Keith Laska, CEO of SDL, has recently published a self-serving, jargon-filled post on SDL's community blog.
His claim is not all that novel: that there is so much content to translate now, that MT must be part of the equation. He then goes out on a limb with some unsubstantiated claims about how MT has become so much better, in recent years (can you spot the logical fallacy in a statement like "As for MT quality concerns: the machine translation quality debate is dead. Over 75% of our language markets report the use - or pending use - of some form of machine translation solution."? - a hint: "use" or "pending use" are not the same as "successful use", and stating, without a shred of evidence, that the MT debate is over doesn't mean that it is).
But my question is another: is there a special secret pact between CEOs that requires them to spew such corporate drivel as "value is now at the critical intersection between machines and humans"? Is that sentence supposed to mean something, or is it there just to give the impression that it carries some momentous meaning? Am I alone in thinking that "thought leadership", in "to drive high-quality, secure MT improvements, innovation and thought leadership" sounds creepy?
Keith, if you do have some good MT product or strategy, write your post again, in a way that does not make the reader think that your product or service is so poor you have to hide it in a fog of jargon lest your prospects realize how hollow the vaunted MT progress actually is.
Speaking as an SDL customer, in fact, I have a suggestion: why don't you redirect some of the efforts you are spending on pushing MT onto the unwary, and instead concentrate on actually improving those products of yours that we human translators use every day? A hint: starting with long overdue improvements to fuzzy-matching algorithms would be a good idea.
You know, translatios sometimes can be very difficult thing..and i definately agree with the last paragraph.
ReplyDeleteAs somebody who spent some years with the SDL MT technology I can also say that their MT technology has very poor acceptance with LSPs or any customer who care about MT output quality.
ReplyDeleteTheir success has been limited mostly to US government where gisting is good enough and even there Google does better but for many government applications use behind a firewall is critcial.
Asia Online has picked up several former SDL accounts because of their poor MT output quality that simply cannot be improved.
" "value is now at the critical intersection between machines and humans"? Is that sentence supposed to mean something, or is it there just to give the impression that it carries some momentous meaning? Am I alone in thinking that "thought leadership", in "to drive high-quality, secure MT improvements, innovation and thought leadership" sounds creepy?"
ReplyDeleteNo, in fact I find such obfuscations fun to translate, and a challenge to find even creativer fud-duddy equivalents in the target language.