#24 Puzzled Interpreters, Loc at Verizon, Surprising MT, Jobs Vanish

Florian and Esther discuss the plight of the EU’s contract interpreters. While conference interpreting work has dried up, the ca. 3,000 contract interpreters, many of whom generated 100% of their income from the institutions, have been given a one-off payment to see them through the coronavirus pandemic. In a show of solidarity, however, staff interpreters created an emergency fund to help support their contract colleagues.Florian draws attention to the Slator Language Industry Job Index figures, showing a further drop from May to June, and highlights anecdotal evidence of localization job losses, including a LinkedIn-publicized cull in WeWork’s Globalization team. Esther shares insights from Verizon Media’s localization teams on their tech stack, including a proprietary loc platform, called Dragonfly, which helps to process 500,000 translated words monthly across platforms including Yahoo Mail, HuffPost, TechCrunch and more, in as many as 79 languages. Picking up on a news item in Jost Zetzsche’s Tool Box Journal, the two talk about free usage of SDL, Google and DeepL NMT. Use of SDL and Google’s free NMT has ramped up since March, with use of SDL’s free NMT around double that of Google and DeepL, according to SDL data. In other NMT news, Esther summarizes a research paper on the surprising and volatile behavior of MT in dealing with almost identical source sentences.Links to the stories discussedContract Interpreters ‘Puzzled’ and ‘Hurt’ by EU Offerhttps://slator.com/industry-news/contract-interpreters-puzzled-and-hurt-by-eu-offer/Slator Language Industry Job Index Falls Again in June 2020https://slator.com/industry-news/slator-language-industry-job-index-falls-again-in-june-2020/This Is How Verizon Media Runs a Centralized Localization Teamhttps://slator.com/features/this-is-how-verizon-media-runs-a-centralized-localization-team/Researchers Explore Surprising Behavior of Machine Translationhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/researchers-explore-surprising-behavior-of-machine-translation/