GTS Blog

I thought it would be interesting if some of our readers would tell us about a great translator they have worked with. Excellence can be expressed in terms of an outstanding academic background/industry specialty, a broad command of languages (e.g., a translator who is certified in 5 or 6 language pairs), someone who has translated known works of literature, someone who has won translation awards. That kind of thing.

With the emergence of machine translation and CAT tools, it is easy to overlook the fact that the backbone of the translation industry is the many thousands of professional translators that have devoted themselves to their profession and that have a genuine love of language. These people deserve to be recognized.

You can tell us about your suggestions by adding a comment to this post, or send us an email to info@gts-translation.com with the subject: best translator.  Please be specific about why you think this translator deserves recognition. After a while I will post your suggestions in a separate blog post.

Here is my suggestion:

Matthew Schlecht: Matthew has a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Columbia University, among other advanced degrees. He is ATA-certified in Japanese to English, and also translates from French and German into English. He is an expert in translation of pharmaceutical patents, scientific reports and most forms of technical translation. The only negative I can say about Matthew is that he is usually too busy to handle our projects.

Breaking news! SDL is buying Language Weaver for a bunch of cash (US$42.5 Million). Read all about it here. Well I can’t be a blogger in the translation industry if I don’t write something about this so here goes–my own thoughts on this deal:

• My first thought was “what, only 42 million? Why so little?” I mean Language Weaver is one of the top MT vendors. Shouldn’t they be worth more? What does this mean for the MT industry as a whole? I guess the valuations of the other MT vendors are much lower now. After SDL bought Language Weaver and Lionbridge hooked up with IBM, it would appear that other vendors that are dreaming of an exit face a much narrower field than before.

• A Great Return on Investment: it appears that the folks that invested in Language Weaver in its first years of operation (2002 to 2004) got a fantastic return on their investment. From what I was able to learn on the Internet, a total of between US$6.7 million and US$9 million were invested in Language Weaver since the company was founded in 2002 (read more here). Two rounds of VC funding in 2002 and 2004 yielded about $4.7 million. Another US$2 million was received as an Advanced Technology Program award from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s NIST agency. And In-Q-Tel, a VC owned by the CIA, provided another round of funding (undisclosed amount) in 2004. So the ROI to the investors was between 500% to 700%. Not too shabby.

• Why is the CIA bailing on Language Weaver? When Language Weaver started in 2002, 9/11 was fresh on everybody’s mind and the US government needed to develop language technology to get more intelligence about Bin Laden. The US government is still investing in translation technology, such as the contract awarded last week to the defense company Raytheon to help troops rapidly translate foreign language text while on the battlefield. So why not Language Weaver? Perhaps their technology is no longer of interest to the US government and the folks at the CIA want to cash in so they can invest in more interesting projects.

• Why did SDL buy Language Weaver? They already integrated Language Weaver MT into Trados Studio 2009 and other TMS products. They have been acting as Language Weaver resellers for over a year now. Will owning the company allow SDL to sell more MT software systems?

GTS has a strong online presence. Our two websites, gts-translation.com and global-translation-services.com attract several thousand visitors a day. Which is a good thing, because many of those visitors are searching for translation services and some of them are willing to pay for it. That is how we make money. But on the other hand, many of our visitors are professional translators, wannabe translators and translation agencies who are looking for work. Those people send solicitations by email advertising their services. That is what is referred to as Spam.

What does GTS do with spam? continue reading…

PROZ.com, which is probably the largest language portal and translator community, has launched a new service which allows clients to order small translation orders and get quick turnaround.  Click here to access this PROZ service.

Using the service, clients pay in advance for the translation directly to PROZ. PROZ then routes the job to a suitable translator and pays the translator upon completion. PROZ gets a commission from the order. Prices appear to be in the range of US$0.15 per word.

In the last year, a number of one-hour translation services have emerged. This includes companies such as Tolingo, Mygengo, Live Person, Babylon and OneHourTranslation. See a blog post I wrote about this a while back. With all of these companies competing in this niche, and with the entrance of a highly powerful competitor like PROZ that has over 100,000 registered translators, can any of these companies make a profit in this game of pennies?

What do you think?