LocWorld54 Monterey delivered insightful talks and warm, person-to-person interactions. The topics presented a balance between human intelligence and technological innovation that felt especially thoughtful, giving the impression that our industry is maturing in how it views and discusses AI.
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Evolving discussions on the adoption of AI
While AI remained the central theme of many of the talks and panel sessions, what stood out at LocWorld54 were some of the changes in how the conversations are evolving.
Rather than debating whether to adopt AI, the focus has shifted toward how to use the technology effectively. Topics of particular interest included identifying which workflow tasks are appropriate for automation, understanding where AI succeeds (and fails) as part of globalization in manufacturing and other technical fields, and tackling issues like AI Quality Estimation (AIQE), scalability, and whether to buy or build your Translation Management System (TMS).
Experience informs next steps
Real-world experience has begun to reveal areas where AI is currently best suited. It comes as no surprise that AI is being utilized for pre-translation, a role that machine translation already fills in some workflows. AI Post Editing (AIPE) is also seeing some adoption as an additional step before human intervention, though it relies on resources such as style-guides and historical data to train on. Another role that was a hot topic was AI Quality Estimation, which uses AI to assign a quality score to segments of AI-translated content in order to draw attention to sections that appear to require attention.
All of these workflows still require a human touch to ensure accuracy and cultural nuance. Furthermore, industry best practice continues to recognize human translators as valuable assets for handling sensitive material or content that demands a high degree of cultural intelligence, originality and creativity.
It’s worth mentioning that though the quality of AI translation for many languages has improved to near parity with human translation, language pairs that differ drastically such as Japanese and English have yet to consistently reach the same levels of communicative accuracy and readability.
Another one for the books
Overall, the event offered many great opportunities to connect with professionals shaping the future of localization and the industry at-large.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the Crestec USA booth at LocWorld54 Monterey! It was great reconnecting with so many familiar faces and meeting new ones from across the localization community.
We appreciate all the great conversations and insights. See you at the next LocWorld!
