One Planet for Everyone! Building Science and Technology Civilization at the Beginning

"Hello, boss. Two people at the front desk of the company said they wanted to find you." The girl at the front desk lowered her voice.

"What did you say? Be louder." Zhou Lei didn't hear what he was saying at all, because there was nothing to do when he went to the company, and he went there very late.

"There are two people from some translation company looking for you."

Zhou Lei originally wanted to ask them to go back where they came from, but in a blink of an eye, "Please ask them to find a place to sit first, I'll be there soon."

The front desk took the two of them to find a seat where no one was sitting, and poured a glass of boiled water for the two of them.

Xu Zhen and Zhang Yan looked at the office carefully. It was like a leather bag company. It was deserted, and there were no calls from outside. And I haven't seen any developers. It is possible that this software was completed by Zhou Lei alone, which is simply a genius.

Half an hour later, Zhou Lei pushed the door and came in.

Xu Zhen stood up, stretched out his hand, and the two shook hands amicably.

Xu Zhen handed over his business card: "Mr. Zhou, this is my business card."

Zhou Lei also replied with a picture of his own, "Please give more advice from President Xu. You are a senior in the industry, and we have to count on you to miss some good points to support ourselves."

Xu Zhen smiled wryly and said, "Mr. Zhou, did you know that? Your software has already ruined my battles and won't break the army."

"I didn't pay much attention to this." Zhou Lei did not pay attention to whether other friends were injured by 100 tons. He was just a porter. In fact, doing business is not his strength. He just took a few and didn't. Competitors' products come out and eat all the benefits in this industry.

Seeing that Zhou Lei didn't seem to be sneering or mocking himself, Xu Zhen took out his computer with grace and opened the PPT of the market share of translation software as of this morning.

Zhou Lei thinks that big companies are really powerful, and the exquisiteness of PPT is more than a few streets of PPT made by those people in his office.

Zhang Yan said: "Mr. Zhou, look at this pie chart, your software has a market share of almost 30%. However, according to our survey, the vast majority of users will install several software with similar functions. And we can see from the feedback on the use of software from several software platforms, almost other software are decorations. Usually you use your three-stone translation software, and we have detected that many people are uninstalling ours one after another. There are other software from friends. In the end, you will take all the market.”

Zhang Yan turned to the PPT on the next page, which is the download data of major platforms, and they made a graph displayed according to the time axis.

Zhang Yan didn't want to continue to introduce this graph. It was too intuitive. There was no language to describe this situation, and it made him feel bad.

The graph goes up with a similar exponential function. The current number of downloads has exceeded 40 million in China and nearly 20 million in foreign countries.

Zhou Lei took a deep breath. He really didn't expect it to be that serious. He always felt that translation software was just a very small product. There shouldn't be many people who usually come into contact with foreign languages. This is Zhou Lei's self-righteousness.

Mainly because the previous translation software was too stupid, either in the form of a dictionary, or in some Chinese sentences, and then returned to you some foreign languages ​​translated by the machine. However, the reliability of machine translation has not been high, which is also because they do not have enough language samples.

For Sanshi translation software, the high-performance semantic algorithm far exceeding the original NLP algorithm can directly defeat all current products, and it is not considered to recognize different languages ​​seamlessly, and even some people will quote other languages ​​in English. words can also be identified.

For the first time, Zhou Lei had a deep understanding of his software.

"So President Xu, are you here today?" Zhou Lei asked with some doubts.

"Mr. Zhou, I want to ask you for a secondary development authorization for a product. After we saw your product, we felt that it was impossible to compete with you, so we decided to transform it immediately."

"Mr. Xu, I'm sorry for the impact on your products. But I don't know how to do further cooperation with you."

"You may not know much about the translation industry. Let me tell you."

"Please speak!"

“Most of what we usually think of as translation is based on spoken language and everyday use, and the great thing is the kind of simultaneous translation that you have seen in international conferences. In reality, simultaneous translation is a chore, and even the best translators are not 100% Convert the other party's language into another language in the way of Xinyard.

After all, the environment in which each language is produced is different, and some words cannot be accurately translated, and can only be translated by free translation. But I researched your product and found that it does a great job and the understanding of NLP far exceeds ours.

So instead of struggling to be phased out slowly, it is better for us to transform immediately and have a chance to survive. "

Zhou Lei said: "Is there any other business that the translation industry can do?"

Xu Zhen said: "In fact, most of our business is still manual translation of documents and documents. Do you know how many translators our company has? There are more than 1,000 translators, not including part-timers. My idea is that if If we can obtain the interface of your software, we can turn to the translation work of a large number of documents. But I hope that your translation software does not support this kind of translation function of a large amount of text for the time being.”

Zhou Lei thinks this is a good way to make money. Dodge is an expert in the industry, and he doesn't rely on this software to make money. now has

There has been a heated discussion in the society, saying that labor will be replaced by software, many translators have been laid off, and English training schools have closed.

If you only dig deep in personal translation, and Dodge rushes in front to shield himself from the wind and rain, that's not a good thing. Even if those professional translators lose their jobs, it has nothing to do with them. What's more, according to those people's brains, casual gangsters are much stronger than others.

"Mr. Xu, I probably understand your thoughts, I need to think about it."

"Then I'll come back tomorrow?"

"The day after tomorrow, I have other things to do tomorrow." Zhou Lei felt that Xu Zhen was a little anxious, and let him dry for a while.

Not to mention how Xu Zhen was restless in the hotel these two days, Zhou Lei was thinking about this at home. It is indeed a big impact. It takes more than ten years of uninterrupted learning for a person to learn English, not to mention the translators in the professional field. They not only need to learn linguistics, but also must understand the special purpose of related majors. language. Especially those of small languages, it is really killing people to learn.

But in a broad sense, the re-erecting of the Tower of Babel is a super event for human civilization. As long as there are no communication barriers for human beings, the circulation of civilization will become smooth. This is a good thing and may affect the interests of some people, but the sharing and circulation of knowledge may even lead to a great leap forward in science and technology.

Zhou Lei became more and more beautiful, and began to have some fantasies about what to say when UNESCO awarded him the medal that day.

On the third day, Xu Zhen and Zhang Yan, as well as a few technical backbones temporarily called from the capital, waited at the door of the small facade of Sanshi Technology early in the morning. Zaiyouzai came to open the door.

Xu Zhen's expression turned a little bad. It was half past nine, and there was no one in the office.

"Girl, what about your President Zhou?"

"Come in and wait, Mr. Zhou estimates it will take half an hour to arrive."

When Xu Zhen was in the office, he saw that other people came to work almost a little bit before Zhou Lei entered the office, and they all wanted to grit their teeth. In my own company, I will definitely get rid of these gangsters.

After Zhou Lei came in, he saw that there were a lot of people in the office today, almost all of them were full. If you look closely, it's all from someone else's company.

Xu Zhen stood up and introduced several new technical backbones, and the two sides shook hands.

Zhou Lei said: "Mr. Xu, I thought about it, we can open the secondary development interface to you. But this is only a network interface, and the data in your place needs to be translated and converted on our server."

"This..." Xu Zhen was a little embarrassed. If not, he would be working for a small company like Zhou Lei. All the core technologies are still here.

"Mr. Xu, don't worry. I will never leave my partners hungry when I do business. I need to pay attention to win-win results. Our two companies alone cannot afford such a large translation market. There will always be customers who will choose cheaper ones. The quality is slightly lower."

Xu Zhen's expression improved a little, "Mr. Zhou said, how can we cooperate?"

Zhou Lei said: "You decide the specific external pricing. I want half of the sales. You know, our server overhead is not a small amount."

Xu Zhen figured it out, this plan is still within the range that he can accept, as long as some low-end translators are streamlined and some high-level translators are reserved for manual proofreading, he will still have a net profit of less than 10%.

"Okay, just do that." Xu Zhen took out a USB flash drive and said, "It's our standard contract. You can ask a lawyer to read it and then sign it."

"No problem. After we sign it, we will forward it to you. After it takes effect, we will hand over the development tools and interface API to you, and the documents will also be sent together."

Zhou Lei is not at all afraid of what Dodge Translation will do in terms of sales. As long as the translation operation is performed on his own server, in fact all sales will be monitored.

The two sides shook hands to express their pleasant cooperation. But after Xu Zhen walked out of the glass door of Sanshi Technology, he felt a little lonely, as if he had signed an unequal treaty.

It's just that small fish eat big fish like this often happens in the technology industry. So after a few minutes, Xu Zhen returned to his self-awareness in the company.

On his way back to the capital, he began to draft a series of measures for layoffs, changes, and new products and new businesses.

Because there is no translation software, it doesn't matter to Zhou Lei, but there is one thing missing and a little less income. But it's a matter of life and death for the Dodge Translator.

In the next few days, Zhou Lei politely declined the cooperation requests of several small translation companies. .