Project Management Inside and Outside the Translation Industry
This article was originally published on the Wordbee Blog. Machine translation and post-editing weren’t born yesterday. This much we know. But, guess what? Project management wasn’t born yesterday either. Project management began in the years between the two World Wars. Its development as a discipline peaked during WWII, when the Unites States needed to maximize its war effort. With the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, project management and related disciplines were applied to large and complex projects: for example, the...
read more#SmartReads 7/2018 – The Fall Issue
#SmartReads 7-2018 on the Language and Translation Industry At the beginning of September, I was invited to hold a workshop at the Translation Technology Summer School, organized by the prestigious KU Leuven University (Belgium). It was a useful experience for me because I was reminded of the state of things in the real world (=translation industry). I can only hope it was the same for the Summer School participants. I wrote a recap of the discussion here: Futurebound: Are We There Yet? In the meantime, there is another workshop in my diary,...
read moreSmartReads 6-2018: Post-Summer Issue
#SmartReads 6-2018 on the Translation Industry Let’s start by wishing Happy Birthday to Katherine Johnson (in the picture above) on her 100th birthday. She is the “human computer” who helped NASA put astronauts into orbit around Earth. Have you seen the movie Hidden Figures? New Articles I published two new articles on the WordBee blog: – Terminology: Necessary Evil or Bare Necessity? – Terminologists have an arduous task. They need to translate terminology into money. How? By presenting convincing examples of...
read more#SmartReads 5-2018 on the Translation Industry
#SmartReads 5-2018 on the Translation Industry. New Articles I published two new articles on the WordBee blog: – Translation Quality Management: A Holistic Approach – Translation quality management can be a rather confusing subject due to the lack of unique and standard terminology. For example, in ordinary quality management (i.e. ISO9000s), quality assurance (QA) is “part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled” (ISO 9000:2005, 3.2.11), and focuses on preventing errors...
read moreFuturebound: Are We There Yet?
The 3rd edition of the International Summer School for Translation Technology, organized by the prestigious Belgian university KU Leuven, took place from Sep. 3 to Sep. 7, 2018. I was invited to hold a workshop together with Iulianna van der Lek, research associate and CAT tools trainer. The title of the workshop was Futurebound: A Matrix for Translation Professionals and was held on the opening day. The premises In his book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999), the futurist Ray Kurzweil stated that spoken language translation would be...
read moreTerminology: Necessary Evil or Bare Necessity?
Terminologists have an arduous task. They need to translate terminology into money.How? By presenting convincing examples of terminological mistakes and their consequences in a corporate setting. And there’s nothing that terminologists all over the world would like more than to know that CEOs, CIOs, or CTOs are interested and ready to invest in a well-structured and fully developed terminology database. In Support of Terminology In reality, thanks to the explosion of the new economy, terminology has already spread without any CEO, CIO, or CTO...
read moreWhat Is Post-Editing? Here Are 3 Approaches
Post-editing of Machine Translation (PEMT) wasn’t born yesterday. On the contrary, it’s as old as machine translation (MT) itself. And although at the moment, we have a large amount of material at our disposal about this topic, the nuances of the discussion are such that in some cases we risk losing sight of what PEMT really is. PEMT: No Need for Creativity Let’s start by saying that PEMT has nothing to do with revision. Nor does it require the “creativity” of, let’s say, transcreation. In spite of all the articles written on the subject and...
read moreTranslation Quality Management: A Holistic Approach
Translation quality management can be a rather confusing subject due to the lack of unique and standard terminology. For example, in ordinary quality management (i.e. ISO9000s), quality assurance (QA) is “part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled” (ISO 9000:2005, 3.2.11), and focuses on preventing errors and defects. Quite differently, what is generally called QA in the translation industry is in fact a quality control (QC) task, very similar to the one that used to take place in an...
read moreKPIs for the Translation Business: A Brief Intro
In a previous blog post, we discussed how to turn your translation (project) data into business analytics (BA). This time we want to provide suggestions for developing your own key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are essential to tracking your business performance and monitoring progress toward your goals. But choosing the right KPIs is not always easy. So, let’s see what KPIs are, why they’re so important, and how to choose them. A Few Things to Know About KPIs KPIs are measures of the performance of a company, its activities, its...
read moreA Data-driven Approach to Translation Vendor Management
Have you ever asked yourselves how a translation vendor differs from a vendor in other industries? Let’s tackle this question from two different perspectives. Consider first the perspective of a company outside the translation industry: A company conducts procurement activities for both products and services as well as staff recruitment activities. The procedure for product and service procurement is different from the one for staff recruitment, but both respond to the same goal of finding the best resources to fulfill the company mission. In...
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