Translation with Systran’s new Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine

Yesterday I translated our company presentation with Systran’s new Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine, and I was amazed at the results.

The presentation in question was a complete overview of all of our services, 59 pages of French text that was edited three separate times to make sure the quality was perfect. (Thanks Faten, Boris and Laurence!)

Then, two days ago, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the presentation for a response to an RFP (Request For Proposals), I found out that our prospective client (a major French manufacturer) wanted our response in English. I had just one day to deliver 59 pages of perfect English content!

Let me give you some background to explain why I, the CEO of a translation company, decided to use Neural Machine Translation for one of our most important commercial documents for one of our most important tenders.

Since 2007, Lexcelera has been responding to customer requests for machine translation for a number of different reasons: to allow clients to understand the contents of a patent or technical document; to translate internal reports; to automatically convert websites into other languages; or to provide a first-draft translation that our team would post-edit to irreproachable quality.

The benefits of Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

The benefits to our clients are just what you would expect. There are cost savings, first and foremost. And, of course, speed is accelerated. MT also makes content accessible that wouldn’t be otherwise, revealing what’s in a document that may be of interest. And with a first draft provided by a good MT engine that we have trained ourselves, Lexcelera’s translation productivity is sky high.

However, MT is not something we would normally turn to for non-technical content like our company presentation. Even though it can actually improve terminological consistency, depending on the software tool we use, it’s normally not suited for content that requires a superb writing style. But I was desperate. I needed a translation instantaneously so I could meet the deadline for our RFP response.

It so happens that we are in the process of beta testing Systran’s new NMT tool. If you haven’t heard of Neural Machine Translation yet, it’s certain that you will be hearing about it soon. NMT is the newest advance in computer-generated translations. Radically different from other approaches such as SMT and RBMT, neural machine translation uses a large neural network, organized much like the human brain.

Now that I have personally seen the result of Systran’s beta engine, I won’t say that NMT will entirely do away with the need for human translators, but it’s sure to have an impact on our industry.

My experience with Lexcelera’s NMT beta test

Usually with machine translation, there is a lot to correct, unless you have trained the engine very very well. That’s our speciality, training good MT engines. But this time, the Systran NMT engine was a completely untrained, generic engine. And still, the translation of our company presentation was amazing.

I needed to make corrections, of course. But I was surprised at how few errors there were. Mostly the Systran NMT engine understood what I wanted to say, and translated it very fluidly. The majority of the time, the terminology was spot on, and the sentences, well, they sounded human.

The translation did go off the rails in a few places. (I wonder how NMT would translate “off the rails”.) Once in a while it would leave a French word in the middle of an English sentence. Or, weirdly, it would repeat the same word twice. And about every three to four sentences, there would be a glaring error that I had to correct. Even so, I was stunned to find that I could leave whole sentences intact.

Most of the errors I spotted are easily fixable, like the repeated words, and the terms the system didn’t know. (Ironically, Systran’s NMT system did not recognize the term “post-édition” in French, and it mis-translated “relecture” as re-reading.) I have no doubt that Systran will make these fixes, and up their game in terms of in-context training as well. And then what?

I believe Lexcelera’s computational linguists will still have a role to play in training the NMT engines. There will always be product names and internal terminology to respect and protect. There will always be the need to integrate prior translations from our translation memories. And we will always need to make sure certain texts conform: for example, to make sure that the help manuals match the user interface.

Most importantly, Lexcelera’s post-editors will always need to re-read every word to guard against errors and omissions. (At least I think they will.) But what’s happening today is that even if NMT is not perfect, it has just crossed over from being a tool that gives you a general understanding of a text (usually referred to as “gisting”) to a tool that, well, gives you a proper translation. Not a perfect one, but a damn good one all the same.

I believe I have seen the future. Lexcelera’s challenge, like the challenge of every language-loving, multicultural and multilingual professional (in other words, translators), will be to establish our relevance alongside tools that are getting closer every day to reproducing human speech. (Did I happen to mention that NMT is also self-learning?)

Lexcelera is already working towards this new future by making sure we are in the advance guard. We know that MT, especially with the advent of NMT, is here to stay. That’s why we have been spending around 7% of our revenues on R&D to make sure we stay in the lead. And the investment has paid off. We’ve been working with language technologies long enough to master them. We know how to customize them, how to adapt them, how to improve them. But this is not just computing work. We train MT engines, good ones, by relying on human talents – on professional translators, post-editors and computational linguists. On people.

I believe that with NMT, there will still be a role for language professionals – for language lovers. But it looks like we will either have to work alongside the technology, or to carve out niches for ourselves in the increasingly smaller number of places where machine translation cannot go. I’d say we have three years to do this, tops, before NMT hits the mainstream. But it could rise a lot more quickly.

Stay tuned.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your opinion. Please leave your comments below.

— Lori Thicke

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June 2017: Lexcelera is present at VivaTech in Paris.

Bringing innovation in start-up translation technology to some of the world’s most innovative companies.

Lexcelera @ VivaTech

For a young entrepreneur, France’s VivaTech exhibition is the ideal hub for strategic meetings. And for established companies, like Lexcelera clients BNP Paribas and SNCF, VivaTech is a reflection of their growth strategies based on technology and innovation.

Held at the end of June, VivaTech was such a significant event that French President Emmanuel Macron himself was also present, declaring his desire for France to be a Start-Up Nation. Therefore, Macron’s vision is for France to become a country of the tech giants of tomorrow, a country of unicorns.

But there may be a little way to go for that. According to CB Insights, there are just 18 unicorns in Europe – that is, 18 companies valued at $1 billion or more. Of these, just 2 are in France: BlaBlaCar (ride-sharing) and OVH (Big Data). But VivaTech aims to set the stage for many more unicorns to come.

The trend has already begun. At the end of 2016, Paris surpassed London in terms of funding for start-ups. Now, France has become the second largest country in Europe for start-ups. With VivaTech, France aims to become the start-up capital of Europe and second only to Silicon Valley globally.

If Paris is aiming to be the San Francisco of technology, VivaTech aims to become the “Cannes” of the start-up world. That’s why it’s not too early to put VivaTech on your calendar for 2018!

Translation technology to support start-ups and future unicorns in their international development

In March, Maddyness, the French start-up magazine reported that between 2015 and 2016, 9400 startups were registered in France, the highest number ever. Among them are the future unicorns of technology and innovation who know that to develop, they need to look beyond the borders of France.

Lexcelera is ready to help. A little-known fact is that Lexcelera’s innovation in language technology is due to the fact that annually, it allocates 7% of its resources to R&D in translation technologies. This means being ready to support companies to expand internationally, and maybe even help them to become unicorns.

— By Misha Warnakulasuriya

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Translate websites to break the language barriers!

Oh how we love July and August: summer time, vacation time, but also sales time! We are in 2017, so when one says sales, the consumer hears online-shopping while companies hear opportunity for e-Commerce. The beauty of e-Commerce is that you can order pretty much anything while cozying up under a blanket at home. Just the thought of it is soothing. And indeed, 73% of online buyers thought so and had planned on shopping online for the 2017 winter sales according to the Consumer Science & Analytics institute. But what does that have to do with multilingual translation? Why translating websites is so important?

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an international consumer.
He or she goes online to buy something specific and notices that the website is only in French or English.
Will the consumer buy the product anyway?
Not so sure.

According to the Common Sense Advisory, most consumers will not buy from a website that is not in their native language. This is true for 78% of the Japanese, 71% of the French and Germans, and between 50 and 60% of the Turks, Russians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Spanish and Chinese.

The stakes of international e-Commerce are huge. The Ecommerce Europe Association published a report in June stating that European e-Commerce increased by 15% to €530 billion in 2016, and was forecasted at €602 billion for 2017.

5 reasons to start translating websites

We are clearly in a digital era and every year e-Commerce is gaining one point of market share over bricks and mortar sales.

So the best way to boost your e-Commerce is by translating your website into the languages of your target customers. By doing that, you will:

• Increase the number of international viewers
• Increase the average session duration
• Increase your sales (including high-priced items or services)
• Satisfy and retain customers
• Optimize your website’s ranking on search engines

Conclusion: whether a website is translated into one’s native language or not has a huge impact on purchasing behavior.

We are already halfway through summer, but that’s okay. Get ready for winter sales by breaking the language barriers with multilingual translation and boost your e-Commerce!

— By Misha Warnakulasuriya

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Does everyone speak English?

Our previous blog listed 5 reasons to translate your website.

Today, let’s find out if English alone can reach the whole world!

How many people actually speak English?

English is one of the most widely spoken languages ​​in the world, and more and more people are learning the language of Shakespeare.

In fact, English is the 3rd most spoken language in the world after Mandarin and Spanish. Today, approximately:

• 450 million people speak English as their first language
• 750 million speak English as a foreign language

As the map below reveals, English is understood by a significant proportion of the world’s population.

Some companies believe that they can succeed in their internationalization strategy with English translations only. Yet only 1.2 billion of the more than 7 billion inhabitants of our planet speak English (The rest speak approximately 7000 languages). So to answer the question “does everyone speak English?”, the answer would be “no”.

But you don’t need to translate your website into 7000 languages. According to the Common Sense Advisory, an independent research firm, you would have to translate your website into just 14 languages ​​to be understood by 80% of the online world.

Even if English is one of the most widely spoken languages, translating only into English (or only into Chinese or Spanish) could lead to missing out on promising markets. In addition, speaking directly to your target markets in their language helps you avoid any ambiguities that could harm your company’s image. Optimizing content in multiple languages can help you win your customers’ trust.

For your website, more languages = more markets, more visitors, more customers

On e-Commerce sites, customers are six times more likely to make a purchase when addressed in their language, according to the Common Sense Advisory.

Translation to the languages of your target markets can also improve your position on local search engines with multilingual SEO to bring international visitors to your site.

If you want to sell your products or services on a specific market, consider translating your content and website into other target languages, in addition to English.

At Lexcelera, languages ​​are our passion. (Discover the more than 100 working languages ​​available.)

— By Adjarath Adjibi

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Happy International Translation Day 2017!

On this very special day that is September 30^th, Lexcelera would like to thank all the translators and interpreters around the world who have been working with our team to take down language barriers.

Last year we wrote about the origins of International Translation Day. This year, we will focus on how translation benefits the world.

Translators without Borders and International Translation Day

As many of you already know, Lexcelera founded Translators without Borders (Traducteurs sans frontières) in 1993 to lend a helping hand to humanitarian organizations such as their namesake, Doctors without Borders
(Medecins sans frontières).

September 2017: Volunteer translators in natural disasters

As Eyewitness News pointed out, “2017 is a record-breaking year for hurricanes”. And as you already know, Harvey devastated Texas, Irma took down the islands of St. Martin and Saint-Barthélémy, and finally Maria raged on Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Puerto Rico. Crises like these often require the intervention of Translators without Borders. Yes, the world has witnessed these natural disasters, but it has also responded quickly, and in some cases that response has required the extraordinary contribution of the Translators without Borders volunteers.

This month the work of Translators without Borders in natural disasters was recognized in The Atlantic, under the headline: When Hurricane Warnings Are Lost in Translation:

“According to Amy Rose McGovern, Translators without Borders’ director of External Affairs, 200 volunteers around the world are rapidly translating tweets and Facebook posts from English into Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, and both Brazilian and European Portuguese.”

Thanks to the Translators Without Borders’ volunteers, information in times of crisis is available in the right language to calm fears and uncertainty at the moment danger sets in.

On this International Translation Day 2017, let us remember yet another reason why translation is a necessity with a quote from George Steiner: 

“Without translation, we would be living in neighboring provinces in silence.” 

Thank you to all the translators in the world.

by Misha Warna

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Today Translators without Borders – the non-profit founded by Lexcelera – announced a major milestone: 50 million words translated to support global aid. In just 6 years, Translators without Borders (TWB) has provided 50 million words of translation to humanitarian organizations for development aid and crisis response programs.

From facilitating communication with the Rohingya refugees to informing the Grenfell Tower survivors to translating health information during the Ebola crisis, Translators without Borders has been on the front lines of virtually every international humanitarian crisis to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

Refugee reading material translated by Translators without Borders

 
“Fifty million is not just a number,” said Lori Thicke, the Co-founder, with Ros Smith-Thomas, of Traducteurs sans frontières (in 1993) and the Founder of Translators without Borders (in 2010). “The contribution of 50 million words to global aid is a stunning achievement made possible by the growing community of Translators without Borders,” said Thicke, who is also Lexcelera’s CEO and Founder. “I believe that language is the missing piece in humanitarian action and that TWB is working today at scale to fill in that gap.”

Lexcelera salutes the tens of thousands of volunteers who are part of the Translators without Borders community and who have made the milestone of 50 million words possible.

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CEO of translation company Lexcelera wins ATC Award

London, September 21^st 2017. Lori Thicke has received the ATC award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Language Industry’. The Association of Translation Companies (ATC) recognized Lori for being an industry inspiration after creating translation company Lexcelera more than 30 years ago and later founding Translators without Borders (TWB), the world’s largest translation charity.

Lori Thicke is recognized for her contribution to the language industry

“I was proud to receive such an honour from the ATC,” said Lori Thicke, the Founder and CEO of Lexcelera.
“But this award isn’t just for me: it’s recognition of the voluntary work that so many people have done for TWB – the tens of thousands of translators, project managers, interpreters, editors and language service providers who support us.”

According to the ATC website, “Canadian Lori founded translation company Lexcelera in Paris in 1986 and it has since grown to a global organisation with offices in London, Paris, Vancouver, Buenos Aires and Singapore.

She founded TWB in 1993, expanding it considerably after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and it has donated nearly 50 million translated words in just the last six years to humanitarian organisations around the world.”

 

Read the full press release about
the ATC Language Industry Summit Awards.

About the ATC Award

The Association of Translation Companies (ATC) is the world’s longest established professional association representing the interests of Language Service Providers. It was incorporated in 1976 by a group of translation companies in Britain.

The ATC has expanded significantly over the last 40 years and now has members from all over the world. It is the leading voice for companies operating in the UK’s expanding language services industry, which is worth more than £1 billion and employs more than 12,000 people.

Lori Thicke was also awarded in 2016

Lori Thicke Receives STIBC Award

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Today, leading companies are expected to communicate about their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Lexcelera often translates this information for our customers’ websites, press releases, podcasts and videos. But what many of our customers may not know is that Lexcelera has a CSR story of its own.

Lexcelera is the founder of the world’s largest humanitarian translation charity, Translators without Borders (Traducteurs sans frontières).

Translators without Borders started life in 1993 when Medecins sans frontières (MSF) asked Lexcelera for a quote on a translation project. Instead of a quote, Lexcelera offered the project for free as a way of supporting MSF, which would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today Translators without Borders has nearly 4000 volunteers and is active in humanitarian operations around the world.

The graphic below illustrates some of the recent work of Translators without Borders (TWB) around the world.

01 North America

TWB worked with partners to teach Guatemalan women in the local language how to save money to survive during the “hungry season”.

02 South America

TWB worked with Action Against Hunger to fight anemia in Peru and worked with WiRED to teach children in the Amazon region of Brazil.

03 West Africa

TWB worked with WHO and other partners to translate health messages into 30 languages to debunk rumors about Ebola.

04 East Africa

TWB helped Microsoft build a Swahili machine translation engine Bing, its first African language.

05 Europe

TWB is working with UNHCR, Internews, IFRC, MercyCorps, Oxfam and Save the Children among others to provide 24/7 rapid translation services to refugees in Arabic, Kurdish, Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Somali and Tigrinya.

06 Middle East

TWB worked with CRIN to educate Arabic-speaking children in Jordan on their human rights.

07 Asia

Worked with Reprieve in Kazakhstan to ease the resettlement of ex-Guantanamo prisoners.

08 South Asia

Worked hand in hand with Humanity Road and search and rescue teams to save lives after the Nepali earthquake.

The post When Translation Saves Lives – Translators Without Borders appeared first on Lexcelera.

At Lexcelera, we follow-the-sun!

Do you ever wonder why it is that sometimes you launch a project with one Project manager, and then another takes over?
The answer is simple!
At Lexcelera we like to ensure that all your translation requests, especially your most urgent, can be treated promptly.  To enable this, our international offices relay jobs to each other, so that if overnight delivery is required, we can do it.

How?

Our multilingual staff members are based in 3 different time zones: Paris, Buenos Aries and Singapore, which means there is always someone to answer your call, or email– hence we follow-the-sun! On top of this, our online client portal enables clients to quickly launch their own translations at any time of the day.  With Lexcelera’s translators situated all over the world, there is always someone available for your needs.

Our Team:

Our Parisian team is led by Stéphane Almin, who starts the day bright and early. At the end of the day, Lamis Mhedhbi, who closes the Paris office in the evening, ensures that Denise Bedouret, the head of our Buenos Aires office, is updated on any projects needing attention overnight.  Denise, who comes online in the afternoon Paris time and works until late in the evening, then passes the relay onto Ganyue Lei in Singapore.  Ganyue takes over in the small hours of the morning and the cycle renews itself as Stéphane and his team start the new day in Paris, thus ensuring 24 hour availability.

How does this benefit you, our client?

It means that anytime you put in a translation request, it will be treated rapidly, and any urgent overnight translations can be delivered in a timely manner. Also, having qualified translators based all over the world means we can always find a specialist in your sector.

The staff at Lexcelera are here to assist you to communicate globally with your existing clients, your potential clients, your stakeholders and staff at any time of the day. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information about how our “Follow the Sun” model helps you.

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June 2017: Lexcelera is present at VivaTech in Paris.

Bringing innovation in start-up translation technology to some of the world’s most innovative companies.

Lexcelera @ VivaTech

For a young entrepreneur, France’s VivaTech exhibition is the ideal hub for strategic meetings. And for established companies, like Lexcelera clients BNP Paribas and SNCF, VivaTech is a reflection of their growth strategies based on technology and innovation.

Held at the end of June, VivaTech was such a significant event that French President Emmanuel Macron himself was also present, declaring his desire for France to be a Start-Up Nation. Therefore, Macron’s vision is for France to become a country of the tech giants of tomorrow, a country of unicorns.

But there may be a little way to go for that. According to CB Insights, there are just 18 unicorns in Europe – that is, 18 companies valued at $1 billion or more. Of these, just 2 are in France: BlaBlaCar (ride-sharing) and OVH (Big Data). But VivaTech aims to set the stage for many more unicorns to come.

The trend has already begun. At the end of 2016, Paris surpassed London in terms of funding for start-ups. Now, France has become the second largest country in Europe for start-ups. With VivaTech, France aims to become the start-up capital of Europe and second only to Silicon Valley globally.

If Paris is aiming to be the San Francisco of technology, VivaTech aims to become the “Cannes” of the start-up world. That’s why it’s not too early to put VivaTech on your calendar for 2018!

Translation technology to support start-ups and future unicorns in their international development

In March, Maddyness, the French start-up magazine reported that between 2015 and 2016, 9400 startups were registered in France, the highest number ever. Among them are the future unicorns of technology and innovation who know that to develop, they need to look beyond the borders of France.

Lexcelera is ready to help. A little-known fact is that Lexcelera’s innovation in language technology is due to the fact that annually, it allocates 7% of its resources to R&D in translation technologies. This means being ready to support companies to expand internationally, and maybe even help them to become unicorns.

— By Misha Warnakulasuriya

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 The year 2018 marks the 18th anniversary of International Mother Tongue Day.
For Translation Company Lexcelera, languages ​​remain an eternal passion, which is why we want to remind our readers of the importance of mother tongues.

Why is mother tongue important?

The mother tongue, as indicated by its name, is the first language a child learns in his or her home environment. It is not just a way of communicating, but a way of connecting to the outside world. The mother tongue usually represents the mother’s impact on the child’s life.

Since we learn our first languages at home, one might wonder if anyone could learn a foreign language simply by living in a guest-house for a few years. Yet, some linguists say that for a second language, the learning process is totally different: the mother tongue is built through a “bottom up” approach while a foreign language ​​learning process is the opposite.

One might think it impossible to lose one’s mother tongue, but there is indeed a risk of losing it.

There are two ways this could happen. For one, just like with any kind of activity, if you stop practicing for a while, you can actually forget it.

Since “all learning begins with a transfer of knowledge from the mother tongue to a foreign language”, according to Brigitte A. Eisenkolb, Doctor of Linguistics and Psychology, a mother tongue could also be lost due to the influence of a new language.

Did you know? Half of all mother tongues could disappear…

Not only is it possible to forget one’s mother tongue, but there is also a risk of mother tongues dying out altogether. According to UNESCO, linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened: on average, one language disappears every two weeks. Scientists say 50% of the 7000 languages spoken today ​​could disappear in the course of this century.

Speeding the loss of mother tongues is the fact that approximately 500 languages ​​are spoken by less than 100 speakers worldwide, and 90% of the content on the web is written in only about ten languages.

The endangered languages ​​in Europe today include:

• Walloon (Belgium)
• Moselle Franconian (Luxembourg)
• Western Frisian (Netherlands)

To preserve the use of mother tongues for future generations, young people should be encouraged to learn their mother tongue so they can pass it on to their children, and the transmission of information through local languages – particularly online – should be supported.

— Jimmy Lasivone

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The Lexcelera team gets bigger

We are pleased to announce that the Lexcelera team is getting bigger! We now have a new member in our offices in Argentina. We are proud to introduce Daniel Schechtel, our new Project Assistant.

About Daniel Schechtel

Daniel is a language enthusiast with a Translation Degree from Universidad Nacional de la Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He went on to study linguistics, literature and philosophy in Germany before joining Lexcelera’s production team in Paris as an intern.

Daniel is passionate about languages, communication and literature and the arts in general. He is in fact fluent in four languages, namely Spanish, English, German and French. He even taught English as a foreign language, has recorded a demo album as a drummer in a rock band, published a short-story, defended gender equality in a human rights organization and researched English-Spanish grammar theory at university.

During his time at Lexcelera, the whole team discovered in him a curious, passionate and hardworking person.

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Lexcelera, a certified translation company for 18 years

Paris, March 5th, 2018 – With more and more companies going international, Lexcelera is doing everything to maintain the best quality of its translation services for their customers. Lexcelera is proud to be a certified translation company, and was the first French translation provider to obtain the ISO 9001 certification in 2000.

Thanks to the entire team, the satisfaction survey conducted between december 2017 and january 2018 shows that 97.5% of our clients surveyed would recommend our services.
The 18th renewal of its certification testifies to the excellence of the language services provided by Lexcelera and its unflagging commitment to customer satisfaction.

We are proud to announce that the company transitioned to the newest version of the certification: ISO 9001:2015.

What is ISO 9001:2015 certification?

ISO 9001 provides a model for a quality management system which focuses on the effectiveness of the processes in a business to achieve desired results. The standard promotes the adoption of a process approach emphasizing the requirements, added value, process performance and effectiveness, and continual improvement through objective measurements.

Previous versions of ISO 9001 were tailored to the manufacturing industries and called for extensive system documentation. The current version is more generic and applies equally well to all organisations, regardless of type, size, and product provided.

— DNV – GL

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Lexcelera joins rankings of largest language service companies in Western Europe

Independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory has ranked Translation Company Lexcelera as one of the largest language services providers in Western Europe as well as the 7th largest in France.

This is the first time Paris-based Lexcelera has made it to the annual global rankings of the best translation companies. The rankings were produced by the leading independent research firm for the language industry, the Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research). The 14th annual survey on the size and growth of the language services and technology market covers private and public language service and technology companies worldwide.

The current global survey is based on revenues published at the end of 2017.

Today, translation company Lexcelera has come in at number 37 in Western Europe. CSA Research had previously estimated the number of translation and interpretation companies overall at more than 26,000 across 150 countries. In France alone there are approximately 1500 translation agencies.

“The CSA global ranking is the best benchmark for our industry, and we are pleased to be included this year,” says Lori Thicke, Lexcelera CEO. “It shows us that quality work, and of course, great people, really pays off.”

In other findings, the report highlighted the size of the market for outsourced language services and supporting technology, valued at US$ 43.08 billion worldwide. CSA Research estimated the market growth at 6.97% from 2016 to 2017.

New linguistic services designed for international communication

Lexcelera predicts even stronger market growth in the coming years for language services, as cross border sales of products and services increases.

“Our customers lead on a global level, which means that they rely on language support to communicate internationally,” says Lexcelera’s Operations Director, Laurence Roguet. “This means not just traditional language services like translation and interpreting, but also new services such as creating multilingual content and web sites that respond to the keywords used in local markets.”

Demand for language services will only increase over time

According to Don DePalma, CSA Research’s founder and Chief Strategy Officer, “The sheer number of countries, people, and languages – many of them in markets experiencing tremendous economic growth – assures that demand for language services will only increase over time.”

Other studies undertaken by CSA Research have identified the strongest possible business case for companies to localize their content:

“As our research conclusively demonstrates, people are much more likely to purchase products in their own language.” says DePalma. ” In addition, localization reduces customer care costs and increases brand loyalty.”

Read more about our translation services:

Multilingual Content Creation

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Lexcelera’s free Translation Portal is open for business

Paris, 28th September 2016 — It’s often said that time is money, and here at Lexcelera we agree that your time is precious. That is exactly why we have developed our Free Translation Portal. After thorough beta testing with some of our most prestigious clients such as ALSTOM, our portal, designed to facilitate the launching and reception of translation projects, is ready to go.

“The process is simple. On average I request about ten translations per week… Before (the portal) I had to write an email giving all the details for each of my requests, whereas now, with the portal I just have to select the appropriate check boxes, upload the files and click send” 
Marion S.

Receiving translations is equally simple: once your file is ready, you will receive an email with a link to the page where you can download your translated file.

How does the translation portal work?

Once you login to your client user profile (set up by Lexcelera), the process is as follows:

• Click the Add New Project button
• Select the project type, source and target languages
• Enter the deadline and add any specific instructions or information
• Upload the files then request a quote, or choose One-Click-Launch.

The portal will send your request immediately to the Lexcelera production team and you will receive a confirmation email.  Because you have already defined your needs, our project managers can quickly generate a quote (timing will depend on the complexity of the project) and get the translation underway on the acceptance of the quote.

Do you have a framework agreement with Lexcelera?

If so, you also have the option of launching translations directly without waiting for quotes to save even more time.

The security of direct server to server delivery is an added benefit of our free translation portal as it means secure file transfer because the files do not pass through an external mail client. The portal is well suited to transferring large files with no limitations of size.  However security and the ability to transfer large files is not the only advantage… You can also manage and see the status of all your translation projects from your customized dashboard.

Of course the automated advantages of the translation portal do not in any way hinder direct communication with our project managers.  You will continue to receive the dedicated one-to-one service for which Lexcelera is renowned.

Is saving time and facilitating your translation projects important to you? 

Contact us

We will be in touch to discuss the implementation of this free service for your company as soon as possible.

The post Our translation portal is open for business! appeared first on Lexcelera.

Translation with Systran’s new NMT engine

Yesterday I translated our company presentation with Systran’s new Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine, and I was amazed at the results.

The presentation in question was a complete overview of all of our services, 59 pages of French text that was edited three separate times to make sure the quality was perfect. (Thanks Faten, Boris and Laurence!)

Then, two days ago, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the presentation for a response to an RFP (Request For Proposals), I found out that our prospective client (a major French manufacturer) wanted our response in English. I had just one day to deliver 59 pages of perfect English content!

Let me give you some background to explain why I, the CEO of a translation company, decided to use Neural Machine Translation for one of our most important commercial documents for one of our most important tenders.

Since 2007, Lexcelera has been responding to customer requests for machine translation for a number of different reasons: to allow clients to understand the contents of a patent or technical document; to translate internal reports; to automatically convert websites into other languages; or to provide a first-draft translation that our team would post-edit to irreproachable quality.

The benefits of Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

The benefits to our clients are just what you would expect. There are cost savings, first and foremost. And, of course, speed is accelerated. MT also makes content accessible that wouldn’t be otherwise, revealing what’s in a document that may be of interest. And with a first draft provided by a good MT engine that we have trained ourselves, Lexcelera’s translation productivity is sky high.

However, MT is not something we would normally turn to for non-technical content like our company presentation. Even though it can actually improve terminological consistency, depending on the software tool we use, it’s normally not suited for content that requires a superb writing style. But I was desperate. I needed a translation instantaneously so I could meet the deadline for our RFP response.

It so happens that we are in the process of beta testing Systran’s new NMT tool. If you haven’t heard of Neural Machine Translation yet, it’s certain that you will be hearing about it soon. NMT is the newest advance in computer-generated translations. Radically different from other approaches such as SMT and RBMT, neural machine translation uses a large neural network, organized much like the human brain.

Now that I have personally seen the result of Systran’s beta engine, I won’t say that NMT will entirely do away with the need for human translators, but it’s sure to have an impact on our industry.

My experience with Lexcelera’s NMT beta test

Usually with machine translation, there is a lot to correct, unless you have trained the engine very very well. That’s our speciality, training good MT engines. But this time, the Systran NMT engine was a completely untrained, generic engine. And still, the translation of our company presentation was amazing.

I needed to make corrections, of course. But I was surprised at how few errors there were. Mostly the Systran NMT engine understood what I wanted to say, and translated it very fluidly. The majority of the time, the terminology was spot on, and the sentences, well, they sounded human.

The translation did go off the rails in a few places. (I wonder how NMT would translate “off the rails”.) Once in a while it would leave a French word in the middle of an English sentence. Or, weirdly, it would repeat the same word twice. And about every three to four sentences, there would be a glaring error that I had to correct. Even so, I was stunned to find that I could leave whole sentences intact.

Most of the errors I spotted are easily fixable, like the repeated words, and the terms the system didn’t know. (Ironically, Systran’s NMT system did not recognize the term “post-édition” in French, and it mis-translated “relecture” as re-reading.) I have no doubt that Systran will make these fixes, and up their game in terms of in-context training as well. And then what?

I believe Lexcelera’s computational linguists will still have a role to play in training the NMT engines. There will always be product names and internal terminology to respect and protect. There will always be the need to integrate prior translations from our translation memories. And we will always need to make sure certain texts conform: for example, to make sure that the help manuals match the user interface.

Most importantly, Lexcelera’s post-editors will always need to re-read every word to guard against errors and omissions. (At least I think they will.) But what’s happening today is that even if NMT is not perfect, it has just crossed over from being a tool that gives you a general understanding of a text (usually referred to as “gisting”) to a tool that, well, gives you a proper translation. Not a perfect one, but a damn good one all the same.

I believe I have seen the future. Lexcelera’s challenge, like the challenge of every language-loving, multicultural and multilingual professional (in other words, translators), will be to establish our relevance alongside tools that are getting closer every day to reproducing human speech. (Did I happen to mention that NMT is also self-learning?)

Lexcelera is already working towards this new future by making sure we are in the advance guard. We know that MT, especially with the advent of NMT, is here to stay. That’s why we have been spending around 7% of our revenues on R&D to make sure we stay in the lead. And the investment has paid off. We’ve been working with language technologies long enough to master them. We know how to customize them, how to adapt them, how to improve them. But this is not just computing work. We train MT engines, good ones, by relying on human talents – on professional translators, post-editors and computational linguists. On people.

I believe that with NMT, there will still be a role for language professionals – for language lovers. But it looks like we will either have to work alongside the technology, or to carve out niches for ourselves in the increasingly smaller number of places where machine translation cannot go. I’d say we have three years to do this, tops, before NMT hits the mainstream. But it could rise a lot more quickly.

Stay tuned.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your opinion. Please leave your comments below.

— Lori Thicke

The post Neural Machine Translation (NMT) Beta Test appeared first on Lexcelera.

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