Background

In 1990, I completed my MA study on "The Future Translation Organization: Information Technology and the Challenge of Machine Translation" at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The research was based on my experience of working as a translator (Japanese/ English) and my interest in the increasing impact on the translation industry of IT and the growing possibilities offered by MT. An array of electronic tools for translators was becoming available, including multilingual word-processing for non ASCII-based Asian languages. It is interesting to note that LISA was also established in 1990.

A number of on-line services such as terminology and other database searches were available then in New Zealand, but were not generally being used by translation companies here. The reason? They were too expensive. The clients of these services were mainly libraries and law firms. Meanwhile, on-line MT services were being offered in other countries such as one by Minitel in France, using Systran. Any serious use of computer networks by the translation industry appeared to be just emerging. On the New Zealand scene, translation operators were beginning to make rudimentary use of modems to transmit text, but facsimile technology was making the most impact on the industry, transforming metropolitan-based translation services into nationwide and gradually international services. In fact, the fax medium itself began to create new demand for translation as business in general started to use fax for international communications with messages written in a multitude of languages. Formerly geographically challenged NZ translators were now able to accept jobs from overseas, also taking advantage of the country's time zone in some cases (we are 12 hours ahead of the UK and Western Europe).

Considering that the travel industry, an early technology adopter, had implemented on-line real-time industry-wide data communications services as early as the mid-1960s, the use of on-line networks by the translation industry in New Zealand and many other countries lagged well over two decades. And yet the nature of the language business is well suited to employ both synchronous and asynchronous electronic communications. Affinity between language services and telecommunications didn't become obvious, however, until into the 1990s. This was partly due to the fact that the translation industry hadn't been an IT-astute sector and also that it tended to be a modest business sector in terms of per unit return, making technology investments generally low. Fortunately, New Zealand had a sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure and good services in place owing to the government's deregulatory policies. The proposition: "why not marry a language service to telecommunications?" therefore sounded right. My proposal to conduct the research on telecommunications-based worldwide language services won grants from two telecommunications organizations in NZ in 1992. The book was the outcome of this research.

The Concept of Teletranslation

The research grants allowed me to travel to Europe, the UK, the US, and Japan, visiting translation organizations, telephone companies offering language services and MT developers, and related research institutes. After the trip I was convinced of the affinity between language services and telecommunications. The former was an ideal candidate to be rendered into digital formats, while the latter constantly trespassed linguistic and cultural barriers, carrying spoken and written words, inadvertently highlighting language-imposed communication gaps. The digital information highway appeared to create both the demand for and the solution to language services.

The use of telecommunications soon made the location of translators and their customers largely irrelevant. This meant translators could telework while customers could choose to have work done by far-flung service providers as long as there was an efficient communications link and, of course, the price was right. The business of translation services has been critically reliant on the input of human experts in most cases and will remain so during the foreseeable future. This is why I describe the task of translation as "knowledge-intensive work which precludes easy automation and requires the expertise of well-trained professionals". Having said that, however, the industry is urged to respond to changing translation needs, much of which come from the advanced communications infrastructure made up of fast computers and telecommunications.

The beauty of a worldwide network such as the Internet is primarily its power to connect "human knowledge" to where it's needed and when it's needed at a reasonable cost. This is the basic thinking behind the concept of "teletranslation". I coined the term to mean "a service that uses telecommunications to optimize the use of language resources in order to provide translation of the written and spoken word." Teletranslation uses telecommunications links to connect human translators in a timely and affordable manner to customers.

Within this framework, I advocated the use of MT where applicable along with other IT tools to enhance translation productivity and to meet increasingly demanding customer requirements for shorter time frames and lower costs while maintaining quality. In 1993, I was present at ATR Interpreting Telephony Research Laboratory for its public experiment on a fully automated telephone interpreting system. The computer managed to interpret without human intervention a telephone conversation between Japanese and German callers, each of whom spoke on a predetermined topic in his native language.

This experiment demonstrated the technological possibilities in the field of voice recognition/synthesis and their linkage into MT to translate very simple spoken sentences from one language into another in real time. This experience in some ways confirmed how valuable and difficult is the task of interpreting as done by human experts, yet at the same time it demonstrated how well the computer can simulate that task under certain limited conditions. The indications were that these MT services would have an increasing role to play in a wide variety of communication needs which are developing. Teletranslation operators should make themselves familiar with the state of the art MT technology available.

Despite the rather glamorous appeal of MT and the leading-edge Internet environment, however, I see teletranslation as encompassing a much wider range of IT tools and communications services such as 3-way conference calls, voice mail, international "800" freephone services, etc. While these have attracted the business community, the translation industry appears to be hesitant in employing them. For this reason, I go into some detail in the book to describe some telecommunications services and their applicability to the translation industry and to a teletranslation service. The book stresses the increasing importance of the strategic use of telecommunications and IT tools for translation operators looking into the future by explaining where language service demand is coming from, what is needed to meet such demands and what relevant technologies are available and may become available in future.

Teletranslation and the Family of Teleservices

During 1995, the exponential growth of the Internet and the Web in particular made it difficult for me to finish the book, for every day seemed to bring news of innovative translation applications. Internet newsgroups and forums for translation-related topics were becoming widely accessed by technology-minded translators. For Asian language translators, a complicated issue of transmitting double-byte characters over the telephone lines now seem to be fully explored, which is not to say there are no problems remaining. Sending an e-mail message in Japanese is still much less straightforward than in English!

Overall the Internet not only proved functional in ASCII-based languages but also capable of accommodating non-ASCII ones. This makes it global both in its nature and capability. Once out-of-reach on-line resources are far more readily available to the translation industry. This year I started to witness bilingual Web pages, WebMT and the development of a number of global-scale teletranslation firms such as Alpnet.

A large volume of communications is now taking place in cyberspace, in turn creating a wide variety of services. In other words, as our "virtual world" expands, a family of "teleservices" - including "teletranslation" - is growing. For example, Victoria University has a pioneer authority on the "virtual class" which is transforming traditional classrooms into teleclasses; telemedicine is being trialled and used in many parts of the world, and telebanking is well established. The Internet and Web infrastructure is providing cosy and dynamic accommodation for these teleservices.

One of the implications of the growth of global-scale teleservices, however, is their need for language and culture translation assistance. This is precisely because they are targeting global markets where huge linguistic and cultural barriers exist. This explains the surging popularity since 1995 of WebMT products in Japan to enable monolingual Japanese Net surfers to "decode" English Web pages into Japanese in real-time. If you are a company introducing your services on the Web, targeting at the world market, you must be aware of this implication. In my view, the strength of teletranslation lies in the fact that it can be an essential support service to any of these family of teleservices. The translation industry now has to be functional not only face-to-face but also in these rapidly expanding virtual environments.

The Future of Teletranslation

"…Mr. Tanaka asks his broadband ISDN terminal to connect him to his New Zealand area manager, Mr. Hone...Within seconds, super-intelligent network systems in Japan and New Zealand locate the Kiwi businessman en-route to Auckland aboard a domestic flight, and arranges a connection to the audiovisual terminal in the seat armrest, into which Hone had inserted his personal identity card at the beginning of the flight. Knowing his Japanese is not up to conducting serious business discussions, after exchanging a few words of greeting Hone asks his caller to stand by a moment. Punching a few digits into the terminal, he requests the services of a teleinterpreter, selecting 'high-level assistance' as accuracy is of paramount importance. From its resource database of several hundred interpreters multi-national teletranslation company Babeltel selects Yuriko in Wellington to do the job, and links her terminal into the conversation. She immediately ceases her keyboarding work, dons headphones and signals she is ready to go. In less than half a minute Tanaka is listening to Yuriko, electronically modulated to a male voice, giving Hone's enthusiastic report of the latest room occupancy figures, all in immaculate Japanese..." (from the Epilogue to The Coming Industry of Teletranslation).

This is a scenario of how a teletranslation service may be provided in the future. In fact, the picture is already half reality. Voice recognition is beginning to be incorporated into telephone-based services while various smart cards and personal audiovisual terminals at airline seats are a common sight. Mobile phones in combination with a powerful laptop PC allow connections to the Internet while the user is on move. All that's needed to complete the picture is an integrated water-tight teletranslation service. The success of an Internet browser such as Netscape lies in its close "fit" into the Internet structure. What we now need is a version of teletranslation which fits snugly into our communications infrastructure, including the Internet and the Web.

The development of teletranslation involves a detailed study of customer needs for a wide range of language services together with applications of MT and other IT tools and how the communications infrastructure is developing. This may be an unprecedented opportunity for the translation industry to not only catch up but leap into the 21st century by adopting the new global communications environment. Now is the time to gear up for teletranslation!

The Coming Industry of Teletranslation: Overcoming Communication Barriers through Telecommunication, M. O'Hagan, 1996, Multilingual Matters Ltd., UK. Available from the publisher (Fax: +44-1275-343096/ multi@multi.demon.co.uk), and from http://www.amazon.com. (cyberbookstore). 117 pp. Price: £9.95