Technology can make remote interpretation as easy as 1-2-3, but at the same time, there can be any number of technical problems that can interfere with an interpretation assignment. Even though problems do happen, it’s our responsibility to minimize them. Having the prudency to keep an eye out for any problems and their solutions is a key skill for interpreters and everyone to have in modern days. In today’s blog, we will be highlighting some common connection issues and what to do in those circumstances.

Interpretation Links

Occasionally, the link you use to log into the meeting may be incorrect. The most common scenario is probably due to a separate meeting being created, causing you to wait in an empty room. If you as an interpreter find yourself in this case, it is best to get in contact with the language service provider you are working with as quickly as possible to ensure that you receive the correct link.

Interpretation Times

The appointment time may be mistakenly written by any party involved in the scheduling, causing the interpreter to be either early or late. To prevent this from happening, it is best to set a reminder that’s sent 24 hours before an interpretation event starts, so all parties including the client and interpreter can double-check on the proper start time and the right link.

Updates

Many of us have experienced this situation. As soon as logging into a conferencing application, you were notified that the application requires an update. This can cause you to be nervous about being late to the meeting. Testing your application at least 30 minutes before logging into the appointment to make sure everything is up to date is a good way to ensure that you aren’t affected by any sudden updates.

Sudden Change of Interpretation Methods

For various reasons, there may be a sudden change in the method for remote interpreting, such as resorting to the telephone or another type of video conferencing service. In such circumstances, make sure to keep your email and phone ready and handy to see if any notification of changes come to you.

Power or Internet Fluctuations

Fluctuations in power or internet can be unavoidable and unpredictable. You may be able to circumvent power outages or battery shortage by planning ahead as much as possible. Charge your phone, laptop, and computer fully. Always think of a backup plan. If occasionally, things just can’t be helped. In these cases, be apologetic and contact your language service provider or the meeting host for contingency.

Subtitle translation is a very useful way to relay information, as subtitles are shown alongside videos. Like all media, it can range from simple entertainment, to scientific, political, or anything. We’ve collected some best practices for subtitle translations below.

First, be mindful of the length of translations. You have to remember that subtitles only have a set amount of time and space to be displayed on screen. You should try to be as concise as possible while also staying as true to the speaking character as possible. If you think you need more space to say something, consider how long the character is talking for. Would it be possible to separate the sentence into two or more parts? Let’s say that a character is talking for ten seconds. You could possibly split a line into two five second segments. That should ensure that you get the viewer has enough time to read the entire line without being too distracted by the length of the line.

Furthermore, do not ever exceed two lines on the screen at a time. Standard practice is at most two lines, but any more than that and it becomes a huge distraction and an eyesore to the viewer. The aim of subtitling is to avoid being intrusive while providing viewers a way to comfortably enjoy the media.

Also be sure to use the right kind of software. There’s a lot of different programs out there that subtitlers use, and it really depends on how you’d like to go about it. For example, while not industry standard, many people enjoy using AegiSub for its easy use and features that aren’t too heavy on resources. Other people may use other programs such as Adobe Premiere or even MemoQ. It all really depends on how you work and if your employer has a preference.

Most subtitlers come across a dilemma between “soft” and “hard” subtitles. Soft subtitles are subtitles that aren’t hard coded to the video. The best way to think of it is to imagine a picture. If you try writing on it, the writing will be permanent, unable to be removed. With soft subtitles, however, imagine taping your text onto the picture. It’s not permanent, and you can remove it whenever you like. The advantage to soft subs is that you can give the user more freedom. If they want to turn off the subtitles, then they can. If they want to use a different language subtitle, they can easily swap them out.

Hard subtitles on the other hand are hardcoded to the video. Once you use hard subtitles, they are not coming off of that video unless you manually edit them out. The advantage to hard subtitles is that people won’t have to go through any extra steps to load subtitles. They can easily just use one file to and enjoy the subtitles. Of course, they will lose the freedom of being able to turn them off, but that’s what the tradeoff is.

The last thing to be mindful of is that subtitling is, in most cases, localization. You are not expected to do a 1:1 translation of what characters are saying. You are expected to give characters their voice in another language. That being said, you should be careful of over-localizing to the point that the character is completely different than what they sound like in the original version. This is where it’s useful to have editors and QAers to help review your subtitles and make sure that they’re good to go.

There’s a lot to keep in mind while subtitling, but one good way to keep in mind what best practices are is to review other websites’ guidelines. For instance, many people follow Netflix’s guidelines for subtitling when doing their own, even if they aren’t employed by them.

Subtitling is fun, but it takes time to become familiar with the process. The good news is once you get it down, it’ll be second nature.

How the neural network works and defines the inputted numbers to produce an output is perfected by training the network with millions of sentence pairs. So for example, if you are trying to train a Neural Machine Translation engine for English to Spanish, you would need to feed the engine a great deal of data to help tweak and refine its framework and make it more accurate. Each sentence pair that is given to the engine slightly modifies the neural network while it uses an algorithm called back-propagation. Back-propagation consists of fine-tuning the error rate that comes from the previous iteration. By properly tuning, the error rates can be reduced and the accuracy can be improved.

So what is the advantage of using Neural Machine Translation? Some of the biggest limitations of other machine translation is that they have difficulty when it comes to more complex or nuanced phrases. However, with Neural Machine Translation, it becomes much more possible to translate these kinds of phrases since the number of parameters and rules that can be given provided are much greater and therefore it is more possible to generate translations that are much more natural sounding and closer in meaning.

Neural Machine Translation is without doubt the future of Machine Translation, but there are still reasons as to why it is not widely being adopted. The biggest reason is the sheer cost and time sink that the engines require to actually become useful. As mentioned earlier, millions of sentences need to be entered into the engine for it to start to really output translations that can be considered good quality, and that means using more manpower and time. Not every company is able or willing to invest that many resources to develop a Neural Machine Translation engine, and that is perfectly understandable when weighing the cost versus the reward.

Overall, Neural Machine Translation is a complicated system, but has the most potential out of all of the Machine Translation methods. It is very possible that Neural Machine Translation will be developed to the point where it can accurately be used in a variety of situations for which it is specifically trained, but it is unknown when exactly that might happen. There have been many advancements in its development, but due to its cost and time consumption it will be quite some time before it will be able to be commonly used.

First, there is Statistical Machine Translation, or SMT. The best example of statistical translation is Google Translate. SMTs such as Google Translate use statistical models that draw on a large amount of bilingual text that is provided to them. Through this, they try to find statistical matches for how many times something has been translated as something. For example, if the word “apple” has been translated as “manzana” in Spanish enough times, then that becomes the SMT’s pick for the word apple. It does this for every word in the source and target language before it finally outputs a translation. SMTs can be useful for translating basic words and phrases. However, for more complex sentences, SMTs are not a good pick because they do not factor in context. This means that you can end up with some very strange sentences that do not properly reflect what is being said in the source sentence.

Next, there is the Rule-Based Machine Translation, or RBMT. As the name implies, with RBMT, the machine is translating based on the rules of grammar that it is given. It goes over the source language to analyze its grammar and then looks through the target language to see what kind of grammar rules need to be followed when translating the sentence. After it is done, it translates the sentence according to the rules that it looked up. While this might sound as if there might be fewer problems than SMTs, RBMT translations still need a great deal of proofreading to ensure that there are no problems with the text.

Third, there is the Hybrid Machine Translation, or HMT. The HMT takes elements of RBMTs and SMTs and then uses a translation memory. The addition of a translation memory makes the overall quality of the translation higher than that of SMTs and RBMTs, but there are still problems with using a HMT. For one, it still needs extensive editing, meaning that human translators will be needed to review all the translations.

The fourth, and final type of translation is Neural Machine Translation, or NMT. This type of machine translation uses neural network models that are based on the human brain to make statistical models for translation. When they work, NMTs can provide some of the most accurate translations that would need little to no editing potentially. One of NMT examples is DeepL.

Overall machine translation can be used as a tool to expedite translation, but whether it can produce clear and accurate translation for high level discussions, complex concepts, nuances and context that is still in question and requires time to advance it. This once again proves that the value of professional human translators is not replaceable just yet!

Let’s look at a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that uses translation services as an example. For such a company, consistency and accuracy in software strings become more important than ever: a single confusion in a software string can be quickly multiplied by the combinations of strings, leading to a lack of clarity in software. Therefore, terminology management is particularly relevant in software localization.

In this new reality, terminology management becomes an invaluable tool for ensuring that the word or a term you use – from industry-specific jargon to marketing tag lines – are clear, consistent, and do not have competing definitions.

Terminology management simply means adopting a systematic approach to the words and phrases you frequently use. It often requires providing clear definitions for the relevant terms and categorizing them in order to create a standardized vocabulary.

There are numerous advantages to systematically managing terminology.

First, it allows ensuring linguistic consistency and accuracy by referring translators and content-producers alike to a single, standardized vocabulary of terms.

Second, terminology management is a great way to save time and resources as it helps minimize errors, reduce revision times, and streamline the translation process, thus allowing for greater re-use of previous translations.

Finally, with many user-friendly options readily available today, ranging from off-the-shelf tools to custom-built platforms, managing terminology becomes an easy process whose benefits multiply as your translation projects grow in scale.

In short, terminology management offers many benefits that are within easy reach and extend well beyond the initial investment. It helps keep your written output clear and consistent, so that everybody is on the same page!

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to request a quote from us.

“Machine-assisted human translation vs. human-assisted machine translation” was the topic that won the Monterey Language Services Tech Contest, which took place on Monterey Language Services’ Facebook page and ended today at noon.

Participants were mainly from the Chinese program of the Translation and Interpretation School of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which is the largest program in the school. Congratulations to Qianxi, the winner, and all who participated! (See his victory speech here.) We felt your energy and it was breathtaking. We hope to see you next time.

The 36 comments touch upon the future for translators, development of language technology and machine translation, CAT tools such as Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast, power of machine translation, human translators versus machine translators, translation software, how machines can improve efficiency and productivity for translators, a real life story with Google Translate, training machines to translate, coding and decoding, translation segmentation, machine language, repetitions in text, subject knowledge and specialization, theory versus reality, and more.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

If you consider yourself to be the most social and opinionated person, check this out. Here are easy steps to win:

• Click on the link below:
Monterey Language Services Tech Marathon
• Start a question about Technology
• Invite as many friends as possible
• Keep your thread alive
(i.e. have your friends join, give feedback, and have fun!)
• The longest thread will win
• Price is $100 in cash

The marathon starts immediately. The deadline is April 18th, Friday, 12 pm PDT. The winner will be announced at 5 pm on Monterey Language Services Facebook.

Everyone can chat about future technology. Are you ready for this challenge?

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) available today, and with good reason. It’s versatile, well-indexed on the internet and SEO-friendly, so it is widely used by everyone from startups to tech companies to multinational corporations like Best Buy and Coca Cola to create their sites.

At Monterey Language Services, we offer full service (one-stop solution) to turn a monolingual website into a multilingual one for you.  No longer do you need to worry about technical details, such as extraction of content or implementation of translation, or even concern yourself with choosing a plugin for the creation of multilingual sites.

Instead, we will take care of it all.  The completed translation including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the tags will appear on your WordPress website, ready to propel you into international markets and draw in new customers for you.

Our globalization localization platform is integrated with WordPress, which facilitates and simplifies the WordPress website translation and localization process. It also allows us to monitor any new content you add and have our translators update the translation accordingly.

We will take care of translation and localization in all languages for all the WordPress pages, posts, tags, categories, and custom fields. So you, as the client, are free to relax.  Want to convert your WordPress website to a multilingual website? Just simply let us handle the entire process, hassle-free.

Send in your request! We will deliver a fully translated multilingual website, and make you ready to shine in the world!

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

There are many different kinds of apps, apps marketplaces and app stores: mobile games apps, apps that serve as extensions of websites for mobile devices, apps that link to and control devices. Apps can provide an entire service by themselves, present a new, portable form of a business’s existing services, or be part of a physical product.

Mobile messaging apps users now number in the hundreds of millions around the globe due to ease of use and a multitude of free service offerings. Whatsapp (based in Mountain View, CA) has 450 million monthly users, with Line (Japan, 350 million registered users) and WeChat (Shenzhen, China, 272 million monthly users) not far behind. Many mobile messaging apps are also major players in the mobile game apps arena. You can use these mobile messaging apps to send and receive text messages, record and send audio files, video chat, send photos, and even purchase sticker, music, and game add-ons.

Other popular mobile apps include free hotel-booking and last minute hotel-booking apps for making reservations. Hotel booking mobile apps are available on Android and iOS, a few on Windows Phone or Blackberry.

No matter what their purpose, mobile apps are especially convenient in that they can be easily distributed to customers worldwide, as long as their interface is completely and correctly translated.

We at Monterey Language Services have the technical capabilities to do so, using our global localization platform. Unlike other translation companies, we can handle localizing the entire app, its API, system and interface. We ensure that the mobile app and all its functions are recreated in the target language of your choice. All you have to do is sit back and have fun with your mobile app! Monterey Language Services takes care of the rest.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

But translating a CMS-based site requires a special approach. The content of modern dynamic websites is not stored in a single file, and it cannot be simply downloaded and sent over to a translator. Thus, an entire localization engineering process is required to first extract the source text, then reintegrate it back in after the translation is complete.

Plug-ins do exist within some CMS platforms to assist with this process. They allow pages to be linked together as multilingual equivalents. However, full integration requires extensive engineering work. While most translation companies do not have this capability, Monterey Language Services does. Monterey Language Services’ localization technology and global localization platform streamline the integration process to ensure that our translation is properly applied within your site.

Furthermore, we can translate not only the surface content, but also the meta data of your site. That will ensure your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) functions in all of its intended languages, serving to attract new visitors and help your site succeed in international markets. That’s right – We translate and localize your SEO content so that your website will rank high in other countries and markets!

We can also monitor the updates you make to your site and update our translations to match, so that all of your customers are presented with the most current information.

With our skilled and experienced team, we guarantee the successful translation and implementation of your website, no matter the content or language, with no extra hassle or effort on your end. Just leave everything to us.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.