Resetting your translation can be embarrassing

Just ask Hillary Clinton how embarrassing it can be. She recently presented a gift to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and got the translation of the word “reset” all wrong. 

The translation Clinton’s team chose was “peregruzka” which actually means overloaded or overcharged rather than reset.  Oops.  When trying to impress or create a better relationship, it is better to get the translation just right otherwise the well intended gift could be an insult.

The same principle can be applied to translating your business documents.  Don’t take a chance with a translation in Bablefish or on freetranslations.com.  It could be a gaffe that you could cost you dearly. And there may not be a reset button you could push. 

Support The Auto Industry Initiative

We are so excited about the grassroots initiative our company started only 4 weeks to get help support the Automotive Industry.

Iterotext has served the auto industry and its suppliers for over 30 years and wanted to give back.

We are looking for suppliers to offer incentives beyond the vendor plans OEMs offer to encourage new American Made vehicle sales.

With more vehicle sales during this slow recession we hope to at least sustain the industry until the economy bounces back and people are better able to purchase vehicles on their own.

We would love your support.

Please visit www.SupportTheAutoIndustry.com for more information and to sign up your company’s incentives.

Myths of Machine Translation

Machine translation has many limitations and I am not a big proponent of complete machine translation but as these systems become more sophisticated, I believe that they do have a place in the translation process.  I read a great article in tcworld on dispelling the myths and bad rap for machine translation. 

Ultimately, most of us have used the free services out there on the net and that is not a true representation of many of the machine translation tools available today.

The free services do not allow users to select a subject field or provide user terminology, they can’t set stylistic preferences or translation parameters other than the specification of desired language pair and the drop in of source text.  Not much to go by.  No wonder there are such problems. Often times what is produced is a word-for-word translation.

The proprietary commercialized machine translation services are usually only utilized in larger organizations.  These systems have cost millions of dollars in research and development. 

Recent facts that dispel some of these myths:

• Machine translation can improve the productivity ands consistency of human translators
• Machine translation enables more translation of materials that would ordinarily not have been translated due to lowered costs and turn around time
• There are many machine translation programs/technologies that are capable of producing translation results in the right environments like rules based machine translation, statistical machine translation and direct machine translation. 
• There are many affordable and user-friendly machine translation packages available for even the smallest of businesses and freelancers.

Machine translation is still a very controversial issue and as a translation agency we will need to utilize and work with this new technology to provide the best value to our customers.  I think there will always be a role for the those with linguistic backgrounds as these systems are meant to be used with human translators.  However, I think in the near future there may be a higher adoption rate of machine translation as more and more technology and sophistication  and solutions are provided to increase efficiency.

Translation Industry Statistics

According to Common Sense Advisory the following are statistics for Language Service Providers (LSPs) and the industry. LSPs includes, translation, localization and globalization service providers.

1.  Overall, the LSP industry top 25 companies are averaging 26% growth over the previous year while remaining companies are growing at 7.5% a year.

2.  The global LSP industry totals US $12.1 Billion, they predict that the industry will reach US$24 Billion by 2012 - which is about 14.6% growth over the next 5 years.

3.  The main drivers for growth are, foreign exchange issues, increased sales in economic environments favorable to international trade and relations.

Despite current U.S. economic issues - LSPs are finding the global economy beneficial.  As more companies are seeking additional clients outside of the U.S. the translation industry will be more and more imperative to global success.  That is good news for IteroText Translation Services and our clients who are going global.

IteroText Translation Services in the News

Recently, I was interviewed for MetroMode an online magazine dedicated to the growth of a region.  Please take a look at the magazine (by clicking on MetroMode) and see how IteroText Translation Services has good news for the Detroit Region.  There is even a funny reference to the movie Office Space in the article.

Additionally, IteroText was highlighted in the Great Lakes Information Technology Report (GLITR) for WWJ. 

I want to take this time to thank all of our current clients and potential clients for helping us grow during such economic times.  Your technical translation business is so important to us.  We hope to work with you for many years to come.  Thank you to all of you, from all of us at IteroText Translation Services.

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