I recently attended the Association of Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) conference in Boston, where TransPerfect demonstrated how the GlobalLink suite of products works with machine translation. Aside from the demo, I also served as a session chair and presented TransPerfect’s approach to improving neural machine translation with artificial intelligence—particularly supervised and unsupervised learning. With hundreds of MT researchers, developers, and users under one roof, there was no shortage of information to go around. Here are a few of my personal takeaways from the event.

Neural machine translation is getting all the hype, but experts are already realizing that significant linguistic information still needs to be added to the machine learning frameworks before it can fully achieve human parity. Examples of such shortcomings are tag positioning, terminology enforcement, and prevention of hallucinations, just to name a few.

Our approach to machine translation is unique. Not to toot our own horn, but the way that TransPerfect utilizes technology, people, and processes to achieve the best ROI for a machine translation program is unique among our peers. We control and own the MT technology, train our people and translators to outperform competition, and handle MT as a standardized process. Our application of artificial intelligence (AI) across our technologies provides sustainable competitive advantages to our clients.

The best is yet to come. Artificial intelligence is here to stay and it will transform how we do, well, everything. Companies that will become leaders in their field will need to combine the best people with the best AI to optimize costs, quality, turnaround times, and human interaction.

The AMTA conference had a lot to offer, and I learned a great deal about the future of machine translation—not only from tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but also from small companies with bright solutions and academia leaders.

By heavily investing in our own deep learning technologies, TransPerfect has been at the forefront of machine translation, and we will continue to blaze this trail into the exciting new age of artificial intelligence. For more information, or to hear more about our presentation at AMTA 2018, reach out to the TransPerfect AI team at AI@transperfect.com.