Balázs Kis
Back to Translation: Make Technology Learn You
Humans are “using technology as their organs”, wrote Stanisław Lem in his Summa Technologiae, fifty years ago. Just think: can one person translate a 500-page deeply technical manual, drawn up in XML, into five languages in ten days? No; but a team of translators, editors, and project managers could by using technology to help and connect them.
In this presentation, I argue that the ultimate end of any technological innovation is the human being. This includes both people who work with technology to deliver a product or service and the end-user of the produce of the human-technology ensemble.
The pure utilitarian, rationalistic approach doesn’t work, neither in software development, nor in any other field of engineering – because technology is never efficient in itself; it’s efficient only together with its human user.
Often the best translation technology doesn’t even touch the text, or only superficially. But it connects human contributors in ways that enable them to work together much more efficiently than they would without it. I will show examples of such processes, and point out where the future is going.