Category Archives: Vendors

The Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies

Posted on by

I’m pleased to announce the newest edition of The Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies.

This is the book I wish I had many years ago when I first went looking for a translation agency.

The book is designed to be used as both a learning tool and a reference. The first two-thirds of the book demystifies the terminology, the workflow, and the major technologies now being used. The last third of the book includes a directory of 44 translation agencies, to help executives begin their search.

The book includes:

  • 10 things you should know about the translation industry
  • An overview of machine translation and how it is transforming the industry
  • 10 questions you should ask any prospective translation agency

Also included is expert advice from:

And there is a price quote template courtesy of Eriksen Translations along with advice on how to read between the lines of a translation quote.

Your translation agency is your voice to the world. Select the right agency, and the world will hear you loud and clear. Select the wrong agency, and the world may never know what you have to say—or worse, hear something you never intended to say. This guide will help you select the right agency the first time.

The book is also available in print and Kindle format from Amazon.

Link: Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies

Keeping translation simple (and fast): A Q&A with One Hour Translation

Posted on by

For those who are new to purchasing translation services, the process can be confusing.

There are new terms to learn, new technologies, and the pricing can vary greatly between vendors.

Which is why I see great opportunities for those translation agencies that can take the pain out of the purchasing process.

Which is why I was intrigued by One Hour Translation. Founded in 2008, the company is a web-based translation services that provides services in 50 languages to companies that include Google, IBM, Pfizer, Toyota, and Zynga. One Hour Translation is not the first company to offer web-based translations, but it is in rare company in its web-only approach to translation workflow.

I was impressed with the company’s home page, shown below:

The translation process is boiled down to three simple steps. It’s probably not an interface that will appeal to a software localization buyer, but I can see plenty of marketing execs appreciating the usability — and the speed. Once clients submit a project they see a countdown timer that ticks down the minutes remaining until their translations are complete.

To learn more, I recently conducted a Q&A with Lior Libman Co-Founder and COO of One Hour Translation.

Here is the interview:

Q: Can you summarize the types of translation services you offer — and your customers?
 One Hour Translation provides general professional translation services and expert professional translation services covering all fields including: Legal, Finance, IT, Gaming, mobile applications, patents, medical etc. Most of our customers are businesses that translate business-related materials, from their website and marketing materials to legal contracts.

Q: What volume are you handling right now?
 We currently are translating thousands of projects a week

Q: What are the most popular language pairs?
 The most common pairs are English to French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Russian and visa versa.

Q: Clients pay only for translation and not project management, correct?
Correct, the client pays per word with no additional fees (including project management, weekends etc.). The revolution is that this is basically a self-service portal where the web interface plays the project management role including counting the number of words, project allocation (according to multiple parameters), direct communication interface between the client and the translator and translation storage and delivery. We provide 24/7 human support but almost all projects does not require our involvement.

Q: How transparent is the process for clients regarding the translators working on the projects? That is, do they know exactly who the translators are?
Our process is very transparent. The customer knows the translator who is currently working on the project (by name) unlike other agencies where the customer hardly ever knows who is doing the actual work. The customer and the translator can communicate freely using the discussion board.

Since the customer knows exactly who is working on the project, the customer may ask for that translator again. As soon as the translator starts working on the text the customer can use the private discussion board to communicate directly with the translator and not through an agency or an intermediate. You can ask the translator for corrections or clarifications and provide any kind of glossary or other information that might help in the translation process. If you are happy with a specific translator you can click the “work with this translator again” button directly on the project’s page and the specific translator will be prioritized for works coming from you as long as he/she has the required skills.

Q: You have been aggressive in meshing translation workflow into software platforms (Twitter, Drupal, etc.). To what extent does this functionality help you win projects?

We believe in integration of professional human translation with advance technologies in order to reach a more efficient translation process. Obviously, many businesses maintain multilingual websites/blogs for marketing or support purposes.

Until we came up with the CMS translation plug-in and translation API, these businesses had a hard time sending the text for translation by email, receiving the translated text and posting it back to their CMS. With the API and software integration, many businesses can seamlessly integrate the translation process with their existing website updates work flow.

Q: I would imagine quality is one of the major concerns companies have regarding a crowdsourced model. What steps do you take to measure and ensure quality of translation?
We deal with quality on many different levels:

  1. Each and every one of the 8,000 translators we work with, undergoes a long manual screening process that includes many different steps (including background check etc.). Only after passing this process will the translator translate.
  2. In some cases the translator also needs to pass exams relevant to his/her field of expertise.
  3. We have a unique, patented, quality assurance system called CQR — Collective Quality Reviews — where each project is checked in real time by 5-10 reviewers who rate it. We get involved where needed.
  4. Many customers rate the projects and we collect statistics about that as well.

Bottom line, using our process and technology we are able to provide top quality translation at an affordable price.

Q: Do you use machine translation? If not, any plans to support it?
We do not use machine translation and we will not use machine translation for the foreseeable future. The quality of machine translation is very low and unacceptable for professional business use.

Q: Do you support TMs?
Yes, all the translators in our community are professional translators and most of them use translation memory. To improve our support of TM, we are currently working to integrate TM directly on One Hour Translation as part of our web services.

Q: How do you view the translation industry evolving?
The translation industry is one of the last services industries to stay offline. In my opinion, a natural evolution of the translation industry would be to shift to the online while reducing times of delivery and overhead costs. I see great opportunity in atomization of the translation workflow.

One might consider the machine translation as a threat to the industry but MT still have a lot of time until it might generate useable results. Leading LSPs have begun to embrace the shift to online and to the advantages of strong technological translation providers. An example can be found in the cooperation between SDL and One Hour Translation (see the “human translation button” on www.freetranslation.com) where SDL refers its online visitors to One Hour Translation.

Link: One Hour Translation

PS: One Hour Translation is one of the agencies included in The Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies, coming in November.

Calling all translation agencies (or language service providers)

Posted on by

We are kicking off production of an updated edition of the popular Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies.

We want to include agencies representing a wide range of specialities and sizes.

If you’d like to participate, send an email with the subject line “Savvy Client’s Guide” to reports@bytelevel.com.

Translation memory goes open source: An interview with Smith Yewell of Welocalize

Posted on by

Translation memory helps companies re-use previously translated text, improving consistency and potentially saving money.

But translation memory requires using translation memory software, which has for years largely meant using SDL Trados software.

When a company hires a translation agency and requires that they use translation memory — not only must that agency have Trados software, but so too must the freelance translators — who are often located all around the world. This is a nice business model for SDL, but it has been a pain point for translators and agencies for years.

For agencies, the more acute pain point has been that SDL not only sells TM software but also sells translation services. Nearly every translation exec I have spoken to has openly asked for an open-source alternative to Trados.

Well, now we have one.

IBM has partnered with LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association), Welocalize, Cisco, and Linux Solution Group e.V. (LiSoG) to launch an open source project that provides a “full-featured, enterprise-level translation workbench environment for professional translators.”

It’s called Open TM2 — and it’s basically a scaled-down version of what IBM has developed and used internally for years. I haven’t used the product yet and there’s understandably quite a bit of work involved to get this software to a point where it’s easy for translators, agencies, etc. to consume.

I’m not prepared to say Open TM2 is going to put an end to Trados. After all, Linux didn’t exactly put Windows or OSX out of business. But I am excited to see it out there in the world. Open source keeps software vendors on their toes. I’ll be very curious to see if developers embrace the code,  and what they come up with.

To learn more, I interviewed one of the partners behind Open TM2, Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize.

Here is what he had to say:

Q: Why did IBM decide to open source its software in this fashion? What does it hope to gain?

Bill Sullivan can answer this question better than I, but as he stated, “Freelance translators are the backbone of the localization industry. These translators have longed for free and open translation tools to increase their productivity. There is a recognized and growing need for standards in the localization industry. Despite our best intentions, however, standards themselves can often be vague and open to multiple interpretations. What is needed are reference implementations and reference platforms that serve as concrete and unambiguous models in support of the standard.”

In my opinion, productivity and standardization go hand-in-hand. By releasing Open TM2 as an open source product with a standards-based, data-exchange goal, not only is there potential for increased productivity – flexibility and freedom of choice also increase.

Q: And what do you hope to gain from this effort?

I like to use the mobile phone analogy. I can travel just about anywhere in the world, turn my phone on, and it works. This is possible, because competing carriers and hardware manufacturers collaborated to be able to offer that seamless user experience across global networks and handset protocols. Consider the user experience in our industry. There is really no ability for a client to turn on a translation supply chain and have it work out of the box across various content types, tools and translation vendors. The clients I speak with are demanding that this change.

GlobalSight, Joomla and Open TM2 are being used to demonstrate an example of a seamless data exchange based upon a set of standards. LISA will play an important role in documenting and sharing these standards so that they can be applied uniformly to other integrations. To put it simply, we need a variety of tools to be able to talk to each other in an automated way. This is where I think we can improve time, cost and quality results and greatly improve the user experience. Ultimately, I expect Welocalize to gain an increase in productivity, interoperability and freedom of choice in configuring the best set of tools for each client’s unique translation supply chain needs. If we can get under the hood, we can tune the engine; otherwise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain time, cost and quality advantages from the old way of doing business.

Q: Who is going to use this software? And what software will it replace?

Many translators are already using TM2 in delivering work to IBM. I expect Open TM2, as its features grow, will appeal to more translators as a desktop workbench. This is only an initial release of the open source product, and there is much work to be done. But the potential is there to collaborate and improve. Ultimately, I think Open TM2 has the potential to replace the Trados desktop workbench.

Q: When you talk open source, stability and support are common pain points. Who will be actively supporting this effort?

The members of the Steering Committee are currently supporting the effort, and the goal is to build a community which can support itself. This open source initiative is not unlike others, what one puts into it will determine the benefits one can pull from it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company create a business model to offer Open TM2 support. Support, training and customization are typical services that bloom around open source initiatives.

Q: What would stop a technology company from taking the source code and creating a competitive ™ product?

It is an open source product, so there is potential for companies to build a business model around the product. However, I doubt that will be a proprietary fork of the code. The appeal is an open source product with growing standards compliance, not yet another proprietary product. What is more likely are support, training and integration services. Anyone investing in the product naturally expects a return, and the better the return, the more healthy and diverse will be the community. I think that is a good thing. Competition drives innovation. However, if we can’t get the standard data-exchange protocols right, productivity across the supply chain will continue to lag the increasing velocity of change in the marketplace. Rapidly evolving time, cost and quality demands already exceed what the traditional translation supply chain can deliver.

Q: The source code is available now but documentation is lacking. What is your timetable for launching a more translator and agency friendly product.

I think the first step for the Steering Committee is to take the feedback that is already coming in about the product, good and bad, and use that to set priorities, responsibilities and a timeline. The idea is sound, but it must be tested in practical use and refined according to what the market really needs. Translators have the answers to many challenges in our supply chain, they are just not asked very often.

Q: How will this software be integrated? Is there is a goal of integrating it with the open source GlobalSight CMS?

Content creation, translation, workflow and performance metrics reporting – there are many systems and tools for accomplishing each of these requirements. However, very few of them can pass necessary data in an automated way. A lot can be accomplished with web services and open APIs, but widespread integration possibilities can only be realized with a critical mass actively using an industry-supported data-exchange standard.

In order to demonstrate this possibility in a live use case scenario, Joomla, GlobalSight and Open TM2 will be integrated with the resultant standards published by LISA. I think additional standards organizations will also need to participate to gain wider understanding, agreement and adoption. If enough of the industry’s thought leaders and leading practitioners get behind this standard data-exchange and tools integration challenge, I think all boats will rise. Without it, the industry will never be able to approach the growing volume of content which current production and cost models can’t support.

Link: Open TM2