GTS Blog

In this post I am going to describe the process that we use at GTS for post-editing machine translation (MT). To run this process you will need to have licenses for Systran Desktop 6 and SDL Trados Workbench. This process yields human translation quality for various kinds of texts and is well-suited for high volume projects that need to be delivered quickly. We have been successfully using this process for translation of technical translation projects such as tenders and technical manuals.

BACKGROUND

MT has long been considered a tool which is good for ‘gisting’ but that is not good enough for translations that require high quality and accuracy. Several things have happened in the last two years which are changing the way that the translation industry and clients perceive MT: continue reading…

Hype is a big part of marketing and some companies do it better than others. SDL is a good example of a company that engages in aggressive marketing (see related blog post here). Everyone knows about their flagship products, such as SDL Trados, which have become the industry standard. Google Translate is another example of efficient hype: hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new feature, service or product enhancement. As a result, Google Translate and the Translation Toolkit are the rage of the Internet and are used by millions of people.

Systran, one of the pioneers of machine translation, uses a much more understated marketing approach with little hype. But they let their products speak for themselves. In a recent annual survey on machine translation software by advisory firm Global Equations, Systran came out on top (read more about that here). continue reading…

The CAT tool market is heating up, which is good news for customers. Prices will definitely come down and the competition is guaranteed to drive CAT vendors to improve product quality, service and support. Lionbridge has announced its new, upcoming product offering Geoworx which can be seen here. 

The following is a direct quote from Nic McMahon, VP Technology Solutions at Lionbridge which was made on the LinkedIn Localization Professional group.
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An SDL advertisement in 2009 claimed that one person translated over 34,000 words in a 10 hour period using the new SDL Trados product release. The logic in the ad: buying a Trados license is a no-brainer and the expense can be recouped quickly. Many people, however, were upset by that ad and called it false advertising. You can read the discussion here. Close to 100 comments were written until the discussion was closed for further comments.

In another discussion about SDL Trados on LinkedIn (read it here) over 35 comments were received, while more comments keep coming in daily.

The following are some selected responses from these two discussions: continue reading…

Lingoes is a free tool which aggregates several free text translators and hundreds of free dictionaries, delivering a wealth of language resources in one application. Once installed you can use Lingoes to translate texts, lookup words using hundreds of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, play texts out loud using text-to-speech, access helpful information such as currency conversion rates and more. Lingoes works on Windows-based computers. You can download the tool from http://www.lingoes.net.

Lingoes is an intriguing tool which many users may find useful, but some users may find it to be cumbersome since it is fairly CPU intensive and also takes control of some Windows keyboard shortcuts. There also is nothing incredibly unique about Lingoes and any savvy PC user will be able to use Google and Yahoo to get  access to the same features without having to install another application on their machine. It is valuable in that it provides links to hundreds of free language resources which you may not have heard about.