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Translation: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Duration:
3 minutes and 22 seconds
Year: 2010
Country:
Netherlands
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
TAUS/TAUS Data Association
Views:
4,095
(526
embedded)
Posted by:
translationautomation on Feb 8, 2010
Translation has always been about sharing. We take this to a new level by providing a way for everyone to benefit from our collective investments - previous translations - to improve translation automaton, to free translators from monotony, to help the world communicate better. Visit http://www.translationautomation.com and http://www.tausdata.org for more information.
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Video Transcription
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- In the beginning was the Tower of Babel.
- The usual story says it was man’s attempt to compete with the gods.
- But what those Babylonians really did
- was build the largest silo of translations in the known world.
- Yes, they were trying to reach the clouds.
- But the tower was so tall and heavy with the weight of translations
- that it collapsed on top of them.
- The translators escaped, and spread out all over the world.
- in search of more effective tools.
- For example, translators need good memories.
- The more they work, the greater the stock of translations others can learn from.
- The Rosetta Stone dates back to the 2nd century.
- With its three versions of the same underlying text,
- it’s one of the finest examples of a parallel corpus or translation memory.
- Give translators parallel data, and they can move the world.
- But they need proper training data.
- In 9th century Bagdad, for example,
- Arabic was a new target language for a huge job of translating scientific and medical content
- from Greek and Syriak.
- Caliph Al-Mamūn built the House of Wisdom to train a translator base,
- establish terminology, and control translation quality.
- The right skills flourish best with proper infrastructure and good tools.
- After millennia of laborious copying,
- moveable print technology was introduced in the 15th century.
- It killed off Latin, and created the first multilingual publishing industry.
- 500 years before, block-printing had been used in Asia
- to print the Chinese translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka.
- In Europe, Luther’s German translation of the Bible
- was one of the first great print runs in history.
- But the explosion of knowledge through printed translation
- started worrying 17th century Europeans.
- So many languages, but where’s the truth?
- John Wilkins, Leibniz and others tried to develop a single logical language,
- a shared interlingua for scientific communication.
- But back in the real world, the translation workload kept growing...
- Dominant languages like Latin, Chinese, or English tend to crush minority tongues.
- Smaller language communities constantly fight back, and language wars are a fact of life.
- In the late 19th century
- Zamenhof invented Esperanto, a mash up auxiliary language for peace and progress.
- A noble dream, but languages are rooted in locale.
- Translators are always the spearhead of local responses to globalizing ambitions.
- But they need better tools.
- The electronic computer arrived in the 1950s,
- not just a number cruncher but a symbol processor.
- It promised software solutions to almost every translation automation problem.
- Translators could finally use machines to do the heavy lifting.
- We now live in a new world of instant global communications.
- Translation is a daily necessity,
- and we can use innovative information technology to leverage language data.
- But first we must share, build and experiment together.
- TAUS is here to help build a new Babel in the cloud,
- to ensure that business and society communicate better
- and solve the language problems that confront us all.


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