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Translation tech goes media

Four out of the five fastest-growing language services companies in 2018 are media localization specialists. The media business has seen a boom over the last two years, and traditional translation companies are taking notice. Media localization won’t stay an uncontested insular niche for long. In fact, conventional LSPs and technology providers are moving into this sector and expanding their technical capabilities this year.

Here are a few examples, with more to follow…

Omniscien launched an automated subtitling tool

Omniscien, previously Asia Online, is best known for its trainable machine translation software, but now they are going into a new area – video subtitling. Omniscien has just started selling Media Studio, which was built based on product requirements from iflix, a Malaysian competitor to Netflix.

Under the hood Media Studio has machine learning components: audio transcription, dialog extraction, and neural MT engines pre-trained for subtitles in more than 40 language combinations. The technology is able to create a subtitle draft out of a raw video already in the target language. It can even adjust timings and split long sentences into multiple subtitles where necessary. And it’s learning all the time.

For the human part of the work, Media Studio includes a web-based subtitle editor and a management system, both including a significant range of features right from the start. Translators can edit time codes in a drag-and-drop fashion, skip parts of the video without speech, customize keyboard shortcuts, and more. Project managers can assign jobs and automatically send job notifications, track productivity, and MT leverage.

The video is hosted remotely and is streamed to linguists instead of sending complete films and episodes. This adds a security layer for the intellectual property. No one in the biz wants the next episode of the Game of Thrones to end up on thepiratebay.org faster than it would on a streaming service. Linguists in low-bandwidth countries can download videos in low quality and with a watermark.

On the downside, this new tool does not integrate with existing CAT and business management systems for LSPs out of the box, doesn’t have translation memory support or anything else that would make it fit as one of the blades in the Swiss army knife of LSP technology.

According to Omniscien’s CEO Dion Wiggins, iflix has processed hundreds of thousands of video hours through the system since its inception in late 2016. By now, three more large OTT providers have started with Media Studio. Content distribution companies are the main target for the tool, but it will be available for LSPs as well once the pricing is finalized.

This has been a preview. The full report can be accessed online by Nimdzi Partners.

The full publication contains additional examples of translation tech providers adding functionality aimed to address the needs of multimedia localization. If you are not a Nimdzi Partner, contact us.

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