December 2023

The New Default for Machine Translation

by John Tinsley

There will come a day, maybe soon, when it's better to use large language models (LLMs) for translation. When that happens, it will become the standard and people will stop talking about it. Just like when Neural MT came on the scene about 6 years ago. Today, LLMs are not ready to replace MT in the enterprise landscape. How do we know this?

You probably already know that the T in GPT stands for Transformer. But did you know that the Transformer was invented at Google in 2017... specifically for machine translation? ModernMT, our adaptive MT solution, was the first commercial application of this Transformer. So what we're seeing today is a repurposing of this technology for another application (generative AI), outside of translation.

We've already tested GPT and other open-source LLMs tuned for translation within the framework we've developed for real-time adaptation with ModernMT. It turns out that they perform well in terms of quality for some content types and some languages. But their performance is far from unanimous across the board. In short, we know we're getting there, but we’re not quite there yet. When the time comes, we’ll have you covered.?

Read more in this post.

?? Deep Diving into LLMs with OpenAI

On December 5th, we hosted the 2023 Pi Campus HackParty at our home base. The event explored state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), thanks to a special contribution from OpenAI 's Will DePue , who introduced attendees to the world of GPT customization. We had the incredible opportunity to see first-hand how advances in #AI can be used to improve our services and meet brilliant minds in the field.

View photos from the event.

??New Horizons for Translated 9

Aboard our sailboat, CEO Marco Trombetti and Salesforce VP Teresa Marshall discuss the future of the project and how you can get involved. Watch the video and discover new ways to be a part of our evolving community.

Watch the video.

?? A Report on Language AI for Africa

Here's a summary of the discussions that took place during the recent Imminent Unconference in Cape Town on Language AI and Africa. Among other things, you will discover insights on the criteria for selecting languages to invest in, highlighting the importance of addressing both widely spoken and minority languages to build engagement and trust in targeted communities.

Read the report.

In-person

• Our chairwoman and co-founder Isabelle Andrieu gave the keynote speech at the 45th edition of the Translating and Computer Conference in Luxembourg. She emphasized the crucial role of language in human evolution and the responsibility for all of us in the language industry to help people understand and be understood.
• We are sponsoring the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), which started yesterday in Singapore. If you are there, look out for our AI director Sébastien Bratières .
• We are also sponsoring the thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in New Orleans from December 11-14. There, you'll be able to meet our Director of AI Engineering, Davide Caroselli .