submitted by Lisa Siciliani, Sales Support Services 

How do free online translation tools compare with each other?

Ever used a free online translator and wondered how the most popular online translation tools compare in quality?

If so, you’ll be interested in a recent survey of Google Translate, Bing (Microsoft) Translator, and Yahoo Babelfish. John Yunker’s May 17 article, Google, Bing and Babelfish: What’s the best translation engine? is a great summary of the results. One interesting find is that “brand” perceptions of the three machine translation (MT) tools significantly impacted quality ratings. Once those brands were masked, ratings for Bing improved by 21% compared to Google, and Babelfish rose by 136% against Google!

Ethan Shen of Gabble-On Translation Tools and Research has made the survey results of Phase 1 available for free (no registration required) at Public Comparison of Online Machine Translators. Visitors may also download a PDF of the full research survey.

Gabble-On is now conducting the second part of their survey Machine Translation Comparison - Phase 2 and invites you to participate. In Phase 2, engines from Systran, Babylon, and Promt will be added to the comparative survey.

So why work with a translation company when these sources are free?

As technology evolves, language service providers are producing an exponentially increasing amount of information, making it incredibly costly and time-consuming to obtain a quality human translation for each and every document, and so many translation companies offer a variety of services applying machine translation (MT). However, when seeking out an MT solution, one must consider the security issues involved in addition to the purpose of the target translation.

When a translation is created using a free online tool, such as Google, that information is kept in Google’s database indefinitely. If a user is trying to obtain knowledge about sensitive material on a free resource, this could put the company or its clients at risk of breaking confidentiality agreements. Understanding who owns the rights to the translation is imperative!

Translation companies often offer several MT solutions based on the varied purposes of the target translation. Options may include:

• Raw MT – machine translation that has not been enhanced with terminology glossaries, editing, or review. Though a translation company may use an untrained engine that is only slightly better than the free online tools, you will gain project management expertise and security, for an extremely affordable price.

• MT via a trained engine – a trained engine consists of machine translation that has been enhanced with technical human translation. There are various ways to achieve a trained machine translation: through applying a client’s preexisting glossaries, terminology, or translation memory, by requesting that the translation provider create terminology lists with the help of qualified linguists, or by the agency using an engine that has been pretrained. Though the overall results will still reflect the lower quality of automated translations, searchability, legibility, and technical accuracy of the documentation will be enhanced significantly.

• Post-edited machine translation (PEMT) – the best value to be obtained from machine translation is via a post-edit. The post-editing option includes review by a highly qualified linguist with expertise in the document’s subject matter. This process is typically half the cost of a full human translation, and although it won’t be of the same quality, it will be legible and technically accurate.  An additional upside to PEMT is that the level of editing to be done to a document can be decided on once the machine translation has happened and areas of interest have been determined. Please note, PEMT documents cannot be certified, and for any document to be used in court, a human translation is recommended.

Resources

Global By Design
Gabble-On

Submitted by Lisa Siciliani, Sales Support Services

For project managers assigned the task of patent translation for filing in foreign countries, the byzantine world of patent documentation and terminology can be overwhelming. A few key issues explained in layman’s terms for those of us who are not attorneys may help to alleviate some confusion and consternation.

Patents around the world is an overview of the patent systems for the major global intellectual property and trademark offices. Skimmable and fact-filled, this European Patent Office webpage begins with descriptions of the various offices, which are interesting when comparing procedures, even if the statistics are a little dated.

Immediately following these descriptions is the first “Aha!” topic for the uninitiated. Did you know that while U.S. patent law is based on a “first-to-invent” principle, almost every other country worldwide follows a “first-to-file” system in their patent regulations?

As you can imagine, this plays into the filing strategy for individuals and firms who don’t have an unlimited budget for intellectual property protection. Just imagine the legal tangle that can result! McElroy has helped many clients as they frantically scramble to obtain the strongest, most uncontestable translation for a patent whose foreign filing deadline has suddenly turned out to be three days away. “Is anyone making coffee?”

The EPO goes on to outline some of the national differences in what can be patented and how many patents will be required for coverage. For instance, your timeline is certainly going to be impacted if a single original patent must be converted into multiple documents for translation to meet the standards of the Japanese Patent Office.

Differences between U.S. and European patents as described on Ius mentis has several easy-to-understand sections on some variations in what can be patented. You have to love this author’s humor in the statement, “It should perhaps be pointed out that ‘skilled person’ and ‘obvious’ do not mean the same in patent law as they do in real life.”

An important point we can take from this discussion is that superior patent translators can actually assist clients with their patent applications by virtue of their knowledge of proper structure, order of the claims, and other content issues within the patent documentation. The best patent translations are grounded in superior linguistic expertise, subject matter expertise rivaling the inventor’s, and knowledge of patent law for the target country. I’m sure experienced patent translators could add more to these requirements.

The generalization about translation costs in Foreign Patent Filing provided by Smith and Hopen, P.A. isn’t very accurate for budgeting purposes because of the wide range of factors that go into determining costs such as:

·     Word count – Is this one little 2,000-word patent, or a single or multiple patents totaling 20,000 words?

·     Language pair and translation direction – The difference in costs here can easily be threefold.

·     Subject matter – Patents in well-established, common technologies will of course have a larger base of linguistic experts to choose from than those on the “bleeding edge” or in niche fields.

However, Pitfalls 3–5 listed at the bottom of this webpage, while super-simplified, describe critical facts if you are considering filing a patent in both the United States and another country.

Because language nuances are so critical in crafting a patent that is not only defensible, but even deters challenges (thus the expense of defending against them), we recommend you allow adequate time and a reasonable budget for the best translation possible. The return on investment can be enormous.

Footnote

This is not legal advice. Please consult an intellectual property attorney for specific guidance on patent law.

Resources

European Patent Office
Ius mentis, Law and technology explained
Smith Hopen

I recently found myself cozied up with a cup of coffee and The Guide from MultiLingual. As I was flipping through it, I came upon this great article from Vadim Berman on “Evaluating Emerging Language Technologies.” The premise was reviewing natural language processing (NLP) technology, or to be even more direct, machine translation. That being said, you could replace that particular technology with just about any technology, and much of Vadim’s article still rings true.

“Try to assess the market realistically, and see if the complexity and the costs are worth the niche they are going to fill. Common sense applies, as usual. Avoid wishful thinking.”

After 11 years with McElroy Translation, I’ve played a role in many strategic purchasing decisions that have been made. I have learned a lot about the do’s and don’ts, and though many of these might seem basic, the moral of this story is, as Vadim puts it, “common sense applies.”

1. If it’s too good to be true, INVESTIGATE! – Be very wary of “guarantees.” If you have been told that this service will guarantee you a certain number of leads, make sure you understand how those leads are generated and who those leads are. If you are being guaranteed juicy marketing opportunities, such as article submissions, advertisements, or speaking opportunities, find out exactly who your audience is. If you are being guaranteed seamless implementation of a technology that affects your services from the ground up, just turn around and walk away.

2. Be a comparative shopper – I don’t care who they are or what they are selling, someone else is doing something similar. Always get at least three to five demos from different companies before making a decision. You will learn a lot about the capabilities of a technology and the ways that you can implement it that you hadn’t considered before.

3. Don’t judge on price alone – Whenever you purchase new technology that will have a drastic effect on a portion of your business, there are bound to be hidden costs relating to support, updates, and new features, let alone time, energy, and sanity. If you have fully evaluated several options and it comes down to the top two, that is when price should be considered. But even then, make sure you understand why there is a price difference, quite often you do get what you pay for.

4. Define “support” – Exactly how much support comes with this purchase? Don’t assume how much you will need or how much you already have. Make sure the vendor clearly defines the maximum amount of support you will receive for your purchase and any additional consulting fees that may be required.

5. Evaluate your resources – What technology do you already have that will be affected by this new acquisition? What plug-ins are necessary to maximize the use of the new technology? How much manpower will you need to support the implementation of the technology? Who will be affected by this change and how? Are they on board?

6. Let your resources evaluate the technology – Again, is your team on board? Let those who will be impacted play a role in the purchasing process. Allowing your team to see firsthand what this can do for them prior to making a decision will get them excited about turning this purchase into a successful and useful product. Your team will also take into consideration issues you haven’t thought of, making your final decision much more effective.

7. Google ’em! (or Bing ’em if you prefer...) – If you look hard enough, you will find someone who has something to say about the company or technology you are interested in. I once Googled a company that we were going to use and found employees of that company claiming that it was a scam. I never found a bad review by a client, but disgruntled employees are always a bad sign.

8. References, references, references – A good salesperson can sell you a subscription to a running magazine the week before Christmas when you neither run nor have the cash for the subscription—not that I’m speaking from personal experience here! I’m sure we all have been bamboozled by a great sales pitch, but when it comes to making a significant technology purchase for your company, check references! If a company has a good product, they should easily be able to give a list of customers who have reaped the rewards of what is being provided. Make sure the references are people who are using the product similarly to how you intend to use it. A reference might recommend the product and company based on one particular feature, but if that reference isn’t using the features you want or using the product the way you intend to, the referral means nothing.

9. Negotiate! – Everything’s negotiable, so be creative. With technology constantly evolving and the proliferation of plug-ins, add-ons, updates, and new applications, sometimes the vendor itself can’t be sure what you’re in for. There is always a risk when getting the latest new gizmo as soon as it hits the shelves. Committing to full implementation quickly and offering to become a reference once success has been reached could be worth a lot to the company you are negotiating with. Whatever you do, be confident when entering into negotiations, remember—you are still the customer and they still want to sell you their product.

10. Don’t be afraid to walk away – If after doing all of your homework, you are unsure about this product’s effectiveness for your processes or the extent to which it will be used, just remember you don’t have to buy it. There’s little worse than spending a chunk of the company’s bankroll on a product that winds up on a shelf or server never to be used. Make sure your plan for implementation and use is solid and you trust the customer support to help you get it where it needs to be.

If you have any lessons learned from past purchasing experiences, please share by commenting below!

Resources:

Multilingual “Guide to Language Technology 2010”

A great deal of cheers and celebration were heard in-house last week when McElroy Translation received national certification as a Women’s Business Enterprise. After almost 3 years of being women owned and operated, we finally had the paperwork to back it up.

But what exactly does this mean for our clients?

Many companies have supplier diversity programs, which, in part, ensure that they promote diversity inside and outside of the company. Organizations are able to advocate for diversity outside of their company by purchasing from or contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBE). Motivating factors for companies to establish these programs include:

• Diversity – Minority owned businesses are diverse, allowing for fresh ideas and points of view that can be tactically advantageous in a global marketplace. Sourcing from minority-owned businesses can also be an asset when reaching out to a diverse customer base. Corporations with supplier diversity programs not only seek out MWBE companies, but look for companies that are also committed to working with MWBE companies. In addition, diverse suppliers can act as powerful advocates for the company sourcing from them, especially since some diverse suppliers are politically active in their communities.

• Economic Development – Supporting MWBEs stimulates job creation and economic development. Establishing contracts with MWBEs helps your enterprise grow, and it provides their communities or the market segments you are employing with additional disposable income, which could be spent on your corporation's goods and services. As minority populations grow, minority-run and owned businesses will be a substantial part of our economy. Helping MWBEs grow creates competition for non-MWBE suppliers. This could lead to lower prices, more choices and better quality supplies in the long term as more businesses compete for the same contracts. Eventually, as the diversification extends to emerging countries in addition to communities within America, the price and quality further improves.
  

• Social responsibility – Working with diverse suppliers gives a company a favorable public image and is seen as a form of corporate social responsibility. This increases the satisfaction of the company's stakeholders. Many businesses apply the same process they do when recruiting a diverse workforce to attract and retain suppliers that reflect the demographic of their customer base or of the community in which the corporation or company operates.

• Supplier opportunities – A business with majority minority ownership can be recognized as an official minority business supplier for corporate businesses and government agencies. Federal contractors are expected to subcontract a portion of their award to diverse suppliers. Because of this, a minority business will sometimes be preferred when it comes to bids for government and special contracts.

When working with minority- or women-owned businesses, keep in mind that the state or federal government must recognize the company as a minority business in order to take advantage of special benefits. This is called a "minority business enterprise certification." There are multiple online resources to learn more about starting a supplier diversity program at your company. See Supplier Diversity best practices for a list I found to be informative.

Resources:

http://www.wbenc.org/About-WBENC/

http://www.ehow.com/facts_5033170_benefits-minority-owned-business.html

http://www.ehow.com/list_6309618_benefits-supplier-diversity-program_.html

http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/Diversity/diversity_mgmt_plan/Pages/supplier.aspx

http://www.diversestrategies.com/Supplier_diversity_best_practices.htm

As a technical translation company, we at McElroy Translation take pride in the quality our translators and editors bring to our services. With machine translation becoming more and more accepted for global use (Survey Shows MT Consideration and Usage Increase, Global Watchtower April 2010), it’s important to acknowledge when it is and is not appropriate.

The key to making this decision is in understanding the purpose your translation will serve. Obviously consent forms, clinical trial protocols, intellectual property, and patents for foreign filing need human translation. But when it comes to translating your website, the choice may not be as clear-cut. After all, there are no regulatory requirements or potential legal issues here, right? If you are actively pursuing business in the Chinese market, studies show 95% of Chinese online consumers indicate greater comfort level with websites in their language (See Global Business Webinar, February 2010), and so it is important that you have a translated website to reach them. But for a content-intensive website, the costs involved in a full human translation may not be feasible. Our recommendation in that case would be to get a high-quality human translation for the pages of highest importance—the pages that directly relate to the information that consumers will need to make a purchasing decision—and then opt for a post-edited machine translation for all additional pages that could be referenced by the consumer. Being able to provide a fully localized website for the language and locale of your target prospect is best, but considering only 1% of US retailers offer sites specific to China, having something available in their native language is a good start. Just make sure you get a post-edit of anything you publish by an in-country linguist, as you could do considerable damage to your brand if you inadvertently offend your audience.

McElroy currently uses machine translation with clients for the purpose of discovery. In litigation cases involving large volumes of foreign language text, the time and costs involved in the human translation of these documents is unfeasible. Legal teams and e-Discovery companies depend on either retaining native-speaking reviewers to run searches through the corpus of foreign language documents or machine-translating them to run English searches. By applying glossaries to the machine translation, portions of text that contain a higher number of hits can be identified, and certified human translations can be provided for those portions.

So machine translation does have its uses. However, you must understand that if you take the machine-translation path, the quality will be extremely low, making post-translation editing vitally important. To test this for yourself, try taking your company’s profile, running it through Google translate into the language of your choice, and then translating the result back to English. This will give you a good idea of  the type of quality a machine translation will provide.

One of the great things I’ve found being a part of the translation industry is just how much LSPs give back to their communities. As I was reading the Global Watchtower’s blog on Language Industry Philanthropy in 2009, it reminded me just how much we can do through our language capabilities and in creating a greener atmosphere.

This month, McElroy Translation announced our new Social Impact Leader, Anna Porlas O’Hara. Anna will be responsible for directing our philanthropy program, including vetting nonprofits for language translation scholarships and organizing volunteer activities and events for McElroy employees to participate in throughout the year. Anna previously worked for Hoover’s, Inc., from 1998–2007, where she participated in the Community Outreach program. As a founding member of the program, she helped create the volunteer and corporate giving program, spearheading the company’s support of the Heritage Society of Austin and the Austin Civic Orchestra. In addition, her interest in event planning and design led to a brief stint as a freelance events manager in the Austin area, during which time she coproduced a fund-raiser for a nonprofit health education website geared toward teens. Anna has a lot of great ideas and suggestions for the company, and we can’t wait to see where she takes us in 2010!

McElroy Translation has committed to making 2010 its greenest year ever.

• Editing, proofing, and quality assurance steps are now done online, cutting down printer use by half and paper use by 90%!
• There are recycling bins near every trash can in common areas.
• Marketing collateral is printed in-house on preprinted templates, which means collateral is produced as needed to diminish waste when content needs to be updated.
• Water bottles are being exchanged for a filtration system.
• McElroy provides washable glasses for use in lieu of Styrofoam.

Legal translation is one of the most challenging areas of translation as evident in Łucja Biel, PhD’s Incongruity of Company Law Terms: Categorization of Polish Business Entities and their English Equivalents. The difficulty in translating legal documentation stems from specific legal language and the differences between civil and common law. Delve even deeper and you find differences in the specifics of company law and how to classify certain business entities.  Because laws are determined by each nation’s legislature instead of through a universal system, terms will be different nation by nation and, more important, specialized by language. Biel’s article touches on the difficulties that arise when doing legal translation and turns to translating from Polish to English for examples.

Legal terms stem from each individual culture and typically do not align directly with the nomenclature of other nations. There may be more than one matching term from the source to the target language, and occasionally, there is simply no equivalent translation. There are two ways of dealing with such a lack of equivalent terminology: domesticating or foreignizing. Domesticating is assimilating legal concepts to the target language’s culture so that a term is immediately understood. Foreignizing is the opposite. There are many ways to “foreignize,” which include transcription with a gloss, naturalization (adaptation of spelling), and a gloss alone. Many times foreignizing makes reader comprehension a challenge. One way to adapt the work for the target audience is to translate the literal equivalent or provide a word for word translation.

At McElroy Translation, we use a pool of translators well-versed in the nuances of legal terminology between the languages that they translate. Our translators will typically choose to domesticate the translation, or as we call it, localize it to the target language for the sake of the reader. However, in instances when a patent must be translated more literally for the sake of its end use, the translator will document the terminology in question, and give options to the subsequent reviewer, who will make a final decision.

McElroy Translation has worked within the legal industry for over 40 years, and celebrates 29 years of service with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

eCommerce retailers to Move Beyond “Traditional” International Markets; Sophisticated Localization Plan Required

There is no question that the last year has been brutal on global markets. Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst for the Forrester research firm which specializes in website localization and globalization, acknowledged as much in a recent note entitled The Globalization of eCommerce in 2010. She points to the fact that the Economist, a truly global business magazine, reports on the “end of globalization” and the decline in articles mentioning globalization.

Yet Wigder is more optimistic. Working closely with multinational companies, especially eCommerce giants of retail, Wigder believes growth will accelerate in 2010. She points to an expansion beyond traditional international markets of the UK and Japan:

The easing of the economic downturn is unlikely to unleash a sudden global eCommerce frenzy: companies rightly continue to be cautious with any new global online initiatives. However, the belt-tightening that took place in late 2008 and 2009 proved not to halt international eCommerce expansion – in some cases, the downturn even propelled expansion as international markets looked more attractive than domestic ones. The interest in global markets is only likely to grow in 2010: look for an increasing number of online retailers and other eBusinesses to start expanding beyond the highly developed eCommerce markets of the UK and Japan into other markets in Europe and Asia.

As international retailers move beyond the “traditional” global markets, they must ensure they have a fluid and detailed localization plan in place. Common Sense Advisory, another major analyst, has noted that, even in 2010, consumers around the world prefer to purchase in their mother tongue. While consumers in some “advanced” international markets have a command of English, they still trust those sites more that have localized to their first language. This is particularly true when international retailers reach out to new markets throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and beyond.

And localizing for consumers around the world does not just mean translating a few pages on the website. Sophisticated eCommerce retailers recognize the need to localize everything from product descriptions, to customer service contact information, to customer reviews and comments. There is even a need to look beyond the company’s borders to social media sites where products are discussed and reviewed. A truly successful international retailer must operate in the local languages of its customers, and must do so rapidly. One of our clients knows this well. A provider of review and customer comment services for major international retailers, this client has learned that translating customer letters and comments swiftly is critical. Through our well-developed network of translators and our crowdsourcing translation network, we are able to provide this client with translated materials in just two hours—much less than the 48 hours they requested.

Reaching further into local markets globally, and providing information to new customers around the world rapidly, can set an eCommerce retailer apart from the crowd—and can strengthen a company’s recovery from the economic downturn.

McElroy Translation Blog, Derek Savage

We all see the effects of globalization every day. Many of the products we see have been localized to our culture so well that you wouldn’t know where they were made without checking out the tag. The idea of globalization is so prevalent that you can hardly turn on PBS or NPR without hearing something on the topic. At McElroy, we see the effects of globalization on everything from drug labels to software engineering. I did some quick investigating specific to clinical trials and found a great article on Multicultural Issues in the Globalization of Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment.

 To sum it up, global trials present a number of cross-cultural challenges including:

•        Concern over accurate reporting of symptoms due to bio-psycho-socio-cultural perspectives

•         Differences in governmental processes and regulatory requirements that affect submissions

•         General language barriers and cultural differences affecting all forms of communication

•         Difficulty in drawing valid scientific conclusions with data from ethnically and culturally diverse populations.

With more CRO’s move clinical trials into Africa, as was evident in 2009, finding the right resources for translating clinical trial protocols into languages like Zulu, Amharic, and Xhosa can be challenging. Finding the right language service provider to meet these challenges with the necessary experience and capabilities within the bioscience sectors are critical to the success of the trials.

McElroy Translation Blog, Derek Savage

Today as I was doing my daily Google, I came across an article that explains standardization vs. localization. As peers and prospects alike have to make this decision when taking a product into multiple global markets, it’s good to get a refresher on why we choose for the final product to receive a standardized translation, or for it to be regionally localized.

Standardization works under the assumption that the wants and needs in global markets are homogenous, therefore, the product offered by one said company is the same throughout all markets without modification. The argument for standardization is that technology is developed and dispersed evenly throughout the world and this will first create a national culture that will in turn conform into one global culture.

Localization focuses on the differences in marketing segments specific to each culture because values and beliefs are different due to how and where each market functions. Taking into consideration local consumer traits helps shape how the product is modified to better fit the consumer of that segment.

To learn more, visit http://globalizationexecutive.com/articles/Chapter3.pdf.