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Emerging trends in localization?... Multimedia!
Apart from the recurrent video game localization round table, LocWorld had never had more than one session on audio/video. This year was the great leap forward: one round table on game localization, a session on entertainment - cartoon and game localization at Warner Brothers, a panel on multilingual audio recordings, and a session on localization of video podcasts. There was a good mix of LSPs, studios, corporate buyers and entertainment buyers.
Perhaps not enough connecting the dots, but definitely a great improvement over previous years. In addition to that, a clear increase in mentions of multimedia at various sessions, from Cisco to Microsoft, and again Microsoft. Audio and video are now clearly components of localization in many people’s mind, not just a by product.
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Most inspiring technology for multimedia? Speech to Speech!
Salim Roukos, senior manager and chief technology officer for translation technologies at IBM, knows how to keep an audience awake. The video samples he showed “by mistake” included lightly clad female dancers, and car collisions with teen passer bys… But what got us the most excited was IBM’s experimentations in not only instant machine translation, but also speech to text, text to speech, and… yes: speech to speech. By combining automated transcription, machine translation, and text to speech, IBM seems to be getting close to automated interpretation…. We’ll get in touch with Salim on what kind of quality is achievable, but from our experience of these different technologies, the limiting factor be at the transcription stage, unless the source audio is very good.
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