What is NMT and how will it change the way we work?

Neural Machine Translation (NMT); it’s time we acknowledged it.

Are you getting the most fun out of your CAT tool?

Two of our favourite memoQ features, the “Do Not Press This Button” button and the Zen mode, have had quite the tumultuous past.

Meet the Team – Rachel Jones

Meet our newest team member, Rachel Jones!

Main concerns of international online shoppers

Presents for family in America   Presents for the kids Present for Grandma Click, click, click.  My Christmas shopping is nearly complete, and 80% was purchased online.  The gifts that haven’t been dropped into my online shopping basket have at least been researched and price-checked online.  Judging by the latest eCommerce research, I am not alone. Consumers around the world are shopping online in increasing numbers.  It’s quick and often cheaper; getting the lowest advertised price only takes a quick Google search.  And with free shipping options, it’s cheaper than paying for city centre parking! Buying gifts for friends and family in another country is also a lot easier – no queuing at the post office! – and saves the cost of international postage. With your international eCommerce site, the concerns are very much the same as for English-language only websites, however there are a few additional points to consider for your foreign-language pages. Simply translating the English content is not sufficient.   Delivery charges […]

A Latin Music Revolution

Whether you like it or not, it has been impossible to escape the rise of Latin music this summer! From Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ to J Balvin’s ‘Mi gente’, Latin music seems to be storming both the UK and American charts, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. Latin music has experienced various crazes throughout the years, however, with the rise of streaming platforms such as Spotify, its popularity appears to only be getting stronger as Latin music fans across the world can easily listen to this genre of music. This has resulted in many English speaking artists wanting to jump on the bandwagon and break the Latin American market. It’s clear that Justin Bieber really kicked off the trend of collaborating with Spanish speaking artists in an attempt to create ‘Spanglish’ hits; and that’s exactly what he did! Bieber’s remix of ‘Despacito’ is the second primarily Spanish language song to reach number one of the US Billboard Hot 100 since ‘Macarena’ […]

There is no word for ‘privacy’ in Russian

Given that for almost all English speakers ‘privacy’ is a normal, everyday concept, it may come as a shock to find that there is no direct translation for this concept in the Russian language. To English speakers the idea of not being disturbed or having every detail of our lives on display is very simple and natural to understand. However, in Russian, along with various other languages, such as Mongolian and Latvian, there is no word that adequately describes it. This can, of course, cause various problems for translators. For example, how would you go about translating Facebook’s “Privacy Policy” or any internet provider’s version of ‘privacy settings’. This is usually where calques, words borrowed from other languages, English in this case, are used as a translation strategy. For example, words such as приватность privatnost’ and конфиденциальность konfidentsial’nost’ have been introduced into the Russian language, however these are anglicisms which have come from our own language and can sound strange to many Russian […]

Are you making the most of your TM? – Concordance searches

Translation memories are one of the most useful tools at a translator’s disposal. They allow us to save translated work to then leverage it at a later stage when translating a new text by providing matches at the segment level. However, many translation theorists argue that whilst these matches are very useful to a translator, a lot of the repetition in a text occurs at the sub-segment level, i.e. individual words or short phrases. This is where concordance searches come in handy for a translator.

Why keyword stuffing is a really bad idea

Adding keywords to your website, in a natural and readable way, is a great idea, but keyword stuffing is considered a black-hat SEO tactic. Even the phrase itself suggests furtive, shady behaviour; something that you wouldn’t want to be caught doing. There are real reasons behind why you shouldn’t include this method in your SEO strategy. Google’s Matt Cutts warned webmasters about SEO keyword stuffing and over-optimisation, saying: “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

Meet the Team – Amy Forrester

Hi everyone, I have recently joined the Web-Translations team as a Project Coordinator, having just finished my Masters in Applied Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. Prior to this I graduated with a first in Russian and Spanish, again from the University of Leeds. During my MA we studied a module on CAT tools which was geared towards preparing us for the world of translation and the language services industry. I particularly enjoyed this module; especially when we took part in simulated localisation projects which allowed us to mimic a ‘real life’ translation project and workflow. It was these projects which actually introduced me to the role of a project manager and piqued my interest in wanting to pursue a career as one.

What’s new in Trados Studio 2017?

As a company specialising in website and web-based translation, Web-Translations likes to keep its finger on the pulse when it comes to translation technology. This month we upgraded to Trados Studio 2017; here are some of the new features we’ve experimented with since the move, along with some of our thoughts about their relevance to our day-to-day workload. Overall interface aesthetics The first thing we noticed when firing up Studio 2017 was the changes in aesthetics. Whilst we were relieved to see that the basic user interface has changed very little, we did notice some brighter hues, as well as a new colour-coding system on file completion bars, which is a nice touch.