Integrating Machine Translation with Customized Localization Services
Machine Translation Today
Machine translation is nothing new. Sometimes referred to as automated translation, it’s been around in some shape or form for at least a decade.
Now such technologies as statistical machine translation and advanced leveraging have been developed to make machine translation more accessible and more accurate.
Rubric is using those advancements, as well as its proven project management skills and its recipe for quality, to offer customers a customized machine translation experience.
Why Machine Translation?
Machine translation is not for every client or every project. One of the true values of machine translation is the ability to mix it with human translation post-editing to translate high volume content quickly. Rubric works with its clients to determine whether machine translation should be included in the mix or not. We evaluate the translation requirements, the quality criteria and time constraints.
Machine translation may make sense for:
- Offering markets translated content that would otherwise not be translated
- Reducing overall time to market
- Attributing to lower costs for overall translation needs
- Offering a product to a market that the client otherwise could not reach
Machine translation has certainly shown to increase productivity and reduce costs. However, success with machine translation depends on a number of key factors. For example, some language pairs are better suited for machine translation then others. Source documentation that follows certain grammar, style and terminology rules will have more success with machine translation then others. Other factors include the availability of legacy content to create a ‘corpus’ for the machine translation engine, and likewise, the availability of dictionaries from the client to be used with the engine.
Rubric Machine Translation Offerings
- Post-Editing. With this service, we use our highly qualified translators to review the machine translated content. Post-editing will deliver high quality content back to the customer.
- Post-Editing ‘Lite’. In this case, human translators are also used, but they ‘review’ the content and the quality measure set differently. The content review still follows post-editing rules but the quality threshold is generally lower. Content that is appropriate for this service often requires a fast turnaround.
The Rubric Machine Translation Difference
Rubric is known for its customized workflow processes for clients. These automated processes have been proven to lower localization costs and speed time-to-market. In situations where machine translation makes sense, we couple our customized workflow processes with machine translation to offer greater benefit to the client.
