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.

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

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).

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

Trados Fun

A few tips on how to manipulate tags in Trados:

When dealing with files that have a lot of formatting tags, there are two possible ways to deal with it in Trados Tag Editor:

1. The simpler more time consuming step:
Copy the source everytime, and then translate in between the tags (overwriting the English source text). Doing this will eliminate the need to copy all the tags all the time.

2. The more technical less time consuming step:
Tags can be protected and unprotected in TagEditor. When dealing with so many tags it might be handy to "unprotect" the internal tags (Tools>Options>Protection>Protect External Tags only). Now you can simply copy and paste tags, delete them etc..

Try it out and let me know.

Crowdsourcing and Translation

Crowdsourcing has been a topic of hype for a number of years in the translation industry, but the reality of it will shape the future of the translation industry. So, does crowdsourcing translation really work? and how does one guarantee quality and consistency? The main concern for companies is entrusting their strong corporate brands and style to unknown volunteers, but the bigger issue is that people are less likely to offer translations for corporate materials in which they hold no stake, and have no emotional investment. For instance, it's unlikely that companies could crowdsource the translation of packaging and labeling information.

The benefits of crowdsourcing lie in in the world of social networking. Facebook's experience with crowdsourcing has shown that they can break down language barriers with the help of their users. Thus making it a stepping stone showing that for-Profit companies can leverage the enthusiasm and language skills of their user base to achieve their business goals. Start-up small businesses are increasingly venturing into social networking by creating communities that are passionate about the product, and willing to translate ads and promotional material. Thus, providing the companies with a wider audience, where they would have a real interest in feeding into the translation process.

The viability of crowdsourcing is giving rise to translation companies like myGengo that are structured to offer clients the best of both worlds: low rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced translations, and some level of quality by reviewing the translations. There are no guarantees on intellectual property protection and consistency, but it's a cheap/fast way of getting translations done. So, is crowdsourcing translations the future of our industry? Probably not. Will crowdsourcing play a role in some sectors of the translation industry? Probably.

Droid

Well, the Iphone and AT&T are going to get a run for their money in a couple of weeks. Motorola, Google, and Verizon will debut a phone with a open source platform. Yes, you can now customize how your phone operates. Another big feature is the ability to run background processes like a computer. Now, you can run multiple apps, thus allowing you to work more efficiently. Now, what does that mean for translation and localization. Well, since it has an open source platform and has a 1GHz processor, it might be able to run a translation software. If SDL, and that's a big if decides to offer a scaled down version of it's new Studio 2009, it's quite possible that translators and translation companies could run it on their phones. Mobility at it's best. If SDL decides not too, and you have a really good programmer handy, then you could create a 3rd party app that is compaltible with Studio 2009 and have an editing tool. You could still perform the translations and apply the memory on the go. Google of course has it's own translation tool (machine, but they wil be coming out with a version that allows you to upload existing memory files and useNow we'll have to wait and see if this will work.

A Tough Sell

Jeff Jorgensen, National Accounts Manager at ICD wrote an article for the August '09 issue of World Trade Magazine. The article titled: "Talk About a Tough Sell," emphasizes the important need to consider quality translations in today's marketplace. Most companies are looking at their bottom line in the economic downturn, but it's also important to consider liability issue when it comes to poorly translated material, and cost shouldn't out way quality. This article is a must read for anyone considering translations or debating the cost versus quality issue. You can download a PDF version of the article here

Trados Limitations and Textboxes

This week I've learned that I hate embedded and grouped text boxes in Word. Why do I hate them? Well, Trados apparently does not pick up text that are embedded in text boxes when you attempt to translate the file in a tagged word format. If you use Tag Editor it hides the text between formatting tags, and the text in the boxes are not editable. Solution, SDLX actually picks up the text for text boxes that are grouped, but it ignores embedded boxes. By the way, text in embedded boxes show up as live text, they don't get picked by SDLX, and there is no option to have it pick up or extract the text. Therefore, the best was is to try and copy and paste the text into a word file, ignoring the boxes and hoping you copied and pasted all the text correctly. So, if you must use Trados, be careful of the grouped and embedded text boxes, you'll be missing a few words if you don't.

Google and Iphone: Proofing and Editing on the GO!

Recently, I discovered Google Docs. Yes, Google has created a web based document creation tool. Essentially, you can create text documents (ie MS Word Style), Spreadsheets with formulas and charts, and presentations (ie Power Point). Google has created a web based version of Microsoft Office Home Basic. You also have the ability to open up PDFs in Gmail without having a Reader. These features may not make a whole of difference to people with desktops or laptops, but with an Iphone, it changes the whole ball game. Now you can open up a PDF, (copy and paste text, if you have the new 3GS), and edit the text in Google Docs. You can view/proof PDFs, make comments in the text editor, create a spread sheet of terms and send it to your Desktop Publisher for corrections. If you need to create a presentation or add a new slide, simple create one.

Oh, and with the wireless printer app, you can print the PDF. You can upload a word, ppt, excel file from your computer, save it on your google account, edit it on your Iphone, and make the world go round. You can save the files as .doc, .xls, .ppt, or aPDF and open them up on computer later on, or send it to someone with a computer and they can open it up as well. Here's a video about Google Docs: