Archive for Translation

Jonathan.Bates | March 10, 2010
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Come fly with me..out of the recession

After the economic struggle of the last two years and with travel and tourism being one of the worst affected industries, we are only just beginning to see a rise from the ashes, just in time for British Tourism Week, which is from 15th – 21st March.

With summer fast approaching and consumers jumping back into holiday mode, now is the time to be communicating with your international audience, as they turn to the world wide web in search of the best package deals, flights, hotel bookings and car hire.

As frugal consumers (and let’s face it, who isn’t one these days?) from every region of the world start to look for the best deals, the UK, as the 6th most popular holiday destination worldwide, is  fast becoming a very popular prospect indeed. According to visitbritain.org, over 40 million visitors to the UK spend over £16 billion between them each year.

With the serious decline in the value of the pound there’s no reason why those figures can’t rise in a similar fashion. However, less people are in fact travelling to Britain – the number of people travelling to Britain (on inbound holiday or short-stay flights, at least) today is almost 2% less than this time last year. This was compounded, or perhaps caused, by an annual 4% drop in global tourism last year, which makes the market more competitive than ever.

To be Frank, the tourism industry could help itself with localization

To be Frank (sorry), the tourism industry could help itself with localization

Now, you might be led to believe that attracting new customers in the tourism industry has always involved investing in localization – but I wouldn’t be so sure that this is the case.

In fact, many online industry operators still only operate in a single language.

It’s crucial to speak to existing and potential customers in their own tongue. The Common Sense Advisory revealed that international customers are four times more likely to buy from a local language site.

At Applied Language Solutions, we focus heavily on supporting the tourism sector with localization services.

We have teams of specialist linguists covering a wide variety of languages who are both experienced in the industry, online marketing and, crucially, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

As well as offering quality localisation, delivering your messages into any language and country, we’ve added the “kill two birds with one stone” service, by adding localized SEO services to ensure more visitors are attracted to your offers in the first place.

With people worldwide warming to the idea of holidays and trips abroad, the time is right to localize your site and capture audiences that speak different languages.

Likewise, if you want to attract new visitors to your hotel, golf course or even your town (anywhere that a tourist might be interested in visiting) – get in touch and we can open your business up to new audiences straight away.

Category: Cultures, Localization, Technology, Translation | Tags: , ,
GregRosner | March 9, 2010
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Why Settle for Satisfaction?

Good vs great

Yesterday I got an email from someone on my sales team forwarding a comment from a customer who wasn’t happy with the services they recently received.

They were absolutely ecstatic. Here is an excerpt:

“I would highly recommend Applied Language Solutions for any translation related needs. The entire translation process, from initial quotation to final product delivery, is meticulously documented and audited to insure that the highest accuracy and quality is being delivered. Additionally our project coming in on-budget and ahead of schedule pleased our investors who are holding us to a tight timeframe. My team at Applied language Solutions will definitely be getting any future translation projects our business requires.”

And the great thing is I see these emails come in all the time. Here’s another one I saw last week;

“Your team has always been on top of your game and super-rapid turn-around times.  I couldn’t be happier with you guys, and the rest of my team and management concurs.  Excellent 10+ overall.  Thanks to all of you for making our lives easier over here.”

 

I am really proud of my team here as they are really doing great work for our customers and is the reason for our growth. With these kinds of raving fans, why do some prospects we speak to feel so squeamish about swapping out their current translation supplier with us? Why do they settle for mediocrity?

Conquering the fear of change…

Change: Alien to many

Change: Alien to many

Time and time again I speak with prospective clients who tell me how they’ve endured poor linguistic quality and poor project management. How they’ve been bounced around from one project manager to another and how they’ve tolerated the silent treatment and reactive responses instead of proactive communications.

I hear how they get e–mails with bad news, like missing Tuesday morning’s deadline at 6:30pm on Monday. Even in these cases of vendor abuse, making their jobs more difficult, why are they still so reluctant to change?

I believe it comes down to the human fear of change. The fear of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.

The risks that change represents are often perceived to be greater than the reward that a new relationship can bring.

So to help you deal with that concern, (if that’s actually your concern) or, to help you come up with a strategy to try working with us (in case you are just “happy” with your current translation provider), here is some advice:

Five Baby-Steps To Changing Translation Suppliers

1. Cover Your Assets

Your first strategy should be to first protect your Translation Memory assets and your ability to make your current deadlines before you compare capabilities. With regard to Translation Memory, those assets are estimated to be worth 1.5 times your annual spend on Translation, so it’s typically well worth the effort to get them from your current supplier.

Asking your current supplier for a copy of their Translation Memory will sound like they are being fired, so you don’t want to give that indication just yet. So, to mitigate that, tell them you are conducting an intellectual property audit and that you need a full export of the Translation Memory data to keep on your computers.

2. Get a quote for a real project from Applied Language

This is a simple way to get an apples to apples comparison of services and costs. If there is a Translation Memory in use, share those TMs with us as well.

3. Hire us on that project – in stealth mode.

This way, if you are not joyful about the results, not too many people will know.

 

4. Move your translation work to Applied Language

After a successful project, the risk of change should be mitigated and you should feel more comfortable with transferring your on-going projects to Applied Language.

 

5. Fire your current translation provider

While this may give you some primal satisfaction, it may be  difficult because of relationships that are currently in place. To make it easier, try conducting an RFP process to make the firing a “business decision”, or say your organization is moving towards a “multi-vendor strategy”, implying that you want to spread the work between agencies to reduce risk.

So if you’re working with www.averagetranslations.com or www.translationsthatareok.com, you deserve better for your investment in time and money. To schedule a discussion with one of my team members who are responsible for NOT just making you satisfied, please contact me.

Category: Business Management, Languages, Localization, Translation, Translation Mistakes |
Lauren Nemec | March 3, 2010
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What’s The Return on Translations?

By Greg Rosner

Translation ROI

For every dollar you spend on translation, how much can you expect to get back? How can you calculate the return on your investment on translation? This question is at the crux of the decision on the minds of many business people, weighing whether or not to translate their web site or communication materials for international markets.

If the answer isn’t obvious by doing some simple math, here is a more complex formula you can use:

ROI  =  P ( S x C ) / N² – T

ROI = Purpose for Market Entry ( Size of Market X Customer Need of Product ) / Number of Markets²  – Translation Cost

 

I’ve devised this fancy formula by combining Einsteinian physics with years of my own experience working with hundreds of companies, both large and small – summed up just yesterday at lunch – which, by the way, I scribbled on the back of a receipt for Cheese Quesadilla from Harry’s Burritos.

This formula has yet to stand up against the rigors of scientific review, but by George, I think it can actually work! It was put together with roughly the same precision that my Quesadilla was prepared at Harry’s, by their skilled chef (which provided me with a tremendous return on investment – I might add) but precise enough to summarize the key things for you to consider when coming up with a return on investment calculation for translations.

Here are the definitions:

 

P = Purpose for Market Entry – Why are you translating? There are typically three camps here;

A. Those Who Have to – in this camp, your not translating completely can result in massive fines imposed by government bodies. (For example, Clinical Trials, or Instructions For Use communications for medical devices. Non-compliance = heavy fines)

B. Those Who Need to – for the businesses in this camp, you need to translate because you already have customers waiting for product to be delivered with accompanying communication material, and if you don’t translate on time, you won’t receive revenues on time. If the translations aren’t there – the customers will go to the nearest competitor, which may be locally based.

C. Those Who Want to – these businesses see the opportunity to gain market share in locales where their prospects are or where their competitors aren’t and take full advantage of it.

S = Size of Market – An estimate of the number of your prospects.

C = Customer Need of Product – An outline of your customer profile in that locale, and a positive answer to the question of whether or not they need (or can use) your product in that locale? (Are you selling ice to Eskimos?)

N = Number of Markets – Here you are simply counting how many locales you are thinking of going into. (Locale is defined as ‘Country + Language’)

T = Cost of Translation – This is the total cost of translation services, which is typically calculated by multiplying the total number of words that need to be translated by the word rates associated with your target markets.

The bottom line? Translations are cheap. Loosing market share is expensive. Consider the impact of not translating and see where that takes you. Or consider how much revenue can be gained by simply providing information in local languages. Granted that translation is only a piece of the cost of doing business internationally, but it is an essential piece. Taken by itself, the cost should be negligible. To this point, I’ve heard of a statistic recently that found most Fortune 2000 companies spend more money on toilet paper than they do on translations, and many of those companies do not even budget for translations since the cost is so low.

The ROI answer will be different for each company depending on what values they put into this. But in most of the business cases I’ve seen my customers create, the answer was overwhelmingly “YES!”, it makes sense to translate and doing so opens markets and retains global customers.

This, from the Localization Industry Standards Association shows a caculation which gives an average of $25 return on $1 invested in translation.

If you’re having problems figuring out how this formula can work for your business, feel free to contact me. I am happy to discuss it – over a Quesadilla, of course :)

Category: Translation | Tags: , ,
john_dixon | March 3, 2010
2 comments

Translation Industry: A Project Management Standard

Having moved into the localization industry fairly recently in my career, I have become aware, very quickly, of the haphazard nature of project management standards and methodologies sometimes found with suppliers, customers and agencies alike.

This is most evident when working with larger, more mature organizations, whose project managers are well versed in the skills and techniques required to deliver complex long-term projects, of which localization is just one element.

As most of the industry seems to have derived from an academic background and language, rather than project management professionals, the industry is ripe to introduce a common, well-recognized standard – and raise its game, at last, to match our customers’ requirements.

This would give us much better credibility in our initial discussions with customers and would make sure that the localization element of large projects is considered, properly planned in and agreed up front, rather than a rushed afterthought.

As the old adage states, fail to plan and you will plan to fail.  As it is, something like 80% of IT projects within certain industries eventually fail.  This is because people tend to think that by completing a project plan, success is assured.

What’s really needed, is the correct gathering of requirements and the ongoing management of risks and issues. Doing this correctly will help increase your (our) chances of success.

There are various standards used in other industries that have been tried and tested, which could easily be adapted for use in our industry.  And no, folks, Microsoft Project is a not a methodology, but a tool with which to aid your planning.

Maybe it is time to adopt – or adapt for our own use – something similar to MSP, e2e or Prince2.

So, what will it be then – more, or less of the same?

Category: Business Management, Localization, Translation |
Oz Hetherington | February 25, 2010
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Time for translation companies to spread the love!

How can larger Language Service Providers grow their own industry? That question has been going around our office recently and, yet again, we’ve come to a conclusion you won’t get from another LSP.

As outlined routinely by our CEO, Gavin Wheeldon, the language services sector generates £7.5bn profit a year and is dominated by the bigger players. The market landscape isn’t completely overshadowed by these larger companies, as there is also a sizeable army of smaller companies and ‘one man bands’ – of course, no single company can do all the translation of the industry.

Love: Lacking in the language services industry

Lacking in the language services industry!

That last statement directly conflicts with the ambitions of my CEO, but for good reason.

I shall proceed with this post anyway. I digress.

Now, these “smaller” companies would be more than willing to process larger projects if they could access some of the same linguists and tools of their larger counterparts – but they often have to refuse work.

Similarly, with short notice, high-volume projects, larger companies can and have refused work because the supply chain is too complex and quality (reputation) might be needlessly compromised as a result.

This paints a bad picture of companies in our industry. Typically, smaller providers seem “too small” and the larger ones are too rigid because they have contracted agreements in place that simply don’t bend to short-term requirements and their binding SLAs.

We then debated this question: “Why don’t the bigger players increase everyone’s piece of the pie, by providing an attractive pricing matrix to other LSP’s with opportunities to take on larger projects?”  This would increase turnover and boost growth in the sector, so why not?

The answer is simple – we don’t know.

Something which goes hand in hand with these opportunities is the turnaround time – bigger companies have 24/7hr coverage, a bigger pool of linguists and suppliers which increases capability. So, in true ALS fashion, we’ll find the solution instead.

As a Business Development Manager, developing markets for Applied Language Solutions in the Legal & Finance sectors, I’ve also recently started to work closely with market research and consultancy firms, enabling them to increase their target market through localization.

This has gives us the opportunity to look at working with other LSPs – effectively bolting on our normal services, at pre-agreed rates as “their” capabilities.

So, if you are an LSP and you have a request that exceeds your typical requirements, you can take on projects that you normally wouldn’t have the resources for, so next time you can answer “yes, we can provide this much in that space of time”.

Contact Oliver Hetherington on 0845 888 7198 for more information.

Category: Business Management, Translation |
Kenny Holden | February 16, 2010
3 comments

Google goggles with machine translation at Mobile World Congress

This evening at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off a fantastic tourist tool – Google Goggles with Machine Translation.

It’s a system for taking a picture of some text and getting a near instant translation of it. Essentially the user takes a picture of something like a street-sign, restaurant menu or poster and then it uses optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the text from the image which is then submitted to Google Translate for Machine Translation.

Eric demonstrated the system on a Google Android powered phone and then went on to promote the rumoured speech-to-speech translation; “I’ve got Google translate which can translate 100 languages to 100 languages, so why can’t I just speak on the phone to someone who doesn’t speak my language? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but it’s coming soon.”

Of-course machine translation is generally far from accurate, but for casual indicative translation results it should suffice for tourists.

So if you’re one of the Android carrying tourists, your menu reading problems may be solved but there are still the expensive roaming data charges to worry about!

Category: Technology, Translation | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Kenny Holden | February 15, 2010
5 comments

Google translation phone. Pipe dream or possibility?

Speak nowThe general media has gone mad over Google’s announcement that, in a few years, they hope to be-able to translate speech instantly.

This is currently available, though in a limited way (Spoken English to Japanese or Spanish), on the iPhone using a 3rd party app.

I’d expect that if and when Google release such a thing it will also have limitations – to believe the media and think that it will support several thousand languages however is a mistake.

For specific needs there are already alternative solutions. The LAPD use a device which has thousands of pre-recorded messages relevant to their standard questions and general announcements, stored in multiple languages. And the device has also been used in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers needing to communicate in other languages.

The device was developed through DARPA funding, and DARPA have been investing heavily in finding automated language solutions for years – so it will be interesting to see how quickly Google can bring a high quality technical solution to market. Alternatively if you need a professional interpreter while waiting for Google’s solution, then you can get one on your mobile phone at any time – just give us a call and we can help set you up to make use of our Instant Telephone Interpreting (ITI) system.

From a technical viewpoint, to deliver automatic speech to speech translation to a mass-market there are 3 key components that need to be perfected;

1. The system would first need to support good quality voice recognition, be able to differentiate between thousands of accents and dialects, and be able to turn the speech into a text form. Anyone who has used speech recognition over the last few years will probably agree that it’s come a long way – however it’s still a long way from where it needs to be, especially when dealing with accents and fast spoken languages.

2. The system is probably going to rely on machine translation to turn the text into its translated equivalent. Currently, there is a lot of work being done in this area using language models, statistical models or hybrid systems. Ultimately while there have been some fantastic gains over recent years, there is still a phenomenal amount of work to be done – especially when dealing with translations in a specific specialised subject area, such as medicine.

3. Finally the system is going to turn the text back into speech. This part of the system should be the easiest part to prepare. Text to speech has been around for a long time, and users would ultimately accept, maybe even expect, an accented digitised voice.

From the announcement I don’t think that Google is suggesting that it will be-able to translate every language to every other language. Nor will it impact the language services industry – unless your core business is interpreting for consumers. Google is merely highlighting the possibility.

The concept is an engineering challenge and if anyone is setup to attack these kinds of challenges, it’s Google.

Category: Machine Translation, Technology, Translation | Tags:
admin | February 11, 2010
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Assessing interpreters for public service assignments

Alireza SheikholeslamiBy Alireza Sheikholeslami

In the past few years, the non-English speaking population in the UK has increased significantly.

As a result, the language barriers that have arisen create major concerns for public services.

Those concerns stem, understandably so, from the potential consequences of even the slightest of errors with translation and interpreting. There are also other concerns which tend to grab the headlines (and be fuelled by them!),  but I won’t add to that, since we’ve been very clear about our stance on the matter.

As a former freelance Farsi interpreter, and as the Interpreting Manager for Applied Language Solutions, I am frequently asked about the assessment and development of (our) linguists. I’ve decided to answer this question and explain how we assess interpreters at ALS in this post.

If only we were as (rich and) glamorous!

If only we were as (rich and) glamorous!

Before I continue, it has to be said that throughout the ALS blog you will see lots of examples of mistranslations and other language-related gaffes – none of which are ours by the way!

Some are funny, some are embarrassing (notably for whoever is behind the gaffe) and others are, of course, far more serious. The latter is my main reason for this post.

In healthcare, you could put a patient’s safety at risk if something is misinterpreted or mistranslated, whereas in legal services, it could even result in a miscarriage of justice or an incorrect plea or testimony.

As a language services provider with many public sector customers, we constantly look to improve standards to counter any such potential risks with our services.

This begins with each and every new candidate that comes to us looking for work as a linguist, or supplier, to use common industry parlance. Since language services will only ever be as good as the people doing the interpreting/translation, we have to make sure we properly assess our existing talent pool before we can make any improvement suggestions.

How to assess interpreters?

There are two key areas for assessing an interpreter. Each comes with its own ‘checklist’:

1- Language Assessment

  • Fluency: ability to convey the message from English to the target language and vice versa
  • Listening: ability to demonstrate a good understanding both in English and the target language and respond accordingly
  • Vocabulary: based on the area of work, candidates should be able to demonstrate a good knowledge of vocabulary in their area of specialty e.g. health or law

2- Interpreting Skills Assessment

  • Accuracy: ability to provide accurate interpretation.  It’s important that it should convey the correct meaning and the interpretation is done in the first person
  • Listening and Recollecting: ability to listen and to be able to recall the words in full
  • Appropriate Intervention: ability to request clarification where necessary to be able to deliver an accurate interpretation
  • Speech Flow: ability to control the speech flow to provide clear and transparent interpretation

One of the best ways to assess a candidate, in my opinion, is through role-play.  This involves the candidate, a first assessor who is fluent in the source language and a second assessor, who is fluent in both the source and target language.

The candidate will perform a role play of a chosen scenario and both assessors can then mark the candidate’s performance in both the source and target languages, and also other key interpreting skills.

Developing Interpreters. A continual process…

Interpreter Classroom: Our constantly updated interpeting resource
Interpreter Classroom: Our constantly updated interpreting resource

 

In recent years, the role of interpreting has become crucial for effective communication between public services and non-English speakers – to the point where, nowadays, proficiency is no longer measured by language skills alone.

For example, “good hand-hygiene” was, until fairly recently, beyond the concerns of public service contractors – unthinkable now!  The recent swine flu pandemic and the subsequent “catch it, bin it, kill it” campaign have profoundly raised awareness of how visitors to hospitals can help maintain best practice.  Interpreters are no exception.

So, to keep our interpreters up to date on best practices, any changes in the law (as they happen) and continual development of their language skills, we have developed the interpreter classroom website. It serves as our knowledge hub for the development of all Applied Language Solutions interpreters.

The course material also includes other topics, like introducing new or inexperienced interpreters to working with victims of crime and other vulnerable people within public services – vital for delivering a professional and compassionate service, as well as giving an interpreter the confidence to keep progressing.

By developing our interpreters via an online classroom along with the regular assessments, we can help to improve the standards of our interpreters and thus the value of what we do for our customers.

What did your interpreting provider say about assessing their interpreters?

Category: Interpreting, Languages, Technology, Translation | Tags: ,
Kenny Holden | February 10, 2010
One comment

Google Buzz: A threat to Facebook or just noise?

It’s interesting to see Google entering the social-networking arena with Google Buzz – facing up against the giants in what I hope is another game changing advance.

However, I’m still waiting to see Google Wave take the world by storm – it’s a wonderful technology but displaced by traditional user habits.

I do think that if Google Wave was integrated with GMail (and given the Google Buzz precedent, it’s a possibility) creating a hybrid solution in the way they have with Buzz then it’d get much more traction in the world – we want a converged place for all of our online communications and Google Mail can serve this purpose perfectly.

Google wants to usurp Facebook with "Buzz", its own social network platform

Hot Buzz: Will Google use its power to usurp Facebook with it's own "Buzz" social platform?

A Mashable survey suggests that of its voting audience, 60% intend to use Google Buzz.  With a primary audience of IT savvy users, this suggests that there will be a strong start with a loyal market of early adopters. Although to be fair only 10% said it would be their primary social networking tool.  I’m sure that if they’d included facebook integration then this would be much higher.

Google Buzz is a feature for Google Mail, so users need to have a Google Mail account.  If you already have a Gmail account, Google Buzz access will be added automatically.  So while I wait for my Gmail account to get Google Buzzified, all I can do is consider the feature set that has been announced.

Certainly some of the Geo-location components look very interesting but only if my friends are using Google Buzz too. One thing that strikes me as being missing from the announcement, and therefore potentially missing altogether, is Google Translate integration. In GMail this feature has been in Labs for almost a year, so I’m not hopeful of a fully integrated, stable solution with the release of Google Buzz.

Look familiar? Google's Buzz

Look familiar? Google's new Buzz social platform

I have friends in different countries and when reading status updates, and especially reading comments of friends-of-friends in different countries, the comments are not always in English. So having a very quick and simple way of getting a Google Translate version of a comment or status update would be extremely useful.

Of course if there was a good API, I’d be happy to contribute – my disappointment with Google Mail is that I can’t write plugins for it, so we can’t even do this ourselves to use the Applied Language Machine Translation system to do the instant translations.

Anyway, I’ll get back to waiting for Buzz and continuing to hope that they will include Google Translate integration, otherwise I’ll have to wait for the full developer API to see what we can do ourselves.

Speaking of translation, you can download our Free Translation Plugin for your blog.

Category: Translation |
Lauren Nemec | February 3, 2010
2 comments

Small World After All

by Shane Grevin

It's_a_Small_World!This past week, I extended a business trip into some much enjoyed family time. The work was in Los Angeles and that meant Disneyland for the weekend.

While on one of the most popular kids rides in the park, I got to thinking… Is it a Small World after all? It seemed that everything I saw/heard/spoke about on this trip had at least a hint of international flavor.

The Australian Open tennis tournament finals were played on the men’s side between a Brit and a Swede.  On the women’s side, an American bested a recently out-of-retirement mom from Belgium. I had a meeting to discuss a major international website with an individual who grew up in India.  I met him through a former college buddy who has never left the State of California.

I drove a Japanese designed, US assembled automobile on the eight hour drive to get to Southern California.  To pass the time, my kids played video games manufactured in Taiwan, watched Spanish language videos on a Korean TV/DVD player, and drew with pencils and markers from China.  Not to mention I sat in on a conference call hosted in the UK on a phone manufactured by a Finnish company and a headset from the US.

Several nations worldwide continued their response to and support with the devastation in Haiti.  A US based company is taking the blame for Toyota’s sticking accelerator problem. I read an article that stated the hospital of the future will have language support for all of its records, patients and equipment.  At Disney, I heard 14 languages being spoken by park visitors and several of the instructions at the rides were in multiple languages.

Thinking about the above it hit me… Whether it’s sports being played, autos driven, children entertained, devastation felt, or ailments treated, it did not matter where the end user and the provider were from.  The experience transcends geography or nationalism and that is what a language provider should strive to do for you.  When it comes to our clients, vendors and colleagues, that is our mission, and yes, this is a Small World after all.

Category: Translation | Tags:
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