Maintaining TMs

What's the difference between 101% match and 100% match. Well, the main difference is a 101% match has been reviewed over time and is matched up not just as a previously translated sentence, but matches in context as well. This means the the translation is not only accurate but matches the style and context of the previous translation in the translation memory. LSPs and translators have faced this issue before. The match is 100%, but sometimes the context might be slightly incorrect or a word choice might need to be changed. For this reason, most LSPs would suggest a review of the 100% instead of ignoring it.  

Translation memory is a fabulous tool to enhance productivity, but if not used correctly becomes the repository for all sorts of old sentences, mistakes, and bad translation choices. Some TM's store multiple entires of the same translation without overriding the previous translation. This is an issue if multiple translators were used on a project. Now you have multiple enteries and inconsistent translations for the same source sentence. Translation Memories should be updated regularly especially after a client performs a review. 

One method to avoid inconsistencies is setting up a terminology database. This is one of the best tools to control quality and consistency of your translation. If terminology is analyzed and agreed in advance with your client and their in-country reviewers, it can only be the "right" terminology to use, thus cutting down on review time and enhancing quality, consistency, and brand messaging.

Downloading a TMX editor to clean up the inconsistencies, formatting tags, and miss-aligned segments is another method to help clean up the memory and ensure that you get better matches for future projects. This is important if you plan on using this translation memory to train an automated translation engine. 

The next thing that helps consistency is coming up with a style guide. Before starting a project, talk to your client, find out who their audience is, which style of writing they want to adopt. For many romance languages there is a great difference if you write in a “formal” manner or an “informal”. Then there is a difference in flavor, especially in Spanish. When a client says Spanish for Latin America, Ideally you want a translator who is a native of Argentina or Columbia. A translator from Mexico will have a different style and dialect that will not suit the Latin American audience. 

These methods will not only improve the quality of your translation, but it will reduce time and cost for you, your client, and the reviewers. 

ICD Exhibiting at the Learning Solutions Conference and Expo 2012

ICD will be exhibiting at 2012 Learning Solutions Conference and Expo in Orlando Florida,
March 21-23, 2012.  Use this discount code: 315LS12  and get $100 off your conference registration.

Register Now: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/lscon/content/2086/learning-solutions-conference-2012-home/

Professional translation services or individual translators? You decide

If your company is thinking of using an individual translator rather than a professional language service provider (LSP), consider some of the advantages of using a professional translation company before taking that next step.

• Although individual translators can sometimes offer better prices, a professional translation company can offer competitive prices while still ensuring quality.
• Professional LSPs may be more likely to provide free trial translations to help you gauge the level of quality of their finished worked product.
• A professional translation firm is far more likely to have set standards for the skills their translation and other company employees must have, as well as criteria for hiring.
• Unlike individual translators who may or may not have experience in a given discipline, professional translation services will typically offer subject matter expertise in a much broader range of specialities, such as automobile manufacturing, medical content, and telecommunications.
• Because of their more extensive experience and body of work, LSPs usually have comprehensive glossaries and terminology lists as well as the experience in ensuring consistency of terminology across a wide range of documents and outputs.
• For any translation work, a critical component to success is good project management and a standard translation process. Professional translation companies have the background in refining their processes to take into account best practices and are able to successfully manage and deliver projects that meet customer requirements, on time and with quality.
• Finally, a professional translation company should have the financial resources to ensure their work product and to invest in sophisticated translation memory tools that can help your company save time and money, project after project, by reusing translated content.

Check out "Translation for the Safety Industry" - new article published in the June 2011 issue of Professional Safety magazine.

How Do You Get Quality Translation?

Companies looking for an edge in competing in a global market need to consider and implement practices that will help improve the quality of their translated content to reach a broad international audience. Some key activities to improving translation quality are:

§  Chose a qualified localization service provider (LSP). Look for a company that has experience and a solid base of satisfied customers. Ideally, the LSP should use only qualified translators who are certified by the American Translator’s Association (ATA). Be sure that the translators also have knowledge is the subject matter of your content.

§  Follow a defined translation process. From quote through final delivery of the finished products, ensure that the translation process you use includes all of the steps that will enhance quality like using a translation memory tool, and following quality assurance steps.

§  Write consistent and clear content with translation in mind. Provide your writers with a company style guide that sets out the grammar and style rules you will follow, as well as the standard terminology your company has chosen. Make sure that your standard terminology will translate well into all target languages.

§  Use in-country reviewers or peer translator reviews. Once your content has been translated, ensure that you use qualified reviewers to check the translations against the source English. Reviewers should be native speakers of the target language and be qualified subject matter experts in the type of content.

By following these basic steps, you can expect to see marked improvement in the quality of your multilingual content, which will enhance the professionalism of your product and help your company to achieve its customer satisfaction goals.

Jeff's take on Conexpo

In March, ICD exhibited at ConExpo/ConAGG 2011, and here is our International Account Manager's take on the show: ConExpo/ConAGG 2011 lived up to its billing as one of the “Greatest Show on earth”.  Exhibitor after exhibitor extremely satisfied with the contacts made. If you have never been to ConExpo, you now have to wait until March 2014. It is worth the cost just to see the “Biggest Sand Box in the World.” www.conexpoconagg.com

Introducing International Communication by Design

Ipad Translation Tool. Really?

Ever wondered what you would do with a portable translation tool? No, this is not a machine translation app. Well, wonder no more. Wordfast has launched Anywhere, the first professional translation memory software application that allows you to translate on the iPad. It is the largest cloud-based translation environment, which is also the fastest growing, there have been approximately 7,000 users since it's launch about 4 months ago. 

Moreover, the best aspect of Wordfast is that this new application is free and accessible to all translator. It also claims to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the source content, and all TM content. It has a “software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that allows you to use a translation memory without having to pre-install any software, instead you can just access the application via Safari web browser

Normally you would upload/download files in Wordfast using your main computer. Now, you can translate files (DOC, PPT, PDF, etc.) that are available from the net - by simply using a URL provided by and LSP or client. Once translation is complete, the translated file can be temporarily stored on Wordfast server for three days. You can for example, inform a client or a Project Manager that the file is available, by just providing the URL. 

This makes it possible to complete a full job with an iPad, from source file upload to the delivery of the translated file (using a full suite of Translation Memory, glossaries, Machine Translation, etc.), without ever dealing with a local hard disk. You can of course log into WFA from your main computer at any time to upload or download files. With Apple's external keyboard  the translation experience is the same as on any other computer. 

Some of the key features:

• Work in groups and collaborate with other translators. You can set permissions to share memories and work together online
• Perform automatic translation integrated and compatible with a wide variety of file types.
• Aligning source and target texts for different languages, and create parallel texts from a translation memory. 

In short, this application allows you to do virtually everything needed to perform the task of translation. This makes translation more accessible to would-be translators.  The limitations of exposing your TM and confidentiality come into question, and this might be a big risk for larger LSPs and their clients, but for small scale translators and small businesses that have in-house employee translators, this could be an easy accessible solution to using a translation memory tool.

ICD has Moved

We moved into our new office this week:


International Communication by Design, Inc.
13040 West Lisbon Road, Suite 600
Brookfield, WI 53005
Ph# 262-781-1644
Fax# 262-781-1654


We are excited to begin a new chapter in our company's history. 

ICD's New Home

International Communication by Design, Inc (ICD) is excited to announce that we are moving! For the past 19 years, ICD has been located in the  “Fortress Building” in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Due to sustained growth, ICD will relocate to a larger more advanced facility in Brookfield, Wisconsin by October 15, 2010. 

Here’s our new contact information:

International Communication By Design, Inc.

13040 West Lisbon Road, Suite 600

Brookfield, Wisconsin 53005

Phone: 262-781-1644

Fax: 262 -781-1654

translate@icdtranslation.com

www.icdtranslation.com

We are delighted to move into a larger space, adding more staff, and implementing new technologies to better serve you and improve your presence in the Global Market Place.  We’d love to show you our new facility the next time you’re in the Milwaukee area.

Together we can Translate To Evolve^SM.

ICD is Moving Soon

ICD will be moving its headquarters from Milwaukee to Brookfield, WI. We'll be moving to a larger more advanced facility in an effort to expand our presence in the industry. Our new address will be posted soon. I'll also post some pictures of our new facility once it's ready.

ICD in the Milwaukee Business Journal

Recently, Catherine Deschamps-Potter, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and one of the founders of ICD, was profiled in the Milwaukee Business Journal.


She talked about how trade agreements, international politics and the worldwide economic recession have wrought huge changes to the global marketplace in the last 20 years, and how one thing has remained clear throughout: The U.S. economy will grow increasingly dependent on the global economy in years to come. This outlines the basic importance of Translation Service Providers.

Photos form Recent Shows in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Las Vegas

Here are recent photos from Trade Shows where ICD was an exhibitor.

MWTA Trade Days: Milwaukee

ASTD: Chicago

AEM Exhibitor Education Meeting: Las Vegas

ICD's Experience at the AEM Exhibitor Education Meeting

AEM Exhibitor Education Meeting, May 18th-19th, 2010

Danielle and Catherine attended this meeting as ICD sponsored the AEM vendors meeting, and is the  chosen vendor for CONEXPO translations. Here is Danielle's insights on the meeting:

The CONEXPO Trade Show can appear quite daunting at first glance: In March 2011, over 2,000 exhibitors from countries all over the world will come together for a five day trade show in Las Vegas. During the 2008 CONEXPO show, over 144,600 industry professionals representing 28,000 companies attended the show. Come to think of it, even after a second or third glance, the CONEXPO is still an imposing figure. How does a company prepare to exhibit at a show of this magnitude?
This is exactly the question that The AEM Exhibitor Education Meeting sought to answer for its attendees. Over the course of two days, industry professionals and trade show analysts provided seminars on a diverse range of topics, such as marketing, booth design and how to create the best return on investment. However, two topics seemed to be the underlying message of the show: the importance of branding your company, and the need to create a goal or objective for your company experience at CONEXPO.
Branding your company into a unique entity within your industry is essential to stand out in a tradeshow of 2,000+ exhibitors. Creating a Branding Proposition for your company means promoting your company not just as “the best of the best,” but instead as the only company that does what you do. How will we stand apart as different than our top 3 competitors at the show? To do this, we will need to create a brand that goes deeper than great quality, low prices and excellent customer service, and instead look at what makes us unique and memorable within the industry.
It is also important to have an explicit goal or objective for exhibiting at CONEXPO. Without a clear objective, it becomes too easy to be swept up into the enormity of the CONEXPO show. Before the show, staff will need to be trained on how to accomplish our goals, the booth will need to be designed to best reflect our objective, and marketing materials will need to be sent out that will aid our goals. During the show, every action the company takes should be working towards our final goal. After the show, a thorough analysis and reflection will need to be taken to make sure all of our efforts were used to accomplish our goals for CONEXPO. March 2011 may seem like a long way off, but every moment of planning will be essential to create a positive experience for International Communication by Design at CONEXPO.

It's Official! ICD is a certified Woman-Owned Business

PRESS RELEASE

CERTIFIED WOMAN-OWNED BUSINESS

DATE:  April 14^th, 2010

CONTACT: Catherine Deschamps-Potter

TITLE: Vice-President

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION BY DESIGN, INC.

State Certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise

International Communication by Design, Inc. has received certification as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) through the State of Wisconsin Department of Commerce. The designation is pursuant to the state administrative rule requirements of Comm 104 which provides validation that International Communication by Design, Inc. meets the requirements of being at least 51 percent woman-owned, controlled and managed. It qualifies International Communication by Design, Inc. to be considered for contracts with corporations and government entities that seek vendor relationships with businesses owned and operated by women.

International Communication by Design, Inc. was established in 1991 and specializes in Language Translation and Localization. To better promote state certified WBE’s and to make it easy for buyers to find them, the Department of Commerce maintains an on-line WBE Directory at http://commerce.wi.gov/BD/BD-WBECertification.html).

Changing the Game

The recession has forced many translation companies to re-think their sales and service approach. The price for translation is a never ending bottom line battle, and companies have to choose to either make less money while providing the same level of quality, or come up with added services at no-cost to justify their prices.

No doubt new technologies have been developed to help the industry move forward as a whole. Machine Translation and Editing by human translators is one service that many translation companies have chosen to offer. It's sort of a budget version translation. A compromise in cost. The quality is probably a B, and that's enough for most instructional manual. The problem here is finding a good translator to edit a machine translation.

Other translation companies have started offering services like 24 hr instant translation. Naturally, they probably use a machine because it's going to be pretty hard to have a translator work on-call for them. There's one company that goes as far as offering a hotline for "translation emergencies". This is a great idea on paper, but when is translation really an emergency. Even if it is, I doubt that a 100 pages can be done in less than 1 day. The hotline does work as a tool for client's to find out the progress of their projects, or to inquire about the completion date.

Overall, we have to adapt to the changing economic climate to satisfy our clients needs. We may have to streamline the process, and offer more competitive prices, or justify the current prices with added services. There is a value attached to every dollar, and we must remember that there is a value attached to a good translation.

Getting Started with Translation Style Guides

Creating a style guide for translation is essential for translators, editors, and desktop publishers. It keeps everyone on the same page through the translation and localization process.  Translation tools are able to preserve most formatting and keep the punctuation intact. However it fails to account for spacngs before punctuations (in French), measurement conversions, decimal points to commas, and units of conversions.
One simple rule to start your style guide is to record  every choice that can not be recorded in a translation tool glossary or a translation memory. You can find instructions and choices that you should included in your translation style guides here: Annex D of European Standard 15038 for translation services (see page 15). Here are some of the criteria listed:

• Punctuation 
• Spelling 
• Formatting 
• Adaptations 
• Language-specific and client preferences 
• Common errors to be avoided 
• Other miscellaneous elements  

An effective translation style guides can vary in length and detail, as exemplified by the following downloadable style guides from the technology industry:

Oracle and Sun’s Language Style Guides: guides in 8 languages, each of at least moderate length, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish

Microsoft’s Language Style Guides: guides for 90+ languages, each of varying length

Other international organizations and governments with respectable translation teams have also made their translation style guides available online for download:

The World Bank Translation Style Guide: English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Russian
The European Commission Translation Style Guides: English, Danish, Finnish, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages

These should help you get started creating your own style guide.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google has added a toolkit to their machine translation software: "Google Translate"

How does it work?

* Choose a language to translate your document into
* Upload a document, webpage or a Wikipedia article
* Google translator automatically uploads, converts and translates the content
* You can now review and improve the translation
* You can view translations that were earlier translated by other users
* You can share your translation with your friends and invite them to view or help edit your translation
* When finished, you can download the translation to your desktop
* For Wikipedia articles, you can even publish it back to the source

Now, the system works well as a crowdsourcing effort where revisions are constantly made to the translations. Thus, improving quality over time. The intellectual prowess of the translator is another questions.

The Toolkit represents another step in the advancement of machine translation. However, it still does not replace a qualified human translator with industry specialization.

Google Translator Toolkit is ideal for fast simple, non-conforming translations. If you want a 50 page manual, then you're better off sending it to your translation vendor.

Fanlation

I just read a post from Joel Zetzsche's newsletter, and he coined a new term:

Fanlation
Translation done by enthused users ready to donate their time for a product.

Joel uses the term: Fanlation to describe crowdsouring of sites like Facebook and Twitter. I have written a few posts on crowdsouring, and Fanlation seems to sum up crowdsouring translation efforts for social media sites pretty well, as most of the users of these sites are not only fans of the site, but they contribute translations for the sites crowdsourcing efforts. I also feel that fanlation can be expanded for technical translation.

I know translators get paid to translate technical documentation, but sometimes if they are truly immersed in the subject or are "fans" of a particular technical field, they could contribute some translations towards a crowdsourcing effort. The translator's would have to get the consent of their client before contributing their translation, or they could simply contribute terms towards a glossary.  

So, Fanlation is a neat term, and I think it could be extended beyond social media sites. After all a fan is fan is a fan. A fan of what is the question?

Facebook's Human Translation

Facebook introduced non-English languages for the first time in January 2008. Now about 70 percent of Facebook's 300 million users are outside of the United States. Many bloggers and tech writers think Facebook's method of human translation seems promising as it combines real people behind the scenes as opposed to machine translation.

Basically, users suggest translated phrases and vote on translations that others have submitted. These crowd-sourced edits, which work sort of like Wikipedia make Facebook's translation service smarter over time. Go to Facebook's translation page to check it out or to participate.

More than 65 languages function on Facebook now, according to Facebook's statistics. At least another 30 languages are in the works, meaning Facebook needs help working out the kinks on those languages before they're put to use.

What's new? Facebook announced in a blog post on September 30 that the social network has made its crowd-sourced translation technology available to other sites on the Web. The update allows sites to install a translation gadget on their sites through Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users sign in on other Web pages.

Facebook also added some new languages, including Latin and "Pirate," which translates the Facebooky word "share" as "blabber t'yer mates!"

People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things. Also, Facebook's site is available in many languages, but its human translators don't touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don't share a common language with you.

Source: CNN.com