Iconic Translation Machines and Translators Without Borders win TAUS Game Changer Innovation Contest Awards 2018

15 October 2018, Vancouver, BC - TAUS, the language data network for the global language and translation industries, has just held its Annual Conference in Vancouver, BC (Canada). During this event, TAUS invites the most inspiring, effective and compelling innovators to present it to a group of 120 industry leaders, raising the bar for others to follow. TAUS Game Changer Innovation Awards celebrate the best innovative solutions in the translation industry.

Paula Shannon, in her introduction, talked about how previous winners of the TAUS Game Changer Innovation Awards have been able to raise millions from venture capitalists (examples are Lilt and Unbabel, who both won in the last two years). With this in their minds, the competition was on for this year’s innovators.

The slots for insider innovators were filled by some of the well-known players in our industry like TransPerfect, Memsource, Welocalize, Kaleidoscope, SDL, and Systran. Among them was also John Tinsley from Iconic Translation Machines who has been competing in the contest for a few years and with his presentation on using neural machine translation in the legal field he brought home the prize this year.

"We're very pleased to win the TAUS Insider Innovation Contest. Looking at the list of previous winners, we're joining some esteemed company in this regard. It's always nice to have your work recognized externally, and the fact that this award is voted for by our peers and colleagues makes it extra special”, says John Tinsley, CEO of Iconic Translation Machines. “We only launched our e-discovery product last year, and it's gone from strength to strength in a short space of time. Our technical team deserves major credit for getting this done so effectively. We look forward to building on this, and our enterprise product, in the coming months and years."

We had quite a few new invaders joining the competition this year: Kudo, Parakeet Systems, Xillio, LIC Foundation as well as a few more established ones like Transifex, Smartling and Translators Without Borders. The competition was fierce, choosing from new technologies like blockchain, speech recognition, connectivity solutions, and more. With their high-tech solution catering for humanitarian needs, Rebecca Petras from Translators Without Borders won the majority of the votes.

“Kató Speak is all about applying the localization industry's best practices in written translation to the real-life needs of the world's most vulnerable people, many of whom are illiterate. At the same time, we use it to collect speech data to build critically needed voice technology in marginalized languages. It's such an honor that TWB's innovative work is recognized by our industry's leaders!” says Mirko Plitt, head of Technology at Translators Without Borders.

The TAUS team wants to congratulate the two winners this year and is looking forward to seeing how these technologies will develop in the future. We also like to thank all the participants this year for their courage to present their innovations in the competition.

See previous winners here: https://events.taus.net/events/awards

About TAUS

TAUS, the language data network, is an independent and neutral industry organization. We develop communities through a program of events and online user groups and by sharing knowledge, metrics and data that help all stakeholders in the translation industry develop a better service. We provide data services to buyers and providers of language and translation services.

The shared knowledge and data help TAUS members decide on effective localization strategies. The metrics support more efficient processes and the normalization of quality evaluation. The data lead to improved translation automation.

TAUS develops APIs that give members access to services like DQF, the Quality Dashboard and the TAUS Data Market through their own translation platforms and tools. TAUS metrics and data are already built in to most of the major translation technologies.