn’t heard before. These errors have been trained away in minutes though, and I always keep an eye out for them now, just in case. The software is set to recognise me as a British English speaking male. I have read the training texts for approximately one hour in total.

I don’t use the software on every translation I do as it often isn’t appropriate. VR software seems better suited to dialogue or magazine style texts than, for example, context-less software translations. As I translate comic books, this is where VR really comes into its own. The bottom line, as they say, is that my productivity increases.

Myth 2 – You need the latest computer to run VR software
My computer is a trusty Thinkpad T42 with 1GB of RAM and a 32GB HD. It can be slow. But not that slow, in that as stated above, productivity increases. Obviously a faster computer would make the process a lot more satisfying to work with, however, I have found that my low spec has presented no obstacles in this respect.

Myth 3 – Voice recognition software costs too much for too little return
The latest version of the Dragon software, version 10, (non-affiliate direct link, amazon.co.uk) is only £40 in the UK and $40 in the US. Reviews and descriptions say it does not require training, with over 99% accuracy out of the box. I haven’t tried it yet, but look forward to doing so. I’ll import all of the training I’ve accrued over the last few years at the same time.

I find this excellent value for money, given the speed increase involved.

Fact 1 – Working with others in the room is an issue
Switching the software to “Off” in order to talk to someone in the room can be impolite, as if you’re finishing a conversation that the other person wasn’t aware you were having. Also translating intimate scenes between cartoon characters can be slightly embarrassing, although perhaps I’m in the minority of translators having to deal with that particular issue. General unavailability to talk and being a distraction to others make VR an antisocial piece of software.

A word of advice – don’t leave the room with the VR software and TV/radio on at the same time, it’s not fair on your computer.

Fact 2 – Typical VR errors are hard to detect
Homophones, words that sound similar, are the standard errors with VR. These are figured out with the help of context in the VR software. For example, wants vs once. Which, incidentally, is the kind of error I start to make myself when tired. On a slight tangent, this has started me thinking and googling about words being stored as sounds rather than letters, with spellings being a guide and mnemonic for how to write out the sound, but I haven’t got very far with that research.

Homophones are harder to detect than typos. They aren’t picked up in spell-checkers and even proofreading them can be tricky at times. I proof read every sentence after settling on a translation, and then the whole text again in context. I do this anyway, when not using VR, but keeping an eye out for these specific errors is an additional requirement to consider.

Fact 3 – VR is fully compatible with CAT tools
Wherever you can input text on your computer, you can use VR. Wherever the cursor blinks, the text is entered. All punctuation must be pronounced. This can take some practice. The software can be set to punctuate automatically, but in my case I’d rather have control of that.

As translation requires a stop-go text input method, while our brains search the memory banks for fuzzy matches, the productivity increases would be less marked than if reading from a book into the software. However the speed gains are still present, especially in larger segments, and it is for this reason that I’d still recommend its use.

Examples online
Plenty of examples of typing performance increases can be found through Google et al., here’s the first one I saw, including a video: Typing vs VR. The author found an increase in speed from 73wpm to 126wpm and a reduction in errors. Although as stated in the comments and above, VR errors are of a different nature.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments section below.

PS Contrary to most voice recognition related blog posts, this one was not dictated with VR.

I’m actually just writing from your future, I’ve chosen this guy’s webpage to post to as he seems like he wouldn’t start running around claiming to be a “messiah” like that other guy did when I accidentally dialled in the wrong date. Seems to have caused a little confusion for you back there, but it’ll soon work out.

This all might seem a little unusual for you, dear reader, but it’s quite simple from here. I just fire up my retinal display, open a post page and start thinking out my message. Once done, I select the language I want - in this case English, British standard 2008 version – and the date I’d like to post to. See, science has recently discovered how to travel through time but only for sub-atomic and quantum sized particles. That led to some pretty interesting developments, this transtime mail for one, but I digress.

What I wanted to tell you about, not as a bleak apocalyptic message of destruction, but as a gentle warning to human translators, was that things are going to change quite soon and you may suddenly find a lot less work being sent your way. For translation, at least. Computing and technology are gradually changing your lifestyle in imperceptible stages at the moment, (your moment, that is) so small that the change is almost undetectable. But due to the lowering cost of computer components there will soon be a surge in people connected and trading globally. A critical mass of people requiring just-enough-to-understand translations will be reached in a short time and machine translation will be in vogue.

Human translators will gradually be replaced by proof-readers who check machine text as it comes onscreen. They are paid by the hour at a minimum wage. The job will require editing a stream of text as it is piped onscreen as fast as the proof-reader can go, the slowest readers being replaced daily in the online network of millions. But what about the people who need legal contracts or mission critical texts translating? How can they trust a machine? I hear you cry. Well, AI improvements and processing power have come a long way in a short time and you wouldn’t believe what wonders await you. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to retrain, but it may be better to start thinking about your future now. Concentrate on your writing skills because your potential market is about to grow like you wouldn’t believe.

Don’t be disheartened, make the most of the opportunities coming your way, harness the power of your imagination because you people are going to need it when the information exchange really begins.

P. Francberg,
EuroNation,
2047 AD
(4,540,000,0047 ABB)

“10%, far more British than European.”
20-something, UK

“More so since I’ve been living in France. Being British is being European. I can’t feel one without feeling the other.”
20-something, British ex-pat in France

“I guess not much really, more Italian, never thought of myself as European.”
20-something, Italian ex-pat in France

“25%.”
20-something, UK

Geographically speaking, it’s easy to identify with being European; culturally speaking, the lines begin to blur. As a euro-translator this question of identity is often the subject of conversation, especially in this last bastion of euro-scepticism that I call home.

Living in Europe, the label is inescapable by default. However, choosing to consciously identify with the continent in political and cultural terms is a leap that few of us in the UK dare or care to make. Our country of birth usually being enough for most to cling to. Some go as far as calling themselves, “citizens of the world,” which could be considered more appealing than, “subject of the Queen,” but when it comes to defending the cultures that we were raised in for the sake of future generations it makes more sense to choose and the obvious answer is the place where we spent our childhood.

The future of Europe would appear to be inexorably approaching a form of super-state to rival the major powers in economic terms. Obvious barriers to efficiency may be linguistic and cultural, but these will be eroded with time as external pressures force cooperation. This could force the emergence of one European representative language, working practice and legal system.

Whether or not this would even ever happen is up to chaos theory to decide, but individual European national identity is a thing of the past. In two generations you’ll have to pay – in Euros – for your EuroNation identity card.