Translation and Language Industry Observations

Coronavirus drives demand for translation services

The entire world seems to be consumed these days with the hysteria around the coronavirus outbreak. And for good reason. Thousands are already dead and the outbreak seems poised to wreak havoc throughout the entire world. US President Trump has issued a travel ban, basically cutting off travel between Europe and the USA.  According to …

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 …

How to Increase Conversion rates on your Website

As any online business manager or owner knows, driving traffic to your website is challenging. But even success in driving traffic is only winning half the battle. Getting visitors to convert and buy online is the other and more important half of your success. The Challenge Facing GTS Translation GTS Translation has been selling professional translation services …

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 …

Chinese Translators take Coronavirus in stride

The coronavirus could not have come at a worst time. During the Chinese New Year, many people take to the roads and railroads, sometimes traveling up to three days to be with family. The outbreak of the coronavirus forced many people to stay at home for the holidays. But for most translators, business is usual …

Get to know your customers. Localizing your website for Latin America.

This post provides valuable insight into the mindset of Latin American customers to help you optimize your website localization efforts. Social scientists have studied cross-cultural communication for decades, and some of their findings can shed light on what should and should not be done when trying to appeal to foreign markets. This article explores some …

Is Trump the New Translator in Chief?

The world is still abuzz with the state-sponsored assassination of Qasem Sulemani. This triggered talks of a US-Iran war. Then came the unintentional  downing of the Ukrainian International Airlines jet by Iran which claimed the lives of 176 souls.  This caused mass riots by thousands of irate Iranians who are demanding the ouster of Iran’s …

5 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Foreign Language Skills

The fastest and most efficient way of learning a foreign language has always been total immersion, using the language on a daily basis, almost to the exclusion of your mother tongue. For people who are not living in a country where their target language is spoken, this is easier said than done. Luckily for the …

NEW! Low Cost Website Translation Services

Translating a website into other languages can be expensive. Translating an entire website may not only require a large budget, it usually requires extensive IT support. This may be problematic for small businesses that want to translate their company website at little expense and without a lot of technical headaches. Or sometimes, companies prefer to …

International debt collection. Is there a happy ending?

As a freelance translator or a representative of a company in the languages industry, you work with international clients in foreign lands. The nature of our business is international, so your exposure to foreign clients is inevitable. So what do you do when such a client does not pay for services rendered? It’s a good …

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 …