GTS Blog

Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and similar machine translation tools are unsuitable for most mission-critical translation jobs. But Google Translate can be effectively used as an aid for various translation-related tasks. This includes using Google as a back translation tool for validation and QA of translations (see a post I wrote about it here). In today’s post, I would like to show you some Google search techniques that we have used to much advantage in translation projects. These simple techniques can be used by professional translators, editors, project managers and anyone who wants to monitor the quality of their translations.

Let’s say your translator turned in a job with some pretty specific industry terminology. How do you know that your translator translated the terms correctly? Incorrect translation of terminology or improper use of acronyms can be devastating to your ad campaign, sales brochure, video presentation, etc. Using Google, it is pretty easy to check for yourself even when your knowledge of the target language is limited.

One thing we need to remember is that Google search has some amazing natural language understanding technology that is initiated as soon as you start typing in your search query. I am sure that most of you know this already but it bears mentioning nonetheless. As you type in a string in Google you can see what the most common uses of it are on the Internet. And since the Internet is so huge, consensus is a very powerful factor in determining what the correct uses of a phrase are. This works in all of the languages which Google supports.

The first thing you want to do is familiarize yourself with the various country versions of Google search by going to Google’s language tools page (scroll down to the bottom of the page where all the flags are displayed). Depending on the language you are working in, you will want to access the country-specific version of Google when using it as a lookup tool. If you want to check a term or acronym in Spanish, access Google Spain or Google Argentina; if you want to check a term in German, go to Google Germany. And so on.

When in the country-specific Google version, type in the term you want to check. Use the Google exact match feature by inserting quotation marks around the term or phrase. If there are no or very few matches, then you know that the translation is probably incorrect. If there is a Wikipedia page for the term, chances are that the term was translated correctly and reading the Wiki page will provide further help on the language usages of that term.

Google's Internet language and country options (Spanish version)

To further pinpoint your search, use Google’s Internet options which are displayed on the left-hand side of the browser. You can choose to only display pages in the targeted language, or to only display pages in the targeted country. By using these search methods, it is easy to check on terminology usage and to verify that your translators have done a good job.

Another option is to type an English phrase into the country version of Google and then to only display the pages in the target language or country. This often provides many examples of how the term is translated in the target language.

Latin was the first real international language, much like the way English has adopted that role today. It was largely spread around Europe, North Africa, and also to a lesser extent into the Middle East, by the expanding Roman Empire. At the time it was used as a way to communicate for people living within the Roman Empire, and between the Empire and their allies. People were travelling to places they had never been before, and trade was flourishing between new territories, so a universal language to communicate with was essential.

Its spread into Europe had a massive influence on the languages that are now spoken in the majority of European countries. It was the basis for the Romance languages, of which the most widely spoken are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. For this reason many of the words spoken throughout the world today have their roots in Latin. But despite its wide influence throughout history, Latin is regarded as a dead language, even though it’s used more than you would believe.

Who still uses Latin?

You may be surprised to know just how much Latin is used in everyday language. Latin still has a dedicated following in religion, and is widely used within the Roman Catholic Church. Many clergymen for the Roman Catholic Church can speak Latin fluently. Official documents published by Vatican City are still written in Latin, as they were done in the days of the Roman Empire.
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The Huffington Post announced that it is launching a French language edition of the leading Internet newspaper in partnership with French newspaper Le Monde and calling it Le Huffington Post. The new publication will be headed by Anne Sinclair, wife of the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chairman Dominique Strauss Kahn. This announcement comes shortly after the Wall Street Journal launched a German language edition.

The Journal has not said how much of the Wall Street Journal Deutschland will be exclusive and how much will be translated stories from the paper’s main edition. But it has a dedicated team based in Frankfurt working alongside reporters and editors from sister company Dow Jones.

It is unclear how much of an impact Ms. Sinclair will have on the editorial content of the new French publication or how much influence she will have in setting its journalistic policies. Some critics were quick to point out that Ms. Sinclair has not been an active journalist for years and that perhaps she was chosen for name recognition, while the DSK scandal in New York is still fresh on people’s minds. But it is clear that the WSJ, the Huffington Post and other major newspapers see the need to take their content into new markets, either by translating it or by creating unique content specifically targeted to the local readership. These newspapers are spending millions to set up operations in other countries which includes hiring high profile figures (like Ms. Sinclair) to head up operations, hiring local journalists, renting large offices, buying expensive equipment, setting up hosting servers. Smaller publications can’t afford these types of expenses and moreover will be facing new competition from the heavyweights.

The good news for the small and medium size publishers is that they can use inexpensive translation tools and machine translation to test the waters and see if a market exists for their content. Depending on the results of the tests, newspapers can decide whether it is worthwhile to take it to the next level.

Case in point: The GTS translation plugin allows any publisher that uses WordPress to publish in another language, using post-edited machine translation for high language quality. Another WordPress plugin which allows multilingual publishing is WPML. It is estimated that about 15% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress. Which means that multilingual publishing is a feasible option for many newspapers and that we can expect to see other newspapers follow the WSJ and the Huffington Post in their overseas travels.

Hi there. 2012 has started out very well at GTS and we are quite busy. The downside is that my blogging production has gone way down and this is only my second post this year. Sign of things to come? I hope so and I expect to pick up the writing pace soon.

I wanted to tell you a story that happened to us late last year. A client named ECETOC (European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals) ordered a website translation project from us in 5 languages. You can see the site on http://www.ecetoc.org. We delivered the translations and looked forward to a productive relationship with this very important client. But then we got this response from the client:

As you know, we have had issues since the outset with the Spanish texts and the feedback from each of the four independent Spanish reviewers is that it is not an accurate translation of the original and not representative of the meaning of the English version. They also said that a number of its phrases would simply not be used in Spain. This problem is causing an unreasonable amount of delay to everyone concerned and is putting us in jeopardy of not fulfilling the project on time. For these reasons it was decided to look for another provider for this language rather than to continue trying to correct your version (the scientists concerned are too busy anyway) and expect you to find another translator to finalise it.

This brings us to your recent invoice no. C-112-10/11-457. 
Please be so kind as to send a credit note to cancel this invoice and issue a new invoice without the Spanish translation option. This invoice will then be paid as soon as the validation on the staged sites has been completed for the 5 languages.

Four of the five languages were well received, but the Spanish version was rejected and the end-client refused to pay for it.

My question is, what would you do in this case? We tried hard to get the client to approve our Spanish version, but they emphatically refused. Since the Spanish translation was prepared by a partner translation company in Spain, are we liable to pay them? Can we simply not pay them and tell them “tough luck, you messed up?”

To be honest, that is what we did. We refused payment based on this client report. But our supplier is very upset, threatening to sue us and sending non-payment reports to some Internet sites.

I am interested in doing the right thing. On one hand the translation company did their job and handed in the translation. But on the other hand we did not get paid for the job they did and ended up losing a good account and future earnings. There are only losers here unfortunately.

Please let me know what you think. Should we pay the Spanish translation company anyway? Should they drop their claims? Should we compromise in some way? I would like to know what you think. Your answers may help us resolve this situation and make sure that we handle this in the right way.

Happy New Year everyone and I hope that 2012 is successful for all of us. Predicting the future is difficult. Indeed the Talmud states that from the time of the destruction of the Temple, the capacity to prophesize was given to children and fools. And that sounds right because some of the predictions you read sound pretty foolish in retrospect. Will my predictions for 2012 be foolish? Maybe, but here goes anyway.

1. Business will be good. 2012 will be a good year for translation companies, following a less-than-great 2011. The US economy in a Presidential election year is rebounding and that should be good for most of the people in the food chain. More and more online content is being translated too which means more business for everyone.
2. Demand for website and online translation services will outperform industry growth. The online content explosion, the death of books and printed materials, the increased penetration of smartphones and mobile readers will increase demand for translation of website and other online content.
3. Customizable MT engines in the cloud. People will be able to create custom machine translation engines with their own training corpus, but without investing in expensive servers and software development. Microsoft already features a Collaborative Translation feature which puts some customization into the cloud. Let’s MT is a European company which already started Beta testing this very system concept (they invited us to start testing the system last November; while it is not ready yet the system shows promise and it should be ready this year). Other MT companies have also considered SaaS models and we may see some in 2012.
4. Further consolidation. The big companies like Transperfect, WeLocalize and SDL will continue to grow though strategic mergers and acquisitions. The big will get bigger, some of the smaller players will disappear.
5. Facebook will continue to integrate machine translation into the social network. They started it in 2011 by integrating the Bing Translator. They will continue to add new language features to help break down the language barrier.
6. Translation prices will continue to drop. People, especially translators who are in denial, have argued this point with me but I expect human translation prices to continue to drop as more use of post-edited MT workflows are adapted by large LSPs and buyers of translation services.
7. More unemployed translators. Freelance translators who refuse to adapt to the changes in the industry and who rely on outdated models will be scrambling for work in 2012. Some may not find it and may need to consider a career change.
8. Speech-to-speech translation will not mature into serious commercial products in 2012. I think that people will continue to talk about a Universal Translator but that advances in technology will not be sufficient for a killer speech-to-speech app to be released for commercial use.
9. European translators and translation companies will become more cost competitive. The Euro has fallen nearly 10% against the US Dollar in the last few weeks.  If the economic predictions come true, the Euro should drop further in 2012. That will make it more economically viable for US companies to buy translation services in Europe.
10. SDL will release new post-editing software. SDL already integrated MT into Trados Studio 2009, making it possible to machine translate a document and post-edit the content. I predict that SDL will release new software in 2012 that automates the MT post-editing process, making translation automation faster and easier.