Global tendencies in translation 2017: report from the LocWorld 34 Conference in Barcelona

  1. Microsoft introduced a chat localization bot.

This course will be available on the Udacity platform for free. It will contain 5 hours of video, as well as written texts and audio materials.

Global tendencies in translation 2017: report from the LocWorld 34 Conference in Barcelona.

  1. Localization course from Google.

This course will be available on the Udacity platform for free. It will contain 5 hours of video, as well as written texts and audio materials.

During the course, Google employees will explain the basic terms and concepts, explain what skills are needed, and demonstrate the tools that are used in the localization process. The translation memory feature will be demonstrated using the Google Translator toolkit.

  1. More adaptive machine translation.

Adaptive machine translation (AMT) technology has made waves in the profession last year. This technology was popularized by Lilt, a Silicon Valley startup. AMT includes a machine translation service that can adapt to the terminology and style of the author while working on the text. The program automatically replaces phrases in the text, and the user can confirm the substitutions by repeatedly pressing Enter and editing the translation from time to time. This allows the translator to work faster and faster - up to 3 pages per hour or more.

  1. Companies calculate the financial benefits associated with localization.

Digitization and measurement, absolutely everything is now an important trend in all areas of business. In the localization business, over the past two years, companies have begun to measure and analyze data on their productivity and translation costs. Forward companies are focusing more on how localization can improve their sales, engage more traffic, and improve the user experience. And they change their policies accordingly.

At a roundtable, organized by them, representatives from the Starwood Hotels Group and Booking.com presented comprehensive case studies. There are too many hotel pages on their sites to be cost-effective to manually translate between all possible language combinations. Booking.com has 1.3 million hotels and operates in 43 languages. Therefore, they need to decide which hotel pages need to be translated into which languages.

Roundtable summary

  • Collect data and make sure it is accurate.
  • Use analytics (for example, GAdwords or Yandex Metrika) to select the languages into which it is appropriate to translate the site.
  • A/B test your localized pages.
  • Provide company management with data on localization investment revenue, not price.
  1. Transmission quality dashboards are becoming trendy.

Large translation services try to measure the quality of their translations at points and display this information graphically with categories of components, as well as translators.

This is usually done as part of the final stage, in which 5-100% of the completed translation is checked: the proofreader notes any errors in style and terminology and evaluates them (how serious or imperfect they are). The result is an objective quality rating on a range, for example, from 1 to 100. The translation department manager can monitor these ratings from his display panel or “dashboard”. When a company works with more than 20 languages and translation volumes of hundreds of thousands of words, such a panel can be an indispensable tool for visualizing large amounts of data. With this quality model, it’s easy to experiment with machine translation or new vendors and then analyze the results of such experiments.