In one hour, this real-time discussion attracted more than 30 comments. The discussion is insightful, with a wide scope of subjects, and the outcome is exciting and remarkable. Enjoy it here: https://www.facebook.com/events/756246771075085/

“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.

Let’s face it. We all have opinions, about everything from the newest cell phone model and Sony’s next 3D experiment, to how to chop onions with light-sabers. That’s part of being a social tech geek. Well, here’s your opportunity to put those opinions to use and to win a prize!

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.

Goal: Propel you into international markets and draw in new customers

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.

Having a bilingual employee can be a great benefit to any business or service, allowing you to reach a wider audience and to better serve any customers that require bilingual assistance. However, testing the language capabilities of an employee can be difficult, especially when you don’t have a background in the language yourself.

Bilingual testing is an important service that allows employers to verify the language capabilities of their workers. Our bilingual testing evaluators are experienced and professionally credentialed. They can fully draw out and judge not only how well your employees speak the foreign language, but also how well they can translate and interpret between the two.

To fully evaluate the bilingual skills of your employees takes more than just a short interview.  We develop a comprehensive testing system using an interactive style tailored to your area of service and your employee’s responsibilities. Our highly skilled team provides testing materials and evaluation. You sit back and after the evaluation is complete, you can see how well your candidates performed. Candidates who pass our test perform their jobs proficiently in bilingual settings.

Monterey Language Services offers bilingual testing for all languages (and Spanish in particular). We develop dynamic test materials, proven to be effective and successful. Our bilingual evaluation is offered in-person, on site, and even remotely through phone or video!

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

Mobile apps are the latest trend in hip, modern technologies and a popular direction for large companies and young startups alike. Apps can be easily downloaded and installed by individual users across the world. Portable, widely available, interoperable, and (mostly) free, they are immensely popular across a wide spectrum of customers.

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.

Creating a website that is both visually appealing and functional has been made easy by CMS platforms – Content Management Systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Articulate, SalesForce, and the list goes on. The Content Management System is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as maintenance from a central interface. 

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.

Deadlines are a fundamental aspect of any project, in any industry. The same is true for translation. Meeting the deadline is one of the most important parts of a project.

Our clients depend on us to get their translated texts to them by a certain agree-upon point, so that they can make their own deadlines. To our customers, we and our translators are just one part in a machine that needs everyone to be on time to run smoothly. If we – or any other part of that machine – fail to perform our part in a timely manner, the entire thing will grind to a halt. Time will be wasted, and time is money.

Missing a deadline by one day, or even just a few hours, can have extensive consequences for a business. For example, if the translation of a manual didn’t arrive in time to be sent to the client’s manufacturer, production would not start on time either. The manufacturer has their own schedule and deadlines, and the client’s order may end up being moved down the queue far more than just one day. The same thing could happen at the next step in process as well.

Compare it to making a connecting flight. If you’re ten minutes behind on the first leg of your journey, you don’t just arrive late, you might not arrive at all.

It is our goal to make sure we meet every deadline, to never put our clients in such a difficult situation.

So how do we do it? Our strict management process ensures that every step of the translation is completed on time and any delays are caught and dealt with quickly and efficiently. We follow up with our linguists by phone and email, so nothing is allowed to slip between the cracks.

We know how important making the deadline is to our clients, and we make sure to do our part in keeping their business machine running smoothly.

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

Whatever the reason your business has for holding a conference in Silicon Valley, Monterey Languages Services is here to help.  We come from a conference interpretation background with an amazing network of alumni, graduates from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpetation of the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), speaking many different languages, and equipped with the most advanced listening and presentation technologies.  We hold ourselves to the industry’s highest standard, and have contributed to the success of many international conferences for our Silicon Valley clients.

Before every conference interpretation event starts, we make preparations in advance. From selecting a team of conference interpreters, putting together interpretation equipment & the audio and video system, setting up interpreter rooms or interpreter booths, to studying the conference materials in advance, there is a design and a goal in mind in order to achieve the best result in an event we are entrusted to provide conference interpretation.

When the audience gets there, each member is provided a headset connected to a radio-like device that receives the channels of interpretation in different languages (English, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, etc.). Use push to talk microphones to ask questions.  With all of these high-tech equipments, we come on site to provide technical support and make sure customers are enjoying using modern technology to help them break the language barriers.

At the end of the event, every audience member has clearly understood the conference. They were enthusiastic about it, and good business deals are about to come out of this.

The Monterey Language Services team feels—hey, Silicon Valley–mission accomplished.

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

At Monterey Language Services, we do the job right the first time! Our customers can depend on us to deliver a high-quality translation from the beginning. Our goal is this: Our customers will not need to have it reviewed and sent back to be corrected even once.

To assure this, we have developed a rigorous management process, starting with choosing the best translators from our translator database. We always select translators with the subject matter knowledge and experience necessary for the project at hand, using translators who specialize in marketing for marketing translations, medical translators for medical translations, legal translators for legal translations, and technical translators for technical translations.

Using translators unsuited to the subject matter leads to mistakes, and it is the most common problem in translation projects. That is why selecting the right translators is a fundamentally important step in our process.

We don’t rely on just a handful of translators. We have a huge database and network of linguists, many of them accredited and certified, and we are continually expanding it, always looking for the best translation professionals in their fields. We start by screening our translators and testing them to make sure they are able to perform to our standards. We also build and maintain a professional working relationship with them, to make sure they understand our standards and our clients’ needs.

Even after the translation is complete, we further review our translators’ work to make sure they meet our quality requirements. We find, isolate, verify and resolve any issues. With the multi-stage quality assurance process, which uses at least two linguists for every translation, followed by an extra round of QA and Verification, we ensure that no mistakes slip past us into the final product.

Doing the job right the first time is utterly important. It saves time and avoids extra cost. Best yet, it helps our clients increase communication success and business growth. This is our mission every day and we are loving it!

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

For translation and interpretation projects, why do customers prefer to hire a translation company like Monterey Language Services instead of an individual translator or interpreter?

The short answer is a company like ours has a system and resources in place to guarantee quality and availability.  In other words, we provide professional translation and interpretation services.

We make sure all our customers are confident that their projects are being handled by experts and their requests will be met with the highest possible quality. We are our customers’ external team, helping them move forward to the growth of their core business.

Whether it is a request for a Chinese interpreter for two hour or a couple of Spanish interpreters and Portuguese interpreters for two days; a one-page press release to be translated in eighteen languages, or a thirty page manual to be translated into Spanish, French, German, and Japanese, we take care of them all.  That is our everyday life.

First, we recruit highly skilled translators and interpreters every single day – find the best translators and interpreters with the right language pair and expert background knowledge, and test them. Then, we train them according to the customer’s guidelines. We coordinate them and brief them with all the necessary information, so they become a part of the company we serve.  

We also decide on how many linguists to deploy to assure quality in every aspect and provide backup translators and interpreters if one becomes unavailable. We provide all languages assistance in order to meet our customers’ needs for comprehensive and full line services.  Once a customer finds Monterey Language Services, they don’t need to go anywhere else.  We tailor solutions to our customers’ specific needs.

Last but not least, often times, a translation project, a conference interpretation event, or a voiceover/subtitling project requires a team effort.  Projects are usually supported by a group of professionals rather than a single-handed individual effort.   It could involve so many aspects that only an experienced and professional company like Monterey Language Services can excel in it.

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