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TranslationJM.com June 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Is Google Translate accurate?

Google TranslateGoogle Translate recently celebrated 10 years of existence. There’s no dispute that its accuracy has increased as it’s gone from supporting a handful of languages to more than 103, but how accurate is Google Translate today? Can you rely on the results when communicating with someone in a foreign language?

Neural Machine Translation: Google’s Latest Translation Technology

Google Translate and other types of translation software have come a long way in fluency by translating whole sentences at a time rather than translating piece by piece. This is important because the meaning of words can change depending on the context. With a broader context, Google Translate can determine the most relevant translation. From there, it actually rearranges and adjusts the translation to sound more like a fluent speaker using Google’s new Neural Machine Translation.

Announced in 2016, this update produces smoother translated paragraphs and articles based on a computer system that learns over time. Right now, Neural Machine Translation is in place for eight language pairs representing more than one-third of the world’s population and over one-third of Google Translate queries.

The new technology is so accurate, in fact, that researchers called the results “unsettling” in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

If you’re using Google Translate to translate to or from English and Spanish, French, German, or other languages that now use Neural Machine Translation, you can expect better translation results than before.

Where Google Translate Misses

As with any translation tool, there are still plenty of areas where mistakes will be made. For example, the tool still doesn’t have common sense so it can mistranslate a sentence like, “The glass will not fit in the box because it’s too big.” In this case, the tool doesn’t understand which “it” is too big. This can be a problem in languages like Swedish in which nouns have two articles: “en” and “ett.” Swedish requires that adjectives and definitive articles to agree with the noun, so “big” can be “stor” for an en word, “stort” for an ett word, or “stora” for a plural noun. Glass is an ett word (ett glas) but box is an en word (en låda). Google Translate may believe the box is the “it” that is too big and mistranslate “it” and “big.”

Another smaller issue you may run into is the words Translate suggests aren’t commonly used or they don’t quite capture the same meaning. Words may be considered synonyms and used interchangeably by Google Translate, but they certainly don’t have the same meaning. For example, “intoxicated” is a synonym for “happy” or “thrilled,” but it also has another meaning and it may not be the right word in the context of your sentence.

The best way to use Google Translate and get an accurate answer is to use simple sentences free of complex structure. Review your sentence before you hit the translate button. Have you used any slang? Did you use correct grammar and sentence structure? Are there any words or sections that may be unclear, such as the example above with the glass? It also helps to have at least some familiarity with the other language to spot obvious problems you can correct yourself or tweak in your original sentence to improve your results.

Filed Under: General

TranslationJM.com May 27, 2017 Leave a Comment

Create a Multilingual WordPress site

When creating a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site, there are numerous steps you will need to take to ensure that everything is translated properly. Whether you’re an experienced webmaster or someone that is designing their first website, here is a straightforward guide for running a bilingual or multilingual website with WordPress
Multilingual WordPress Site

Creating a Site with Multiple Languages

In the past, creating a multilingual website was an extremely difficult task to accomplish. While there are still some hoops you have to jump through in order to get your site working properly on WordPress, it takes much less time than it once did to get your multilingual site up and running. The essential aspect of any bilingual or multilingual site is a good multilingual WordPress plugin.

There are other methods that will allow you to forego reliance on a plugin, such as WordPress Multisite. However, these options weren’t specifically created for the creation of multilingual websites. Plugins allow for a streamlined approach to multilingual site creation. They also work wonders in keeping your posts and content up-to-date.

Using the Right Plugins

First, identify the multilingual plugin that you want to use. There are numerous plugins available to you, all of which have their own distinct advantages. WPML is likely the best bet, as it’s the most powerful plugin available. WPML allows you to easily run this type of site by providing you with a plethora of features that simplify the translating process.

With this plugin, you can readily translate all of your web pages, posts, menus, widgets and themes. This plugin is perfectly compatible with all themes and plugins from WordPress, so you don’t have to worry about it not working properly when adding content in the future. Other plugin options include Polylang and qTranslate, both of which are free.

Polylang is a great option, but it’s important to note that there is no accompanying installation wizard, so the initial set up of its features can be time-consuming. As for qTranslate, there are a multitude of features that comes with the plugin, all of which are designed around utilizing proprietary tags for translations. However, it can cause issues with your current content if you ever decide to deactivate it.

Translating Website Posts and Metadata

Once you’ve fully installed the multilingual plugin of your choice, it’s time to start translating the content of your website. This content likely includes more aspects of your site than you’re fully aware of, such as attachments and menus. The first portion of translation should focus on your posts. With a multilingual plugin, this process is simplified. The plugin settings should allow you to add the languages you want your posts to be translated to. With WPML, a screen will come up that lists your posts and allows you to translate them into any language you want.

Each translation will be made into a separate post, which allows for URLs for each one. Many posts of yours will also have metadata. This needs to be put through the multilingual plugin as well. Any info that’s been stored as custom fields in a post will need to be replicated for each translated post. Once you save these changes, the translated metadata will immediately be placed with the proper translated post.

Translating Attachments and Widgets

While the posts and metadata you’ve just translated make up the bulk of the content you need to put through the multilingual plugin, there’s still some work that needs to be done to have a fully operational bilingual or multilingual website. For any post attachments or images, it’s recommended that you replicate them for all translated posts. This can be essential to the layout of your website and theme.

To translate an attachment or image, upload the exact file to each translated post. This may take some time, but is a relatively easy process. As for widgets, these can be somewhat difficult to translate properly. The reason for this is that most plugins don’t come with built-in support for widget translations. In some cases, there’ll be no way around it, but to go in the plugins’ code to manually translate some strings.

One other possibility is to use the Widget Logic plugin, which will create a field alongside each widget, wherein text can be added that will allow for different languages.

This text should read ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE==en. The final en portion of the code should be changed to reflect the language you want the widget to be translated to, such as fr for French, de for German and es for Spanish. To have the widget be translated to all supported languages, leave this area blank.

Translating Menus and Themes

Any menus on your site should also be translated. This can be accomplished in much the same way as the rest of your site content. Various menus can be created for each language, all of which can be customized. WPML offers automatic menu syncing, which makes this step much quicker. When it comes to themes, most themes aren’t created with multilingual settings built in, which can make translation tricky. However, there are some themes available that support multilingual and bilingual sites, which may be your best option.

Plugin Installation That Allows For Switching Languages

Once the translation has entirely been completed, users will still need to be able to switch between content and page languages.

If you’re using WPML, just go to “Languages” and configure the switcher from there. It’s recommended that you make it to where the language switcher is placed in a sidebar on your theme, which makes it easy to access across all web pages.

However, if your website is larger than a blog, you might want to place the switcher in the header across all pages. To control where the switcher is placed, insert the code icl_language_selector into your theme’s layout. Once you’ve done all of this, your bilingual or multilingual website should be good to go.

Filed Under: General

TranslationJM.com July 24, 2015 Leave a Comment

Why you should transcribe your podcasts?

The profit potential of podcasting makes it an attractive medium for a variety of content creators. You don’t need millions of followers to make a decent impact and increase your listenership in the podcasting game if you know what you’re doing. Producing transcripts of your podcasts is one step that even some of the experts in the field don’t take the effort to make. This can seriously help your enterprise as you attempt to grow. Transcribing audio is a key ingredient in any successful podcast for a number of reasons.

Immediate SEO Ranking Benefits

Despite all the malarkey you may have been hearing lately about SEO being dead, the fact of the matter is that traditional SEO still counts. Google and Bing continue to scan and index text when figuring out which sites or pages should sit at the top of their SERPs. While their algorithms are increasingly dependent on social media signals and visual data such as video and images, the search engine heavyweights primarily rely on text. A transcript of your podcasts will help you to get found online.

Organic Backlinks Generation

Though text versions of your podcasts are a great way to augment your SEO strategy, they’re even better at getting people to do your SEO for you. By making your audio searchable and presenting it in written form, you’re making it far easier for other people to link to it from their own sites. When bloggers have quotable pieces of text to latch onto, they’ll create organic backlinks to your content if it’s relevant. Long story short, text transcriptions encourage followers to powerfully promote your podcasts.

Content Creation Possibilities

Transcribing audio from podcasts allows podcasters to increase their content offerings in a number of ways. For instance, one could turn podcasts into newsletters or email blasts. You could also create entire e-books out of podcast content and sell it for a few bucks on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Transcripts can also be edited to create blog posts or articles. Ultimately, the possibilities for re-purposing audio content into new formats are limited only by your imagination.

Superior User Experience

Nowadays, providing a great user experience for podcast and website followers alike is the name of the game if you want to get ahead. With so much content to choose from online, podcasters will suffer if they don’t include transcripts of their episodes. Some listeners can’t give their full attention to audio for whatever reason and like to follow along via the written word. Providing transcripts puts followers in the driver’s seat and allows them to consume your content on their terms.

Add-On Monetization Options

Another great thing about producing transcripts of podcasts is that they can be used to make extra money. For instance, you could distribute your text transcriptions around the web and pop in affiliate links that center on appropriate anchor text. Those links can produce income for years to come if you play your cards right. You could also insert links back to a subscription service like a paid email newsletter within your text as you see fit. Either way you slice it, transcribed podcast content can be monetized in a variety of creative ways.

Enhanced Social Media Marketing

While streaming audio services are ubiquitous on the Internet, they don’t exactly lend themselves to social sharing. Transcripts are a far better way to promote a podcast on networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. For instance, you could select choice quotes from every podcast that’ll pique the interest of potential listeners and post them to your social media profiles. By spreading text from your transcripts around the broader social media sphere, you can draw in far more followers and build hype. Transcripts or at least excerpts are just one more way to advertise.

A Boost in Perceived Reputation

Nowadays, consumers have learned to be very discerning when it comes to which podcasts they patronize. What’s more, podcasts have become increasingly polished and professional over the years. Even a lone podcaster without a studio can put out a great product for the cost of a hundred bucks worth of audio equipment. Lacking a well-edited transcript of episodes can make your podcast look amateurish and potentially scare off new listeners.

Getting Started with Transcription

In the end, transcribing podcasts is fairly straightforward and well worth the effort. Some programs like Dragon Dictation, Transcribe and Express Scribe can help you do it yourself. As great as those programs are, they’re not infallible. The most important step when running audio through a transcription program is to go through and manually edit it for formatting and spelling, assuming the program was fairly accurate in the first place. Another option is to use a professional transcription service like the one we offer here at TranslationJM.com. A real human will transcribe your podcast for you and deliver it in its finalized format. When you consider the cost vs time benefits, using a professional service often makes financial sense.

One last thing, once you have your transcripts, be sure to prominently display links to transcripts for each episode that you upload to the web.

Filed Under: General

Charles August 8, 2009 Leave a Comment

Translationparty.com – The wonders of Google Translate

I just read about this site on TechCrunch. The idea is very simple; you type a phrase in English, and Translation Party uses Google Translate to translate it in Japanese, and then re-use Google Translate to translate it back in English, and so forth until it reaches an equilibrium – a point where translating back and forth will always lead to the same translation.

Translationparty.com

Watch out, it gets addictive!

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Google Translate, Japanese, TechCrunch, Translation Party, translationparty.com

Charles January 16, 2008 Leave a Comment

2008, going strong!

Now I haven’t had the chance to update the blog in the past weeks, and that’s because we’ve been busy catering to our increasing number of clients. While attracting new clients is always an obvious objective, I’m very satisfied with the number of returning clients we’ve been able to keep month after month. I believe there’s no better assessment of the work we’re doing.

The site is coming up nicely and should be completely ready on the first week of February. The copywriter we’re using – Angelique, a writer I had to chance to work with for a while now – is doing an amazing job in spawning the pages that are slowly appearing on the website, and in really reflecting the spirit of our company. The website pages are being published on a ‘as ready’ process for a number of reasons. First off, we’re not a new company, hence, while we plan to make the new website a central part of our business, there’s no real need for secrecy surrounding the project. Secondly, we have not started marketing the website itself yet and we just recently started using our new brand name, hence the site is probably only getting traffic from existing customers – chances are, if you’re reading this (old) post, the website has already been launched!

Filed Under: General

Charles January 3, 2008 Leave a Comment

So who are we?

We’re based in Montreal, Canada. We truly are a web-based translation firm. Our network of professional translators spans from all the corners of the world, which allows us to use native translators who live in the actual countries of the target languages – this is an obvious advantage for accurate localization. We’ve been offering various languages services for a little over two years now. We already have a good set of clients and have been providing services ranging from translation to actual content writing.

If you wish to know more about us, feel free to drop us a line!

Filed Under: General

Charles December 22, 2007

How did you get here?

Welcome to our website! The website is currently under construction. While we’ve been offering translation services for over a year now, we will be launching a new official portal for all our language services (translation – localization – proofreading – transcription). We will also be keeping a blog with all relevant news about the company as well as interesting (hopefully) comments and articles about the industry in general.

We don’t have an official date yet for the launch, but expect something early February. In the meantime, I still invite you to contact us for any needs or requests, because it’s business as usual!

Filed Under: General

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