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There are Information That Computer s Software Can Help Us Transforming from one Language to the
Another
R&D magazine Quark, year 1999By Simon Bratina Company Iolar was founded in 1998 from the publishing and localization department of the Skupina Atlantis company. It has been fully operating under the new
name since January 1999, in separate office premises and confirming its own identity and reputation. It builds on the knowledge it gained in the past, implementing it in the present time. Constant learning,
process improvements, overall quality, project management and particularly language research and quality are the cornerstones of our operations. Iolar has two main goals. First to improve customer
satisfaction in the area of IT localization, and the second to help other IT and non IT companies to benefit from knowledge we have gained in the past in the area of human language tech- nologies and
computer assisted translation.  In the past,
translating was an art. Even today it is still believed to be an art and some translators want it to stay like that. But in the IT business, some people say that translation is a process of transforming
information from one language to another. Usually using paired words, which carry the same meaning. And if we look at translation from a technical point of view, we could say that in this
case the translation process can be automated. With a little bit of artificial in telligence, we would not need human translators to do the
work, but would leave it all to machines; in this case to computers with adequate software and they would do the translation for us. So in the
past 15 years, we have succesfully identified all the steps in the translation process, we have also identified the critical points and we now have the means and knowledge to reduce the need for a human
being in this process. Information technology has helped us develop translation support systems, translation memory systems, and as the ultimate stage, machine translation systems. We can hear people say
that we don t need human translators to do translation work because the machine translation process for some languages has been improved almost to perfection and the results obtained from such systems are
very good and productive.
However, they are still not perfect, although considerable effort is being invested in further improvements of machine translation systems. They
now achieve a level of accuracy up to 60 percent, and they will never be able to replace the human translator completely. More likely they will
become an indispensable tool for pretranslating information from one language to many languages. So companies entering international or local markets have to be aware and keep in mind that machine
translation simply can not give satisfactory results to answer the high quality demands of a competitive business environment.
Can translation and engaging translation agencies be enough for
companies of today, whose objective is to reach further into foreign markets and increase their sales? Clearly the answer is NO. Translation is simply not enough to give your company the boost to foreign
markets, to make you visible, to give your company a chance to be recognised in other markets and, at the same time, to achieve this goal without spending a fortune on it.
What a company has to do at this point is to shift from simple translation to localization. Localization differs fundamentally from translation. Localization means that the company is tailoring the product
to a specific culture, not just translating it. We are convinced that companies that want to increase their sales should not neglect the importance of high-quality localization. Localization can dramatically
raise the impact of a product in the international or local market. Together with localising the product itself there is also collateral material that needs to be localised (marketing materials, web pages,
documentation ).
Once a company decides to start localising its products, it also realizes a significant increase in the costs of translation, spending a lot of
money on translating different materials. Naturally, the company will decide to keep the costs within certain limits. If this is the case,
technology can be usefully employed to ease the workload, to lower the costs and, at the same time, to increase the return on investment rate.
The buzz word is translation memory technology . And IOLAR has all the knowledge and the tools, which allow companies to build their translation memory . Translation memory system serves as a company s
memory of all translations, together with the original text. It gives the ability to recall previous translations, usually at the sentence level, and
reuse them for any subsequent translation - be it in the current project or in possible future projects. Such systems are especially effective
when working predominantely with revisions of documents. When I refer to a document, I mean a generic information container, which can be a file of any file type (HTML, ASP, RTF, DOC, MIF, ). From past
experience, we know that more than 50 percent of sentences are usually reused from one revision to the next and, at the same time, more than 80% of key terminology, too. Even more, companies usually
cut and paste the same content among many versions of their contents, including documentation, Web pages, marketing materials .
Our experience shows that typically about 20 percent of translated
material can be reused across the company. Taking everything into account, using translation memory systems can shorten the time to produce localised material, accelerate the time needed to get the
information or the product to the market and ,most important of all, it cuts the translation costs.
However, tools are only one part of the story. To be really able to
produce high quality localised material, to meet deadlines with the lowest costs possible, one also needs efficient and productive project management. Iolar has exceeded itself in past projects. Its team of
project managers, localization engineers, tools specialists and others is able to help you in achieving the goal a localised product of the highest
quality, within the predefined budget and timeframe. Our team uses all the above mentioned technologies daily and invests a considerable amount of time and effort in getting to know them better and finding
new ways of using them. We can help you even more with enormous knowledge of internationalisation issues, experience in international sufficiency testing
We really don t want you to be one of those who spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and money in finding the best solution to getting
information localised. The right way is to engage professionals, who know their business, who give you clear answers to your questions, and
whose only goal is to help you in every way they can. Iolar definitely is a professional in localization business.
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