People often ask me what I do for a living. The answer is usually not very straightforward or interesting. The questioner often starts to lose interest quite rapidly. This animation explains what I do more succinctly and in a far more interesting manner. Hhmm … maybe it’s the backing track?
Selling Translations® & memoQ Weekend Workshops, 6th &7th Oct 2012 Lærdansk Odense Denmark
I’ll be running a joint workshop weekend with long time friend and ex-Trados colleague Lone Beheshty. The workshop will take place at the Lærdansk centre in Odense (Hans Christian Andersen’s birth place!). I’ll be delivering a Selling Translations® Sales & Marketing workshop with a focus on making translation technology investments a competitive advantage rather than just another cost. Lone will cover memoQ […]
Unless you want “Ice Cream in the a*s” use Yandex for Russian MT, or better still a human!
I’m often asked why we need professional translators when Google Translate (for example) is free. The short answer is because Google Translate, and other MT engines, can make mistakes. The picture below, of a mistranslation from a Russian Menu, has been circulating on Facebook. “в асс.” is short for ассортимент or assortment, meaning choice – and has been badly mistranslated. […]
Russian language version of Selling Translations Technology Assisted Translation Pricing Spectrum March 2012
Thanks to Ego Translating Company for supplying the translation into Russian of the these documents previously posted in English only. Click the links below to download the PDFs. Russian-US-Letter-Selling-Translations-Technology-Assisted-Translation-Pricing-Spectrum-March-2012 Russian-A4-Selling-Translations-Technology-Assisted-Translation-Pricing-Spectrum-March-2012
Selling Translations® Technology Assisted Translation Pricing Spectrum
If you’re a language serviced provider this spectrum provides a model for you to think about the advantages and disadvantages of how transparent (about technology savings) you are when quoting. For example giving your client all the savings you make when applying translation technology is simple and, some would argue, honest. However this approach can make it difficult for […]
Bing Machine Translation added to Facebook … in case you didn’t already know
OK I’m probably not the first to spot Facebook offering Bing Machine Translation, indeed a few of my friends said they’d noticed this a week or so again. And when I “Googled” this (other search engines are available) there were plenty of pages dedicated to predicting how useful or successful this feature will be. The “horse’s mouth” […]
Autumn Tour: No sleep till Kalafat!
2 continents, 9 countries, 20 cities, a good number of rivers and unfortunately 9 currencies! Avid readers of this blog (surely there are some? Mother?) may have noticed many of my recent posts were about events I’m attending, presenting, moderating, facilitating or other business-like jargon verbs and noun-verbs. This entry combines (and links to) all […]
“Is Translation Software Heading to the Cloud?” – Tekom Panel Moderation
I’ve been invited to moderate this panel at tekom on Tuesday October 18, 14:45-15:30, in Room 2c at TECH-POD 3. The panelists are: Terry Lawlor, Senior VP Operations, SDL Stephan Böhmig, CTO, Wordbee Elliot Nedas, Business Development Manager, XTM David Canek, CEO, MemSource I am looking forward to panel which builds on my keynote TM-Europe […]
How to Answer “Can’t I just use Google to translate my website?”
This Google Webmaster Central Blog entry “Working with multilingual websites” by Xavier deMorales, Google Search Quality, is a little dated (March 19, 2010) but can help you to answer the, some think, ill-informed question “Can’t I just use Google to translate my website?” The killer line is “We recommend that you do not allow automated […]
Google Translate adds Indic Languages
The Google Official Blog has announced Google Translate support from today for “five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu“. This brings the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63. Readers of my blog will remember my story about the Tamil Shower Caretaker at Dubai Airport who taught me […]