Eric Yu, secretary-general of Language Big Data Alliance (LBDA) and CEO of Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (GTCOM), spoke at LBDA’s 2017 annual conference in Guangzhou on April 8, looking back at LBDA’s progress in the past year and then into its future.

CEO of GTCOM Eric Yu speaks at the conference

An international organization with well-structured partnership

 LBDA made much headway in every field it reached in the founding year of 2016.

According to Eric Yu, LBDA has been moving fast towards the goal of becoming an international organization ever since its inception, striving to make itself better known and more influential in the world. Its membership has covered some globally renowned universities such as University of Vienna, University of Geneva, and Gazi University.

Now LBDA has 138 members and the number is expected to keep growing.

LBDA Europe is planned to be established later this year to promote resource-sharing, exchanges, and organization of international events among its member organizations worldwide.

A global platform for collaboration and resource-sharing

LBDA has run more than 30 projects over the past year in such fields as speech recognition, machine translation, and analysis of big data, said Eric Yu. In these projects, universities and businesses worked together on translation assignments involving a total of 50 million characters.

One particular project marked a milestone in the Chinese history of translation: 750 translators from 58 universities – LBDA members – completed the translation of subtitles for 50,000-minute videos in just seven days. More projects are on the way.

LBDA also seeks to facilitate the exchanges between its members and their counterparts in other countries.

At FIT Congress 2017 to be held in Brisbane, Australia in August this year, LBDA – a top partner of the congress – will invite representatives from the world’s top research institutes to talk about the future of the translation industry.

In closing, Eric Yu unveiled the plan for LBDA’s future development.

The year of 2017 will be focused on the “sharing and exchange of resources worldwide”. LBDA will build an online platform for its members to share and exchange resources with each other.

Moreover, the inaugural meeting of LBDA Europe will be held in Switzerland in September this year.

Europe’s leading universities and research institutes in such areas as journalism, psychology, neurology, medicine, language, and business will be the founding members of LBDA Europe, and joint labs on machine translation, speech recognition, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) will be established among them. A host of key collaborative research findings will also be announced at the meeting.

LBDA Europe will surely help foster collaborative innovation among Chinese joint labs and the leading universities and research institutes of other countries.