Communication

Why a human translator is best for translating training materials

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Some training documents containing graphs and charts are on a table, with four people's hands gathered around it.

When you work in an international company, documents and paperwork can come in many shapes and forms, as can the reasons why business documents need to be translated into another language. For every document with an external use, such as marketing materials, proposals, and websites, there are tons of internal documents that need to be available in multiple languages too, such as company policies, financial statements, and reports.

I have translated hundreds of business documents, and lots of them are meant for internal use only. This sometimes includes training materials, which are either designed to be delivered to new employees or to help develop the skills of existing employees.

But, just because they are not going to be seen by the public, doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be translated well or given less thought – after all, your employees’ opinions matter too! I have already covered why getting a colleague to do your translations is not a good idea, but it could also be a mistake to run your text through an AI program such as ChatGPT. Here are some of the challenges that I come across when I translate internal documents such as training materials.

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The pitfalls of AI translation for large-scale projects

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An image of a robot in front of a laptop to illustrate automatic and AI translation.

Whether translators like it or not, AI translation and other automatic translation solutions are here to stay, and are becoming a popular solution for companies with large, repetitive translation projects that they will keep adding documents to.

Even before ChatGPT, automatic translation has been around for many years, under the name “machine translation” (MT). A machine translation engine automatically translates sentences into another language, while a translator or editor may post-edit the text to make sure that it is translated correctly and makes sense. Some engines “learn” from previous translations that the translator has made, and can incorporate those solutions into similar sentences that it finds in future documents.

In theory, this speeds up the translation process (the translator’s role is more editing than actual translating, since they are working with the sentence that the MT has made) and generally reduces the company’s translation costs.

But sometimes, this is all too good to be true. Although this method can speed up large translation projects, if too many corners are cut then it can lead to subpar work and some embarrassing mistakes once the translation is published.

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Thinking about the future: My impressions of CIOL 2020

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BMA House, London

On 6 and 7 March 2020, I attended the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ first two-day conference at BMA House in London. It was a very fruitful couple of days with a wide range of subjects: some very topical, such as Brexit and Interpreting at the Olympic Games, and some more practical, such as digital marketing and specialising in fields like public service interpreting.

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What to do if you’re not happy with a translation you’ve commissioned

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You may not have to throw away your translation

On my blog, I like to talk about how to get the best possible translation for your money and reach the happiest ending for either you or your business – but unfortunately, sometimes things may not go as planned, either for the translator or for the person requesting the translation. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve never received questions about a translation I’ve done – although thankfully, these have never been full-on complaints, just clarifications 😉

Still, if you’ve hired a translator to translate your website or business documents, but something feels a bit off…how do you fix it?

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Got a bilingual colleague? Don’t use them for business translations

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Bilingual employee translating company documents

In my previous job, there was a Dutch guy and a French woman (and me) and we were always called upon to do quick translations for our teams. The company we worked for was in that funny position where there wasn’t enough demand for there to be a full-time in-house translator, but the need for small or urgent translations still arose from time to time – for things like invoice queries, training materials, and certain emails.

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3 challenges of translating tourism content

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Tourism Translation

I wrote a guest blog post for the translation technology company SDL about the challenges of translating tourism content.

Although translating texts for the tourism industry can be very interesting, there is a lot more work to it than meets the eye, and it’s certainly not something that should be rushed – or left to chance.

Read an excerpt from my blog post below, and read the full article here.

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When is it OK to use Google Translate?

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cogs-resized

Google Translate, and other machine translation (MT) programs, have come along in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Not only can we download apps where we can just type in words and instantly get a result in another language, but you can take photos of signs and get a translation straight away, and even instantly translate voice and video calls with the likes of Skype Translator. With the magic of deep learning technology, computers are able to “learn” more and in theory, improve the quality of their output the more it is used.
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