Re: Language barrier and Machine translation

Hello Mingli:

  Thank you for such a good idea! It’s a meaningful topic we can communicate. We are planing to organize some web-related discussions and communications, the latest communications time will be confirmed at the F2F group meeting(after TPAC 2018). Hope you can join together.


Thanks!

Qingqian

Chinese Interest Group co-chair

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From: Mingli Yuan <mingli.yuan@gmail.com <mailto:mingli.yuan@gmail.com?Subject=Re%3A%20Language%20barrier%20and%20Machine%20translation&In-Reply-To=%3CCAGDRuAjLReDBbMxGTivErM8BBT-0c_MOw5B_WAHHeuA-75M_wQ%40mail.gmail.com%3E&References=%3CCAGDRuAjLReDBbMxGTivErM8BBT-0c_MOw5B_WAHHeuA-75M_wQ%40mail.gmail.com%3E>> 
First, let's congratulate the founding of this group. Web is an astonishing
and profound phenomena for decades and maybe the only one by standard of
time. But challenges had arosed these years and people are talking about
fading of the web.

* the closed-side of Facebook and Wechat vs. the openness of the Web
* debris of information flood on SNS vs. the ideal of a shared knowledge
base for human together.
* the echo chamber effect and polarized society
* the violated personal privacy vs. the collectors with wheel of fortune

These are quite old-fashioned discussion but are still far from a consensus
by the society. What I want to talk today is opportunities for an opened
web - the language barrier on content and machine translation.

In general, the language barrier is one basic barrier for our human being,
and W3C are fighting with it on all levels. On the other hand, the quality
machine translation are improved greatly these years and begin to become
usable in many scenarios, and gradually the translation technology and
related services become pervasive at least in US, Europe and China.

Is it possible to standardize a new Web technology to help content
providers, translation providers and browsers? Google Translation already
gives us one showcase how it is showed for normal people. We,
Caiyunapp.com, do have some practice experience on this in Caiyunapp.com,
but I don't want to talk too much on the technology side to make this email
lengthy, maybe further discussion can emerged in this thread.

It is relevant to the chinese-web-ig because:

1. Huge information flow on Web from English to Chinese, this reflect the
curiosity by nature which defend the openness.
2. Many translation vendors in China, and several vendors provide content
translation, for example Tencent and Caiyunapp
3. In case of translation, Chinese is an important language other than
English and many other indo-european languages.

Best,

Mingli