Business

Columns and Commentary

Off the Map: Keeping faith in spatial data
Tom Edwards
So you're driving down a narrow road on a dark and stormy night, and you look to your car's dashboard to see where your trusty global positioning system (GPS) unit is directing you. No more paper maps to fumble with and try to fold ...

World Savvy: Your global home companion — Minnesota
John Freivalds
When I travel around the United States and even the larger world and mention that I lived in Minnesota, the response I get is typically about the "many lakes there" or Prairie Home Companion, the immensely popular radio-program-cum-franchise ...

The Business Side: Lessons from globalization management system ashes
Adam Asnes
They say that the early bird gets the worm, but you could also joke about the second mouse getting the cheese. Personally, I think cheese tastes better. Metaphors aside, a point we've seen in our industry and beyond is that early ...

Perspectives: Localizing a localizer's website: analysis
Gary Muddyman
As I write this article in January, we are deep into the planning phase of Conversis' revamped website. I always thought of our site as a sort of process where we could let the creative juices run wild, resulting in something spectacular ...

Getting Started Guide

Localization Technology
Angelika Zerfaß
When you start thinking about translation and localization processes, you will sooner or later have to deal with the tools and technologies that are being used in this field. Here are some of the tools you should know about. You don’t have to own the tools yourself ...

Expanding Your Business Globally
Laurel Delaney
Even the most ingenious idea designed to take your business to the next level won't be enough if you don't develop a clear and viable roadmap on how to get there. You must develop a successful global strategy. Why? Today's global business environment has too many ...

How to Build an International Team
David Smith
Thinking about building an international team? The first question you should ask and consider carefully is "Why do you believe you need an international team?" If your answer is akin to "keeping up with the Joneses" or portraying a more robust, global corporate size, then ...

Using Common Sense to Go Global
John Freivalds
Once upon a time, about two decades ago, I was sitting in my office when a product manager from ACT IV microwave popcorn walked in. After pleasantries, he told me, "We're going international, and we need your help." "Oh goodie," I thought, "this will be fun." ...

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Takeaway

Tech

Machine translation: not a pseudoscience
Vadim Berman
It always amazes me how the business model of fortune-telling works. The essential part of this industry is to have plan B ready — to explain why the future does not correlate with the predictions. The machine translation (MT) industry ...

Putting MT to work
Lou Cremers
Machine translation (MT) has been around since the early 1960s, but even today companies hesitate to invest in the technology. On the other hand, there is no hesitation whatsoever to invest in translation memories (TM), although both ...

Monolingual translation: automated post-editing
Hugh Lawson-Tancred
Men and women may have seven ages, but machine translation (MT) can be expected to have just three: comic relief, mass gisting and mainstream productivity enhancement. Perhaps the most important question currently confronting the industry ...

Machine translation: is it worth the trouble?
Kerstin Berns & Laura Ramírez
We can answer this question clearly with "It depends." It depends on text volumes and types and what you are aiming at in the short-, mid-, and long-term perspective. Do you have large text volumes with very short translation times ...

Challenges of Asian-language MT
Dion Wiggins & Philipp Koehn
When it comes to machine translation (MT) and manipulating text written in various scripts, every language has its unique characteristics, properties and challenges. Asian languages in particular have been very difficult to deal with ...

Advanced automatic MT post-editing
Rafael Guzmán
"Why is translation difficult for computers? Because it involves problems that resist an algorithmic solution, including common sense reasoning, learning, and combinatory explosive tasks." -Doug Arnold, "Why Translation Is Difficult for Computers" ...

Translation