Localization Today

Galateo Per Traduttori: Regole e segreti per un rapporto di successo con le agenzie di traduzione (Italian for A Translator’s Etiquette: Rules and Secrets for a Successful Rapport with Translation Agencies)  is the latest joint publication by Marco Cevoli and Sergio Alasia, managing director and owner, respectively of Qabiria, a language consulting company based in Barcelona, Spain. Giada Gerotto...

Multimedia post-production offers various ways to reach your audience. The most popular of these include dubbing, voiceovers, and subtitling. Each method has its own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important for a company to evaluate all pros and cons in order to choose the right one for its goal.

Most people understand the value of a foreign exchange student program. But what if the concept of an exchange program wasn’t the exclusive domain of students? For LSPs Kobalt Languages, based out of Spain, and Creative Words, based out of Italy, that simple idea sparked into a fully formed project.

For as long as Denis Ivanov could remember, his localization team worked with Google Sheets. Everyone was comfortable and familiar with it. But at some point, the thought popped into their heads that there must be something better. When they went searching, they discovered Gridly, a localization platform. 

As the pandemic from which we are painstakingly emerging has taught us, making correct scientific information available to the public is not only a question of professional ethics for those who work in communication, but also a question of public safety.

One can easily imagine a small LSP where there is no separate vendor management function — likely project managers perform this role. Ultimately, it is the PM who is responsible for all key aspects of a project — budget, time, and resources. But mature providers have a dedicated team of vendor managers, who take over much of the PM responsibilities.

Having such committed partners is the first step in being able to provide clients with high-quality translations in low-resource languages. The Akorbi team is delighted to be at least a small part of the ongoing effort to keep Hawaiian growing and evolving, as they also do with languages like Ilocano and Samoan. In the story of this collaboration, one can find a real-life example of how language s...

This month in The Lab, Mark Shriner looks at trends in the delivery of interpretation services in healthcare. Specifically, drivers of the growth in this space and a few of the key attributes of the technology that supports the delivery of interpretation services. 

When COVID arrived, or more exactly when Zoom arrived shortly afterwards and we all invited the world on a video tour of selected parts of our homes, we all faced interesting design/disclosure questions. What did we want the world to see, and not to see?

A company as massive as Dell Technologies has no shortage of need for translation and localization services. And Wayne Bourland, director of translation, is the man heading up that operation. Though he didn’t originally envision a career in language service, his career took him in an unexpected direction, and now he oversees the translation of words by the millions or even billions. 

What happens when the translation of a book comes out before the original text? That’s what happened earlier this month with Prince Harry’s memoir — albeit, inadvertently so. The Spanish translation of his book  Spare  went on sale nearly a week before its official release date on Jan. 10, prompting some premature media coverage of the book’s contents in the Anglosphere. 

On Jan. 24, KUDO held a launch event announcing its forthcoming artificial intelligence (AI)-powered speech-to-speech translation tool, KUDO AI.

Generative AI tools have arrived, quite loudly, onto center stage, and in my opinion, this is not just part of another tech hype cycle. Rather, they deserve our eager applause. 

A California-based language service provider (LSP) is in hot water this week, after reports came out that the company provided the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with nonsensical translations into Indigenous languages.

Cologne-based DeepL has announced the beta launch of  DeepL Write , an AI-powered authoring tool intended to improve texts by fixing errors and making suggestions for word replacements while keeping an eye on style, grammar and formatting. 

BLEND, a Tel Aviv-based language service provider (LSP) specializing in localization and translation, recently unveiled its 2022 Hall of Fame initiative to highlight some of the year’s most successful and creative localization projects.

Mobeus, a London-based investment firm, supported The Translation People’s MBO as a platform investment, making its first investment in the language services industry. 

In its most recent call for submissions (which opens Monday, Jan. 9), the ICML included a note in its “Ethics” section prohibiting the use of text generated by ChatGPT and other LLMs, unless “presented as part of the paper’s experiential analysis.”

Knowing when to make a change in strategy is possible only when clients or prospects trust their provider enough to give honest feedback. And sometimes providers just try something new because they believe in it, and measure success as they do so. These are the trailblazers, but they do this at a huge risk — reputationally and financially. Marketing and experienced media agencies can help analyze...

A recent study published by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute found that Asian Americans with limited English proficiency (LEP) face unique language barriers compared to other groups with high levels of LEP.

Software is often the external face of the company. Many people interact with the company exclusively through the software. But what if your software biases some employees to be more successful than others?

Catalan has often been excluded from some social media platforms on the assumption that Catalan-speaking users would feel comfortable using the Spanish version. Recently, Plataforma per la Llengua (“Platform for the Language”) published the results of a market study conducted in Catalonia that sheds light on the possibility of companies such as LinkedIn and Instagram increasing their market penetr...

Organizations are adopting a data-driven culture in order to avoid falling behind their competitors and to see results. According to a  Forrester report , data-driven companies “grow at a rate of more than 30% per year.”

In this column, KUDO co-founder and chief language officer Ewandro Magalhães tells the tale of Enrique — an enslaved person who served as Ferdinand Magellan’s interpreter in his quest to circumnavigate the world.

The phrase “LangOps” has received quite a bit of buzz lately, but where did it really come from? In this piece,  MultiLingual  staff writer Andrew Warner takes a look at the phrases’s origins and how it fits into the evolution of the localization industry.