Early in January as I was leaving my office to go home – as usual, a bit later than I would like – I saw a notification come up in my Google Calendar suggesting that I set a New Year’s resolution. It seems to be a new feature in Google’s calendar application, as it did not bother me with New Year’s resolutions in the past years. I kept the notification on my phone for a couple of days but couldn’t think of a good resolution, so I eventually dismissed it.

A couple of weeks later, I had a meeting with Sarah Good, our Content Manager, and she asked me to contribute to our content creation efforts here at Memsource. I said: Do you know what? I will write an article every month for our blog. I like writing, so I was fond of this idea immediately and thought that I finally have my New Year’s resolution. Thanks, Google! So here is my first article from the “Memsource CEO Monthly Article” series. It is January 31 today, so I think it is probably the last day when one can look at the past year and not be way too late with such a reflection.

So here we go: 2016 was another year of double-digit growth here at Memsource with our sales increasing 80% year-over-year. However, the year was also noteworthy for several other reasons.

Zero Downtime Deployments

In 2016 we spent a lot of time on improving the way we release new versions of our software. There were two major changes in this area. First, in March, we started deploying not just our minor but also our major releases with zero downtime. This wasn’t a trivial task to achieve in terms of engineering but it was a great improvement for our users who rely on Memsource being up and running 24/7.

Weekly Development Sprints

With our ability to deploy pretty much all versions with zero downtime, it didn’t make sense to have monthly major releases anymore. Why wait for a month when we can ship that feature next week? Starting in October, we switched to weekly development sprints and synced our deployment cycles with them. This initially created some friction in our marketing efforts: We can no longer advertise a big new version of Memsource since our new features are now released continuously. There aren’t any more monthly dates towards which all marketing effort is coordinated, culminating at the release date of a major version. We soon realized that it’s a non-issue – customers are far more interested in the actual features than a symbolic version number.

16 Billion Words Processed in 2016

Over the past year, customers around the world have uploaded files with an aggregate source word count exceeding 16 billion words. In May 2016, we peaked with a monthly word count of over 2 billion.

359 Million API Requests

In 2016, our customers sent 359 million API requests to our servers from their custom-built integrations, which are typically connections between their in-house systems and Memsource. This number excludes even more API calls that were generated by Memsource-developed integrations, such as our machine translation integrations or the requests between the desktop Memsource Editor and Memsource Web Editor that also use our public API to communicate with Memsource Cloud.

Memsource Team Grows to 50+

Obviously, all of the above would not have been possible without the truly exceptional team that we have here at Memsource and are continuing to build. We grew our team significantly in 2016 and are now over a staff of 50 located in Prague, Vancouver, and Tokyo. We have expanded to the entire floor in our building and are currently renovating the newly added office space. Here is a photo from one the rooms we recently added (pre-renovation), featuring most of the Memsource staff based in Prague:

And More…

There was obviously much more that took place in 2016 that didn’t make it into this blog post. Some of it I cannot share publicly and some of it I want to save for my next blog posts. As I write this, it’s almost midnight here in Prague. If I want this article to go out by the end January, I have just a few minutes left. So, I am going to hit the “Publish” button now and if you enjoyed this post, stay tuned for another one in February.

David Canek is the CEO and Head of Product at Memsource.

We have added a new option to our Linguist User Settings: Edit translations in TM.

Admin or Project manager can now allow a Linguist to search in TM on Cloud and edit the records in the Translation Memory. It it similar to the “Terminologist” option which was now renamed to “Edit all terms in TB.

Linguists can log in to their Linguist Portal, open the Project page and and click on the Translation memory assigned to the project. They can search TM, edit the text, delete the segment or the whole translation unit the same way Project managers can.

• Only a “Write” TM is open for editing, “Read” TMs are for search only.
• All languages in writable TM will be available for search and editing.
• Import, Export and Align functions are not permitted for Linguists.

The UK-based non-profit organization onebillion develops multilingual apps to spread numeracy and literacy among marginalized children throughout Africa and other regions.

Translating and localizing the apps presents a number of challenges for the developers, such as the quantity and type of target languages. As the app was deployed in more and more areas, it became clear that a smarter approach to managing the translations would be required.

Learning math in 50 languages
onebillion launched their math apps first and they are now available in more than 50 languages. The content for these apps consists mainly of short and simple instructions for the children to follow as they work on their exercises. Local translators, often non-professional, have so far been able to provide these translations.

Next project: literacy apps

The literacy app is a more complex project and only 3 language versions are currently available. Starting with the alphabet, it then moves to forming syllables, words, sentences, and finally short stories. For the localization of this type of material, onebillion collaborates closely with professionals working at local universities as well as UK based academic institutions.

Time for a new approach to translation
Until recently, onebillion was relying on an in-house translation system, which was perfectly adequate for the numeracy app. However, for the literacy app, it was clear that a centralization of their database and an advanced translation management tool would be crucial. Et voila! Memsource presented some key features that will assist with these challenges.

Advanced API functionality enabling the integration with the onebillion in-house database to keep data centralized and consistent.

User-friendly interface making it easy to use for both their volunteer and professional translators.

The possibility to work offline, overcoming the challenge of poor internet connection in the regions where their collaborators are located.

Proud to be onboard!
Memsource is now supporting onebillion with a free BIZ Team edition of our translation management system plus full technical support and training. We hope that this contribution will enable onebillion to work efficiently and deliver outstanding apps that make education accessible to even more marginalized children.

What about you?
Would you like to support onebillion as well? Why not volunteer your time to translate and localize their learning apps? Contact Judith at onebillion to find out which languages are currently required!

Learn More: onebillion website
Additional onebillion supporters include: VSO, Malawi Ministry of Education, eurotalk, Norwegian Embassy in Malawi, Scottish Government, University of Nottingham, Junior Language Challenge

Users can now sync Memsource accounts with yet another CMS – Drupal. Please note that the Drupal connector works only with Drupal 8 (and later) and the integration currently allows manual file import only.

Follow 10 steps below to successfully enable Memsource Connector module on your Drupal site and synch it with your Memsource account.

1) Go to your Drupal server and find Admin / Configuration / Regional and Language / Languages page.

2) Add all languages you want to use and set one of them as Default (this is equivalent to “source language” in Memsource and will be probably the same as the main language of your Drupal site).

3) Go to Admin / Configuration / Regional and Language / Content language and translation page.

4) Select translatable content types. Memsource currently supports “Content” and its subtypes (“Article” and “Basic page”).

5) Go to Downloads section on https://www.drupal.org/project/memsource_connector and copy the link address of the version you would like to install.

6) Go to Admin / Extend / Install new module.

7) Paste the URL copied in step 5) into Install from a URL field and install the module.

8) Go back to the Admin / Extend page, find “Memsource Connector” in the MULTILINGUAL category. Select the checkbox and click Install.

9) Go to Admin / Configuration / Regional and Language / Memsource Connector page. Copy the value of Memsource Connector authentication token field to the clipboard.

On this page, you may also set what posts should be translatable based on their statuses (only Published posts, only Unpublished posts, or both) and set the status of translated posts (Published or Unpublished).

10) Log in to your Memsource Cloud account and create a new Drupal connector with the copied token and your Drupal site URL.

Drupal connector is available for Team, Ultimate and all Business editions.

Last fall, translation and localization students from all over the world participated in a Memsource contest to portray an English translation of a joke in their native tongue. We interviewed three of the winners and they offered some interesting insights into their translation student lives and their views about current trends in the market.

Elizabeth Nowicki

Elizabeth is from Chicago, Illinois and is majoring in Linguistics and East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s a native speaker of English and Polish and has also studied Japanese since high school. Elizabeth is currently working on a Translation Certificate and is fascinated by the fluidity of language.

What’s the biggest translation challenge that you have faced so far?
I find literary translation to be very hard. It’s difficult to make a story flow without being a writer. You have to maintain the story line and make sure everything makes sense. You also have to make sure not to give too much away – foreshadowing is really hard to translate. You have to know what’s going to happen in order to make it sound correct and appealing in the target language, but you mustn’t give it away. And the most difficult part is revision – it’s very time consuming and can feel endless. In some cases, it can take longer than the actual translation!

Do you think technology will replace translators or it will help them become more effective in their work?
In my opinion, technology will never replace translators because languages are very fluid and are constantly changing. Technology can’t update as fast as humans, but I believe it’s extremely helpful. I’ve been using several translation softwares, including Memsource, and it’s very useful to have a baseline starting point, such as a termbase. It definitely helps having that guidance and makes future projects go a lot faster.

Do universities in the United States prepare translation students well for their careers?
Every university is different, but in general, I feel they could do better. For example, in our studies we tend to focus on English, because everybody translates into it, but we can’t consult anyone about the meaning in the source language. On the other hand, we get excellent training in CAT or subtitling tools. Overall, I feel that the technical teaching is good, but there is less focus on language practice. I find programs that focus more on your specific language pair more useful.

Soykan Ataman

Soykan is a senior translation student at Trakya University in Turkey, and he works for gaming companies as a freelancer. Aside from game localization, he is passionate about translation technology and subtitling. Soykan is an active member of the Trakya University Translation Students Community and his main goal is to produce game localizations that have the same feeling as the original language.

Do you think technology will replace translators or it will help them become more effective in their work?
It’s kind of a love-hate relationship. Most of the old-school translators in my country hate translation technology and machine translation because they are afraid of becoming unemployed. But I think it’s an opportunity to be seized. With the help of advanced technology such as the cloud or Artificial Intelligence learning, translators are getting better results day by day. I think we should focus on how to use these translation tools effectively.

What’s it like leading a CAT tool course in your university student club?
Together with a friend, I provide an introductory course to Memsource. We explain how to create termbases and translation memories and we also teach how to translate in Memsource’s CAT tool. Many students who don’t join a university club like ours can struggle when they enter the industry. Finding an internship or an adequately paid job can be difficult since employers don’t want to waste time or resources to train you in CAT tools.

What are some of the challenges with video game localization?
Currently, I work as a subtitler and translator for a video game company. I think that the character limitation is the main challenge when localizing video games. You have to fit your translation into a designated area, which is often quite difficult. On top of that, a lot of games have many specific items that need to be translated and well enough so that the players don’t feel like it’s a translation.

Charlotte Busch

Charlotte is a second-year student of Spanish and English from the Netherlands. She hasn’t yet chosen her specialization but she’s already excited at the prospect of localizing for gaming companies. During the next academic year, Charlotte will travel abroad for a 5-month internship that she believes will be a challenging but valuable experience for her translation future.

Do you think technology will replace translators or it will help them become more effective in their work?
I think technology will continue to evolve at a rapid pace, and eventually it will be able to understand and apply complex grammar. This doesn’t mean that translation technology is necessarily a bad thing for translators. Certain programs, like Memsource, can be an asset and help lift the workload. In areas such as law and medicine, a living and breathing translator will still be essential because accurate translations are absolutely crucial in those fields. In the case of literature, I don’t see any chance of translation technology ever replacing translators, because there are certain feelings in the original text you have to convey to the reader in your translation that technology cannot express.

Do you think it’s important to stay up to date with industry trends?
I don’t think you always need to immediately adapt to new trends, but I do think it’s important to pay close attention to them, especially those that can make your job a little easier for you. Also, clients may ask you to use a new kind of technology and you really want to know what they are talking about about if they do so.

What do you think you will choose for a specialization?
Before I can pick my specialization, I’ll have a mandatory internship abroad during the first 5 months of my third year. This is, without a doubt, going to be biggest challenge yet, but it’ll definitely be worth the experience. Nevertheless, I’m already leaning towards game localization. I’m an avid gamer myself, so it would be amazing if I could combine this hobby with translating. I like to play all kinds of games, but I enjoy action-adventure, (J)RPGs, and open-world games the best. I have yet to localize my first game, but I’ll be doing my first localizing assignment very soon, so I’m very excited for that.

Interested in learning about the free Academic Edition for your university? Contact Filip Sanca to learn more.

Both Memsource editors bring shortcut Ctrl+Shift+F8 to insert all tags from the source segment at the cursor position in the target segment.

Memsource Editor brings new categories of segment status for filtering – Edited and Not Edited.

Administrators can now modify the default import settings for the entire account (under Setup -> Project Settings -> File Import Settings)

This allows users to define most used settings for specific filetypes without the need to create a Project Template.

Scanned PDFs are fully translatable upon their import into Memsource thanks to the integration with the TransPDF service that has added the automatic conversion (OCR) of scanned PDFs.

A new set of dashboards featuring localization analytics for jobs, costs, savings, and more is now available on the homepage in Memsource Cloud.

The new home page analytics dashboards are available for users of Team Start, Team, Ultimate, Biz Start, Biz Team, and Unlimited editions. They allow users to have an overview of their jobs and processes and receive in-depth analysis of their localization statistics as they log into their Cloud account.

On the homepage, users can add and arrange the dashboards according to their preference. When users select “Add Dashboard” at the top of the page, they are presented with eight dashboard options: Providers, Jobs, Issues, Costs, Savings, Leverage, Machine Translation, and Automation Widget.

Upcoming Webinar: Track Localization with Home Page Analytics Dashboards – March 8, 2017

Benefits of Analytics Dashboards

For Translation Agencies: Get an overview of current projects’ status, your team’s productivity, and savings from Machine Translation and Translation Memory.

For Translation Buyers: Analyze costs per vendor, see a status overview of all your current projects, and generate localization ROI reports.

Dynamic Dashboards

Each of the eight dashboards has a minimum of three charts with a breakdown of different features and reports. “Leverage” includes charts related to date created, savings with machine translation, translation memory, and repetitions, and savings from different clients or vendors.

The charts are dynamic and adjustable – they can be arranged and resized as desired, and users can select and deselect options like language pairings, currencies, and time to create the desired report. Links of linguist names and projects will open a new window with additional information.

Financial Reporting for Localization

Dashboards with revenue-based data will give project managers and translation managers further insight into their costs and ROI for localization, as well as benchmark best practices.

Available dashboards to showcase financial reporting include:

Costs and Savings – overview of costs in selected price list currencies and various cost breakdowns per language pairing, client, project, provider, and Automation Widget

Leverage – Savings from translation memory and machine translation, broken down by date created, language pair, client, matches, repetitions, and more.

Machine Translation – Savings from different Machine Translations connected to your account

The new analytics dashboards can help increase transparency of your localization process, create reports for senior management, calculate localization ROI, and identify best practices.

Register for the upcoming webinar: Track Localization with Home Page Analytics Dashboards – March 8, 2017

Are you a Memsource user with specific metrics you would like to measure? Contact our Support Team with your feedback.

A new set of dashboards featuring localization analytics for jobs, costs, savings, and more is now available on the homepage in Memsource Cloud.

The new home page analytics dashboards are available for users of Team, Ultimate, Biz Start, Biz Team, and Unlimited editions. They allow users to have an overview of their jobs and processes and receive in-depth analysis of their localization statistics as they log into their Cloud account.

On the homepage, users can add and arrange the dashboards according to their preference. When users select “Add Dashboard” at the top of the page, they are presented with eight dashboard options: Providers, Jobs, Issues, Costs, Savings, Leverage, Machine Translation, and Automation Widget.

To read more about these dashboards, please visit the main blog.

Marketers around the world are all trying to do one thing: reach more people. With only 26% of the world’s internet population operating in English, if localization isn’t part of your marketing strategy, it’s likely that billions (yes, billions!) of non-English customers are slipping through your hands.

For companies that want to expand globally, a successful strategy must be in place and language considerations should be a part of that. A study by research firm Common Sense Advisory surveyed online shoppers from 10 countries and found that 75% of people preferred to make purchases in their native language and a shocking 60% of respondents “never” or “rarely” purchased from English-only websites.

An additional CSA study shows that the market for outsourcing translation and interpreting services in the United States surpassed $40 billion in 2016, and the demand for language services and technology increased by 5.52% from the previous year.

Theses studies tell us that localization is no longer optional, it has become a necessity.

Is your team localizing? Why aren’t more companies doing it? Is it really as complex or as expensive as it seems? Well, let us break  down some marketing localization myths for you:

Myth #1 – Translating content is a complex process

With so many people involved – the in-house team, external translators, translation agencies – and many documents needing translation very quickly, getting everyone on the same page with localization can seem like a daunting task. Plus, there’s the technology. Who has the time to get trained on yet another tool?

For marketers, localization doesn’t have to be complicated. There are now easy-to-use systems that can streamline the content translation process.

Translation management systems (TMS) offer a centralized platform that allows global marketing teams to work alongside each other and easily collaborate with translation vendors and freelancers. Companies like Sega Networks and Citroen can work side-by-side with their in-house translators and chosen translation vendor. Citroen and their translation provider, TextMinded, are able to share data and resources between the marketing team, the in-house translators, and the external TextMinded team.

With a professional TMS, marketers can be completely hands-off. At Tennis-Point GmbH, the company software development team set up the new TMS to automatically send new website updates for translation once per week. As a result, their marketing team easily sends HTML email newsletters twice per week to their translation agency to be localized into 12 languages without having to dive deep into any installation and training procedure. They simply log in, drag and drop their HTML files into an Automation Widget, set a deadline, approve the cost, and the file is off to the translation agency. When the translation is completed, the marketing team receives a localized HTML file that they can easily import into their EMS.

Myth #2 – Localization is too expensive and time consuming

Is localization really worth it? Is there really a return on value for marketing? Perhaps senior management doesn’t see the value or it seems unnecessary to invest in another technology tool.

A translation management platform is not only a worthy investment, but an affordable one too. Translation management platforms come equipped for translation memory (TM), a database that stores previous translations over time. Utilizing a translation memory within a CAT tool will save money by eliminating duplicate or repetitive translations. Translators will spend less time on translating the same words and phrases over and over again, and focus instead on making the translation feel natural in the target language. And you will save money because you will never translate the same sentence twice.

You will also be able to analyze the cost and savings through dashboards. Analytical dashboards can break down costs by vendor, job, or word, show savings over time from translation memory and repetitions, and display job status. Dashboards can easily allow marketers to create visual and dynamic ROI reports for senior management so managers can align marketing localization with company strategies.

And you will also save time. A lot of time.

Fujifilm was able to cut down their localization of InDesign files from 90 minutes to just 15 – an 80% saving! Tennis-Point also saved 30% of their time, 130 days per year, by centralizing and automating their website localization.

Remember that by localizing more content into multiple languages, you will gain a significant competitive advantage in your market. A study by Memsource highlighted how 80 major companies worth over one billion USD are localizing not only their websites, but their additional support sites as well. It is in your company’s financial interest to speak to your customers in their native language across as many mediums as possible – before your competitors!

Myth #3 – There’s no way to keep track of what you said last year

Let’s say you’re already localizing – but other than digging through proofs and files, or contacting previous freelancers, there’s no way to keep track of what you said a year before, or how your slogan was translated into a specific language. How can you keep track of previous translations and phrases? How can you guarantee the same wording across different marketing collateral and media channels?

Companies like Danfoss are able to maintain terminology consistency in 20 languages across websites, product catalogues, email newsletters, and more by maintaining translation memory and term bases (glossaries) in their TMS. It keeps all the data centralized on their side, and translation memory recognizes full or partial sentences (segments), ensuring they are translated in the same way each time. The term bases keep company phrases, slogans, and key terms consistent across media, regardless of which vendor or translator is doing the localizing. If any term is updated, the central term bases can be modified and the new term will be applied in real time to all current and future projects.

When companies and translation agencies team up together, maintaining glossaries and translation memory not only keeps things consistent, it also allows everyone to save on their budget (another way to save!) and reduce turnaround time.

Myth #4 – It’s hard to add new languages

You’ve just learned the company is entering a new country and the marketing team needs a plan of entry. How are you going to introduce yourself to your new customers? Just use English? And possibly isolate a large group of customers?

As mentioned, the CSA online shopping survey suggests you should definitely take a different approach and speak in your new customers’ native language whenever possible. Online job boards can help companies connect with language- and region-specific agencies and freelancers to help expand localization offerings.

Is it a country with less reliable internet connections? No problem, CAT-tools can have both online and offline functionality, keeping the data connected but allowing flexibility for internet connections.

It’s also possible to work with multiple translation vendors to get the best translations and quality checks in specific languages. For example, you can work with your long-standing translation agency as well as a native-speaking freelance translator living in the desired country for a quality check. You can also find language service providers who specialize in region- or industry-specific areas to ensure the best possible translation. Working with multiple partners can help make expanding your language offerings much simpler.

To take your localization even further, you can look into transcreation services provided by language agencies like Xigen which will bring even more benefits to your multilingual SEO.

Myth #5 – There are too many mediums and formats

HTML, PDFs, InDesign – oh my! There’s no way you can easily translate all of these and maintain the same structure and format, right?

Wrong. Translation management platforms offer compatibility with dozens of file types (50+ in Memsource), including the types marketers use daily such as .pdf, .idml, and .html. CMS systems can also be integrated via API to easily translate websites on platforms like WordPress and Drupal. There’s also increasing demand for multilingual video subtitles and voiceovers which can be managed by partnering with agencies.

Fujifilm’s graphic department easily translates .idml and .pdf files and Tennis-Point’s team localizes HTML files on a regular basis (remember, we mentioned it earlier). Some CAT-tools also have a live in-context preview feature that allows translators to see how the localized content will look, eliminating the back-and-forth conversations about increasing or reducing the character count to fit the area.

With a TMS that handles multiple file formats, you will eliminate the need to copy-paste content, maintain strings in a spreadsheet, and many of the other manual localization headaches.

Start localizing today

Speaking in your customer’s language across marketing media isn’t only critical, it’s a revenue generator. Now that you know localizing can save time, money, and doesn’t have to be complicated, why not try out Memsource for 30 days and see the benefits for yourself?

Already localizing? Are you certain you’re getting the best bang for your buck? See how you could streamline your efforts through centralizing your data and automating your processes.

Start a free trial of Memsource today.

It’s been almost six years since we launched Post-editing Analysis, a somewhat revolutionary feature back in 2011 when it was first introduced. Post-editing Analysis measures the post-editing effort based on an edit distance (the machine translation output vs. the final post-edited translation) and introduces the concept of “machine translation matches” that work very much like “translation memory matches”.

In Memsource, we extended the widely used translation memory matches to machine translation and combined the results in the Post-editing Analysis. This similarity to the well-established translation memory matches was one of the main reasons why it was so well-received by our users and why some translation software developers have adopted this approach as well.

Here is a video from 2012 that shows the main functionality of the Post-editing Analysis (by the way, I produced the video myself – at that time we had a staff of 5 and obviously didn’t have a marketing department!):

The post-editing analysis proved to be extremely useful, not only to establish machine translation post-editing efforts, but also to capture translation memory matches in projects on which multiple translators collaborated.

The standard practice introduced, along with desktop translation tools to analyze translation memory matches before translation, does not work in a scenario where translators contribute to translation memory in real time. As a result, it’s not known if Translator A will contribute a translation to a translation memory and Translator B will then re-use that translation or vice versa. By adding the post-editing analysis feature, it helped project managers establish who translated what and determine the impact on billing.

Freelance Translators as Early Adopters of Machine Translation

Another interesting by-product of the Post-editing Analysis was the ability to get machine translation a bit more under control. At some point, translation providers and translation buyers realized that some of the more innovative and tech-friendly translators (kudos to them) had decided to start using machine translation as a way to increase their productivity.

Given the prevalence of desktop translation tools at that time, there was almost no way for a translation agency or translation buyer to actually find out if MT is used by some of their translators or not. The adoption of machine translation into the professional translation process was a lengthy process with a number of technical, process, financial, and other pitfalls; however, to adopt MT as a freelance translator was remarkably easy.

This created a bit of a paradox: there were a number of discussions – mainly theoretical – at numerous industry conferences asking if/how to adopt machine translation. At the same time, many innovative freelance translators jumped on the MT bandwagon and just started using it as an additional support tool that greatly increased their translation productivity.

Here is a screenshot from a 2012 webinar I did on machine translation with (mainly) translation agencies and translation buyers confirming they mostly did not know whether their translators used MT or not when translating for them:

Recent Developments

Machine translation has moved from being an academic topic at conferences to being a major element of translation production. There are an ever growing number of machine translation providers to choose from. While Microsoft and Google may win on scale, smaller providers focus on customization and professional services. At Memsource, we have been adding new MT providers on a quarterly basis and have seen a surge of custom-trained machine translation usage over the last couple of years. We have seen some major translation providers adopt the post-editing analysis as the default input data for their billing.

Additionally, drawing on customer feedback, we’ve implemented a few improvements to the Post-editing Analysis such as an option to include translation memory post-editing into the overall results (when translation memory results are not accurate, they need to be edited and the translator should be paid for that). We have also made some technical and security changes to how the post-editing data is stored, so that it is tamper-proof and can be collected when working offline.

The Future

I feel like we are still at the beginning in many ways and there is a lot to come, including from Memsource. Stay tuned…

David Čaněk is the CEO and Head of Product at Memsource.

“I am convinced that training translation students to become proficient users of CAT-tools will help them to acquire the necessary experience and skills to be more competitive on the translation market. Memsource gives this opportunity to our students.” says Yurii Zablotskyi, Postgraduate Translation Lecturer at the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Languages at the National University of Ostroh Academy, Ukraine.

Yurii leads a translation internship program, where he offers students the opportunity to work with a number of different translation tools, including Memsource. Here are some further insights into his experience with Memsource:

Memsource was firstly introduced to our faculty for the translation internship purpose. The aim of the course for students is to translate a certain volume of text, but they are free to choose how they do it and what tools they use. That means we only suggest Memsource as one of the options. Initially, the course was not compulsory.

Frankly, I didn’t expect that so many students would show their interest in the course. I had to quickly find additional materials to assign tasks to everyone. At this point, some of my colleagues volunteered to help me supervise the project.

As a first step we organized a series of meetings to explain how Memsource works and how the translation process is organized. Then I enrolled some of the students into the program and assigned tasks for them. Soon after, more students asked to join and as a result, we now have 15 fourth-year students doing their bachelor’s degree and 2 instructors assisting me in the management of our translation internship project. In less then a month, nearly 60 third-year students will join our Academic Edition to study cloud-based CAT software.

All features of the product are very helpful, but one I like in particular is  having the ability to monitor the students’ progress in real-time. I can nudge them and “wake them up” if they are working too slowly. Memsource combines highly functional performance and user-friendly interface. It wasn’t difficult to start working in the system; however, after attending some of the free Memsource training webinars, it became even easier.

To sum up, I am convinced that training translation students to become proficient users of CAT-tools will help them to acquire the necessary experience and skills to be more competitive on the translation market. Memsource gives this opportunity to our students.

________________________________________

Yurii Zablotskyi
Postgraduate Translation Lecturer
Faculty of Romance and Germanic Languages
The National University of Ostroh Academy

It is now possible to use API to edit analyses (change the analysis name and/or assign a user).

Memsource has released a new solution to offer your translation clients.

Client Portals make it even easier for translation providers and internal localization teams to create customized online portals for their clients, giving them access to project overviews, job statuses, financial metrics, and drag-and-drop automation widgets.

Prior to this release, the main access point for non-user clients was a public website or unique URL with an embedded Automation Widget. This provided the clients with a quick access point for uploading files for translation, selecting the desired languages, and approving a price quote, but didn’t allow the client to have an overview of project progress or see any translation metrics. To check the progress of a project, the user had to find a previous notification email with a link to the project overview.

Now, clients can access their personalized portal as a “submitter”. This new role enables the user to easily order, monitor, and receive translations in one secure location  – all without needing a separate license or managing any technical settings. This increases transparency between the client and provider, and further streamlines communications. There’s no need to keep track of previous job emails to see translation progress and clients can easily log in from anywhere to see how a project is progressing and to download completed files.

Another benefit of the portal is the enhanced security for the client. With the individual login, it requires the user to log into Memsource Cloud to access project data and the user can also set up 2-factor authentication for additional protection.

For Translation Agencies: the Client Portal is a new way to give your translation buyers more oversight into their projects without purchasing additional licenses. Clients can see how much they’re saving on localization costs by working with your agency, and it removes the need for unnecessary email communication on project status and progress.

For Corporate Translation Departments: the Client Portal provides simple access points for internal departments (marketing, documentation, e-learning, HR, etc.) to submit and manage their translations with you and to track their budgets and savings.

Memsource Editions: The Team and Ultimate editions will come with two Submitter roles for each project manager license, and the BIZ Start, BIZ Team, BIZ Ultimate and Unlimited editions will include 10 Submitter roles for each project manager. This enables translation agencies and translation departments to distribute logins to a variety of internal and external clients, and to streamline the localization process at no additional cost.

How to set up the Client Portal for your customers

To set up the Client Portal you need to create a Submitter role:

1. Go to Users -> Create/Edit and select the Submitter in the Role field.
2. In the Widgets section, you can see the list of widgets created in your account.
3. Select the specific widgets you want your client to have access to; the widgets can be unique for each submitter. If you want to set up a new Automation Widget for your client, visit our Help Center for more information.
4. Once the form is filled in with all the necessary information, Create your Submitter.
5. To give your Submitter access, simply select them from the list and click Email Login. This will provide your Submitter with instructions on how to log in and create a password.

Once logged in, the Submitters will be able to see the list of Widgets assigned to them as well as the option to select which analytics dashboards they want to feature on their Home Page.

After being created by the account admin, the submitter user can log into their Client Portal and work in Memsource Cloud on two pages: the Home Page and the Project Page.

Access to analytics dashboards and automation widgets

On the Home Page, the client can access dashboards with metrics related to Jobs, Costs and Savings, and Leverage. These dashboards can be added and adjusted by the client to create a custom overview of their projects and financials. (Learn more about the Analytics Dashboards).

Also on the Home Page, the client can submit new projects through any Automation Widget set up by the administrator. The submitter can see the price and approve the project to be translated before it’s sent to the main account with the pre-determined settings. After uploading a file into the Automation Widget, the client will be sent to a confirmation page where they can also order additional files.

Real-time project overview

On the Project tab, clients can see an overview of all submitted projects with information on due dates, project statuses, and purchase order numbers. Each project can be monitored and users can open each of the projects to see an overview and to download the completed project file when the job is finished.

The client can monitor project progress directly in the project list, and can also click on the name to open the project, view the status, and download completed files when the translation process is finished.

For more information about creating Client Portals for your customers, visit our Help Center.

Not using Memsource yet and want to see how Client Portals work?
Start a 30-day free trial today: Translation Agencies – Corporations

“In my opinion, technology will never replace translators because languages are very fluid and are constantly changing,” says Elizabeth Nowicki, one of the three students who shared with us their views on current trends in the market and offered us some interesting insight into their translation student life.

Elizabeth is from Chicago, Illinois and is majoring in Linguistics and East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s a native speaker of English and Polish and has also studied Japanese since high school. Elizabeth is currently working on a Translation Certificate and is fascinated by the fluidity of language.

How has the relationship between translators and technology developed in the past few years?

I think that technology has changed a lot in the past few years and it has changed for the better. I remember using Google Translate only a few years back in high school and the results used to be very poor. However, there has been a really noticeable improvement. The translations I am getting are no longer simply replacing word for word from the source language, but they make sense in the target language.

Do you think that technology will replace translators or it will help them to be more effective in their work?

In my opinion, technology will never replace translators because languages are very fluid and are constantly changing. Technology can’t update as fast as humans, but I believe it’s extremely helpful. I’ve been using several translation softwares, including Memsource, and it’s very useful to have a baseline starting point, such as a termbase. It definitely helps having that guidance and makes future projects go a lot faster.

For which languages did you use Google Translate?

For Polish, Russian and Japanese. For Japanese, I have noticed that the word choice in Google Translate has improved greatly over the past few years and I think that’s because of the amount of data that is being fed into it. The logarithms and algorithms they use for translating the sentence structure are slowly getting better as well, but it’s not there a hundred percent yet.

Do you think it’s important to keep up to date with industry trends or technologies?

Without a doubt. If you want to be competitive as a freelance translator, you need to be well versed in all the technologies that are available on the market.

Is studying translation enough for working as a translator or do you have to specialize in a particular field?

Only studying translation is not enough.  You don’t necessarily need to specialize in a particular field, but you need to read up on the subject. For example, I had a translation project on the topic of telehealth from Japanese to English and I knew nothing about the subject. It was very difficult for me to find the correct words. I had to do a lot of reading on the topic and would not have been able to deliver a good translation without this additional learning.

Do universities in the United States prepare translation students well for their careers?

Every university is different, but in general, I feel they could do better. For example, in our studies we tend to focus on English, because everybody translates into it, but we can’t consult anyone about the meaning in the source language. On the other hand, we get excellent training in CAT or subtitling tools. Overall, I feel that the technical teaching is good, but there is less focus on language practice. I find programs that focus more on your specific language pair more useful.

Do they teach you the soft skills, for example how to approach potential employers?

On a number of occasions, our university invited professionals that work at the EU for short seminars. However, this was organised outside of teaching hours and we had to dedicate our personal time to this project. We don’t have any classes that would help us gain this type of skills.

Why did you decide to become a translator?

I had always been interested in linguistics. I wanted to see how good a translator I could be and if I would enjoy it.

Have you already selected your areas of expertise?

No. One of the reasons is because I am an undergraduate student. As a graduate student in the program, you are able to choose between interpreting and translation and within those fields, a specialty.

Let me ask you about Japanese, because that’s a language I know nothing about. Is there some interesting thing or challenge when translating from Japanese to Polish or English?

Yea, sometimes you don’t know what tense to put things in in English because Japanese doesn’t really have a future tense per se. On top of that, sometimes Japanese sentences have no subject so you can’t figure out who the subject of the sentence is. In English you always have a subject like “I” or “she”, but in Japanese it’s not explicitly written and it’s really difficult to figure out who the actual subject is from the context.

What’s the biggest translation challenge that you have faced so far?

I find literary translation to be very hard. It’s difficult to make a story flow without being a writer. You have to maintain the storyline and make sure everything makes sense. You also have to make sure not to give too much away – foreshadowing is really hard to translate. You have to know what’s going to happen in order to make it sound correct and appealing in the target language, but you mustn’t give it away. And the most difficult part is revision – it’s very time consuming and can feel endless. In some cases, it can take longer than the actual translation!

Are there any other challenges that you can think of?

Cultural references come to mind. Recently, I worked on a translation from Japanese where a famous baseball player was mentioned. Since it would be unlikely that an English reader would be familiar with this person, I had to add extra information including his full name, the name of his team and even his nickname, which was Tornado. It became relevant when I was translating a scene where the main character was standing on a roof and a thunderstorm, comparable to the power of Tornado’s skills, was approaching. I had to add this information to help the reader.

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Professors – would you like to give your translation students a head start in their careers? Contact Filip to set up a Free Academic Edition for your university!

Translation students – is your university not using Memsource yet? Sign up for the Free Personal Edition today, or tell your lecturer about the Memsource Academic Edition!

When submitting files for translation via Automation Widgets, clients can enter purchase order number for reference. Then, a Project Manager can easily filter all projects sharing the same purchase order number on the Projects tab, save the filter and reuse it when necessary.

Previously in Memsource, workflow steps could only move forward. If a revision by the translator was needed after a reviewer made changes to the text, there would typically be another subsequent workflow step for that (i.e. Translation – Revision – Translator’s Revision). From now on, BIZ Team, BIZ Ultimate and Unlimited edition users can benefit from the Reject Job feature.

Admins and Project managers can enable the Reject Job option for individual linguists upon creation or when editing them. Linguist users that have this option selected will have the functionality enabled. When they accept a job, they will be able to assess the quality of the translation without making any changes to the text. If they think the quality isn’t good enough, they can change the job status to Rejected by Linguist and send it back to the translator for re-translation. The linguist in the previous workflow step automatically receives Job Rejected notification and the job status is automatically changed from Completed to Emailed.

Please, keep in mind that changes from a higher workflow step aren’t automatically propagated to lower workflow step. If a proofreader makes changes in Revision step and then sends the job back to the Translation step, the translator will need to filter the changes in the editor and insert them manually.

Users can now sync Memsource accounts with yet another online repository – Box. The integration allows both for manual file import and Automated Project Creation. After a file is translated, it can be uploaded back to the online folder with a modified name.

The Box connector, together with Google Drive, DropBox, Drupal, GitHub and WordPress connectors, is available for all LSP and Enterprise editions.