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Follow on Google News | Shaking up the Translation IndustrySkilled human translators have been the backbone of the industry but technology has been chipping away at them for many years. However machine translation will never completely replace the need for a skilled human translator
By: Straker Translations Skilled human translators have been the backbone of the industry but technology has been chipping away at them for many years. However machine translation will never completely replace the need for a skilled human translator due to the subtlety of language and its context. Despite the advances in technology, the industry is slow to innovate and the same problems exist regardless of global changes. The top five languages translated into and out of English are French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese. Traditionally the translation industry quote prices on the basis of word volume, e.g. how many words need to be translated multiplied by a per word rate. For a first time, or one-off job, this model makes sense, as it is often the best way to give a guaranteed price. However for ongoing and repeat work this model costs clients a lot more. So what happens when an ex-paratrooper, a mother of 3 and an Irish Australian take on the translation industry? A major revolution in how translation costs are managed. The team at Straker Translations have spent the good part of a decade developing the technology that will revolutionise the way the translation industry charges for its services. Over the years the team at Straker refined and expanded their system to include automatic machine translation, originally starting with Google Translate as a backbone, but quickly developing their own. However the same problem remained, inefficiencies in the translation industry made the cost of translation for their clients with large-scale translations prohibitive. Compounding this was the free-lance nature of translators. Each of them have their own tools and methods for managing their own jobs, no two are exactly the same. This frequently added the issue of inconsistency across jobs for a single client. "The traditional way of charging for translations is by the source word in. The problem with this model is it has no correlation to the actual time taken to complete the job; in nearly every case any time saved is a bonus to the translator, not to the client. This is where the Straker 'translation by the hour' model is a winner for our clients. The faster the translators, the less our clients pay. Everything above the line is a saving for the client." Straker's team of developers, who had worked on the problems of improving efficiencies in the industry for over half a decade, then spent the next few years developing a highly advanced model of an online translation management system, Transl8. Transl8 enables translators to work together using a common toolset, with integrated memory on a client by client basis to ensure consistency of content regardless of which translator does an individual job. Transl8 is a proprietary system, which allows Straker's project managers to track translator time and efficiency on jobs in real time. While other translation companies send content out to translators in plain text or PDF format, this leaves them with no visibility on how long translators are spending on a job or what their productivity is. In real terms, this means there are few metrics that can be measured to identify gains in efficiency. In a service-based industry, time is used as a measure of cost, however traditional pricing methods for the Translation Industry create no correlation between the two. Straker have been able to link the economic cost of the service (a translation) About Straker Translations Straker Translations is revolutionizing the translation industry by offering fast, efficient and cost effective translations with their unique pay-per-hour translation model, it enables clients to significantly reduce their ongoing translation costs as well as simplifying the translation process. Founded in 1999 by Grant Straker, as a software company specialising in multi-lingual content management for websites, they morphed in 2010 into Straker Translations, a global translation agency with offices in the USA, Canada, Europe, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand building a global client base that includes: Sun Life Financial, Glaxo Smith Kline, Caterpillar, Creative, Exxon Mobile, Fuji Xerox, Mailchimp and BP. Visit www.strakertranslations.com Contact : Grant Straker Straker Translations 33 Apollo Drive Auckland, New Zealand +643095252 grant@strakertranslations.com http://www.strakertranslations.com End
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