On the afternoon of May 30th, Mr. Zhang Jing, founder and CEO of Tmxmall and deputy director of the current language network, made a special trip to College of Foreign Languages in Nankai University and made a lecture entitled “The Status and Trends of the Development of Translation Technology Cloud Platform” at the invitation of the MTI Education Center of Nankai University. The lecture was chaired by Professor Wang Chuanying, a member of the National Translation Professional Graduate Education Steering Committee and deputy director of the MTI Education Center of Nankai University. The students who attended the lectures included MTI graduate students, academic graduate students, and Ph.D. students in translation, as well as some students from Tianjin University.
Prof. Wang Chuanying introduced the development status of MTI education in Nankai University to Mr. Zhang Jing and emphasized that Nankai University is the first university in China to offer specialized professional courses such as computer-assisted translation (CAT), localized translation technology and technical writing. The research on globlal language service industry development, Chinese language service demand, emerging language services, translation capability construction, terminology knowledge base development and application, localization translation, and technical writing theory and practice are among the front lines in China.
Mr. Zhang Jing emphasized in his lecture that since 2015, various types of translation platforms have made great progress. He elaborated on three recent landmark events, including Google's neural network machine translation, Sogou CEO Wuzhen’s speech for the first time using artificial intelligence simultaneous interpretation, and Boao Forum’s artificial intelligence simultaneous interpretation aid application, pointing out that artificial intelligence translation technology not only involves language technology processing also integrates multiple cross-border technologies such as speech recognition and speech synthesis.
In the lecture, Mr. Zhang Jing divided the translation platform into four categories: translation trading platform, translation production platform, corpus data platform, and machine translation platform according to its basic functions, and based on “mass, high-frequency, and absolute demand”, three market principles, detailing the operating characteristics and technical advantages of excellent platforms at home and abroad.
Mr. Zhang Jing also started with the three elements which are algorithm, computation, and data, highlighting the importance of data resources for the development of machine translation technology, and pointing out that the incremental, closed-loop monopoly of human translation corpora is the key to the development of large-scale cross-border companies in the future. It is also an important breakthrough in cooperation between school and enterprise.
Finally, Mr. Zhang Jing provided some suggestions on the career planning of the students. First of all, MTI graduate students cannot exclude translation techniques and at least they should achieve symbiotic development. Second, MTI graduate students must consolidate basic language skills during their studies, and “graft” language skills into the use of specific areas of knowledge. Finally, they must be bold in accepting new things because large-scale cross-border technology collaboration and joint research will become the future trend of the language service industry.
