Translation and Language Industry Observations

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Will Google Glass Make Interpreters Obsolete?

One of the most common questions that people in the translation industry are asked is: will Google Translate replace professional translators? The funny thing about this question is that it has been being asked for over 10 years at least. Does that mean that the question is stupid or that the answer is no? Well, …

An Inside Look at Microsoft Translator

Google is by far the leading search engine used in the world today. Industry estimates give Google over 85% of the market share. In distant second place comes Bing, with about 7% of the market share. In a similar pattern, Google’s popular machine translation program Google Translate is the leading online machine translation (MT) program. …

Facebook’s Machine Translation. What’s in it for you?

It seems that nowadays, every big tech company has its own machine translation (MT) system which it uses for both internal and external purposes. Here is a partial list of these deployments: Google. Anybody who spends time on the Internet knows about Google Translate. Google is one of the pioneers of MT and is by …

Translating for free. When a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Last week we received the following email from a potential customer. This is what he wrote: I hope that all is well. My name is Anthony and I lead our regulatory/compliance efforts at XYZ Parfums. We’re developing some new aftershave products, and need to have “aftershave” translated into a few different languages for packaging for …

Quick Guide on Machine Translation Post-Editing Practices

Machine Translation Post-editing (MTPE or PE) is an innovative way of correcting machine translation output. However, in spite of its simple definition, PE can still be unclear when attempted. But why? The truth is, PE comes in different forms, which can only complicate things if you don’t know where to start. Plus, there doesn’t seem …

How Can Localization Help Your Amazon Business

How Can Localization Help Your Amazon Business Taking your Amazon business into international waters can take you to the next level. Especially since the projected global sales for 2020 comes out to a predicted $3.9 trillion. Consumers value businesses that are customer-centric. Speaking in the language of your audience will show them that you are …

Is Neural Machine Translation (NMT) as good as human translation?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on LinkedIn entitled: More proof why IMO machine translation is clearly not ready to replace professional translators. You can see the full post here. This was a simple test that we ran after receiving an order from one of our clients. We ran the original German sentence …

Google Translate Beats DeepL in Translation Test

The state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems available today provide a fast, excellent basis for high quality translations. Spelling, grammar and general formulations have a low error rate and therefore the post-editing (PEMT) requires little effort. For post-editing of technical texts, however, specialist knowledge must be available in both theory and practice in order to …

Translation trials: Can AI translators beat humans in business?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in the world of technology. It is nothing less than a revolution in the field of modern software. As any piece of technology before, AI too has posed certain threats to the traditional industries and setups. One particular threat that we will be discussing today is whether …

Translation prices. Per word or per hour?

In the translation and localization industry, translation prices are typically quoted on a per-word basis. So if a document or file has one thousand words, we multiply the number of words by the price per word to get the translation price per 1000 words. It is a simple pricing system which seems to work. Translators …

Summarizing Slatorcon Amsterdam 2019

I love Amsterdam. This was probably my fifth time there. Localization conferences I like a bit less and have not gone to one in years. But my love of Amsterdam outweighed any other consideration and I decided to attend the one day Slatorcon Amsterdam 2019 conference on November 28, 2019 which was produced by Slator. …

Google Translator Toolkit to be shut down on December 4, 2019

I just got an email from Google announcing that it is shutting down its Google Translator Toolkit (GTT) service. This is pretty big news, although I am not really sure why. Was anyone using GTT? Obviously not very many and the number of users was in decline, because otherwise why would they do that? I …

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