by Susan Andrus, Marketing Coordinator
In early November, I had the opportunity to represent McElroy Translation at the tekom Trade Fair in Weisbaden, Germany. McElroy was the only US based exhibitor in the GALA booth, which included 10 GALA member companies from around the world.
The annual conference that takes place at the Rhein-Main halls in Wiesbaden in November attracts visitors from around the world. Along with the tcworld conference and the tekom-Trade Fair, that are happening at the same time, the tekom annual conference by now is Europe’s largest event in the industry, with 2,110 conference participants and 1,019 visitors to the fair.
While at tekom I had the opportunity to sit in on a few incredible sessions. Daniel Goldschmidt of LocFlowTech gave a great lecture on “Crowdsourcing translation – is it real?” pointing out that crowdsourcing can work when the project is mutually beneficial to both parties. Crowdsourcing is here, it’s not exploitation, it’s NOT free, and it can be high quality. This is an opportunity, not a threat to our industry. At McElroy Translation, we use a form of crowdsourcing to meet the needs of some of our technology clients. Translators involved are pre-approved and able to meet the quality level requested by these clients and they are paid appropriately for their work. For us, crowdsourcing isn’t about cost cutting. Crowdsourcing is about being able to harness the power of collaboration with the efficiency of technology to provide clients with human-quality translations within hours, without the added cost of project management and rush fees.
Another great session came from Bernard Aschwanden at www.publishingsmarter.com. The session was entitled “Choosing a translation vendor that is right for you” and was directed to companies looking for a translation vendor. As Bernard doesn’t work directly in the translation industry, it was a smart, unbiased instruction on how to figure out what it is you really need and how to find the best company to meet that need. This presentation breaks down what translation tools are and how they work, translation vs. localization, in-house vs. outsourced, stakeholders (who is involved and how), choosing a vendor, costs, avoid common mistakes. This session really gave me a chance to evaluate the client perspective of our services, where we are successfully educating our clients on our processes, and where we could do more.
Some tips from Bernard to those seeking translation services:
• Know what you need
• Build trust
• Get credentials
• Find out ALL costs
• Don’t be a guinea pig
• Ensure industry experience
• Find out quality processes
• Find out how they handle verification
And finally I want to mention Angelika Zerfass’s presentation on “Trends in translation technologies.” Angelika gets into the weeds discussing terminology, localization tools, translation memory tools, authoring memory tools, standard file formats, crowdsourcing, machine translation and open source. I was most impressed with the evolution of machine translation. Machine translation is never going to be a good answer for clients who require certified translations for highly technical documentation. But could we be breeching the cusp of a world were we can get a machine translation that is actually somewhat readable? We are now seeing a world where translation memory systems are combining with machine translation systems to fill in the gaps of text that was previously not found in the TM. In addition to this, statistical MT systems can learn from the vast amount of sentence pairs generated by translation memory. In laymans' terms—translation memory is teaching machine translation. So how effective a teacher is translation memory? Time will tell.
Aside from amazing sessions, I had a chance to learn more about all the workflow system technologies out there, which will be leading to some very exciting changes at McElroy in the near future! Stay tuned.