Uncategorised Archives - Dialogue

An exciting new chapter for Dialogue

Robert Shimwell — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:35:17 +0000

Announcing an exciting new chapter as Dialogue joins forces with The Translation People, embarking on a new phase of growth

We are delighted to announce that Dialogue Language Services International has joined forces with The Translation People, a well-established and respected fellow language services provider. This is a move that highlights the dedication of both organisations to enhancing service offerings, content security, and expanding global reach.

All localisation services will continue under Dialogue Language Services International and the training division of Dialogue (business languages and cultural awareness) will continue to support you as Dialogue Language Training. Contact details for all parties remain the same, so you will continue to enjoy the high-level, human-centred service as before.

This strategic acquisition will bring significant benefits to Dialogue, our clients and suppliers, notably gaining access to an expert technology team focused on leveraging the latest innovations and security in AI. In addition, we will benefit from enhanced project management capabilities, a wider pool of linguists, and in-house localisation engineering and DTP teams.

The Translation People has over 40 years’ experience of delivering high-quality localisation services globally. With a strong focus on customer service, flexibility and the use of state-of-the-art technology, the partnership represents a positive move for Dialogue against the backdrop of shared values and priorities.

Jasmin Schneider, Managing Director of The Translation People, said: “We are delighted to have concluded this acquisition. DLSI has demonstrated steady growth over the last few years and complements our existing offering. We are thrilled to welcome the DLSI team into the group and look forward to supporting their professional development. Together we can continue to support DLSI’s existing clients who will benefit from the larger infrastructure of the combined businesses.”

Cathy Branson, Managing Director at DLSI, agreed: “We are very excited to be joining forces with The Translation People. There is strong cultural alignment between us and both companies are equally focused on a commitment to quality and customer service. Joining a larger organisation will offer new resources, capabilities and technology to our clients and also provide new growth opportunities for our staff. Our clients can rest assured they will receive the same excellent service they are familiar with, plus numerous added advantages from having access to new resources.”

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How to get the most out of your remaining localisation budget in Q4

Robert Shimwell — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:16:19 +0000

As the government’s Financial Statement date looms (set to be held on 30 October 2024), you may have budgets on your mind. But rather than holding fire on essential localisation projects when budgets are tight, why not rethink your strategy instead? Read on to find out how to get the most out of your remaining localisation budget, without compromising on quality.

Hire a professional

The quality of your translations will reflect the quality of your product or services. Paying a higher rate for a professional translation is always worth the investment – particularly when you’re dealing with high-visibility content. You get what you pay for: a carefully-crafted translation will take you far, but a linguistic blunder could land you in hot water and cost far more to fix in the long run.

Start with the source text

If the amount of content you can send out for translation is limited, try condensing it first – making sure the most important points get covered. If you know your content will be translated, bear that in mind when writing. If at all possible, avoid filling the text with idioms and cultural references that take longer and more expertise to transfer to the target audience.

Finalise your copy

To save time, clients often send a draft version of a text for translation, so the translators can make a start. This is perfectly manageable but will end up costing you more (both time and money-wise), as translators will have to go back and update your changes in the target text. To avoid overspending, ensure you send out the final, signed-off version for translation, in plenty of time (to avoid any added urgency fees).

Check out what you’ve already got

Before sending your document for translation, look at the content and reference material that you already have. You never know – part of it may have been translated before. And if you have any sentences for translation that have already been reworked in the past, they can probably be reused – thus shaving off a proportion of the word count for translation. Even if you don’t find any duplicates, reference material will help your translation team find your preferred terminology faster.

Think about what kind of service level you need

The service level you need can be dictated by your content requirements. We absolutely don’t recommend skimping on high-visibility content, but maybe internal documents won’t need an additional proofreading step if you have the capacity to work on them in-house?

Let AI tech support you

AI technology can help you save money translating large amounts of low-visibility, non-specialist content when paired with teams of specialist Machine Translation Post-Editors. These specialists are trained to understand the process and its potential pitfalls. Opting for Machine Translation should be a carefully-considered decision aided by your language service provider. If it’s something you’re interested in, have a look at our Buyer’s Guide to Machine Translation Engines.

It can be difficult to navigate important decisions that affect your translation quality and spend. We’re here to help you get the most out of your remaining budget. If you would like some advice, get in touch with our team and we can discuss your requirements.

The post How to get the most out of your remaining localisation budget in Q4 appeared first on Dialogue.

How localisation and cultural training can help you attract and retain top global talent

Robert Shimwell — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:37:55 +0000

As your company grows and moves into new markets, so might your recruitment efforts. Top candidates from across the world bring well-needed diversity and local representation to your business, but attracting and sourcing talent from other cultures can be tricky. A good HR localisation strategy, which includes cultural and language training, can help you find the right people, with aligned values and skills, and boost employee retention and integration across your global teams. Not sure where to start? Read on for some things to consider when planning.

Employer value proposition and branding:

It’s important to stay authentic and keep your employer branding consistent if you want to attract and retain the right candidates for your business. While globally, the principles of your EVP should stay the same, it is important to recognise cultural differences across different regions and divisions that could be adapted without straying away from your core values. By understanding what different cultures expect or value in a workplace, you can tailor your recruitment materials to target these values.

Some examples:

Compensation: different pay expectations and evaluations depending on the market and local laws.

Working hours: some cultures value clear working hours, whereas others may prefer flexible working

Time off: consider that it’s the norm in some cultures to take longer periods of leave once a year, rather than several shorter breaks.

Benefits: think about things like childcare norms, eating habits, expected retirement age, and healthcare entitlement before communicating the benefits – to ensure that they really are beneficial to a different culture of employees.

Compliance and legal: international and local laws will often require hiring paperwork, employee handbooks, safety documentation, contracts, and confidentiality agreements to be translated into all native languages, not just the company language. Not only will this compliance keep your employees safe, but having all official documentation in their native languages will reinforce workers’ responsibilities and empower them to understand their role and rights.

Feedback: people best express themselves in their native language, meaning you’re more likely to receive valuable, constructive feedback if you allow employees to answer surveys and give feedback in their native language (if it differs from the company’s working language). Multilingual feedback can then be translated by professional translators specialising in HR, to give you an accurate picture of your employees’ shared thoughts and feelings.

Language and cultural training: this can help you empower, unite, and support your team and break down cultural barriers. From business etiquette and communication and management styles to cultural norms that affect work and home life, having an understanding of your local team’s cultural habits and taboos is essential for a smooth integration of global teams.

The little extras make a big difference…

Think about all the content (e.g. careers landing site, recruitment newsletters, and social media posts) you’re putting out there to find and retain the best people for the job. It’s been well documented that people prefer to buy from websites in their native language, so it stands to reason that the same could be said for employer branding as well. While it’s important to mention any language requirements in these materials, adapting your recruitment-related copy and strategies to local audiences might just make the difference between them sitting up and noticing you, as opposed to seeing content in another language and immediately switching off, without realising it is designed ‘for them’.

All these considerations add up. By staying authentic and tailoring your HR localisation strategy to local teams’ needs and requirements, you’re more likely to attract, and more importantly, keep the best people for the job within your teams, in a positive working atmosphere.

The post How localisation and cultural training can help you attract and retain top global talent appeared first on Dialogue.

AI in medical translation: balance speed and safety

Robert Shimwell — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 12:16:33 +0000

How to best use AI technology for your medical translations

Improved access to information, the ability to weigh up the benefits and risks of suggested treatments and make an informed decision, accurately following medical guidelines, informed consent, and much more… medical translations can save lives and provide your patients and users with a better, more equitable experience.

Several examples of erroneous machine translation have been noted recently by The University of Aberdeen. A series of package leaflets were machine- translated by New York pharmacies across six different languages.

“Once a day” in English was translated as “eleven a day” (because “once” has the meaning of “eleven” in Spanish). Similarly, boca (which means “mouth” in Spanish) was spelt as “poca” instead (meaning “little” in Spanish), which caused customers to incorrectly assume that the medicine should be taken in small quantities rather than simply orally.

Given the severity of the subject matter (and clear potential consequences!), enlisting the help of Artificial Intelligence in the medical translation sector was traditionally considered a risky endeavour. But AI-powered Machine translation tools are becoming increasingly efficient and more widely accepted in the medical sector. Neural Machine translation (NMT), and more recently, Machine Translation development, has changed the game. Instead of decoding word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, the technology looks at the entire content of a sentence, understands it, and produces a much more fluid and usable result.

But to get the most out of technology, we need to use it to the best of its ability, and understand its limitations. Here are some best practices and guidelines on how to leverage AI technology for your medical translations.

Find out if AI is suitable for your needs

Machine Translation output can’t be reduced down to being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The quality varies depending on the languages, subject areas, and the engine being used. It generally performs best with technical content, such as clinical and regulatory documentation, research papers and studies, reports, medication inserts and product descriptions. It’s weaker for creative and high-value content, so we would advise exercising caution for translation of ads, landing pages, marketing copy and psychometric content.

Choose the right engine for your content

You’ve probably already heard of the major players, like DeepL and Google Translate, but there are plenty of other available machine translation engine options to choose from. Some specialise in specific language pairs, others in certain subject areas – Rozetta T-400 and CrossLang are among some of the MT engines that specialise in medical translations.

Give your tool a helping hand

With a large budget, you can develop and train tailor-made models with your own data. This kind of investment requires a lot of time and input to get to a usable state. For smaller budgets, utilising Translation Memories and adding glossaries to your MT engines is also effective.

Enlist human help

Time and accuracy are of the essence when you’re dealing with people’s lives.

Machine Translation speeds up the translation process considerably, and can be a cost-efficient solution. But that’s not the only thing: AI can support human translators in many ways. Through research – by helping them quickly find resources and information that is relevant to their translations – and by helping them maintain accuracy (through the use of glossaries and Translation Memories) and keep content consistent throughout.

On the other hand, professional human translators are excellent at spotting and mitigating a machine’s potential problem points. They have a refined ability to recognise the context and reproduce the desired tone of voice and can localise the text if needed.

If you’re publishing materials or working with critical documents, then it’s a good idea to have a human edit your machine-translated materials ahead of distribution, to ensure they are accurate and ready for publishing (this is called Machine Translation Post-Editing, or MTPE).

Feed your processes with feedback

Establishing a feedback process afterwards will be helpful for future projects and can provide you with the opportunity to refine and review your Translation Memories and Glossaries.

Don’t hesitate to ask us for support

Monitoring devices that keep patients safe and trigger for early detection, robotic-assisted surgeries with lower risks and faster recovery times, the ability to analyse data sets with lightning-fast accuracy, and much, much more… AI is already being leveraged in the healthcare industry for the better. If used properly, it can significantly improve patient experience and safety across the board. We believe that AI-powered translation services can also contribute to positive, life-changing developments in healthcare and medicine – if administered properly.

As always, if you have any further questions or would like some specialist advice, contact us and we’ll set up a meeting to discuss your requirements.

The post AI in medical translation: balance speed and safety appeared first on Dialogue.

To cheque, or not to cheque: do you need your machine translation validated?

Robert Shimwell — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:50:38 +0000

Machine translation tools are great when used properly. But to produce a good result, it’s best to understand what kind of texts they work well with, where they struggle, and where we need professional translators to intervene. Let’s find out more about their pros and cons.

What are machine translation tools good at?

Machine translation tools are great at quickly producing large volumes of translated text, at a fraction of the price of a human translation. They’re great for internal documents, where you just need to understand the basics.

What are machine translation tools not so good at?

Some tools are able to produce more human-sounding text, by mimicking casual or formal writing style, but it’s still best to approach machine translation for creative texts with caution. Machines don’t understand context, or cultural nuances, aren’t that imaginative, and don’t get jokes. Sometimes the results can be very literal. It’s also worth bearing in mind that results differ depending on the languages you’re working in. Many are better at translating into English than the other way around.

Where do humans come in?

For technical documentation, manuals, guides, and presentations, machine translation can be a useful tool – although it’s best to involve professional translators at this stage to ensure a higher level of accuracy and fluency.

How Dialogue can help with machine translation validation

We work with paid machine translation tools which produce good results, can handle large volumes of text, and are compatible with complex file formats.

Depending on your needs, we can offer a range of different service levels: from a raw, untouched machine translation to help you understand the gist, to a light post-editing focussed on the accuracy of the text, and a heavier post-editing service that produces a higher level of accuracy and fluency.

Unsure about how much human involvement you need? We can help you get the best results from the latest translation technology. Let’s talk about your requirements, and see what we can do.

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