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March 2013
Translation quality expectations
Sonia Monahan
The idea of translation quality is, shall we say, a bit elusive. To one translation buyer, the definition of a quality delivery is a translation that is orthographically perfect and grammatically correct. To another, a quality delivery is one that arrives on schedule; if the project is delivered late, then by that definition, it is not a quality delivery.
Not only is there no exact definition of quality, but that ill-defined designation is also a moving target. The same translation buyer will, for separate assignments and at different points in time, have varying quality expectations. All translation service providers understand this. . .
January/February 2013
Post Editing: Proving technology
Katie Botkin
I imagine some of this sounds familiar. Very few people are willing to initially embrace the idea that a machine of some kind is going to be changing their job. It’s only when they see that it truly is going to make their job easier, or better, that they’ll accept it. It might take a little proving first. . .
January/February 2013
Richard Sikes
Lingoport Resource Manager version 1.0, which was released early in November, is a software solution that monitors the software build environment for localization-relevant changes, flags and extracts changed resource files on behalf of localization project managers, automates the testing of both outbound and inbound localized resource files, and automatically replaces build-ready files back into the build environment in the proper location. . .
January/February 2013
Enterprise Innovators: Building low cost MT
Lori Thicke
Valarie Gilbert joined EMC nearly two years ago as a senior director in EMC’s Services and Support team, building tools and systems for online self-service problem resolution. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, holding BS and MS degrees in metallurgical and materials engineering. Valarie also earned a certificate in capability maturity model integration from Carnegie Mellon.
Thicke: At 16, you were one of the youngest women ever accepted at Carnegie Mellon. What does this say about you and how did that prepare you for your career? . . .
Gilbert: It prepared me to confront scary things face on. At the end of the day, I don’t like a problem to be ahead of me. I want to face it, figure it out, solve it, move forward. This sometimes means not doing the popular project or taking the easy road. It’s not recognition that motivates me, but the pleasure of getting things done and getting them behind me.
January/February 2013
Off the Map: The impact of territory disputes
Kate Edwards
Over the years, we’ve seen this form of retail retaliation take place in various markets, and it’s understandable. Ordinary citizens in a specific locale who disagree with another country’s actions really don’t have a lot of leverage to make a difference, except when it comes to their spending habits. On more local levels we see this kind of business boycotting taking place on a regular basis, as it’s a common part of citizen uprising to disagree with the actions of a specific business and then try to choke the flow of income to that business. What makes the phenomenon to which I’m referring more unique is that this happens on a national level. It’s not just a few citizens boycotting over one company or one issue; it’s an entire nation wanting to economically damage another nation in lieu of overt military action. . .
January/February 2013
Macro/Micro: The polarizing business of opinion
Terena Bell
For those of you who have forgotten the scandal or never heard of it to begin with, please allow me to fill you in. Chick-fil-A is an American fast food chain serving the tastiest chicken sandwich known to man. Seriously, I think they must slather the things in crack or something because they’re that addictive. Anyway, while the actual Chick-fil-A restaurants are locally owned franchises, the brand itself is owned and licensed by a man named Dan Cathy. July 16, 2012, Cathy was quoted by The Baptist Press as being personally against gay marriage for religious reasons. Enter the long tail. Media organizations that do not share Cathy’s beliefs of course got wind of them. And they printed them. And aired them. And broadcasted them until the whole of the United States was fully aware that the owner of Chick-fil-A is anti-gay.
Personally, I don’t care if his religious beliefs are the worship of Zuul, Gatekeeper of Gozer, the demigod from Ghostbusters. His company makes a darn good chicken sandwich. But I’m pretty much alone in that opinion. The Twitterverse, Facebook — the entire US media world, really — erupted. . .
January/February 2013
World Savvy: The ugly American
John Freivalds
The novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer first appeared in 1958 and was later made into a movie in 1963 starring Marlon (The Godfather) Brando. The book takes place in a fictional Southeast Asian country and deals with the yucky behavior of Americans, particularly government employees. Quoting U Maung Swe, a character who appears in the book: “No one who has ever visited America and come to know the country could fail to trust and respect her people. For some reason, however, the Americans I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious.” . . .
January/February 2013
Jeff Beatty & Staś Małolepszy
The open source movement is about open development and design of software applications. Open source software is not developed behind closed doors by a small team of developers, but in the open, and by everyone willing to enhance the application through their own time commitment and expertise. This philosophy automatically lends itself to the recently popular crowdsourcing methodology — organizing a volunteer community to perform a given task for your organization. For open source, that task is generally software engineering. For us at Mozilla, it means a lot more. . .
January/February 2013
Touchscreen devices in the localization industry
Shailendra Musale
I decided to curb the kids’ overuse of these devices. So I did a little trick. Since I know Japanese and the kids don’t, I changed the user interface (UI) language to Japanese so the kids would stop using the devices.
But, to my surprise, I failed. The kids were still using the devices, and the overuse didn’t stop, because they didn’t need any language help. They can easily get what they want on these devices by sliding and flicking through icons and images. It was not the UI language, but icons and images that were navigating them through using the device. My five-year-old son cannot read the UI text and screen messages, but based only on the icons and images, he can interpret what’s on the screen and just like a pro user, he can do things such as change the wallpaper to a picture of his choice, view animation clips, check scores and levels for his favorite Angry Bird game, and a lot more. . .
January/February 2013
Cost scaling through technology management
Wayne Bourland
There are many pieces to translation cost, with vendor rates, computer-aided translation tools, TM leverage and machine translation (MT) being the primary ones. Each had to be addressed. We gained some initial cost benefit by reducing our vendor pool from five to two. It’s a prominent trend in large enterprises across the outside services spend ecosystem. On the client side, we gain lower vendor management overhead, volume discounts and the ability to invest more time in partner relations — and honestly, this one doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The vendor gains increased revenue. It’s a win-win for those involved, but does have implications for the broader market. Once we had resized our vendor pool, we turned to rate analysis. We reviewed industry reports from Common Sense Advisory, spoke with other large enterprise clients — in aggregate, of course; no specific rates were discussed — and had an opportunity to hire in someone from the vendor side with the added benefit of strong vendor-side pricing knowledge. We negotiated roughly a 10% reduction in cost, while still leaving our partners with healthy enough margins to continue the great service they were providing. . .
January/February 2013
Translation technology's big data revolution
Rahzeb Choudhury
Translation technology can certainly be better exploited to capitalize on massive demand to translate content across all industries throughout the many touch points in the consumer decision journey. They may be particularly important in the burgeoning consumer classes in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China or the CIVETS markets of Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.
But translation technology providers will need to maintain openness in order to continue the change they have exhibited in the last few years if they and we are to enjoy rich rewards. After a generation of stagnation, where there were only rare examples of firms improving on tired old TM technology, often built with Windows-based editors, we suddenly find ourselves primed for a generation of dynamism. . .
January/February 2013
Lori Thicke
Progress has been made in a number of areas, particularly with the hybrid engines that combine the best of rule-based machine translation (RBMT) with statistical machine translation (SMT) techniques. But these changes have been incremental rather than groundbreaking. MT alone is still not capable of delivering fully automatic human quality translations.
So why, then, is MT on the roadmap of almost every savvy translation buyer today? If MT's quality hasn't improved as much as we had hoped it would, there has been at least one significant change in the MT landscape: our expectations. We have stopped expecting MT to be perfect. Instead, we have realized that there is a place for imperfect MT, and when it needs to be perfect, a strong business case can be made for human rework. . .
January/February 2013
Integrating language technology
David Filip
However, all the items that need to be right pose a multilingualism challenge, as the vast majority of the online population regularly interacts only in one language. The challenge is to make information shareable and comparable across language silos. This means the NLP areas of MT, cross-lingual retrieval and (automated) language learning amplify the usability of the other areas: search engines, question-answering, text mining; adaptive filtering and personalization; task modeling, behavioral predictions based on anticipatory analysis; speech recognition and synthesis; summarization and drill-down techniques. . .
January/February 2013
System functionality in language technology
Andrzej Zydroń
The last ten years have seen some real practical advances in translation technology: statistical machine translation (SMT) and effective collaboration using server and cloud-based translation management systems.
Both increase productivity and reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a given localization project. This same period has also seen great advances in IT, namely the universal adoption of XML as a vocabulary for all aspects of interchange and data definition, as well as big data, the ability to store and process vast quantities of information, and to mine it in order to benefit from this immense resource. Hand in hand with these advances, we have seen a constant and almost remorseless rise in internet connection speeds and geographical penetration. . .
December 2012
Localization for the long tail: Part 2
David Filip
This is Part 2 of a series focusing on long tail localization.
Traditionally, translation management systems (TMS) have been able to effectively address their customers’ needs by radically simplifying the admissible choice of workflow patterns.
This was a viable solution in the past, where each of the relatively small producers had to cover the whole localization cycle not being able to effectively rely on standardized interchange with their competitor’s tools. This worked as long as there was at least one major tools provider independent of any single language service provider. However, the comprehensive TMS of the past is not able to address the generalized workflow needs of next-generation localization. . .
December 2012
Right-to-left localization for mobile devices
Amr Zaki
During the past few years, mobile device applications boomed and the need to get these applications localized into right-to-left languages became crucial. The question is, why is localization into these languages important?
In fact, there are a number of reasons. For one thing, there is a big market share to be had in this area in general. Secondly, there is huge potential in new categories specifically, such as banking and health care. But social and news applications still have a long way to go. . .
December 2012
Language technology in Saudi Arabia
Mansour Alghamdi, Mohamed Alkanhal & Faisal Alshuwaier
With the advancement in communication and information technology and their widespread usage, Saudi Arabia is a leading country in mobile penetration rates and Arabic applications, including internet and social networks. Arabic is the first language of the 18 million Saudis, while English is the second.
Since Saudis tend to use Arabic in most mobile and PC applications, more research and development need to be done on human language technology with more focus on Arabic. . .
December 2012
Localization lessons from intercultural mentoring
Mimi Hills
It could have been the start of a multicultural take on a classic joke premise: an American, a Moroccan, an Algerian and a Yemeni were riding in a car — and it did end up a joke of sorts. Not understanding Arabic, I listened to the cadences of language among my passengers, until they burst into laughter and then into English. It turns out they could not understand each other, and were laughingly accusing each other of not speaking Arabic.
For the second year, I’ve had the privilege of volunteering as a cultural mentor for technical women visiting Silicon Valley under TechWomen, sponsored by the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. . .
December 2012
Translation and social media in the Middle East
Afaf Steiert, Matthias Steiert & Elanna Mariniello
Over the first few months of 2011, the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, shortly followed by revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Other countries are still struggling with further uprisings around the Arab world. Dominant regimes continue to be challenged due to the snowball effect in the Middle East, spurred by a potent combination of economic, social and political grievances in opposition to their autocratic political systems.
Most of the English-speaking world followed the unfolding news by checking their Twitter feeds in line at the grocery store, sitting on their dorm room beds scrolling through Facebook on their laptops and reading translated articles on Al Jazeera from their home offices or cubicles at work. . .
December 2012
Understanding the orality of Arabic culture
Khaled Islaih
Signs define visible and invisible boundaries within cultures and societies, and semiotics is the study of these signs and symbols. It is used to study people’s perceptions, interpretations and interactions with symbols and signs. As computational software is breaking distant boundaries and rewiring cultures and societies, human-computer interaction researchers are relying on semiotic methods to study the interplay between information systems, languages and cultures.
To meet the exponential growth in the use of codes and software in today’s organizations, linguists and cultural brokers working in the field of localization and broader language technology require semiotic perspectives on language and culture to mediate the development of usable spaces and devices for users with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. . .
December 2012
Macro/Micro: Untangling the deemed export mess
Terena Bell
War is one heck of a macroforce. Let’s face it, there are fewer things on this earth that impact more aspects of people’s lives than war. Whether or not countries are getting along, and to what extent, greatly controls the outcome of almost everything it touches: world politics, the economy, even translation.
I’m not talking about language services for the defense industry, even though that’s clearly a way in which the macroforce of war and peace impacts our work worlds. I’m talking about exporting. Exporting, you say? Yes, deemed exporting. . .
December 2012
Off the Map: Dealing with regime change
Kate Edwards
However, we are businesses operating on a global scale and not only across many diverse cultures, but across cultures that are constantly evolving. In some locales it seems as if those changes are so subtle as to be imperceptible, so they’re sometimes (perhaps unfairly) viewed as backwards or conservative. Other areas are showing more overt changes, often for the betterment of their society, but sometimes not so much. Whatever the case, change is inevitable; as the oft-quoted Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only constant is change.”. . .
December 2012
Enterprise Innovators: Twitter’s 400,000 Translators
Lori Thicke
Founded in March 2006 and launched in July 2006, Twitter is a real-time information service on which people post ideas, comments and news in 140 characters or less. Twitter brings users closer to the topics, events and people they care most about around the world. Twitter is available globally in 33 languages, with 140 million active users and 400 million tweets per day. Based in San Francisco, Gaku Ueda is Twitter’s engineering manager in charge of making Twitter an even more global product by translating it into more of the world’s languages. . .
December 2012
Post Editing: Beyond Headlines
Katie Botkin
It seems like everyone in my field of vision has been paying just a little more attention recently to the Middle East and North Africa — from lawyer-blogger Yasser Latif Hamdani calling 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai “Pakistan’s Jeanne d’Arc” in Pakistan’s Daily Times, to the televised US presidential debates on foreign policy that included at least 185 references to the Middle East, to a friend of mine coming back from hanging art in Tunisia. . .
December 2012
Gender bias and project management
Hannah Berthelot
I have had to deal with catcalling before and even assumptions about my intellectual and physical abilities due to my gender, but never so directly and from so un-self-conscious a source. Many people I have spoken with have assumed I would encounter this type of prejudice primarily with immigrants from the Maghreb living in Paris, but much to their surprise the verbal abuse came in equal parts from both native and nonnative French people. So why was this hurtful, demeaning and frankly rather aggressive behavior deemed appropriate in both native French and immigrant culture? . . .
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