One of the most popular tools is those that allow you to do PEMT (post-edited machine translation). If you receive a long document and are on a short deadline, then one of the best things to do is to run it through machine translation first and then work on it from there. The most recognized and possibly used machine translation program is SDL Trados. One reason is that SDL Trados has a vast amount of features and functions.

With all the features and functions that SDL Trados comes with, naturally it is much more complex and difficult to learn to use than other, simpler machine translation programs such as Memsource, Wordfast, or Google Translator’s Toolkit. There are also programs such as MemoQ who have been gaining their own following of people who would prefer them to SDL Trados due to certain features or ease of use. However, if you have the time to learn SDL Trados and become able to use it effectively, then it can open a lot of doors for you to do many things.

Aside from machine translation, translators of websites can also rest assured that there are easy ways for them to translate webpages for clients. For instance, if a website is WordPress based, you can ask the client to install a plugin such as WPML. With WPML, all they will have to do is export the target page or post that they want to have translated as an xliff and send it to you, the translator. Once you receive it, you can open it in one of the machine translation programs that were discussed above and insert your translations as if it was a bi-column word file. Then after you are done, you can just send the client back the xliff file and they can import it back into their websites and the translations will be there as if by magic. The great thing about most of these kinds of plugins is that they are simple to learn and once you do learn them, they will save you a lot of time. If the website is not WordPress, there are other programs that you can explore and some webhosts even come with their own built-in language support.

There are many different types of specialized tools that will best fit the kind of translation job that you are working. Therefore, it is important for us as translators to stay updated and in the loop of technology that is being updated or developed regarding what we can take advantage of as translators. This way we can rest assured to do better work and help more people in need of translation.

The first one is how to search for an exact phrase. While a dictionary can provide the exact word you want, there are often times where the word might not be used the way you think it should be, or there might be specific contexts in which it can be used or it might just be an outdated term altogether. To find out if a word or phrase you want to use can be used the way you want it to be, you can perform a Google search and put the term or phrase in quotation marks. So, for example, if you wanted to search for only the phrase raining cats and dogs, you could put it in quotation marks, “raining cats and dogs,” and then every single result will be websites that have the words in that exact order. You can also use the “verbatim” search function to search for only the word that you enter.

Next, if you want to find alternatives to words in phrases, you can use Google to search for alternatives. For example, if you wanted to search for different types of machine translation in one search, you could search like this: neural OR statistical OR rule-based machine translation. When you do that, Google will generate search results for machine translation that includes the words neural, statistical, and rule-based. This is handy if what you are searching for has numerous variations to it, but you only need a few alternatives as opposed to all of them.

On the flip side, there is a way to exclude search results from appearing. So in the case that you want all the different variations of a phrase but not something else, then you can use the minus sign to exclude the results that you don’t want. So if you want all the different kinds of machine translation, but don’t want statistical machine translation, then you can search –statistical machine translation and it will exclude all mentions of statistical machine translation. This is great if you know that you don’t want a search result to appear and are looking for other things instead.

One of the simpler tricks that does not require any special input is just comparing the amount of results that one version of a phrase generates versus another. So if you were wondering which spelling of versus is more commonly used, you could search for “vs” first and see how many hits are generated and then search “versus” and then see how many hits are generated. After comparing which one generates more, you can more confidently say that the one with more hits is the more commonly used word and therefore, safer to use in your translation.

The last trick is searching within a specific website for a specific phrase. If you wanted to look for the phrase “machine translation” on SDL’s website for example, you could search it as follows, site:sdl.com “machine translation” and then Google will generate all the instances of machine translation being mentioned on SDL’s website.

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!

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.