Playing Santa Claus in the 21st Century
Applying Smart Technology to a “Seasonal” Challenge
This is a guest blog post written by our partner Omniscien Technologies
With Christmas just around the corner comes the hunt for the perfect gifts for loved ones, family, friends and colleagues, or perhaps that helpful neighbor you wanted to surprise with something special. So what could be the perfect gift? Something generic (socks? a book? a sweater?) from the nearest shopping mall? Too ordinary? Then you recall your spouse raving about this limited-edition perfume from France. You remember your kids shouting about that rare, hard to find super robot from Japan or your best friend’s long-desired wish to visit Russia. How nice it would be if you could surprise them all with something unique this year. But how to find and actually acquire those gifts?
Keeping in the spirit of the season, and assuming we had all the technology we needed at our fingertips to assist us with our little challenge, how would we go about applying tools like Basis Technology’s Rosette and Omniscien Technologies’ Language Studio to such a hypothetical challenge? How would we go about fulfilling our little one’s wish for the rare Japanese super robot , assuming we were searching globally in a set of key markets where different languages prevail?
The basic steps to solving this hypothetical challenge are the same ones we face tackling our day-to-day professional problems:
Step 1: The first step would be to define the search terms, both in the source language as well as target languages. We would need to define the terms as well as relevant synonyms (or in case of names, aliases, etc.) and then determine good quality translations for these terms
Step 2: Search – in this particular example we would probably use our friendly cloud provider’s search engine to help, but in enterprise scenarios others platforms will be required
Step 3: Parse – Parse the results, rate them and collect the relevant metadata, such as product name, description, specifications, URL, price, etc.
Step 4: Localize; i.e. translate your results to your target language for analysis and selection
Step 5: Analyze the offerings and (hopefully) select the best one
Rosette can effectively be applied in the initial steps, Language Studio is your solution for step 4. Need to have your query in Japanese to comb through the super-robot toys local market in Tokyo? No problem. Need to visit a boutique shop in France virtually and chat with the shop assistant in French in your search for the limited-edition perfume? We’ve got you. Need to bargain with a Russian seller for a local Matryoshka doll or Valenki (traditional Russian winter footwear) for your best friend? Done! Language is no longer a barrier for you.
Language Studio is the only professional language processing and machine translation platform that preserves the metadata of the input text during the machine translation process while maintaining the added value that Rosette provides and also offers the ability to perform tasks such as currency conversions on the fly during translation – what use would the currency information be to you otherwise?
With support for up to 540 language pairs in 13 broad industry domains, Language Studio is the most comprehensive solution around.
So wouldn’t it be great to have the power of our professional tools at your fingertips for your year-end challenges? Mission accomplished and we can all relax and enjoy the break! Good luck with your year-end rush, season’s greetings and look forward to talking to you about these and other challenges soon!