Our machine translation (MT) solutions for corporate clients scale from the implementation of turnkey MT solution on the customer's infrastructure with customer's specialists training to the integration of the company's translation department with third-party MT services as well as full outsourcing of MT service providers.
We help to choose an MT supplier depending on the source and target languages, the type of content to be translated (technical documentation, software, contracts, correspondence, etc.), requirements for the quality of translation and many other parameters the MT quality depends on.
The difference in quality between publicly available and specially trained MT systems is enormous. However, proper MT training isn’t a trivial task, nor a cheap one. Our training platform lets you customize the training process and evaluate the results with minimal costs before the system launch.
MT training requires "training corpora" on a given subject: the sets of bilingual texts, where the sentences in the source and target languages are aligned. While corpora of general lexis such as news are freely available, narrowly themed corpora of the required size are a scarce and expensive resource.
There are three scenarios for MT training and using it in practice. The best choice requires consulting specialists and studying the specific task of a given customer.
To assess the effectiveness of training and the daily operation of the MT system, machine translated texts are compared with a reference translations using specific metrics. The reference may be an independent human translation of the same text or a post-edited machine translation of the original text.
MT lets you translate those types of corporate information, where previously manual translation couldn’t be used at all due to time and cost constraints: user-generated content, technical support chats, market research, internal correspondence in a global company, etc.
MT lets you reduce the costs of common tasks in technical documentation, software and partly marketing materials localization. With the MT of the previous generation (statistical, SMT), it was possible to reduce translation costs by an average of 30%. For example, if the translation cost is 1, MT post-editing costs 0.7 or perhaps 0.6. The transition to neural MT systems drops the cost to the level of 0.5 and even lower. However, cost efficiency requires careful preparation and proper tuning of the MT system and thus the adaptation of translation workflows.
The obvious advantage of MT is a significant acceleration of translation processes. Given the various factors, the translator's productivity increases up to threefold. It all depends on the language pair, the type of content, the way the system is taught, and other circumstances that can be noted only by specialists experienced in working with MT.
The deployment of an MT system at an enterprise must include the decision about system hosting and employee training to work with and administrate the system. It also includes the connection of the system to the enterprise IT environment for information exchange, integration with translators' CAT systems and the preparation of data for training MT.
Typically, the MT server is hosted on the customer enterprise network or the supplier's data center. The second option may require the use of special measures to ensure the confidentiality of information to be processed.
The process of administrating a deployed MT system involves training for the responsible employees. Alternatively, it can be outsourced through remote system administration.
To reduce the costs associated with daily use of the MT system, it’s advisable to link the MT system with the enterprise's CMS system. Because different MT vendors may provide different API interfaces that are specific to their systems, you may need the skills of a specialist.
CAT systems differ in terms of integration with third-party MT systems, so a specialist advice may be required. We offer a specialized Memose solution for optimization of the MT post-editing process. It complements existing CAT systems and implements a new concept for working with MT. It significantly increases the quality of the final translation and enhances the translator's experience of working with MT.
We provide services for the thorough cleaning of accumulated arrays of translation memory (TM) for MT system training. Additionally, we offer migration of existing TMs to our Memose translation-memory server. The server is based on a new translation memory-storage concept and ultra-fast database. So, it's optimized for translation processes with the use of MT.
MT training requires a corpus of bilingual texts of 50,000 pairs of sentences and more depending on the MT version. If the existing arrays of translation memory do not provide the required amount of data, we offer our solution Paralela for the automatic alignment (matching) of texts in different languages based on the latest AI technologies. To obtain the aligned bilingual arrays, similar to translation memories, it’s possible to use multilingual documents available at the enterprise: the enterprise website content, other available texts and third-party websites. The alignment is automatic and highly accurate.
Subsequent to the training phase and launch, the MT system requires periodic maintenance, including additional training, quality control and post-editing performance assessment. It’s also important to periodically compare the chosen system with others. After all, progress is a constant pursuit. MT systems improve at different rates, and sometimes they may even backslide.
After additional training of the system on a new domain, it’s necessary to perform not one, but two quality checks.
To assess the efficiency and cost of MT, you can measure the time spent by post-editors to edit the raw MT. The best option is when the CAT system lets you measure this time. An alternative is to selectively measure the performance of post-editors. To obtain a reliable estimate, it’s necessary to meet a number of conditions described in mathematical statistics. The measured average output of the post-editors also helps to draft the translation schedules.
The deployment and subsequent operation of MT systems abound in pitfalls. Listed below are typical questions that inevitably arise along the way.
