Debate between leaders from business and research on the question how near we are to the point in time that machines will be better at translating most content, often referred to as the singularity. Session host: Jaap van der Meer (TAUS) Presenters and panelists are: Marcello Federico (FBK Trento), Jean Senellart (SYSTRAN), Renato Beninatto (Moravia), Alex Waibel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Marco Trombetti (Translated).

1. The Future does not need Translators. Or does it?
How near are we to the point in time that machines will be better at translating
most content?
• The point is already there:
Machines are translating today
probably around 100 times what
human translators are doing.
• “Super-Human” machine
abilities
• Proven in Vision
• Proven in Speech Recognition for
very specific tasks
• Proven by DeepMind in for the
Game of Go
• Needed creativity, strategy, overall
situation analysis
• Why not for “translation”?

2. Human translators vs. or w/ Machine
Project
Analysis
Project
Planning &
Evaluation
Project
Execution
Project
Monitoring
Project
Finalization
Translation or Post-Editing
Editing/Reviewing
Proofreading
DTP

3. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibilities
New opportunities coming from deep learning
• From Translation to Post-edit to automatic Post-editing of Human
Translation
• Translation Assistant
• From Machine Translation to Transcreation
• Through concept of “thought vector”
• For even more advanced use that we can not even anticipate