Global Authoring, Crowdsourcing, Terminology and Machine Translation in Prague….and beer, of course

The awe-inspiring and enchanting city provided the backdrop to some heated debates on the ever-growing importance of machine translation, its impact on traditional localization practices and how quality is the key to success. I particularly liked Gordon Husbands’ dramatic stance in his assumed role of anti-machine translation on Tuesday’s session on ‘The Risks and Rewards of Machine Translation’. His address to the audience as “Comrades!” encouraged us all to sit up and listen.

Another of the ‘takeaway’ themes from the conference was community translation and crowdsourcing. Don DePalma hosted a fascinating plenary session with our own Sophie Hurst on the panel with contributors from Sun Microsystems and SAP. Sophie’s ‘in favour’ stance made the case for community translation being achievable and successful with the growth of social media and the building of communities on the web. She also made clear that community translation or crowdsourced translation cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution – only certain types of content and certain situations lends themselves well to such a solution. You can see Sophie’s presentation below:

All the debate and discussions made for thirsty work. Luckily, we were in the beer capital of the world and our friends at CEET were offering it for free at their booth, along with a delicious slice of apple strudel. Wonderful!

Thanks to all the folk at GALA for a great event in a great city.