Obama Calls on Translators to Save Economy

Posted by Alex on October 2, 2009 under Translation News | Read the First Comment

A new bid at the White House seeks to begin research into new translation technologies. This new idea, known as the “Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs,” was derived from Calvin Lee from Singapore, a specialist in translation and localization services.

In previous decades, machine translation had been the biggest breakthrough in technology for the translation industry. Companies and researchers have predicted the progress of this new technology proposed by Lee and the White House to be speedier, as well as more efficient and precise.

But most of these new technologies have not quite progressed as far as many individuals had hoped…

There are still many problems with the accuracy of machine translation, and the possibility of a global market free of language barriers is still a goal to work towards.

Many companies have decided to combine the power of both humans and computers in order to double their turnaround times, but have met with little success; even the most up-to-date software cannot keep up with the growing change of language. This is a risk many companies cannot afford to take. In the White House report, officials state how translation plays into their strategies for growth of the economy through international trade. With this initiative, they hope that someday real-time translation between major languages of the world will directly lower the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.

While it is not know how much of the $1 billion dollar stimulus will go to translation, there will continue to be a need for companies dealing in international trade to utilize the services of translation companies in order to better suit their needs in a changing economy.

Read more on this topic as reported by Damian Joseph of BusinessWeek: White House Challenges Translation Industry to Innovate

Photo via the White House Museum.