Survey for Translation Transcription and Dictation

The website with the survey and short explainer video is http://www.sightcat.net
The idea is to build a human transcription service. We just need a few translators per language that want to work with a transcriptionist due to RSI, productivity etc. and we can use that data to build an ASR system for that language. There is also a good chance the ASR system will be accurate for domain-specific terminology and accents as it will be adaptive and use source language context. 

Click on the graphic to go to the survey

memoQ Fest 2018 was, among other things, a good opportunity as always to spend time discussing things with some of the best and most interesting consultants, teachers, creative developers and brainstormers I know in the translation profession. One of these was my friend and colleague, John Moran, whose work on iOmegaT introduced me to the idea that properly designed, translator-controlled (voluntary) data logging could be a great boon to feature research and software development investment decisions. Sort of like SpyGate in translation, except that it isn't.

John and I have been talking, brainstorming and arguing about many aspects of translation technology for years now, dictation (voice recognition, ASR, whatever you want to call it) foremost among the topics. So I was very pleased to see him at the conference in Budapest last week, where he spoke about logging as a research tool in the program and a lot about speech recognition before and after in the breaks, bars, coffee houses and social event venues.

I think that one of the most memorable things about memoQ Fest 2018 was the introduction of the dictation tool currently called hey memoQ, which covers a lot of what John and I have discussed until the wee hours over the past four years or so and which also makes what I believe will be the first commercial use of source text guidance for target text dictation (not to mention switching to source text dictation when editing source texts!). John introduced that to me years ago based on some research that he follows. Fascinating stuff.

One of the things he has been interested in for a while for commercial, academic and ergonomic reasons is support for minor languages. Understandable for a guy who speaks Gaelic (I think) and has quite a lot of Gaelic resources which might contribute to a dictation solution some day. So while I'm excited about the coming memoQ release which will facilitate dictation in a CAT tool in 40 languages (more or less, probably a lot more in the future), John is thinking about smaller, underserved or unserved languages and those who rely on them in their working lives.

That's what his survey is about, and I hope you'll take the time to give him a piece of your mind... uh, share your thoughts I mean :-)