Common Sense Advisory recently posted a blog (on Global Watchtower, the industry's #1 blog) about a new technology from Alchemy that threatens to disrupt localization engineering, which would follow in the footsteps of other disruptive technologies like translation memory (TM). What new technology could shake up the interpretation industry in a similar fashion?
The Alchemy Layout Manager threatens to reduce the time spent adjusting the layout of 1,000 dialog boxes from 5 weeks to 7 minutes. Passolo also plans to release a similar "Layout Engine". Common Sense Advisory makes a good point that, in the near future, LSPs will probably use these technologies "in the back room while charging full price to the unaware," just like they did with TMs. Could any technology affect the interpretation industry in a similar way? Here are a few technologies that may or may not have the ability to shake up the industry.
- Phone Interpretation & Video Conferencing have practically created a new industry.
- Digital Recorders to aid consecutive interpretation have been promoted and tested by Erik Camayd-Freixas at Florida International University, and awareness of this tool is gradually increasing in the industry. These recorders help interpreters overcome the memory factor that is usually such a significant hurdle in consecutive interpretation.
- Computer-Assisted Interpretation to aid simultaneous interpretation is almost unheard of. An interview by Vincent Buck from the AIIC of Panayotis Mouzourakis in 2000 is one of the few places where computer-assisted interpretation is ever mentioned in the same breath as computer-assisted translation. Such technology could integrate not only memories and glossaries, but also touch screens and voice recognition, to make interpretation easier and more accurate.
Speech-to-Speech Tools and similar technologies, including voice sensors & simultaneous interpretation goggles developed at Carnegie Mellon, encounter some of the same problems faced by machine translation (MT) and are often developed by the same companies. At most, these technologies will likely affect the interpretation industry no more than MT has affected the translation industry.
