Everyone knows machine translation (MT) has enormous potential for dramatically reducing translation cost and increasing speed. But who thinks of MT as a way to improve quality? ISO 9001-certified for the last decade, my company’s quest for quality has unexpectedly led us to MT. Along the way we’ve developed and tested a number of different processes…
Everyone knows machine translation (MT) has enormous potential for dramatically reducing translation cost and increasing speed. But who thinks of MT as a way to improve quality? ISO 9001-certified for the last decade, my company’s quest for quality has unexpectedly led us to MT. Along the way we’ve developed and tested a number of different processes…
If there is a localization mantra, it’s sure to be “Do more for less.” Product managers want to extend localized products to their customers in international markets, purchasing managers are looking for overall budget reductions, and project managers, as always, are required to hit seemingly incompatible targets for cost, speed and quality.
Enterprise Innovators is a series of interviews with trailblazers whose innovations in language technologies are helping establish new best practices within the localization industry…
Yahoo! Inc., founded in 1994, is currently the third most visited website on the planet with over half a billion unique visitors every month. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, has more than 13,000 employees in 25 countries, provinces and territories, and localizes content into over 30 languages. Salvatore Giammarresi is Yahoo!’s localization director, hired to reinvent Yahoo!’s localization strategy, processes, organization and technology.
Traducteurs sans frontières, the French predecessor to Translators without Borders, was founded in 1993 as a way to provide free translations to humanitarian organizations. In the past year, since the crisis in Haiti hit in early 2010, thousands of translators have volunteered their services to help not only the people of Haiti but those in other troubled regions of the world…
Autodesk, based in San Rafael, California, publishes 3D software for design, engineering and entertainment. Autodesk products are localized from English into as many as 20 languages. Mirko Plitt is senior manager of language technologies at Autodesk as part of the localization services team in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
If machine translation (MT) has gone mainstream, our guess is that this has more to do with changed expectations than with improved technology. That MT technology has advanced goes without saying, but the biggest change may be that users no longer expect high-quality translations “out of the box.” Most users anticipate having to invest in some customization work to get the kind of MT output that is as close to human quality as possible…
