TAUS Asia

In March 2018, TAUS will come back to Beijing for a two-day event, hosted at the Beijing Language and Culture University. This event is aimed at an open exchange about language business innovation and translation technology and is open for buyers and providers of language services and technologies as well as researchers and academia.

In April 2016, at the TAUS Executive Forum in Beijing, after a six-year absence of TAUS in China, we were excited to come back to Beijing and learn about the newest innovations happening in Asia. Last year we learned that most language service providers in China don’t yet use translation memory software. This doesn’t mean though that they are a step behind on the West. In the contrary, perhaps we can say that China is benefitting from the handicap of the head start. To deal with the ever-increasing and demanding translation market in China, they might be skipping the step of using last century translation technologies and directly move on to even more advanced technologies and platforms.

With the rise of neural MT, the development of new translation technologies, including speech-to-speech translation, integrated in our everyday apps and the datafication of translation, we look ahead to the story of the translation industry in 2022. The ten mini-chapters described in this story are all in some form present in the Chinese translation industry. The China One Belt-One Road program helps with access to the long tail of languages, big data and the datafication of translation is on the minds of many large Chinese enterprises and the concern about translation quality is certainly familiar for Chinese LSPs.

Flow and Format of the Conference
The TAUS Conference in Beijing will be a two day meeting, consisting mostly of presentations by industry professionals. The presentations are divided by themes, such as the ones described in the call for proposals tab. There will be Q&A sessions after each presentation or topic and discussion will be stimulated.

Live Interpretation
During the TAUS Asia Conference in Beijing we will be making use of live automatic and human interpretation. The conference will be bilingual, namely English and Chinese. Students from the Beijing Language and Culture University will be helping with live human interpretation through interpretation booths and headphones. Automatic interpretation (subtitling or transcription) will be done through an online tool. More information about this will be published here shortly.

Who’s Attending
The TAUS Conference in Beijing is aimed at language service providers and buyers in the Chinese translation industry as well as academics and researchers in the translation field. We also welcome delegates from companies outside of China with an interest in the Chinese translation market.