News

At the AMTA 2010 conference, to be held October 31—November 5, 2010 in Denver, Colorado, the EuroMatrix+ Project and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation are organising the Second Joint EM+/CNGL Workshop, titled “Bringing MT to the User: Research on Integrating MT in the Translation Industry”. The workshop will take place in Denver, Colorado on 4 November 2010, immediately after the main AMTA 2010 conference.

Recent years have seen a revolution in MT triggered by the emergence of statistical approaches to MT and improvements in translation quality. MT (rule-based, statistical and hybrid) is now available for many languages for free on the Web and is making strong inroads into the corporate localisation and translation industries. Open-source MT solutions are competing with proprietary products. Increasing numbers of translators are post-editing TM/MT output. At the same time, there has been some disconnect between academic research on MT, which (rightly so) focuses on algorithms to increase translation quality, and many of the practical issues that need to be addressed to make MT maximally useful in real translation and localisation scenarios.

This workshop will bring together MT researchers, developers, industrial users and translators to discuss issues that are most important in real world industrial settings involving MT, but currently not very popular in research circles.

Workshop Chairs:
Ventsislav Zhechev
Philipp Koehn
Josef van Genabith

For the Call for Papers for the workshop and additional details please visit http://web.me.com/emcnglworkshop/JEC2010/Home.html

The top four individuals from the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (Emma Carrigan, Cormac Manning, Ellen Cameron and Imogen Grumley Traynor) are all set for go to Stockholm on Monday morning to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad.

The students will take part in the individual round on Tuesday, which consists of 5 questions over 6 hours. On Wednesday they will get a chance to see a bit of Stockholm, with visits to outdoor museums planned. They will take part in the team competition on Thursday and the results will be announced on Friday.

Good luck guys!

Irish translation company, Cipherion Translations offers “Best Thesis” prize to translation students in DCU’s School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS).
<!--break-->
Cipherion Translations, an Irish company specialising in translating software, websites and marketing materials into as many as 40 languages, is offering a prize of €750 to the best final year B.A. or M.A. thesis on a topic related to the translation industry. Every year, several students of translation studies undertake research on topics related to the business of translation or translation technology. Theses will be judged by Cipherion’s COO (María Jesús de Arriba Díaz), who has a background in translation studies from the University of Salamanca in Spain, and who has over 10 years’ experience within the business of translation.

Criteria such as innovativeness, creativity and relevance to the SME sector will be considered as part of the evaluation. The aim is to encourage students to apply the theoretical and practical knowledge they gain in their studies in research that is relevant to the business of translation.

Referring to the importance of DCU’s School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies and its graduates, María Jesús de Arriba Díaz, COO of Cipherion Translations adds “We have hired graduates directly from SALIS into our project management team and always found that they are of the highest calibre. They have always had a good knowledge of the theoretical aspects of translation as well as an ability to apply their theory in the real world of translation and localization.”

Read the full press release here.

CNGL signs Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

DCU, on behalf of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), has signed a Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT) in Tokyo.

Professor Josef van Genabith, Director of the CNGL at DCU’s School of Computing, led the CNGL delegation which included Dr. Páraic Sheridan, CNGL Operations Director, Mr. Richard Stokes, CEO of DCU INVENT and Mr. Takeshi Fukunaga head of the Global Meta Media Division of Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), an industrial partner of CNGL based in Tokyo. This Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with NICT is part of CNGL’s strategic objective to strengthen relationships with international partners and to develop new opportunities for research collaboration in areas underpinning Next Generation Localisation.

Prof. van Genabith said, “We are particularly pleased to sign this agreement to deepen the relationship between Ireland and Japan in the research and development of computing technologies in areas such as language, speech, and digital content personalisation which are becoming increasingly important.”

Some of the potential in these areas was demonstrated at the signing ceremony where Prof. Eiichiro Sumita, head of the Language Translation Group at NICT’s Knowledge Creating Communication Research Centre, demonstrated an iPhone application which allows people to speak tourism-related questions or answers into the phone in English and have those automatically translated into Japanese (or vice versa) and then spoken through speech synthesis from the phone. The NICT attendees also showed particular interest in details of the CNGL ‘Twanslate’ application that is currently being used to stream automatic real-time translations of online Twitter messages related to the World Cup tournament.

The strategic importance of the relationship between Ireland and Japan in these areas was further highlighted at the signing ceremony by Mr. Fukunaga of DNP who stressed the commercial potential of multilingual and personalised digital content delivery technologies and pointed to the unique industry-facing nature of CNGL and the scope of the research programme enabled by the Irish government’s investment through Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). “Dai Nippon Printing has been actively engaged in the process for commercialising research outputs of CNGL and sees great opportunity to build on Ireland’s leadership position in the localisation industry and take advantage of business opportunities with DNP and other Japanese companies seeking to adapt new media products and services from Japanese to English and European languages”, Mr. Fukunaga said.

The Sunday Times interviewed Prof. Andy Way and Dr. Declan Dagger about the CNGL / CLARITY The Twanslator:World Cup 2010 project.

The Twanslator:World Cup 2010 project forms part of the CNGL efforts into personalised multilingual social networking (codenamed ‘myisle’). Headed up by Prof. Vincent Wade (Deputy Director & Track Leader for Digital Content Management - TCD) and Dr. Declan Dagger (Postdoctoral researcher in Digital Content Management - TCD) ‘myisle’ seeks to enable the “right time web” by applying CNGL research and technologies to create personalised and localised web experiences on the fly. This specific work on the Twanslator:World Cup 2010 project is being coordinated by Prof. Andy Way (Track leader for Integrated Language Technologies / Machine Translation - DCU), Dr Declan Dagger and CNGL researchers are collaborating with researchers from the CLARITY research centre on aspects of the project.

Twanslator WC 2010 is an attempt to filter the information streams on Twitter during the world cup into a number of different languages and overlay sentiment analysis techniques to create match summaries.

You can view the front-page article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7144941.ece

On Tuesday, 1st June 2010, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Batt O’Keeffe TD announced that Straker, an emerging leader in the field of web localisation, is to establish its European Headquarters and Customer Support Hub in Tralee, with the creation of 25 high-value jobs. The investment is supported by the Irish Government with the aid of IDA Ireland.

David Sowerby Director, Straker Europe, said, ‘We looked at a number of options for our European headquarters, but with Ireland widely recognised as the centre for Localisation globally it was one of the first locations we considered. Export driven growth is a major focus for most organizations in the new economic climate and with the Internet forming the major launching point for entry into new markets the demand for our technology and translation services is increasing rapidly. The combined factors of a readily available and skilled workforce and access to the talent pool and research capability at the Institute of Technology made the Southwest a good area for servicing our increasingly global customer base.'

You can read the IDA Press Release here.

The 1st International XLIFF Symposium will take place in Limerick on 22nd September 2010. This event will be the main pre-conference activity for the 15th Annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference organised by the LRC.

We are very happy that Bryan Schnabel (Chair of the XLIFF Technical Committee) will be the keynote speaker.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together specialists, tools providers, developers, TC members and researchers to discuss and share their experience with XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format). New trends will be presented, implementation cases will be demonstrated, and the future of XLIFF and its new version 2.0 will be discussed. More information: Symposium Website

Startup Weekend Dublin is a 54-hour startup event that provides the networking, resources, and incentives for individuals and teams to go from idea to launch. The event starts on Friday 7th May at 5.30pm. The event is being held in the National Digital Research Centre in Dublin.

The event targets entrepreneurs in the local community and puts them in a setting where anything is possible. In the past 2 years, 250+ startups have started, 9,000+ entrepreneurs have been inspired, some teams have even started to generate revenue during the 54hr event.

For more information, check out the Startup Weekend Dublin Website.