Tembua: The Precision Language Solution Newsletter
The Machines Have Taken Over!
August 2015 
In This Issue
Tembua News
Moore's Law
The Machines Have Taken Over!
Upcoming Events
Tembua News:
Large Software Translation Project Completed

Tembua's client is a major manufacturer of water treatment devices.
 
Patricia May, President and CEO, thanks the project managers and 3-member teams in each of the 20 languages who provided translation, revision and in-place review during the 4 month life-span of this complex project!
 
Tembua is proud of the linguists who made this happen! 


Moore's Law

    
"Moore's law" is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.


The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore,

a co-founder of Intel who observed in 1965 that the transistors, approximately doubled every year and predicted it would continue for at least a decade. It also predicted that price per performance would decrease by the same ratio. It was quite accurate and, along with that, storage, graphics, and virtually everything else followed the track. 
In 1975 he adjusted the prediction to doubling every 2 years for the future.
 
 
To read more about Moore's Law, click here: 
 
 
 

"The smaller our world becomes, the more important it is that we understand each other."

--Patricia May, CEO & President of Tembua



 
   The Machines Have Taken Over!
 
        
In a recent post, I included information on when to use the ever-more prevalent free online translation engines. (Yes, we do sometimes tell our clients to use free translation. Our responsibility is to our clients, and some texts simply do not call for professional work. "Don't pay for something you can get for free! May 2015")

Readers came back with questions about machine translation (MT): What is it, exactly? Is it something new? Why doesn't everyone use it? What is an MT engine?
All good questions!

The ultimate goal of MT is to build software that can move the meaning of a text from one language to another, and people have been trying to do this since the mid-1900s. The idea may have originated with Descartes, but the computer age finally gave it legs.

One of the first approaches used was to compile huge amounts of data from dictionaries and grammar references in both the source and target language. The computer was taught to match words across languages like a bilingual dictionary: word by word. This is called Rule-based MT (RBMT), and it can work fairly well if the two languages are related and tend to use the same type of sentence structure, such as subject-verb-object. When sentence structure varies, rules of syntax become vitally important, and RBMT works less well.

Human language is an intricate, layered thing. When I studied computational linguistics years ago, we designed a back-end processor, and I am still astonished at the hidden complexities that came to light in the paragraph we were given to analyze.
           
    
 
To finish reading: Machines are taking over!
   
Upcoming Events:

Jeff Olsen, Tembua's VP of International Busines will attend: 
Medtronic's Supplier Diversity Event in August
   
A Life Science Alley networking event at Surly Brewing in Minneapolis (someone has to take the difficult assignments!)  
 
The 29th annual Entrepreneurial Woman's Conference in Chicago in September
 


 
Connect With Us
Sincerely,

 


Patricia May
Tembua: The Precision Language Solution

Legal, scientific, HR, technical and website translation

Specialized BioMedical division

Simultaneous conference interpreting

 

http://tembua.wordpress.com/ 

pm@tembua.com

www.tembua.com