Review of language business & technologies in Asia by Mike Tian-Jian Jiang
Translation innovations that are leading the change and may help us surviving the change Innovation is uneasy when it comes to differentiation. There are many different kinds of innovations, ranging
from
improved
customer
satisfaction
to
invented market demands, and in terms of the recent trend, the
“disruptive”
kind is the most welcomed
innovation.
By decorating an adjective “disruptive”, however, doesn’t really weigh clearer degrees on the spectrum of innovation, hence it is common to transform the question to the degree of inefficiency: how efficient is the target market1? Here we adapt this viewpoint for the market of translation, and then try to identify certain disruptive innovations that might be game-changers, in particular two factors of inefficiencies: human-resource and software ability. Inefficient supply-demand match making Crowd-sourcing translation services has been quite popular in the recent couple of years. On one hand, crowd translation indeed increased supply, and potentially decreased the price. On the other hand, the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers remains almost the same. Customers may still find it difficult to locate the best translator who will yield the expected outcome, and vice versa.
What if a match making can be done systematically and semiautomatically?
While it is a general question to most businesses, translation can be even tougher when the work of conduct requires further “translation”. Typical tactics to tackle this problem include categorizing source texts, relying on translators’ reputations, assuring quality by post-editing and/or proofreading, etc. 1 https://medium.com/@moonstorming/whyinefficiency-is-needed-for-an-innovation-to-be-disruptive8994845b09d9
8
What if a match making can be done systematically and semi-automatically? That is one of the questions DuoLingo is trying to answer. Luis von Ahn, the creator of reCAPTCHA, started DuoLingo. According to the very first sentence of its Wikipedia page, DuoLingo is “a free language-learning and crowdsourced text translation platform.” To comprehend how language-learning and crowd translation align, it might be easier when we first understand how reCAPTCHA works. Like the original CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA asks web surfers to type words shown in images, to prevent bots accessing restricted web pages. Unlike CAPTCHA, r e C A P T C H A presents two sets of word images. One of which the answer is known in the system and another is not yet “translated”. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) doesn’t work on images like this. The idea is to utilize the wasted human effort on entering CAPTCHA, so the entered
reCAPTCHA eases the pain of normal validation that is usually laborintensive.