OpenNMT-tf 2.0: a milestone in the OpenNMT project

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OpenNMT-tf 2.0 workshop. Red Kakemonos and French Tech Central logo in front of the entrance door of Station F held in Paris in March 2018.
OpenNMT workshop held in March 2018 at Station F in Paris // Copyright SYSTRAN

SYSTRAN has been wholeheartedly involved in open source development over the past few years via the OpenNMT initiative,whose goal is to build a ready-to-use, fully inclusive, industry and research ready development framework for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). OpenNMT guarantees state-of-the-art systems to be integrated into SYSTRAN products and motivates us to continuously innovate.

In 2017, we published OpenNMT-tf, an open source toolkit for neural machine translation. This project is integrated into SYSTRAN’s model training architecture and plays a key role in the production of the 2nd generation of NMT engines.

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Beyond the AI Hype – Neural Machine Translation Is Production Ready

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AI programs background with the article title "Beyond the AI Hype – Neural Machine Translation Is Production Ready" in front - Systran
A SYSTRAN Blog for the US Government Community

Since the publication of the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence by the White House this past February, many government agencies are struggling with getting started in AI. They realize use of this technology will help them be more efficient. However, finding those tasks that will be “quick wins” in moving towards AI adoption is the main challenge.

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“So, You Think Your Game Is Localized?”

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Game Is Localized? Player holds a controller and plays video game - Systran
Highlights from Webinar with Elizabeth Senouci And Victor Ramirez

Last month, we conducted a webinar “So, You Think Your Game Is Localized?”, the first of a 3-part-series given by Elizabeth Senouci from XTM International, and Victor Ramirez from SYSTRAN.

If you couldn’t guess by the title, “So, You Think Your Game Is Localized?” was a webinar focused on Video Game Localization. Senouci and Ramirez are both experts on the topic and thus decided to share their knowledge with the video games community.

In the webinar, Senouci and Ramirez discussed the need for game localization, some basic terminologies associated with it, user interfaces, global marketing, and the importance of customer service.

“Localization isn’t just one thing you can do and just get done with it. It’s a holistic process and it’s actually customized based on your game, your product,” Elizabeth said in her intro.

Why Localize?

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Four Ways SYSTRAN’s Neural Machine Translation Supports Global Commerce

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Explatory infographic the neural machine translation through Systran pure neural server and its process.
SYSTRAN Pure Neural Server Process // SYSTRAN

For staff of multinational companies who want to translate a simple phrase or word, systems like Google or Microsoft come in just handy. They help you order a taxi in Japan, pay your restaurant bill in France, and impress your clients with a hearty “jó reggelt” (“good morning”) in Budapest. The problem is such tools are notorious for imprecise translations and data leaks.

Would you really want to use Google Translate for that internal email to your affiliates in another country?

On the other hand, research from the European Parliament shows that on average a common language increases trade flows by 44%. So, how do you – and your staff – hack through language barriers and achieve professional communication in the business world?

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The art of speeding up NMT with SYSTRAN 2nd generation engines

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Machine Translation users care about quality and performance. Based on our own observations and the feedback we’ve received; the quality of our Neural MT is impressive. Evaluating performance is a stickier subject, but we’d like to dig our hands in and present our innovations and achievements and how it benefits NMT users.

By performance we mostly mean the manner in which a system performs in terms of speed and efficiency in varying production environments. It is important to note that performance and quality in Neural MT are tightly connected: it is easy to accelerate a given model compromising on the quality. Therefore, when evaluating performance improvement, we always check that quality remains very close to optimal quality.

Since switching to NMT at the end of 2016, we’ve invested our R&D efforts into optimizing our engines to be more efficient, while maintaining and even improving translation accuracy. Our latest, 2nd generation NMT engines, available in our latest release of SYSTRAN Pure Neural® Server, implements several technical optimizations that make the translation faster and more efficient.

New model architecture

The first generation of neural translation engines was based on recurrent neural networks (RNN). This architecture requires the source text to be encoded sequentially, word by word, before generating the translation.

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Online Translation Tools and Data Breaches

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Man is holding a tablet through which he has access to users data.

Is Your Team Violating Data Compliance Laws?

Data leakage and lack of information are two critical issues that can harm businesses. Nonetheless, due to the ever-growing global marketing and communication needs, the temptation to use the fast and free online translation tools are rising.

Apart from the apparent dangers that these tools pose to businesses such as miscommunication, loss of business, and cultural insults, there is critical important threat that many enterprises often fail to recognize. 

Whenever an employee uses a free online translation tool, they may cause massive data privacy breaches by making the consumer data searchable. Data breaches as such mainly happen due to employee negligence looking for quick machine translation, and it can often put millions of customers’ sensitive data at exposed on the internet.

Companies thus struggle to find the right balance between enabling business and securing information. Without the capability of translating software, potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of employees could turn to free translation tools to get their content translated in turn making the content available online.

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Four Reasons to Use NMT for Translation Work in the U.S. Federal Government

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Reading a Czech book through eye glasses. Systran gives 4 reasons why NMT is primary for such complex & important structure as the U.S. Federal Government

Until recently, using machine translation (MT) was considered a hindrance by serious translators.  Now that machine translation is powered by artificial intelligence, translators in the government are intrigued by this new technology.  Forward-thinking linguist programs recognize the value of MT, and it’s only a matter of time when others will follow suit.  Consider these four reasons as motivation for modernizing the status quo:

1. Translate Smarter

As with many other skilled professions – accountants, doctors, analysts – technology is a time-saver.  Translators now have the same benefit.  In fact, commercial benchmarks show that neural MT helps translators post-edit at 2000 words per hour.  Without technology, which is typically the case in the government, translators translate at 300 words per hour.  Imagine the time-savings — the same 6000-word document can now be translated in 3 hours instead of 20.   Additionally, SYSTRAN MT will retain the formatting of the original document, which further saves time.

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Our Neural Network just learned Syntax!

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Experience unprecedented integration of customer terminology with neural networks!

SYSTRAN Pure Neural® Server, our state-of-the-art translation technology tailored for businesses, delivers quality, fast, and secure translations using Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence. We have just added support for a unique feature that takes it a step further. Users can now add custom terminology to be used in their translation tasks. Seasoned users know about User Dictionaries in our previous rule-based and hybrid technology, but this feature was not fully implemented by the Neural Networks. Until now.

A book in which the word "translation" is highlighted in green. SYSTRAN show the importance of translation in business & in life in general.

Translation tailored to your need

User Dictionaries (UDs) are key in customizing translation to users’ needs by allowing them to determine their own terminology and ensure that it is translated as such regardless of context. They can also be used to disambiguate between a word with multiple meanings. In this case, translation profiles can be created that apply user dictionaries with the ambiguous term translated differently in each. For example, “mettre sous tension” would be translated from French as “to turn on” in a Generic profile, but a user could create an Aeronautical profile and add the entry to a UD as “to energize” and if needed create an Electronics profile for the term to be translated as “to apply power.” User Dictionaries can also quickly correct any translations that are not accurate for the user’s context. User dictionaries are primarily used so that industry jargon and brand, model and product names are translated accurately.

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When Neural Machine Translation is boosting Customer Service

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In today’s accelerated globalization, booming e-commerce and customer service digitalization, the languages spoken by potential consumers come in hundreds. Global companies are faced with a problematic equation: while they might have centralized their customer service operations, it is still costly to recruit an agent for every language covered. It is nevertheless crucial to respond to customers in their native language quickly, efficiently and at minimal cost to achieve excellent Customer Service.

Breaking the language barrier

It’s simple: translating client emails instantly, responding to them in their language just as quickly or automatically displaying the most common answers in FAQ databases in multiple languages is a real Game Changer. For global Customer Service teams, the response time in foreign languages can be divided by 10 after Neural Machine Translation implementation! Calls are reduced with increased usage of a multilingual online knowledge base and customer satisfaction is higher than ever!

Data leakage is the biggest threat

More importantly, unsecured online translation tools, often used by customer service teams to understand customer queries in foreign languages expose companies to data leaks. The nature of interactions  during customer service operations can be as critical as sharing account information, credit card numbers, passwords and so on…

To guarantee complete security of your customer data, it’s absolutely key to rely on a provider that is able to provide the translation service on-premise or accessible via a private cloud. It is also true for internal support interactions. SYSTRAN also provide translation solutions for enterprise IT departments following a trend of global support services centralization, and allow them to manage technical support requests worldwide while ensuring user data security.

For more information on SYSTRAN’s multilingual solutions for customer service visit https://www.systransoft.com/business-solutions/customer-service-success/

Video showing how SYSTRAN uses the Neural Machine Translation to help customer service satisfaction through the world. Boosting customer service satisfaction is easier!

Seven Tips for Better Translation Results

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Whether you are using SYSTRAN’s Desktop, Enterprise Server, SaaS or online software, one question our IT Support is asked all the time is “How Can I Improve My Translation Output?” If incorrect or incomplete text or data is input into Machine Translation software, (also known as “garbage in, garbage out”) the outcome will, more often than not, also be incorrect or incomplete.

F.A.Q photo with tagline "How can i impove my translation output?" - SYSTRAN is showing ways to make better translation.

Here are seven tips to a better result:

  1. Use complete, grammatical sentences – Sentences should always start with a capital letter and end in either a period, exclamation point or question mark. A complete sentence always contains a verb, expresses an idea and makes sense standing alone.
  1. Avoid the passive voice – The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action.
  1. Punctuation is important; clauses will translate best if separated by commas – Punctuation is the feature of writing that gives meaning to the written word. An error in punctuation can convey a completely different meaning to the one that is intended.
  1. Try to use simple, declarative sentences – A declarative sentence makes a statement, is in a present tense, and ends in a period. These are the most common sentences in the English language. It can either be a simple or compound sentence.
  1. Avoid ambiguity – To avoid ambiguity keep your sentences short, start with the subject, then the verb and end with the object. Use words and tenses consistently throughout.
  1. Avoid abbreviations, acronyms, jargon and colloquialisms – An abbreviation or acronym should first be spelled out if there are to be used consistently in a document. Colloquialisms are informal forms of speech and should be used mainly for speaking and not writing. Abbreviations, acronyms and jargon can be added to your User Dictionary or Translation Memories.
  1. Use your Dictionary Manager – SYSTRAN software includes a feature called the Dictionary Manager, which allows you to create your own dictionaries to supplement or override the main dictionary that comes with the program.  Using this feature can make substantial improvements to the translation.

The accuracy of the translation varies with the input.  If the input text is grammatically correct and unambiguous, it should translate well enough to convey the gist of what’s been written.

By: Ashley Shuler, Technical Support Analyst and Brooke Palm, Director of Customer Care SYSTRAN Software, Inc.