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Seeking solution for Chinese company with global offices
Thread poster: Languageman
Languageman
Languageman  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:58
German to English
+ ...
Oct 26, 2011

Dear all,

I am currently working with the UK office of a Chinese engineering company on ways to improve their communications. The company has recently set up global offices in the UK, USA, Japan and Italy.

Part of the problem is a large body of written documentation in Chinese that is effectively inaccessable to the branch offices due to lack of existing translations and it seems to me that MT will necessarily form part of any solution to make this body of knowledge ava... See more
Dear all,

I am currently working with the UK office of a Chinese engineering company on ways to improve their communications. The company has recently set up global offices in the UK, USA, Japan and Italy.

Part of the problem is a large body of written documentation in Chinese that is effectively inaccessable to the branch offices due to lack of existing translations and it seems to me that MT will necessarily form part of any solution to make this body of knowledge available, with engineers then identifying documents for post editing by human translators when these require more than gisting

The company has a strict security policy that prevents users having Internet access at their desks. Currently, when an engineer needs to obtain some documentation, he must first contact a Chinese colleague to have them locate the document, then logon to webmail, download the document onto a dedicated Internet PC, cut and paste to and from a free Web translation tool (usually Babelfish or Google Translate) and then cut and paste back to a fresh document, which they then have to e-mail to their desktop PC. A lot of the documentation is in the form of Excel tables and this further complicates matters.

Clearly there are a number of problems with the existing approach, primarily the exceedingly long time it takes, but also revealing corporate information to Google et al, lack of a human post-editing solution, no glossaries, no TMs, no project management and so on. Another big issue is a lack of awareness of the problems at the parent company.

The ideal solution I envisage would allow engineers in the various locations to surf (and search!) the corporate Intranet and network in their own language, parse e-mail address lists and automatically append MT translations according to the recipient's language (maybe even with a button in the e-mail to click to send MT for post-editing), batch translate documents at the desktop (without Internet access), handle difficult formats (including Excel, Word documents with tables, scanned PDFs), and cope with multiple language pairs (combinations of Chinese, English, Japanese and Italian initially).

I suspect I am asking a bit too much here in terms of seamless integration! My question then is, what solutions are there out there that come close or address parts of the problem? This could include internal server based solutions, backend Web-based solutions, traditional CAT tools added MT functionality, MT tools with add TM and glossary management, ...

If you read this far, thanks for bearing with me and thanks in advance for your insights and suggestions.

Regards,

Stephen



[Edited at 2011-10-26 13:09 GMT] ▲ Collapse
 
Phil Hand
Phil Hand  Identity Verified
China
Local time: 04:58
Chinese to English
China meets the world... Oct 26, 2011

I'm afraid I'm just a human translator, and I don't have any MT knowledge to help you on the full system. I have worked with a company very similar to the one you describe, though, and I would offer one suggestion: a good multilingual register of document titles.
Titles (especially Chinese titles) and headings often get really badly chewed up by MT. Conversely, nice, long, explicit titles of docs will often take you half the way to the goal you want to achieve. Of course, I'm suggesting th... See more
I'm afraid I'm just a human translator, and I don't have any MT knowledge to help you on the full system. I have worked with a company very similar to the one you describe, though, and I would offer one suggestion: a good multilingual register of document titles.
Titles (especially Chinese titles) and headings often get really badly chewed up by MT. Conversely, nice, long, explicit titles of docs will often take you half the way to the goal you want to achieve. Of course, I'm suggesting that this be a human-maintained register.

Good luck with this, I hope you manage to get something working! ▲ Collapse
 
Languageman
Languageman  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:58
German to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks Phil Oct 26, 2011

Hi Phil,

Thanks for your input. This sounds like sage advice and a good place to prioritise human resources.

I certainly don't envisage an entirely MT based solution, I'm just trying to work out how I deliver a vast body of knowledge to the engineers when they need it, at the quality they need it, at a cost the company can bear. It seems to me inevitable that aspects of both MT and human effort will be needed.

Cheers,

Stephen
 
Kirti Vashee
Kirti Vashee  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 13:58
Solutino for high volume MT needs Oct 26, 2011

Hi, I am with a company (Asia Online) that produces MT solutions for the kind of scenario you describe.

Here is a video presentation made by a partner that describes how En to ZH MT can sometimes actually be better than first pass human translations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjK17GWynoU

For those skeptics of MT, here we have a customer (a major glob... See more
Hi, I am with a company (Asia Online) that produces MT solutions for the kind of scenario you describe.

Here is a video presentation made by a partner that describes how En to ZH MT can sometimes actually be better than first pass human translations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjK17GWynoU

For those skeptics of MT, here we have a customer (a major global enterprise) that actually says that the "MT output in this case is better than the human output" from the standard TEP process - see the video comments at 31 minutes

The whole overview of this particular implementation begins at 27:30

There were also several examples given at the TAUS conference about MT systems that were producing better results than the traditional TEP process in rapid turnaround scenarios.

This requires that MT systems be trained in the domain of the company products ▲ Collapse
 
Languageman
Languageman  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:58
German to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Asia online Oct 27, 2011

Hi Kirti,

Thanks for reply and the link to the video. I watched the segment that you indicated and it sounds like an interesting solution. A lot of the discussion in the video centres around Sajan and it is not completely clear to me what parts of the service were offered by Sajan and what parts by Asia Online. Does Asia Online offer similar services directly as well?

Also, do you have links to any independent reviews or testimonials of your products that can be found o... See more
Hi Kirti,

Thanks for reply and the link to the video. I watched the segment that you indicated and it sounds like an interesting solution. A lot of the discussion in the video centres around Sajan and it is not completely clear to me what parts of the service were offered by Sajan and what parts by Asia Online. Does Asia Online offer similar services directly as well?

Also, do you have links to any independent reviews or testimonials of your products that can be found online? There are lot of products and services with the name "Language Studio", which makes finding information quite difficult.

Thanks again,

Stephen ▲ Collapse
 


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Seeking solution for Chinese company with global offices






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