Master Linguistics 2022

Abstract

Master Linguistics (Master), a small player in the Language Services Industry, faces a strange issue; despite industry demand for language services (translation, interpretation, etc.) increasing, Master’s B2B project team has noticed an increase in rejections of their quotations. To counteract the trend of clients opting to use machine translation software to perform their own translations, CEO Angela Sandler made the decision to sign an enterprise-level contract with Amazon Translate for their neural network machine translation application. Neural network machine translation is the most advanced form of computerized language translation where AI learns how to produce sophisticated, natural translations of content between languages after training on volumes of human data. Sandler has prided her firm as a “human-centered” player, emphasizing the quality that only human professionals can provide, but recent advancements in neural network machine translation continue to diminish the quality gap every year and provide boosts to speed and cost reduction too valuable to ignore. After deciding to sign the contract to use Amazon Translate in Master’s workflow, Sandler is left with decisions to make: how does she reposition her firm’s value proposition to appeal to customers by leveraging the use of this technology; how does she change the firm’s offerings and pricing to take advantage of the technology; how does she inspire project teams to advocate this change and overcome resistance from the human professionals they share close relationships with; and what ethics guidelines should she create to direct all of the above initiatives?

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