What is New in Language Studio 6.0
After 14 years of meeting the security and processing needs of some of the world’s largest organizations, governments, and service providers, and with billions of documents translated, it was time for critical review, architecture update, optimization, and rewrite.
The first version of Language Studio was developed in 2006. Technology moves fast. Much has changed between 2006 and 2020. When we first developed Language Studio 1.0 Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) was still the mainstream state-of-the-art technology and was still relatively young in its adoption. In 2006, Google had just started using SMT as the technology behind Google Translate. Today, like Google, Omniscien uses the latest state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT).
Language Studio is a mature, 14-year-old, product that has served its intended purpose well. It has evolved and been adapted to incorporate all the latest technologies and advances. However, in 2019 the Omniscien team decided that it was time to take a step back and look at areas of the product that could be optimized and more efficiently deployed. We had reached a point where the number of adaptations to accommodate new technological advances was becoming excessive and the product was become challenging to continue to incorporate new features and maintain optimal performance.
Language Studio 6.0 is a full rewrite. With the knowledge gained over 14 years, the Omniscien team redesigned the architecture and core platform to be more extendable and flexible than ever before. The new simplified architecture has been optimized for performance. The Secure by Design philosophy has been used as the core underpinning approach to all our software development.
Available as two Platform Editions specifically designed to match different business needs.
- Product Overview
- Machine Translation
- Custom MT Engines
- Industry Domains
- Data Creation Tools
- Clean Data MT Approach
- Ways to Translate
- Hybrid NMT/SMT Engines
- Detailed Features
- Supported Languages
- Document Formats
- Deployment Models
- Data Security & Privacy
- Secure by Design
- Languge Studio Secure Cloud
Hosted by Omniscien - Language Studo Enterprise
On-premises or private cloud - Portal and APIs
High-Level Change Summary
The following list is just a subset of the notable changes and optimizations in Language Studio 6.0:
Translation Speed
Using identical hardware, the translation speed of Language Studio 6.0 is nearly 5 times faster than Language Studio 5.0.
Updated User Interface
A new modern user interface provides a clear and easy to use set of tools to translate and to customize machine translation engines.
Machine Translation Engine Assembler
Enables multiple engines and translation technologies to be seamlessly incorporated into a translation process to deliver the best quality translation.
Expanded Translation Workflow
Language Studio 5.0 had 26 processing steps, with every step being controllable via JavaScript rules. Language Studio 6.0 expands the pre- and post-processing steps to a total of 46 to cover most use case scenarios with configurable modules and allow the flexibility to handle future yet-to-be-devised use cases with ease. As an example, automatically detect the source language and domain of a document and select the optimal machine translation engine that will deliver the highest quality output.
Improved and Extended Translation Runtime Rules
Customizable runtime rules have been one of the long-term differentiators with Language Studio when compared to competitors’ offerings. Previously configurable at a project folder level, runtime rules are now available at a job-level. Each job can have its own runtime glossary specific to a document or set of documents that work in conjunction with project-level runtime rules.
Advanced Data Preparation Tools
Convert legacy files into “data gold” and create new high-quality bilingual data quickly and efficiently.
In the process of building thousands of custom machine translation engines for clients the Omniscien team found many manual tasks to be repetitive and often too large and too error-prone to be performed with humans alone. Over many years a large number of internal tools were developed to help automate these processes and improve data quality. With the release of Language Studio V6.0 these tools are now available as part of the standard Language Studio platform.
Language Studio 6.0 provides powerful tools to create, match, mine and synthesize bilingual sentences that are specific to your context, domain, and purpose. A rapid customization can be performed with your own data with some reasonable translation quality improvement. Comparatively, with the additional data created by Language Studio tools, translation quality is taken to the next level.
Multi-Domain Custom MT Engines
Language Studio has a unique feature for customized engines that allows the translation genre, domain, and writing style to be specified at the time of translation (i.e. marketing, technical manuals). The resulting translation to be stylized to match. A full range of genres, domains, and styles can be built into a single machine translation engine.
Enhanced Confidence Scores
Every sentence has a calculated confidence score that estimates the quality of the translated output. This can be leveraged at a sentence, paragraph, or document levels to guide workflows or for quality and effort analytics.
New Translation Sources
Language Studio has always had a variety of ways to translate. As machine translation became more popular, translation from many new sources and integration points was needed. Previously this would require custom connectors that call the Language Studio REST API. With Language Studio 6.0 connectors for many common data sources are provided out-of-the-box. Translated directly from an email server, DropBox, AWS S3, Google Drive, DropBox, and more.
Expanded NLP Processing Features
Our LSTools library continues to add more features for NLP processing. Syntax parsing, named entity recognition, glossary extraction and other text analysis features are all readily available within workflows.
Integration with Workflow Studio
While Language Studio offers advanced translation capabilities, often the workflow before and after translation can be challenging. Language Studio has been fully integrated with our latest product, Workflow Studio 1.0. This is the same set of tools that the Omniscien team uses internally to gather, process, and prepare data. Tools that have been in use for years and now made available to customers.
Backward Compatibility
All features are backward compatible.