The Journalist’s Perspective by Lane Greene
Insiders or outsiders “If I’d asked said ‘a faster
people what they wanted, they’d have horse’.”
The
Henry Ford is a staple of tech-themed conference talks, the kind where “disruptive” is on every tongue. It’s intended, with more than a bit of smugness, to show just how head-in-sand, inside-the-box and, well, not “disruptive” some other people are. A faster horse, indeed. quote from
Ford himself, then, might have been surprised that, a century later, the industry he built has delivered – what, exactly? Nothing more than faster cars with internal-combustion engines. Slow progress in electric and hydrogenpowered cars, and a century of dreaming of personal flight, hyperspace or teleportation (think The Jetsons, Star Wars or Star Trek) later, the majority of rich-world people wake up in the morning and turn the key in a petrolfueled car to go to work. What if the best technology has already arrived? People like their petrol cars. It is hardly the only technology that persists against apparently long odds. Despite the fact that everyone in the rich world has a smartphone with a big, sharp, contrasty screen in their pocket at all times, most people still prefer to read longer things improbably printed on dried sheets of pulped tree, a technology little improved since the Han Dynasty.
What if the best technology has already arrived?
So the question of where innovation in the language industry will come from is an open one. Will innovation be gradual, or sudden? Will it come from a company that already exists today, or from one yet to be founded? Will it come from someone who dreams in Portuguese, Dutch and Persian, or someone who dreams in Perl, Ruby and C++? (Or, as the title of a recent New York Times Magazine article put it, “is translation an art problem or a math problem?”) Finally, will the
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disruption come in translation itself—or in the business models of its providers? This is the view of an outsider. In a recent article in The Economist, I tried to tackle the same subject, but by the time I had explained the shape of the language industry today, for the benefit of a nonspecialist audience, I hardly had space left to speculate about tomorrow. Herewith, some more detail. Will innovation be gradual or sudden? On the language technologies themselves, especially machine translation, the improvement of late has been gradual—and looks as though it may even be plateauing. In my last column, I reported that MacDuff Hughes, the head of engineering at Google Translate, confessed that he did not expect more data to improve his engine’s performance. At this point, the next jump forward in quality looks likely to be more sudden
Will the disruption come in translation itself—or in the business models of its providers?