ESTeam

In a recent Forbes Technology article, council member Joao Graca states that Language Operations should be the new paradigm in globalization. He hits the nail on the head by saying that serving global markets is no longer about broadcasting translated content, but rather enabling businesses to communicate with stakeholders no matter what language they speak. LangOps is an enterprise function formed of cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams which efficiently operationalize the management of textual data. Neural machine translation (NMT) and multilingual knowledge management are indispensable tools to win, understand, and support global customers.

Semantix and its long-term partner ESTeam have been awarded the EU Commission’s call for tender GROW/2020/OP/0002. The service contract represents a total value of 34 MEUR and is one of the largest in Europe. Semantix is the leading language company in the Nordics, currently ranking #13 worldwide. ESTeam is a tech company known for innovative NLP, knowledge management, and multilingual data solutions. Further a significant partner for the collaboration will be Summa Linguae.

For decades Computer Assisted Translation based on translation memories has been the standard tool for going global. Although CAT had been originally designed with a mid-90s PC in mind and there have been proposals for changing the underlying data model, the basic architecture of CAT has been left unchanged. The dramatic advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have now made the whole product category obsolete.

On March 22-24 the DTT Symposion (short DTT) took place again in Mannheim. It is the bi-annual meeting of the German Terminology Association (Deutscher Terminologietag). We were exhibiting and I enjoyed talking to many Coreon customers there. It was a truly exciting event this year and according to the organizers the most busy ever. 200+ participants meant house full!

The biggest challenge for widespread adoption of the Internet of Things is interoperability. A much-noticed McKinsey report states that achieving interoperability in IoT would unlock an additional 40% of value. This is not surprising since the IoT is in essence about connecting machines, devices, and sensors – ideally cross organization, cross industries, and even cross borders. But while technical and syntactic interoperability are pretty much solved, little has been available so far to make sure devices actually understand each other.

On 3 – 5 March the 15th DTT Symposion took place in Mannheim. With approximately 160 participants this bi-annual event is probably the largest German speaking conference on terminology. In an exhibition hall several tools and services providers including Coreon presented their offerings. The focus theme of this year's event was "Terminology and Culture". I had slight worries before the conference whether it will be too theoretic, with many "dry" lectures and without practical impact. But no – I was positively surprised by the opposite: Many presentations, particularly during the two afternoon sessions, made the bridge from the humanities research to best practices in daily life.

Last November 150 experts and I from all across the world attended the NATO Terminology Conference. The event took place at the campus of the NATO headquarters in Brussels, hosted by the NATO Standardization Office (NSO).

Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Chairman of LT Innovate, foresees a major disruption in the Localisation Industry in the near future — one that will elevate the question of multilingual data from translation processes to a C-level concern. How can Language Technology leverage Big Data and transform the industry? Within this framework, Hummel introduces this quarter's issue of the GALAxy newsletter and invites readers to engage in this brave new world.