Conference Program | 2022
The events of the past two years have changed how we see the world—both from business and personal perspectives. Based on primary data, CSA Research has identified 20 localization industry trends that will shape the future of roles, responsibilities, and work environment for years to come.
Join Alison Toon, senior analyst at CSA Research, as she shares seven of the trends they identified for 2022 and beyond. From intensified data security to responsive MT to the multilingual metaverse, Ms. Toon will discuss the impact of technology and economic factors affecting the language industry and the global businesses they serve.
Management is all about numbers. "You can't manage what you can't measure" is the mantra.
But how can translation memories be translated into numbers that management can relate to?
Translation technology is a black box outside of translation agencies and technical writing departments in many companies. This means that anyone who talks about translation memories and other translation gadgets is not always well understood. Especially in budget negotiations and in the task of demonstrating the benefits of a professional translation system, this can quickly become a disadvantage. But there are several ways to cast the reports and data from memoQ into crispy KPIs that can be understood even by people outside the translation business.
This session will show how to measure the monetary value of translation memories using exemplary products from Microsoft, such as Excel and Power BI. It will also show how the time saved by translation memories can be determined and translated into clear figures and charts.
Our mission in LBS is to make your daily job as smooth and easy as possible, on any level of project management. It applies also to our integration with memoQ! Come and have a look how create and handle your memoQ projects directly via LBS with only few clicks.
roject creation, supplier assignments, deliveries- all these actions are made only once and are updated in both tools at the same time. Need to supervise your translation progress? Nothing could be simpler, you track it in real time in your PM dashboard. New version of the source file? In few seconds both tools are updated. We make it simple, practical and intuitive.
Whether you are just starting or whether you have already been in the language business for some time, at one point you might wonder how to best (re-)organize your linguistic resources. It starts from choosing the right language variants, working with one or multiple translation memories and termbases, whether to use additional metadata or not and goes to questions like how to exchange data with suppliers, partners etc. Well, as we consultants tend to say: "It depends...".
In this presentation we will focus on the following aspects:
- Understanding the value of linguistic data
- What can we learn from language data?
- How can translation memory, terminology and other language data be used in other areas?
- What is data quality and how to assure it?
- How to (re-) organize language data?
- Cleaning up translations and terminology
- What to watch out for when migrating translation memories and terminology data to memoQ?
- Enriching language data using NLP
In this presentation, based on some mid-sized and large projects of the past years, we will share some of our learnings, solutions and best practices.
Note: While also containing takeaways for freelance translators and smaller language services, the main target groups of this presentation are medium-sized to large language service providers and organizations.
In our live demo, we are showing how Plunet and memoQ are shaping the future of project management for LSPs and language departments. We will take you on a tour of the project management platform’s advanced features including auto-quotes based on memoQ matches, request rounds for automated vendor assignment as well as automatic deliveries powered by Plunet and our dynamic memoQ integration. Don’t miss this chance to keep your LSP on the cutting edge of technology by utilizing both systems to its fullest potential.
The leverage loss myth is looming ahead all the time someone considers TMS replacement.
Everybody knows what leverage loss is, all the risks rooting from TM import, filters, tags, segmentation. However, often, these technology aspects are the farthest we look.
But we fear to ask about the temporal financial impact and calculate complex metrics that could support business owners to make the best decisions. How could we foresee the pace that the new native TMs in our new TMS take the place of the migrated ones and so leverage loss effect decays?
This presentation wants to bust some of the myths around these robust leverage loss metrics.
I aim at showing how data, math and technical wizardry can be combined to calculate such metrics and provide monthly breakdown of estimated financial impact.
Consoltec cares about its users’ experience and provides them with a complete solution to manage memoQ projects with real-time synchronization with FlowFit.
This seamless integration between FlowFit and memoQ goes beyond project creation and document delivery to also handle new document versions, resources assignment, invoicing and reporting.
Ironically, the translation industry requires addressing many terminology-related issues to enable business growth. Most translation companies still operate without having a well-defined idea of what a project, a task, a job, or an order is. Only a few have a clear understanding of what the units of payments are based on, what’s the extent of the responsibilities of their project managers, or how service provision and quality intertwine.
As a result, there is a lack of clear reporting, which makes it extremely hard to work out and manage key performance indicators and incentives, two conditions that are fundamental to introducing innovation and automation — ultimately hindering their scalability and growth potential. How many times do you say “my project managers are against change”? Well, they’ll just play by the rules you establish.
In this presentation, we’ll show how clearly defined translation business concepts - also called clean project data - can provide a competitive edge, give some distinctions and possible definitions you can work with. We will also look at how a modern company can streamline reporting — both by using built-in reports of translation industry tools and by combining data into different reporting applications.
Terminology changes and evolves and inconsistencies creep into to translated content due to the fact that unchanged segments can endure for years. If certain segments are continually pretranslated with 101% accuracy, there is little incentive for translators to revisit them unless the customer makes an explicit request.
The best way to check for these kinds of inconsistencies is using a terminology QA. However, this is far from straightforward. The reports are laden with false positives and it is expensive and time-consuming to process.
We are trying to reduce the size of the terminology QA report in various ways: creating a project-specific QA termbase which is different from the regular translation termbase, using custom matching based on an automated stemming algorithm, giving translators the chance to earmark terms for exclusion, etc.
Correcting pretranslated segments costs money. In this way we are hoping to streamline the task so that it can be priced efficiently.
In many languages, the proper use of wild card expressions in TB entries is inevitable for the effective handling of all forms of a lexeme. The burden of this task tends to land on the shoulders of the linguists and PMs updating/maintaining the resource in question. This may seem a fairly straightforward and quick process most of the time, but the amount of work associated with this task can add up to long hours when a large number of entries need to be handled at once. To save time, we have automated this tedious task using the memoQ Resources API and a custom algorithm based on a handful of rules. The presented method can be used to aid or replace human efforts altogether for Hungarian entries.
My aim is to spark ideas among language engineers and developers about implementations of similar solutions for other languages and to stimulate discussion about the possibility of an official memoQ feature in the future with similar capabilities.
"Meet the Product Team." Take a behind-the-scenes tour with the Product Team and learn how product roadmap planning and customer needs are aligned, how user ideas are processed and even turned into memoQ features, and - the most important of all - how our users are involved every step of the way.
Templates are a very powerful and at the same time little-used feature of memoQ. They automate a lot of tasks around project creation and management and generally make life easier both for individual translators and project managers.
During this presentation I will show how templates can benefit both these groups, since with a little configuration effort templates can be used, for example to:
- Automate client-specific or domain-specific project creation with assignment of heavy resources like TMs, TBs, LiveDocs and light resources, e.g. custom spell-checking dictionaries or QA rules.
- Automate custom file import options, e.g. for change-tracked Word files, specific Excel configurations or automatically-selected XML filters.
- Automate project preparation stages, like analysis, pre-translation both with TM and MT, segment locking etc.
- Automate project clean-up stages, with file export and TM updates.
- For PMs: automate translators assignments, multiple project management tasks and reports generation
In March 2020 a very small group of freelancer language service providers teamed up with health care professionals with the aim of providing information in Hungarian at the beginning of the pandemic. Two years later, the group has had around a hundred active members who translated just over 1.1 million words.
The first translations were done using Word. However, Ildi, a terminologist who has been working in the language industry for a long while, suggested going professional. She asked memoQ staff to kindly grant us a server. She got László Kovács on board as project manager.
So, in a few weeks time, there was a professionally organized group of dozens of people: doctors, biologists, pharmacologists, medical translators, terminologists, DTP experts, and we even got support from Balázs Kis.
Texts were translated, revised and proofread in memoQ. We provided memoQ trainings for healthcare providers and translator students, some of whom have never seen a CAT tool before. To support the work, terminologists have built a terminology database consisting of 4500 terms, and every term was validated by an expert of that domain.
Ildikó Szemők
Freelance terminologist, reviser, proofreader, editor, translator
Ildikó Szemők earned a college degree in 1993 at the College of Foreign Trade. After translating at a foreign trade company, she worked for a publishing house for 10 years, staring out as a copy editor and later becoming a managing editor, accumulating experiences in editing in general, and also in reviewing translations. From 2004 she is freelancing: beside editing textbooks, specialist books, and even fiction, and proofreading cultural magazines, she works as a reviser translator and language lead from English into Hungarian and Hungarian into English for the biggest Hungarian LSPs, specialising in trade, finance, insurance, law, economy, European Union, management, linguistics, and pharmaceuticals. In 2018 she became a certified terminologist at the Károli Gáspár University. From 2020, she is a headquarter member of the COVID1001 group of volunteers. From 2022, she is an external lecturer at the Kodolányi János University, teaching translation.
Papp, Eszter PhD
Covid1001 volunteer translator group; Translators Without Borders
Eszter holds degrees in English and Applied Linguistics, and a PhD in Linguistics. Having started her career in teaching English and language testing, she later moved on to technical translation and terminology. She gained experience in many aspects of language services: at a translation agency, as an in-house translator and also as a freelancer. She collaborated in several term base creation projects. She joined the Covid1001 group of volunteer translators as a reviewer and terminologist, overseeing the compilation of a term base of almost 5000 terms. She later became a project manager of the group and a mentor to new joiners. She has shared her knowledge teaching in the translator training programmes at various universities, and the MA in Terminology at the KRE. Currently she works as a Terminology Officer at TWB/CLEAR Global.
László Kovács
TEK Localizations
László earned his first degree as a Mechanical Engineer but moved to the field of technical translation before working on any actual real-world engineering problems. Since 2002, he runs his English-Hungarian translation business called TEK Localizations, where he gained knowledge and experience with a few CAT tools and translation technologies. He has helped many students to gain CAT experience at Hungarian universities including KRE and PPKE. He joined the Covid1001 volunteer group to help set up the translation workflow and the group’s memoQ server donated by memoQ, including the onboarding and training of CAT virgin volunteers. Currently, he still runs the TEK translation business, while running a coworking office.
Nowadays, MT and post-editing are getting almost an integral part of the translation process. However, measuring the real effort of the post-editors is still a challenge. In this presentation, participants will learn about the different methods for measuring and pricing of MT post-editing. They will get insight in the pros and cons of the different pricing models, and recommendations how apply them in a way so that the whole ecosystem of buyers, LSPs and freelance translators can benefit from it.
Machine translation is making big strides, but it is not always appropriate, and this may remain so until actual artificial intelligence exists.
Safety documentation is one problem area – the tendency of MT to make errors of meaning requires that such material be vetted line by line, often involving more work than human translation.
Medical documents also pose a big challenge. Context-dependent abbreviations and indeed source errors are stumbling blocks here. Pharmaceutical and clinical trial documents often require backtranslation where errors and ambiguities in the source must be maintained.
So much for content: what about style and humour? Marketing requires both of these. Subtitling and dubbing too.
This presentation will look at examples of these problems and ask what effect MT might be having on our writing – is there a tendency to write more simply and directly to optimise MT’s efforts?
This session is about getting value from machine translation adoption. The quality may be high and getting even better, but does that help your organization?
- Setting up organizational goals to advance MT adoption
- Operationalizing raw (unedited) machine translation
- What roles and competencies are needed on the internal MT team
- The difference between MT adoption on the buy-side and LSP side
- How translation economics are impacted by machine translation
When it comes to software localization, there is no other tool on the market as versatile as memoQ. During this presentation I’m going to show how various memoQ features can be used to simplify and streamline software localization. These include:
- Variety of input formats used in software localization, like XML, PO, RESX, XLS, PHP, all mobile formats and almost any text-based format, which can be described with a regex-based filters. Plus some of the formats support multilingual files. And chain filtering enables painless processing of not-so-translation-friendly embedded content in different formats.
- Ability automate projects for fast turnover (e.g. with frequent updates), including automatic pre- and post-processing of translation files.
- Length limit information: there are three separate mechanisms for string length limitation verification.
- Context based both on string ID and file structure.
- Regular expression based tagging for excluding contents not to be messed with.
- Versioning for source and target, which makes mid-project updates so much easier to manage.
- Term bases with forbidden terms functionality and several matching mechanisms fit for various languages.
- LiveDoc corpora for reference materials and direct matches.
- Good control over auto-propagation.
- Views for joining or extracting content meeting certain criteria.
And many more. There are other programs offering some subsets of these features, but only memoQ includes everything. Plus translators like it, and satisfied translators do better job. Trust me, I'm a translator and I know.
Margin pressure and tight deadlines often look like insurmountable obstacles that stand in the way of a quality translation, but is this really always the case?
Our presentation will show how the implementation of memoQ with a series of internally-developed regular expressions combined with memoQ resources enabled us to complete a very challenging project with a tight deadline and achieve the required margin for that particular project, without relinquishing the quality level agreed with our client.
The presentation will focus on the project’s features and the different solutions developed to address the various obstacles to overcome in order to deliver the translation on time and at the same time reduce the workload for translators and proof-readers, explaining how memoQ really made the difference in our case.
Presentation Slides
