text&form attends as many industry events as possible throughout the year. It’s how we stay in shape and provide our customers with the highest level of service possible. Here’s what we’ve been up to over the last few months.
Making the Translation Process More Efficient
XTRF specializes in the translation process, i.e., they provide language service providers with solutions that help them deliver translation projects to their customers faster. This was their first summit. Topics of discussion included internal resources planning, customer success stories, and of course XTRF’s own roadmap.
At the Machine Translation Summit, we discussed neural machine translation, knowledge-based machine translation, and how humans contribute to accurate and fast translations.
Machine Translation—Are We There Yet?
At the Machine Translation Summit, we discussed neural machine translation, knowledge-based machine translation, and how humans contribute to accurate and fast translations.
It may sometimes feel like perfected machine translation is just around the corner, but then new tests (and our own experience) confirm that it isn’t. At the Machine Translation Summit in Dublin, discussions evolved around how to train machine translation, if companies that have not yet embraced it should begin using it, and if language service providers lose work because of machine translation. (They don’t, but their productivity and the quality of translation increases.)
Attending conferences like this one also helps us see ahead to the future of translation so we can help prepare our customers for that future. For example, machine translation is here to stay. That’s not new. But how can language service providers most effectively use machine translation to benefit their customers? The answer keeps changing, because machine translation keeps changing.
The Challenges of Technical Communication
Translation also heavily depends on the mode of communication. For example, multimedia translation requires adherence to available space on a recording, whereas translating a blog post usually has no such restrictions. That means that different components of your content strategy may require different approaches to translating that content.
That’s why we’re also heading to tekom-Jahrestagung, a conference organized by tekom Deutschland e.V., in November. This association specializes in technical communication, and translation and localization are crucial to accurate, multilingual technical communication.
If you see us at a conference or exhibition, feel free to ask us any questions about translation and localization. We’d be happy to answer them for you.
