Recently, Laurence Roguet, Managing Director of Lexcelera, talked to Gaëlle Bou, Chief Revenue Officer of Systran, about machine and human translation.

Lexcelera self-trains NMT engines and it leads to significant quality improvement. Laurence said that training an NMT engine is like teaching a language to children, starting with small, simple sentences and then moving towards more complexity. This is what Lexcelera excels at.

Laurence talked about the changing work profile of the translator. MT is a translator’s ally. It can take care of volumes and repetitive tasks while translators can engage in high value work. They are key to maintaining terminology bases, training machines, and giving feedback on the MT output.

Laurence advised anyone starting on an MT translation project to inventory their needs and their existing assets in the company. And, understand that MT is about processes and not simply the tools.