Lingotek

What is a Translation Management System? Language Tech 101

lingo_admin — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:50:11 +0000

A high-quality Translation Management System (TMS) is the cornerstone of a well-run localization program. Just ask any TMS vendor! But, what problems are solved by a TMS? Let’s explore the answer by considering the least complicated scenario you’ll face: a document that must be translated into another language.

Translating a single document can be a series of simple steps. First, you submit the source content to a translator. How do you do that? Maybe you send the document through email. Maybe you share it via Box.com or a similar service. The translator does the work of reproducing your content in the target language. The translator provides the completed translation back to you. You then distribute the translation to your target audience.

Need your content in another target language? No problem! Simply repeat the process for every language you require. Now, add a second document that needs translation. And then a third. Now, all of the pages on your company’s website. Throw in some product documentation and a few video transcriptions, too.

That can be a lot of emails and a lot of document transfers happening! How do you track progress? How do you know when new content needs to be sent for translation? How do you incorporate feedback on the translations you’ve received? How do you know how much your team is spending?

It doesn’t matter how “simple” the translation process is. Any process that is frequently repeated takes time and effort. If there are multiple activities overlapping, there is overhead to manage status and communication. Human error begins to play its inevitable part. The first job, then, of a Translation Management System is to automate the repeatable processes that make up your translation workflow. This is why other business-critical processes such as payroll, billing, and inventory have been automated over the last sixty years — to alleviate the burden of tedious, manual, and error-prone tasks.

With a Translation Management System in place to automate the translation workflow, we can now begin to add sophistication to the process. Reporting on actual volumes and projected costs is a simple task for the TMS. The TMS can track and reuse previously approved translations through Translation Memory. Terminology consistency can be enforced through glossaries. Interested in using machine translation and AI to dramatically increase the volume of content you have translated? A TMS provides integration with the best-in-class machine translation engines. You’ll even be able to fully integrate with content sources and eliminate the file transfer nightmare that plagues content owners and localization managers. With a TMS in place, digital transformation becomes a reality for localization teams.

The Lingotek Translation Management System (TMS) does all of these things, and more, for our clients. The Lingotek TMS automates and streamlines workflows, integrates with many different content sources, drives quality improvements while constraining costs, and provides transparency and accountability in the translation process.

In future posts, we’ll introduce a variety of topics in translation management and Translation Management Systems. We’ll explore Translation Memory, Quality Management, Term Bases and Glossaries, and we will spend plenty of time on machine translation and its impacts.

The post What is a Translation Management System? Language Tech 101 appeared first on Lingotek.

Is Domestic Translation Worth It? Only If You Like Making Money.

lingo_admin — Mon, 17 May 2021 16:45:38 +0000

Companies tend to start thinking about content translation only when international expansion is looming. At least, that is the trend in these here United States. You may want to consider the 2.6 trillion reasons why translation should be part of the business plan long before doing business across borders.

Two Point Six Trillion What, Now?

Arle Lommel at CSA Research has expanded on a panel discussion hosted by Multilingual Magazine. The point in focus is a $2.6 trillion economy, within the larger U.S. domestic market, consisting of people with limited English proficiency. On its own, that figure would stand larger than the economies of Italy, Brazil, or Canada. And that $2.6 trillion is in a market with a currency, taxation laws, and business regulations you already handle as a U.S.-based company. CSA Research has a fun slide showing how that $2.6 trillion breaks down across different languages. I don’t want to steal their art, so be sure to check out the article. I will be using those numbers in my own chart later, though.

Let’s use another number from CSA Research. They find that a full 40% of people don’t buy something if they can’t do so in their preferred language. That means, of that big $2.6 trillion economy, just over a trillion of it is untouchable unless you are speaking the customer’s language(s). That number is still a bit fanciful, though. That $1 trillion wouldn’t go to any one business – or one industry. It will be spread around to pizza and shoes and gasoline, just like the larger market. What could be your company’s share of that just-out-of-reach $1 trillion?

Break Out Your Pencils and Spreadsheets

Let us assume that your industry’s share of the larger economy, and your company’s market share of that industry, are consistent in this non-English U.S. market. In other words (and numbers), if your industry normally attracts 1% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), you’re in a $200 billion industry. If your company has an industry market share of 1%, the company is bringing in $2 billion in revenue. We’ll carry that assumption into an examination of the domestic, non-English market.

Let’s look at some more realistic, although still very arbitrary numbers. I picked my numbers from Wikipedia and the Wall Street Journal. Go pick your own and play along. Let’s look at an unnamed sports apparel company with $75 million in annual revenues. That gives our company 0.044% of the, roughly, $170 billion dollar sports apparel industry. In turn, the industry accounts for 0.8% of the $21 trillion U.S. GDP. So, of the approximately $1 trillion controlled by people who don’t buy if they can’t read your content in their own language, $3.8 million could be flowing to your business.

But at What Cost?

What might it cost to add $3.8 million in revenue for your business? Here are two more assumptions for our hypothetical scenario. First, we’ll assume that you need to translate your website, some documentation, and maybe some other marketing content. Call it 25,000 words. For context, that would be 100 really wordy web pages. Secondly, we’ll also assume you are paying $0.25 per word for translation. Nobody is charging 25¢ per word, but let’s say you go with a sophisticated strategy in which critically important content is transcreated, regular content is professionally translated, and low-priority content is post-edited machine translation output. Each of those is a different rate and, blended together, might be around a quarter-a-word. That and 25¢ makes for easy math on a blog article.

If we take the per-language economic impact estimates from CSA Research and the market assumptions we made above, we get a chart that looks something like this:

If the estimates from CSA Research are reliable (likely) and my math is sound (open for discussion), we have an expenditure just north of $106,000 to add support for seventeen languages. Spending $106k to attract $3.8 million in revenue probably isn’t too difficult of a decision. Even just spending $6k to get back $28k from the Persian (Farsi) market is a better return than current money market account rates.

Sprinkle In Some Reality

Admittedly, these won’t be your actual revenue and expense figures. There will be labor costs associated with managing this extra content. You’ll, of course, need to execute a marketing strategy to attract these customers. This scenario is also well into the territory where a good Translation Management System is warranted to eliminate manual labor and minimize mistakes. That product cost would be offset by tools like Translation Memory and automated quality checks – both features that save money on translation costs in the long run.

And In Conclusion

There’s a framework here to help you draw your own conclusions. The key point is that there’s an untapped market with a reasonably low cost-of-entry that is waiting for you. Every business with an online presence has access to this market. Even supporting one more language inside the U.S. can lead to non-trivial revenue growth. Start small, learn, profit, and then repeat. And if you need help, call us.

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Plan, Don’t Panic, Because of Scary Google Translate Headlines

lingo_admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:56:01 +0000

A research project is making headlines for finding that machine translation engines, like Google Translate, produce translations that introduce bias or ruin the source text’s intended meaning. This is a good time to call out a few points and then talk about how Lingotek can help. First, a quick summary of the story.

The Problems of Bias and Meaning in Machine Translation

Researchers delivered a paper at a recent conference workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Africa. Their research highlights concerns about some of the output created by machine translation (MT) engines, Google’s in particular. These concerns extend to all languages and not just the ones found predominantly in Africa. These concerns focus on bias and meaning in translation. This research finds that MT engines might introduce biased language based on gender, race, or ethnicity where none previously existed. This is not news in the MT world and Google, Microsoft and other smart people are working toward solutions. The researchers also confirmed that MT engines can struggle to keep a text’s meaning in the produced translations. And by “struggle”, we mean “completely reverse the intended meaning”. Unclear writing styles, the use of contronyms, archaic terms, and other sources of ambiguity in the original text force the MT engine to “guess” at meaning. The resulting translations can range from embarrassing to controversial.

The “bad guy” in this story isn’t so much Google as it is the entire field of MT. Google just happens to be the biggest target and, to their credit, they make it easy to do this sort of research. All MT engines have shortcomings in how they handle specific source-to-target language pairings, domain-specific content, or both. And, yes, meaning can suffer when text is processed by an MT engine. Extracting meaning from text is hard enough for humans. That a series of computer algorithms can come even close is a tremendous accomplishment.

Tremendous accomplishment or not, the issues brought up in this paper are very important if you depend on MT for translation. Should you avoid using machine translation because of these issues?

Plan Before Using Machine Translation

I am not going to argue against using MT. Using an inexpensive technology to reach underserved markets and stretch your translation budget is an easy choice to make. I will, however, always recommend that you have a plan when you use MT. Think about your content on a continuum and do some basic classification.

At one end of the continuum is your most important content. A professional translator should always be engaged if there are clear legal, financial, or health and safety implications to a mistranslation. Also, if the source text is complicated, ambiguous, depends on metaphor and cultural references, skip the MT and go for a pro.

On the opposite side of the continuum, there are large volumes of content that are ripe for machine translation. Product documentation, knowledge base articles, community-contributed content are all good candidates. A minor mistranslation isn’t going to ruin anyone’s day.

Somewhere in the middle, there’s content that’s important to translate well, but you have trouble justifying the budget for full professional translation. Consider having a professional post-edit the MT output. It can sometimes be a great way to get decent quality at a lower cost.

Let Technology Help

Once you have your content plan, you will need to execute on it. Fortunately, a number of content platforms have connectors into Lingotek’s Translation Management System (TMS) and use it to drive quality throughout the localization process. The TMS can automate the process of getting your content to the right MT engine, professional translator, reviewer, or mix of all three. The Lingotek TMS already has direct support for many of the best-known MT engines. For more specialized MT scenarios, we now integrate with Intento Hub so you can centralize the choice of MT engine and get the best translation from more than 30 different MT engines.

There’s one more thing to consider. Most MT engines provide a choice of usage models – one that is free with basic features, or one that is tied to a paid subscription. The paid versions will have additional features and, for some engines, will let you train an instance of the engine with your domain-specific content. This should lead to better translation quality than you get from the standard offering. That is the case with Google’s Translate and AutoML products, Microsoft Translator, DeepL Pro, Amazon Translate, and pretty much any other MT engine provider with an actual business model.

In Summary

No existing machine translation engine is a complete replacement for professional translators. Language is infinitely malleable and constantly changing. Usage patterns and cultural norms evolve, new words are born, and new meanings attach to existing words. That matters when translated content needs to have the same meaning and personal impact as the original text. You can still get useful results from a machine translation engine, though. Plan carefully, leverage any customization features you can, and keep your expectations reasonable. Use professional translators with the content that matters most. And, of course, take advantage of a good translation management system to automate content processing, quality assurance, and take control of the entire localization process.

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Intento Integration Complete

lingo_admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 13:54:24 +0000

Lingotek & Intento Integration

San Francisco, CA, March 25, 2021 – Intento and Lingotek, leaders in enterprise AI integration and enterprise translation management respectively, announce a new partnership and incorporation of Intento’s AI-driven MT solutions into Lingotek’s highly-regarded translation management platform. With the new Intento connector, Lingotek users will be able to take full control over their machine translation requirements by deploying Intento’s MT Hub directly in their workflow. The addition of Intento’s AI-driven applications will significantly broaden the scope of MT providers that can be supported through Lingotek’s platform, leveraging Intento’s curated tools and services for greater choice and adaptability in choosing best-fit MT.

“Lingotek is a driving force in the current localization technology landscape, and we’re pleased to initiate what promises to be a fruitful partnership and integration between our two platforms. We see MT program development as a key initiative of most enterprise localization departments in 2021 and Intento’s customers benefit from seamless access to best-fit MT, choosing from over 40 engines, and easy MT program management through the Intento MT Hub. Intento powers the MT programs of many of the world’s largest companies, increasing quality, speed, and ROI”, says Konstantin Savenkov, Intento’s CEO. Savenkov continues, “The ability to access all of these features through Lingotek’s trusted systematic approach to translation management will provide customers with effortless access to the tools they need to dramatically improve and expand their MT workflows.”

Intento offers Lingotek users full visibility and control of their MT program, starting with guidance on what options they have and best-practices for MT selection, deployment, and improvement. Custom MT solutions allow users to achieve the highest effort and cost savings while retaining maximum MT benefit. Intento clients see up to 60% of translations accepted by linguists and up to 97% by end-users, not to mention that MT can drive up to 20x ROI for the customer. Intento also provides Lingotek customers with an intuitive MT dashboard for viewing detailed MT usage and flexibly filtering by languages, providers, projects, and more. The whole machine translation ecosystem will be at your team’s fingertips – project managers and other team members (from Lingotek and the customer) can focus on their projects and not on MT configuration; you won’t need to be experts in MT to utilize the best-fit MT for your business.

“Machine translation and AI continue to become more of a strategic focus in the localization industry as companies are looking for ways to expand their global footprint in cost-effective ways,” says Jeff Labrum, General Manager of Lingotek, a member of the Straker Group. “We are expanding integrations with MT providers, giving our customers the ability to leverage the best-of-breed MT engine(s) for the given content and languages. The ability to tap into Intento’s AI, MT evaluation, and content routing capabilities adds incredible value to our joint customers. We’re excited about this integration and to be partnering with Intento moving forward.”

About Intento:

Intento helps global companies procure and utilize the best-fit cognitive AI services. The Intento AI Hub connects AI models trained on multiple platforms (such as Amazon, Google AutoML, or Microsoft Cognitive Services) with many enterprise software systems. Launched in 2017, Intento offers its patented, ISO-27001 certified platform to global companies across all industries, augmenting their Localization, Content Management, Customer Support, and Marketing Operations with AI. For more information, visit Intento.

About Lingotek:

Lingotek, part of the Straker Translation Group, is a technology-driven language services company. The Lingotek Translation Management System (TMS) centralizes and automates localization activities including translation, vendor management, and quality control.

MEDIA CONTACT:

James Hjerpe – Intento
Brad Ross – Lingotek

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Announcing Support for Amazon Translate

lingo_admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 19:30:31 +0000

Lingotek is proud to announce the availability of Amazon Translate as a machine translation engine option in the Lingotek Translation Management System (TMS). The Lingotek TMS powers workflow automation of key tasks in the localization process. Amazon Translate customers can utilize their engine customizations such as Active Custom Translation (ACT) and Custom Terminology during the machine translation phase of a Lingotek TMS workflow. The machine translation results can then be edited or reviewed, as appropriate, prior to publishing.

Providing a choice of machine translation engines allows localization projects to choose the best engine suited for their content types and language pairs. The Lingotek TMS provides direct access to leading machine translation engines including Amazon Translate, DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Omniscien, and more.

The Lingotek TMS Connector ecosystem provides integration with popular content management, marketing automation, and sales automation systems including Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, Oracle Content & Experience, Contentful, Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, and more.

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Don’t Be Like Joe

lingo_admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:01:17 +0000

Meet Joe. Joe manages localization for the DMV, and his translation just made the new driver’s manual. For some, making national or even international headlines is a dream come true, but probably not as a bad translation meme, right? Here are some tips on how to deliver quality content translation and avoid being like poor Joe.

Tip #1: Quality to Match the Content

Not all content is alike, so to maximize your localization spend, you want to be sure to pay for high quality translation for highly visible, long-lasting content, so ask yourself:

Does an incorrect translation put someone’s life in danger?

Would our brand be severely damaged by an incorrect or misleading translation?

Is this a short-term or long-lived piece of content?

Is this being distributed as hard copy or digital?

How easy is it to fix the content when a mistake is found?

Your answers to these questions will determine the quality level you need and help you avoid Joe’s fate.

Tip #2: Understand Quality Metrics

Language Quality Evaluation (LQE) is a way to objectively view your content quality, based on the criteria that matter to you – using human reviewers. It is an investment, so it’s best applied to the right content (see Tip #1), but it can help you understand the level of quality you currently have and whether it is trending over time in the right direction. It can also help you make decisions about your vendors and any trade-offs you may be making for speed or cost considerations. For an in-depth view of how translation quality is defined, check out this research.

Lingotek has spent the better part of the last four years creating the best integrated LQE feature-set in any TMS. Learn more.

Tip #3: Context, Context, Context!

That would have never happened to Joe if the people translating that content knew it was a road sign for a driver’s manual. Context changes everything, and Lingotek is the world’s leader in providing context!

See our Blog Post on the importance of Context.

Tip #4: Don’t Repeat, Repeat, Repeat!

Once you have invested in translating your content, you don’t want another translator to come along and translate it again in the next revision.

A real-time, cloud-based Translation Memory (TM) means that the translations you already have and have approved will be reused – maximizing your quality, but also your spend and time-to-market – TM for the hat-trick!

You can’t underestimate the power of quality translations, and the work involved to ensure a high standard can be overwhelming. Click on the link below to learn more about how Lingotek can help you easily achieve the kind of quality that leads to business growth and customer satisfaction.

Linguistic Quality Evaluation

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Business Innovation Starts at the Bottom

lingo_admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 14:08:47 +0000

Over the years, I have been involved in some extremely innovative companies. I’ve learned that rarely do the truly great ideas come from “the top.” So, at Lingotek, we embrace an Agile software development lifecycle that encourages collaboration across the entire team, seeking business innovation. Everyone on our development teams is responsible for identifying the problem or opportunity, exploring potential solutions, choosing a path forward, figuring out how to do it, and then making it happen. Product people are involved in the discussions around architecture, and engineers are involved in discussions around product requirements and priorities. It’s how we’re built, and we know it drives the right result, so that is how we operate every day.

Another big piece of this puzzle for us is having regular Hack-A-Thons – a time when our teams are given a break from day-to-day responsibilities and the Backlog, and instead are permitted to explore the unexplored – a chance to pursue and demonstrate their ideas!

“…tap the potential of

business innovation…”

I have brought this concept to various companies along the way, with mixed results, and what I love about Lingotek is how easily they embraced and broadened it.

Often, this is an exercise for just the development team, but not at Lingotek. Here we include everyone in the company – Sales, Language Services, Client Success, Finance, Marketing, and yes, Product Development – all working together on something they think is worth pursuing.

Often, this is an exercise in lip service – the time is given, the results reviewed and judged, the kudos passed out, but that’s where it ends – ultimately limiting the possibility of enhancing business innovation. At Lingotek, we act on these ideas and incorporate them into our business and our product – more often than not. In this latest Hack-A-Thon, we immediately added over one-third of our ‘hacks’ to our official Backlog and intend to execute and release them as a part of our Platform within the next 3-6 months; more than half were given the time and budget to take the next step – more discovery to determine their feasibility and potential impact. Overall, 88% were acted upon, which is absolutely amazing.

I am often asked whether spending the time on Hack-A-Thons is worth it, and honestly, it all depends on the motivation. It can be used to give the team a break from things and clear the mind – and that can have value, I suppose. Perhaps there is even some value validating and rewarding the ideas without then acting on them.

But, if you are open to new ideas (especially the ones that go against the “current thinking”), are inclusive of everyone who may have that brilliant idea, and are willing to invest in the ideas that come out of the process – then it is invaluable. Hack-A-Thons can play a big part in the innovation engine for your organization – and that’s an engine that must be finely tuned.

As for us, we are already planning the next one!

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Finding the Right Partner – Language Services Providers (Part 1 of 3)

lingo_admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:22:01 +0000

Is your translation service provider a strategic partner or merely another vendor? The distinction is key as managing another vendor can become another full-time job, draining valuable resources.

With the thousands of translation and language service providers, it’s critical that you find the right partner to help you reach your business goals. Here are some considerations to keep in mind to find the right translation partner to grow your business.

Know Your Business Needs

The first step to finding the right translation services partner is understanding your own unique needs so you can communicate them and find a partner with those capabilities. There are several factors that may require custom capabilities. When searching for a prospective translation partner, here are some special requirements to keep in mind.

1. What is your industry?

2. Do you have any uncommon language pairs?

Some language pairs are more common than others. For example, common language pairs often involve English. However, some language pairs that don’t involve English may be less common and may add another layer of complexity.

If you have an uncommon language pair, a special team may need to be brought in. For example, if translating from German to French it’s likely that your content will need to be translated from German to English and then from English to French. It’s important to know if your language partner has that capability.

3. What is your workflow and pace?

Different industries and organizations require different pace, teams, and workflows. When choosing a partner, find one who can meet product deadlines, is flexible enough to work with your existing workflows and vendors, and can meet your budget expectations.

Is this a one-time translation project or something that will need to grow? As your company expands, you may need increased content or dynamic content on your website to be changed frequently. Depending on your budget or timeline, you may also want to stagger translation focusing a larger portion of your budget on marketing or supporting a product launch with more specialized human translation. This can grow over time to include technical support and user forums.

Questions to Ask a Translation Service Partner

Now that you understand and have communicated your needs, determine if a potential language service provider has the capabilities to meet those needs. Here are some questions for your team to discover how a translation service functions and if they’ll be able to help your organization meet its goals.

1. Who are your content creators?

Who is creating your content is often overlooked, but the “who” is critical to the quality of your content. Content writers should be regional, in-country experts and understand locale-based language nuances as well as your company’s technical and stylistic needs.

Lingotek’s linguistic experts have top certifications (ATA, ITI, CATTI, LISA, etc.), go through security protocols, and provide samples to make sure that your brand can be reflected appropriately. The quality of your content will make a difference in your brand’s digital visibility and the overall user experience.

2. What technology do you use? What are its capabilities?

Your translation partner will be collaborating with your team members and within their own teams (content creators, engineers, designers, marketers, etc.). Integrated tools and connectors that make collaboration seamless are vital to this process.

Lingotek’s technology connects to the most popular software for designers, marketers, and project managers to allow them to focus on producing quality content and spend less time on duplications and unnecessary conversions.

3. Do you have a method to check the quality of translations?

Quality evaluation tools are critical to efficiency. Lingotek leverages translation memory with its Linguistic Quality Evaluations (LQE), a premium evaluation software that allows managers to provide analyses of current processes and workflows with proactive recommendations and improvements.

Coupled with our Translation Management System (TMS), we are able to provide real-time transparency and performance metrics for your company and build agile workflows to help the measurement of your KPIs.

4. Can your processes align with our processes?

There are thousands of language service providers on the market. But the main difference between a provider and a partner is the ability to create custom content and strategy aligned to your company’s goals.

This may mean creating a customized strategy from Point A to Point B; but sometimes getting your product to market also means working with existing vendors and workflows. Knowing if your vendor can be flexible from the start is critical. At Lingotek, we listen to your needs first and align to meet those needs with custom strategies that meet your needs, timeline, and budget.

A True Partner Adds Value

It’s easy to find a translation services provider — there are thousands of them! But a true partner looks out for your best interest and works alongside you to understand your business, build trust, and tailor solutions to give you a competitive advantage. A partner is aligned with your strategic objectives and goals to create custom solutions in order to enter new markets quickly and effectively.

At Lingotek, we aren’t just looking for the next transactional exchange; we are here to help you create quality content that adds value with premium technology and expert strategy. If you’re ready for a true language services partner, contact one of our experts at Lingotek to create your translation strategy.

The post Finding the Right Partner – Language Services Providers (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on Lingotek.

The Challenges of Content Marketing in a Global Market

Richard Roberts — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 17:08:17 +0000

Marketers often find themselves at the forefront of a company’s global expansion and responsible for creating a strategy to reach customers in target countries. While an exciting opportunity, going multinational is also a huge challenge for those tasked with overseeing the development of new marketing strategies.

Entering new markets requires rewriting the playbook that brought domestic success. While brand consistency is important, different markets favor different approaches, and the pieces of effective translation and digital optimization are no exception — this can be a daunting task.

However, the right combination of tools and automations for your strategy can ease that burden. While investing in shiny, new tools alone may deepen the trough of disillusionment, combining the right tools and experts with your strategy will help your team hit target audiences effectively on time and within budget.

Leveraging Automation: Translation Automation to Fit Your Strategy

Post-pandemic, businesses might have fewer resources and human capital; this is where automation can step in to fill the gap.

Similar to how your organization-wide strategy sets the vision and defines strategic objectives, market-entry should include translation automation that does the same. Start by identifying your overarching goals for leveraging automation, the strategic areas that you feel could most benefit, and the budget that you have available.

If entering a new market, you likely have a lot of content to translate and a limited budget and timeline within which to do so. While human-translated content can be key to expanding into a new market, sometimes it isn’t practical financially or logistically to have all of content localized by human translation. It’s critical to understand the different types of content you have, their different weights of importance, and then prioritize them accordingly.

With a prioritization strategy and a staggered translation process, your brand expansion can reach your desired market successfully. A staggered translation process includes using automation where possible for certain types of content, and saving more costly expert translation for more complex or nuanced types of content. There are also specific types of content that necessitate discussing with a translation strategy expert as cost and time savings may differentiate depending on industry.

There is some content that can be effectively machine-translated to save time and money. User-generated content such as user forums and user reviews can be efficiently translated with machine learning as well as frontlines of communications like SMS or emails. Other resources that translate well via machine are FAQs, knowledge bases, and alerts and notifications. By using your style guide, term glossary, and machine learning these are excellent places to utilize automations.

Conversely, there is some content that necessitates more localization involving expert (human) translators. Some examples of content more appropriate for the nuances of human translation include advertising, legal, and marketing content. Other content such as websites, software application interfaces, documents and manuals, and user guides may be able to include some cost savings by integrating different levels of machine translation.

By differentiating, prioritizing, and staggering content, your business can focus on high-quality translations in the areas that matter and:

Achive Faster Time to Market

Gain First-Mover Advantage

Stay Within Defined Budget

Meet Legal Requirements

With consideration to human capital, technology resources, and budget, your translation experts can create a prioritized, staggered approach to translation services that will optimize automation for your market entry and scalability. With clear expectations, a specialist can work with your vision to create an informed strategy with measurable outcomes.

Agile Translation Solutions to Drive Your Revenue

The other key to overcoming the challenges of going global is to properly utilize your current resources and find integrations where possible. “Reinventing the wheel” and disrupting current workflows or supply chains has the potential to be disastrous during a precarious time. Therefore, a premium translation partner will be able to optimize the resources that you already have and create efficiencies with processes currently in place.

An agile company should be able to connect to popular enterprise applications so that you can work directly in your native environments. For example, by connecting to the highest-rated applications on the market such as Adobe, Drupal, and WordPress, Lingotek gives your project managers the ability to work with translated content in real-time and on the tools with which they are familiar. Expert translators, project managers, designers, and marketing leaders can translate, localize, update, and publish global content within a single, uninterrupted workflow resulting in quicker time to market.

To create a seamless work environment and meet your goals, your translation partner should be able to work with your vendors with ease. It’s critical that your translation company is able to fill in the gaps that you need by either working with your vendors or having the capability to handle every aspect of your needs. As companies scale up, there is value in having partners who have the flexibility to fill in the needs of your supply chain in order to minimize disruption and create process efficiencies.

Trusted Experts to Meet Your Goals

Reaching a new audience successfully often depends on choosing the right partners. That’s why it’s important to have trusted translation experts on your side to help you meet your goals.

With over 20 years of optimizing automation systems, one of Lingotek’s relationship leaders, Richard Roberts, provides the following tips: “Begin your venture with the end goal in mind. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. What are your company’s unique goals and values? While some organizations are focused solely on cost savings, others may prioritize increasing accuracy, enhancing the customer experience, or reducing vendor utilization.”

In order to define your market entrance strategy and the appropriate partners, consider the following questions:

What are the problems your organization needs to solve?

What resources do you currently have to solve those problems?

What is your prioritized content?

Where does automation make sense?

Roberts continues, “Star Trek’s Universal Translator envisioned a future where we could speak into a machine and immediately and accurately translate the nuances of language. Unfortunately, society isn’t quite there yet, but if used correctly we have real-time and agile tools to streamline the process and get us a little bit closer.”

As businesses continue to globalize, companies can gain a competitive advantage by focusing their marketing efforts on content that targets the right international markets, adapting their products and strategies to appeal to local customers, and resourcefully using the right tools and automations in the right time and place.

Reach out to Lingotek to work with our expert advisors to find the custom strategy to meet your company’s goals. We’re ready to help provide you with a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

The post The Challenges of Content Marketing in a Global Market appeared first on Lingotek.

Help! I was taken out of context !?!?

lingo_admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:26:32 +0000

Almost every other day, you hear from a politician, a celebrity, a sports athlete, and everyone on social media saying “they were taken out of context.” It is typically related to past interviews, tweets, posts, and yes, even articles.

The definition of “to take things out of context” is:

If a statement or remark is quoted out of context, the circumstances in which it was said are not correctly reported, so that it seems to mean something different from the meaning that was intended. The consequences of someone “taking something out of context” can be career-ending, temporary, or long term damage to their image or brand, to many others. It may also poorly reflect on a government institution or company.

There are plenty of examples of words that have resulted in a person’s downfall, but for this post, I wanted to illustrate a less “extreme” example, from a saying you have likely heard, which was taken out of context.

Nice guys finish last.

Leo Durocher

Leo’s misquoted words soon became a credo for over-aggressive coaches and guys with no romantic game everywhere.

You might be asking. Where are you going with this article, Mike?

When it comes to being “taken out of context,” this relates to the translation industry in so many ways. If you do not have “context” in the translation process, you risk a poor or damaging customer experience, such as:

Decreased translation quality
Offensive or demeaning “missteps” in the translation
A poor customer experience
Costly public relations nightmares.
Confusing content and negative product feedback
Increased support costs due to a poor understanding of documentation

For marketing, sales, localization, development, and support teams, “context” is a critical component in the translation and localization process. It can be the crucial difference between a good translation and a GREAT translation or even a completely incorrect “contextual” translation.

During translation, the core components to a high quality finished product are:

Using translation memory (TM ) – A database of previously paid for translations utilized for content reuse and cost savings.
Providing a termbase (or glossary). A list of terms or phrases that have been translated and reviewed for quality. Typically includes product names, descriptions, key phrases, SEO, etc.
Defining a style guide. A reference guide for a linguist that can help them translate in a company’s voice and adhere to their brand.
What is commonly missed in every translation process: CONTEXT

Technology has come a long way in the translation industry, using translation management systems, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, and integrations to automate the people, processes, and technology. All these solutions automate translation memory usage, automate the termbase (glossary) application, provide automated quality checks, and usually provide a linguistic quality evaluation (LQE) tool to provide constructive feedback to linguists. These features are quite normal for most translation management systems or CAT tools out there.

I’ve been presenting demonstrations and providing translation solutions for over four years now at Lingotek and what is the question I’m asked at every customer meeting?

Does your solution provide context?

Why does this question commonly come up?

Why isn’t “context” used in every translation process?

It comes down to technology. It’s not very easy for most translation providers to automate, generate, and effectively deliver context to a translator, reviewer, or an “in-country” customer review team.

There is a substantial amount of technology to automate the translation process, but in most cases, they are still “translating” in a black box. The only context linguists have is within the text itself. They see the prior sentence, the next sentence, the preceding section, the next section. No images, site information, or previews of their translation within the finalized document.

The one thing that has impressed me the most about our technology at Lingotek is that when it comes to technology and technology-enabled language services, we strive to make sure context is of the highest quality no matter where it originates. We know and understand how context is so crucial to the translation process and require our language services to use context as part of every phase of the translation workflow. We even allow (and encourage) our customers to be included as part of the translation process as final reviewers with context.

The following are areas we excel at when it comes to context:

Content Management Systems
Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms
Help Center Technologies
Indesign Files
Video Captioning
Software UI

But Not All Context is the Same

Whenever we build a new connector, we attempt to include robust context solutions to ensure that you are not “just getting a screenshot” as other solutions may provide. We want to make sure you don’t have to “refresh” your context view to see translation updates while you type, as other solutions may provide.

We always attempt to provide two main features in all of our context solutions:

Source Reference – Our context solutions are always architected to connect back to the source to display all references as part of the translation process (user interface, graphics, other dynamic content, etc).

In-Context Translation – No refresh! You see your written translation in real-time. It’s dynamic, not static.

Here are some context examples below.

Drupal CMS Example

The following screenshot shows how the Lingotek Workbench displays context within the Lingotek Workbench. A WYSIWYG experience provides real-time updates that happen when you edit the final translation in the workbench. All of your quality components are in one view (Translation Memory, Glossary, and Context).

Do you have dual monitors????

You can pop-out your context viewer to run your context view on another screen side by side with the Lingotek Workbench.

Are you kidding me, Mike? No, I am not… (see below)

Adobe Experience Manager Example

The connection back to Adobe Experience Manager makes sure you will not miss out on content fragments and other assets that are part of the context of your translation.

WordPress Example

Context allows you to make updates to SEO and Glossary terms within the workbench with more accuracy.

ZenDesk Example

Reduce your support calls by providing technically accurate knowledge base translations. You can provide Linguist Quality feedback in real-time to the translator to correct common issues.

Adobe Indesign Example

We support complete InDesign pre-flight packages (with fonts and links). This provides a near-perfect rendering of the translated InDesign document. Lingotek is the only platform that incorporates an InDesign server in our SaaS infrastructure to make this happen. Concerned about file size? We allow a file size upload limit of 8 Gigabytes, which is one of the largest in the industry.

Video Captioning Example

Lingotek allows you to store and directly upload video files to Lingotek with the accompanying subtitle file. This provides real-time context and audio to linguists to optimize your translation quality. The video player automatically starts and stops audio/video between segments based on timestamps. Real-time editing allows you to shorten translations if needed.

Software Localization UI Example

A challenging problem with software translations and Linguistic QA is that translators and reviewers only have short strings or screenshots to work with and – in complex applications – little context. They can’t see how a particular string is being used within the native app, which can drastically affect their word choice.

With Lingoport’s InContext Translation & QA, translators just have to click on a word to see where it appears in the interface of that particular product. This helps translators produce far more accurate translations saving time and correction cycles. Context helps your translators deliver accuracy. No proxies, javascript snippets, or changes to your software.

To Summarize

There are parallels between being “taken out of context” in your written or spoken word and not using “context” in your localization and globalization strategy. Both scenarios have unfavorable results, and you want to make sure your linguistic resources have the “complete context” within the translation workflow.

If you are struggling with quality due to the lack of context in your translation process or you want to #LoveYourTMS, feel free to reach out to me to know more about Lingotek.

No PowerPoint presentations here, just LIVE demonstrations.

The post Help! I was taken out of context !?!? appeared first on Lingotek.