by Delingua
Even though we will soon settle down for Christmas, our office will be open as usual between Christmas and the New Year. Our office is closed on 24–26 December 2024 as well as on 1 and 6 January 2025.
We would like to wish all of our customers and cooperation partners a very Merry and Peaceful Christmas and a successful New Year 2025!
Successful translations require teamwork. Although the key person in the translation process is the translator and their tools, they alone are not able to achieve ideal quality. In the translation process, the best possible result always requires input from the translation agency’s other employees as well as the customer. Validation is perhaps the most important tool for assessing the linguistic quality of translations.
If you are a customer, you may be asking why you should contribute to the process – it’s our job, after all. You are correct and, as a customer, your involvement is not obligatory. But if you want the best result, it is in your best interest to participate in the process – especially through feedback.
To some extent, language is a matter of opinion. We are all fluent in at least our own native tongue, and many of us also know several other languages. Therefore, we all have a lot of opinions about language. This is especially true in work contexts if language plays a central role in our work and we put a lot of thought into how a message should be conveyed. We know how we want to address the reader, and perhaps the organisation we work in has even defined common rules for what kinds of images we should evoke.
Even if these rules are self-explanatory within the organisation and come naturally to you, they may not be self-evident to the translator. The translator is always a bit of an outsider and depends on what they are told about your preferred language and its nuances. This is where teamwork comes into play: the ideal translation process involves cooperation to ensure that the translation matches the customer’s communication needs as closely as possible. By providing feedback on the translations, the customer can ensure that each translation is better than the one before and closer to the customer’s ideal.
One of the most important tools for the process described above is validation. This means a review by the customer after the translation has been completed. It may often be carried out by an expert whose main work tasks do not include translation. The expert is responsible for checking, in particular, the terminology and style, and assessing whether they are in line with the customer’s brand. Other review work can also be done at the same time.
Validation in itself is a simple step, and there is no doubt about its usefulness, but it is still often skipped altogether. Typically, validation is carried out by sending PDF or DOCX files to vendors or technical experts, for example. The expert will use the comment or track changes functions to add their own comments and corrections to the document. These will be included in the final version and imported into the translation memory by the translation agency. This process is quite laborious and may complicate version control, which are the main reasons why it is often skipped.
At LanguageWire, workflow and translation work are based on a shared platform used by customers, translators and internal project managers. Using a single platform has many benefits, especially in terms of translation project communications and transparency.
The validation step also takes place entirely on this platform, which makes the process quick and efficient. Usually, the validation step is added as soon as the project is created.
Validation takes place after the translators have done their work. The experts assigned to the project will receive an automatic message from the system and, by clicking on the link, they will be forwarded to the right project. There is no need to search for the project or upload any files, and the expert can start working in their browser right away.
Validation is done in the same tool that the translators use, and the validator has access to all the same information. This means, for example, that they will automatically be able to view the correct terminology if there is a glossary attached. This helps to avoid situations where outdated or otherwise incorrect terminology is used in the text during the validation phase. The validator also has access to other tools, such as proofreading and translation tools. Our user-friendly interface ensures that you do not need to be a professional translator to benefit from the translation platform. Everything you need can be done with basic browser skills.
In addition to possible corrections, the validator can also communicate with the translator, which helps to quickly solve potential dilemmas. Since everyone works in the same digital environment, all corrections are also saved directly in the translation memory, and they do not need to be separately exported at the end of the project.
In order to ensure the best possible translation quality and that the translator and proofreader learn as much as possible, a language specialist will check the changes made by the validator at the end. This ensures that all changes follow the customer’s own standards and, of course, the general rules of the language.
Would you like to discuss your organisation’s language needs? Contact us via email at contact-fi@languagewire.com for further information!
by Delingua
There’ll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing when loved ones are near – it’s the most wonderful time of the year 🎅
It’s always Christmas at our Finnish translation agency. Here in Santa’s home country, Christmas is a business for many, and Christmas preparations start months in advance. Christmas gifts, catalogues and greetings are usually designed well in advance in the summer and are also submitted for translation well before Christmas. Thus, we translate Christmas-themed content throughout the year.
Translating Christmas-themed texts in the middle of a sweltering summer may be an amusing prospect, but there is always a certain shimmer and sparkle to these texts. Since Christmas is associated with many positive and warm thoughts, it is also pleasant to do such assignments in summer.
Now bring us some figgy pudding and a cup of good cheer… 🥣
According to Finnish grammar rules, Christmas and New Year are not capitalised in holiday greetings. However, in many ready-made Christmas cards, capital letters are used for these. In English, the names of holidays are always capitalised. In German, all nouns are capitalised, which also applies to holidays. In French, Christmas greetings and New Year’s greetings rarely appear in the same sentence, with Happy New Year being the most common holiday greeting in France. However, people will not mind if you do wish them a Merry Christmas. As we can see, holiday greeting conventions vary a lot across different languages, and a direct translation from Finnish is not always the best choice for your international holiday greeting.
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas… ✨
Christmas carols are an important part of the holiday season and Christmas itself. Did you know that many Christmas carols we know and love are translations? In Finland, “Petteri Punakuono” (orig. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”), “Oi kuusipuu” (orig. “O Tannenbaum”) and “Heinillä härkien kaukalon” (orig. “Entre le bœuf et l ‘anne gris”) are examples of songs translated into Finnish from English, German and French, respectively. Song translation is not quite as straightforward as the translation of ordinary texts. The translated lyrics need to be just as singable as the original ones. The translations must also take into account the rhythm, harmonic qualities of the words as well as the original message. So, not as easy as you may think! Luckily, the translators of Christmas carols have done a wonderful job.
From now on, our troubles will be out of sight… ❤️
We think that mulled wine, gingerbread, candles and Christmas lights are essential to the holiday season. And, of course, the Christmas tree, which we already have on display in our office. Although we are always busy before Christmas, we are enjoying the wonderful Christmas atmosphere. We would like to wish everyone a peaceful holiday season!
Have you tried using generative AI yet? Perhaps you have produced images or text with prompts? You have probably at least read about the possibilities offered by generative AI – if not, you must have been living on a desert island for the last couple of years!
AI tools have different user interfaces, some of which are ideal for small experiments and playing around. Some even provide a somewhat human user experience through dialogue. As if you were dealing with another person, not a machine!
However, it may be that the professional and truly efficient use of generative AI models are still in the planning stage for you. In text production, the results obtained with generative tools can seem slightly random, even if the text flows smoothly and provides a good starting point for further editing. Achieving a better output may require multiple prompting rounds and extensive manual post-editing.
At LanguageWire, we are experts in text processing and storage, and we want to offer our customers practical and easy solutions that make their text-related work as efficient as possible. With this in mind, we launched in October LanguageWire Generate, a monolingual text production tool. This platform solves the above-mentioned challenges, making the tool easy to use and ensuring the relevance of the output.
The basic concept of LanguageWire Generate is simple and powerful: with just a few straightforward choices, you can create new texts that are relevant to you and your organisation. Relevance is ensured by the RAG method and, most importantly, by your own language resources.
The key to using generative AI models is getting their output to best match the user’s expectations and the operating environment. Despite its many strengths, AI cannot read your mind (at least not yet), so it needs a little help. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is one of the key techniques in this. In practice, this usually means that when you request something from a language model, you also give it information about the context or desired style, for example.
LanguageWire Generate yields the best results when at least 10,000 words of proven text materials are uploaded into it (Content Memory). These texts can be, for example, your organisation’s marketing materials or user guides. The most important thing is that you know that they are the kind of text that you would like to produce in the future, too.
You can improve the text quality not only with the above-mentioned text materials but also by uploading a glossary containing the terms you want to use. There are no strict format settings for the glossary: it can even be a very simple list of words.
The text materials and the glossary are used when LanguageWire Generate is requested to produce new texts. It finds suitable sections in earlier texts and word lists and uses them as models for new texts. These sources align new texts with your organisation’s style and ensure that your own terminology is used.
Earlier content alone is not sufficient: the user must also describe what the new text is about and for what purpose it is needed. In LanguageWire Generate’s user interface, you can easily select the text format (e.g. Blog Post), tone of voice (Casual) and length (Medium). A few key settings are available for each item, but there is also the option of entering an attribute completely freely.
In addition to these, you need a content description, which you can write freely and in as much detail as you want. If you are just looking for inspiration, a short description will go a long way, but providing a more detailed definition is likely to give you a more ready-to-use text.
Another important feature is key terms: you can add as many of them as you need. Key terms are words that you want to appear specifically in this text but that do not need to end up in the termbase.
LanguageWire Generate supports efficient text production for a wide range of purposes. Would you like to try our solution and see how it meets your writing needs? Contact us and let us help you select the appropriate reference materials and create a glossary if necessary.
by Delingua
For many companies, the financial period is a calendar year, which means that the financial period ends at the turn of the year. At the end of the financial period, companies must remember to provide their auditor with, for example, receipts, possible loans, investments or changes in the activities of the company as well as to carry out an inventory.
The new financial period also brings certain things to remember. At the beginning of the year, an annual report on the previous year will be drawn up and a meeting of the Board of Directors and an annual general meeting will be arranged. It is a good idea for companies operating internationally to prepare the annual report in all of the languages used in the company to allow owners and investors to get acquainted with the figures and events of the previous year. If the company has foreign owners, it would also be advisable to arrange annual general meetings in such a way that everyone attending them understands what is being said. In such cases, professional interpreting is justified.
We are happy to help when you need to have the annual report translated or interpreting arranged for the annual general meeting. From us, you can order a translation of your annual report and interpreting for the annual general meeting. We have compiled a few tips below to keep in mind when the annual report and the annual general meeting are topical.
When ordering a translation of the annual report, it is worthwhile to get in touch early enough. Annual report projects are ordered and scheduled well in advance, and professional translation agencies will be busy in the first months of a new year. Be sure to be on time, allocate enough time for the translation and involve the translation partner already in the planning phase of the annual report.
Reference material makes translation easier, and annual reports are no exception. You can provide your translation partner with previous annual reports or other material in the target language, for example. This gives the translator an indication of the company’s terms, specialised terminology and style of the translation.
Also, decide in advance on the file format of the annual report. If possible, translations should be made directly in the original file format. The translation partner should also be informed of any exceptions, for example regarding the figures.
The annual report is often a highly confidential file and should not necessarily be delivered for translation by email. The file can be delivered over a secure connection through the translation agency’s ordering portal, for example. If the company does not have a written agreement with the translation agency, it is advisable to sign a possible non-disclosure agreement well in advance of the start of the translation project.
You will find more practical tips in our annual report guide (in Finnish).
If international participants are attending the annual general meeting, they should be provided with professional interpreting. Conference interpreting, which practically means simultaneous interpreting, is the most suitable method of interpreting for an annual general meeting. In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter interprets at the same time as the speaker speaks. The speech to be interpreted is transmitted to the interpreters’ headphones with the aid of interpreting equipment and interpreting is then transmitted by microphone to the listeners’ headphones. Interpreting can be arranged on site, as a hybrid model or entirely remotely. Interpreting can be arranged whether all of the participants or only some of them are physically present at the meeting or whether the meeting is held remotely.
When planning interpreting arrangements, the following factors, among others, must be taken into account: which languages the meeting will be interpreted into, what the main language of the meeting will be, and where and when the meeting will take place. It is also a good idea to provide the interpreters with advance material that will facilitate successful interpreting. Advance material may include the schedule as well as the documents and presentations of the meeting. Any other material in the target language also helps the interpreter to maintain terminological consistency.
Interpreting for foreign-language participants makes them feel that they have genuinely been taken into account in the arrangements of the meeting. We have prepared guides on interpreting for an event (in Finnish) and on remote interpreting. The guides will provide you with comprehensive information on what to take into account when arranging on-site and remote interpreting.
Now is a good time to order a translation of the annual report and arrange (remote) interpreting for the annual general meeting; we are happy to help. Contact us via email in matters concerning translation and interpreting; we promise to get back to you as soon as possible!
by Delingua
While AI translation represents a significant leap forward in the field of machine translation, it shares common ground with its predecessors. At its core, both AI translation and traditional machine translation methods aim to facilitate cross-linguistic communication by automatically converting text from one language to another.
However, what distinguishes AI translation is its utilization of advanced neural networks and deep learning algorithms, enabling it to surpass the limitations of earlier approaches. This article explores the evolution of machine translation, highlighting how AI translation builds upon and enhances the foundations laid by its predecessors to redefine the way we break down language barriers in the modern world.
AI translation and machine translation are terms that are often used interchangeably in discussions about automated language translation technologies. However, there are nuanced differences between the two, primarily in terms of the technology and methodologies they employ. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for appreciating the advancements in the field of language translation and the capabilities of current technologies.
Machine Translation refers to the use of software to translate text or speech from one language to another without human intervention. Historically, MT has evolved through several stages, each marked by different approaches and technologies:
This approach relies on a comprehensive set of linguistic rules and bilingual dictionaries. It translates by analysing the source text based on these rules and then applying the corresponding rules in the target language. While RBMT can be highly accurate for languages with a limited scope and well-defined rules, it struggles with the complexity and variability of natural language.
SMT models translations based on the analysis of large amounts of bilingual text data. It uses statistical methods to predict the likelihood of certain words or phrases being a correct translation. SMT marked a significant improvement over RBMT, offering more flexibility and better handling of languages with less rigid structure. However, it still faced challenges with context, idioms, and linguistic nuances.
AI Translation is an advanced translation technology. It incorporates artificial intelligence, especially deep learning, and neural networks, to model the entire process of translation in a way that mimics human brain functions.
Here are the key features that distinguish AI translation:
Unlike its predecessors, AI translation can consider the entire context of a sentence or paragraph, rather than translating piece by piece. This holistic approach allows for more accurate and natural translations, especially in complex or ambiguous situations.
AI systems are designed to learn and improve over time. By analysing vast datasets and learning from corrections, AI translation models continually refine their understanding of languages, idioms, and cultural nuances. This self-improvement aspect is a hallmark of AI technology.
AI translation models can be adapted and specialized for different domains (e.g., legal, medical, technical) much more effectively than traditional MT systems. They can learn the specific vocabulary and stylistic preferences of a field, leading to higher quality translations in specialized areas.
While machine translation laid the groundwork for automated language translation, AI translation has significantly advanced the field. The key differences lie in AI translation’s ability to understand and translate text in context, learn from interactions, and improve over time. These capabilities make AI translation a more dynamic, accurate, and effective tool for overcoming language barriers, especially in professional and specialized setting.
This article was originally published by LanguageWire Company (Verity Hartley).
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