We decided to do something cool for our presentation at the ATA in November — Quality Still Doesn’t Matter. That presentation was to focus on topics that should really matter to translators and LSPs, such as productivity, new technologies, sales, cost per word, and so on — so we decided to start with a video subtitled in dotSUB.

• dotSUB lets you to upload your video, transcribe and subtitle very fast. We wrote about it in the Global Watchtower over a year ago.

• Add to that October’s news about Google abandoning SYSTRAN and starting to use its own statistical machine translation (SMT) instead.

We played with it a little bit by writing some text in Portuguese and having it translated into English at several OLMT sites, including Google, PROMT, SDL, and SYSTRAN. We were all pleasantly surprised with the quality of the translation into English. That’s when we decided to really play with Google Translate and dotSUB.Here is what we did:

1. Wrote a script in Portuguese.
2. Had it translated into English with Google Translate.
3. Read the script to a webcam.
4. Pasted the Portuguese text into dotSUB.
5. Pasted the English transaltion into dotSUB.

All of this took about 10 minutes to do — really! Then we decided to have some fun. We edited the English translation a little bit and used Google Translate to go from English into Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

We found that the quality of the translation was much better than expected. Renato could judge Spanish, French, and Italian by himself. A couple of Russophones at Common Sense Advisory checked out the Russian. To be honest, we haven’t verified the Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese (we’re sure somebody will let us know how good or bad it is. Here’s a hint: Just look for where we visually pasted the subtitles and you’ll probably see some broken words).

Check it out for yourself. Try changing the languages using the small arrows in the bottom right corner of the video.

What we said at the ATA presentation was that if translators that are not using Google to pre-process their jobs today, they are doing too much work. MT is here to stay. As Common Sense Advisory has predicted for years, automated translation will be the disruptive player in the language services market.

Look out for mash-ups of translation memory technologies with Google from Elanex, XML-Intl, Proz.com, and other suppliers. We can now see huge projects incorporating all these new technologies: a Ning portal for discussion and training, Google Translate for preprocessing translations, a shared translation memory repository from LingoTek, a wiki in wikidot.com for editing the translations in a collaborative way.

What we have found so interesting is that these are all free technologies that let a company manage a huge project much more efficiently than using the translation tools of today, most of which have their origins in the 1980s. All of these activities could be managed in ]Project Open[, while the sales process might have been tracked in FreeCRM or SugarCRM. Some will incorporate enterprise-wide technologies from commercial suppliers like Clay Tablet, Idiom, and SDL to integrate these free components with corporate data and content repositories.

Smart translation agencies — but just as likely, early adopters outside the current LSP mainstream — will meld these technologies into a powerful new solution for globalizing websites, documentation, and marketing materials in whatever form they show up — online, paper, broadcast, audio, and video. Translators of the world, start up your browsers!